With a 60 to 39 vote, the Senate has passed the motion to proceed to move on with the debate over Obamacare. Again, it is important to note that this is only a vote to begin the floor debate on the bill. It is not a vote to pass Obamacare.

In the Washington Examiner, Byron York has an excellent point when he asks, “why was it so hard for Democrats even to start the healthcare debate?”

The extraordinary thing about the dramatic events surrounding the health care bill in the Senate is that there is any drama in it at all. Lawmakers are simply voting to begin debate on their version of health care reform. Just begin debate — not end it, and not move on to a final vote.

If Democrats, with a 60-vote majority in the Senate, were not able to begin debate on the top Democratic policy priority in a generation — well, that would be a devastating turn of events, both for the party and for President Obama. And yet just starting debate has proved difficult, and only today did the 60th Democratic vote fall in place in favor of beginning the process.

I have made this point myself as it happens. On Nov. 19, I was writing about the sly, underhanded tricks that Reid was using to advance the Senate debate on Obamacare but why, I wondered, are these tricks even necessary? If this bill has the wide-spread support that the Democrats keep claiming it has, why all the dirty tricks, obfuscations, and rules bending?

If this bill was a legitimate bill would all of these dirty tricks be necessary? Further, if this bill had such wide acceptance and agreement among Congress and the people alike, why are Democrats afraid to let everyone see the bill?

York is essentially echoing my point and adding that this bill does not have wide support in Congress or among the voters that Reid, Pelosi, and the President are pretending it has. The fact that Reid had to work so hard to get this thing even to a stage where further debate could be had is telling.

We still have a chance to kill this bill, people. We must keep the pressure on our Congressmen.

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A few weeks ago we reported on how the Services Employees International Union was attempting to fix the vote in Sonoma County, California so that Sonoma’s in-home healthcare workers would end up with SEIU representation instead of NUHW representation.

Well, Sonoma wasn’t an isolated case. The SEIU used the same vote fixing tactics in Fresno County.

Andy Stern’s SEIU is playing hardball, using techniques that harken back to the mob-infested old days in order to win the game of representation. And THIS is the guy that President Obama is taking close counsel from? A goon. A thug. A mob-like hitman.

It’s the Chicago Way, alright. From Chicago to Fresno and Sonoma Counties all the way to the White House. This president and his cronies are instituting mob action everywhere they go.

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Sen. Claire McCaskill on Thursday touted the Senate healthcare reform bill by taking a dig at former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s new book.

McCaskill (D) said if the bill was printed in regular size font, it would be the same length as Palin’s (R) memoir Going Rogue: An American Life “but with more meat on the bone.” She tweeted:

If we printed the health care bill in regular size font it would be same legnth as Sarah Palin’s book, but with more meat on the bone.

The Senate healthcare bill is 2,074 pages long. Palin’s book is 413 pages long with 16 pages of photographs.

Best comment at the source

Senator McCaskill would do well to remember that no one is being asked to suffer under the yoke of the contents of Sarah Palin’s book. Nor will they be forced, against their will, and at perhaps great financial cost, to abide by the contents therein. Methinks Senator McCaskill should probably speak less, and listen, (to the American people), more. Dusan on 11/19/2009 at 22:32

Can’t add anything to that.

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In another in a long series of swift kicks to Israel and American Jews, the Obama Administration has announced that it is slashing the guest list and budget for its 2009 Hanukkah celebration.

According to the Jerusalem Post the guest list is being cut in half causing some American Jews to wonder if Obama is giving them the cold shoulder… again.

In case no one has been paying attention, President Obama has been slighting Israel and American Jews since before he became president. His pick of Samantha Power, the Palestinian apologist, for his Mid East policy team was a fine example of his obvious disdain for Jews. And she isn’t his only pro-Palestinian adviser.

Of course, were I president I’d cancel Hanukkah entirely. Just as I’d immediately stop any recognition of any other holidays except the officially recognized, Christian holidays of American history and culture. No slight meant to those religious celebrations at all. They just aren’t American unlike Christmas, Easter, and the like are.

In fact, this willy nilly waste of the American taxpayer’s money on these idiotic grand celebrations where 400 guests are pampered at the taxpayer’s expense is entirely obscene. They should all be canceled. This isn’t the gilded age anymore.

Still, it’s disheartening to see Obama constantly jabbing his thumb in the eyes of Jews everywhere. Even though I’d cancel the Hanukkah celebration, I am one of Israel’s best friends. After all, I wouldn’t pick policy advisers that want Israel wiped off the face of the Earth like Obama has!

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Meet Lavelle Stewart.

Hat tip: Hot Air

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If the U.S. captures Osama bin Laden, there’s no need to interrogate him, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Thursday.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the chairman of that committee, said that arguments raised by Republican senators about whether bin Laden would be afforded Miranda rights if he were captured amount to a “red herring.”

“The red herring that my friend [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.] was covering is not realistic,” Leahy said during an appearance on “Washington Journal” on C-SPAN.

“For one thing, capturing Osama bin Laden — we’ve had enough on him, we don’t need to interrogate him,” Leahy added.

So, let me get this straight. If we were to capture the head of Al Qaeda, the man essentially responsible for the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans and certainly behind terror plots to kill countless more, there would be no need to interrogate him? Seriously?!

What’s scary is that this isn’t some random dingbat unknown Democratic congressman from a middle-of-nowhere district saying this. Leahy is a high-ranking Democrat, one with a high position and a lot of power and influence in Washington, DC. If we catch bin Laden alive, we should waterboard him to within an inch of his life, or until we find out every single last bit of intelligence we can about Al Qaeda and their plans. How is that so hard to grasp??

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

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The health watchdog has blocked a critical liver cancer drug, saying it is too pricey for the state health service, leaving manufacturer Bayer vowing to appeal the decision.

Most people who get the aggressive form of cancer are diagnosed too late for surgery to help, meaning that the drug — Nexavar — is one of the only options left, and it has been shown to prolong life by almost four months on average.

The decision, announced on Thursday, is a setback for Germany’s Bayer and its partner Onyx Pharmaceuticals, which have already seen Nexavar turned down by the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to treat kidney cancer.

NICE said in the final draft recommendation it would not recommend Bayer’s Nexavar to the National Health Service (NHS) for the most common type of liver cancer as it was too expensive…

In a free country, you can have whatever drug you want, provided you have arranged to pay for it. But no doubt bureaucrats know best when it’s time for us to die.

On a tip from Gore blimey, the sky is falling. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.

And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified.

Government: If you think the problems we created are bad, wait till you see our solutions.

Those fictional districts in Arizona are by no mean a small sample. Pretty much every state has entries like that. I looked up my home state of NC, and, apparently we now have a 14th, 37th, 86th, 24th, 99th, and 00 districts! We only have 13 total districts. The 37th created 2 jobs for a cost of almost $4 million dollars.

My old home state of NJ has 18 extra districts, which supposedly created 574.6 jobs with a price tag of around $24 million. What is your state looking like?

Meanwhile, the Generational Theft Act is actually creating new jobs: grifters.

And the original idiocy, the TARP plan, wasted billions on AIG.

The Federal Reserve’s initial emergency plan last fall to save then-failing American International Group was so hastily put together and poorly structured that it resulted in billions of additional taxpayer dollars spent on the insurance giant, says a new report by a Treasury Department independent watchdog.

And guess who coordinated the plan? If you guess Little Timmy Geithner, give yourself an early morning shot of Tequila.

And these are the same people who want to run our health care system and say they can actually reduce costs? Good luck with that.

And someone make sure Sheriff Joe didn’t lock himself in a jail cell again.

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Women in their 40s should stop routinely having annual mammograms and older women should cut back to one scheduled exam every other year, an influential federal task force has concluded, challenging the use of one of the most common medical tests.

In its first reevaluation of breast cancer screening since 2002, the independent government-appointed panel recommended the changes, citing evidence that the potential harm to women having annual exams beginning at age 40 outweighs the benefit.

Coming amid a highly charged national debate over health-care reform and simmering suspicions about the possibility of rationing medical services, the recommendations immediately became enveloped in controversy.

“We’re not saying women shouldn’t get screened. Screening does saves lives,” said Diana B. Petitti, vice chairman of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which released the recommendations Monday in a paper being published in Tuesday’s Annals of Internal Medicine. “But we are recommending against routine screening. There are important and serious negatives or harms that need to be considered carefully.”

Several patient advocacy groups and many breast cancer experts welcomed the new guidelines, saying they represent a growing recognition that more testing, exams and treatment are not always beneficial and, in fact, can harm patients. Mammograms produce false-positive results in about 10 percent of cases, causing anxiety and often prompting women to undergo unnecessary follow-up tests, sometimes-disfiguring biopsies and unneeded treatment, including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

But the American Cancer Society, the American College of Radiology and other experts condemned the change, saying the benefits of routine mammography have been clearly demonstrated and play a key role in reducing the number of mastectomies and the death toll from one of the most common cancers.

“Tens of thousands of lives are being saved by mammography screening, and these idiots want to do away with it,” said Daniel B. Kopans, a radiology professor at Harvard Medical School. “It’s crazy — unethical, really.”

The new guidelines also recommend against teaching women to do regular self-exams and concluded that there is insufficient evidence to recommend that doctors do the exams or to continue routine mammograms beyond age 74.

Some questioned whether the new guidelines were designed more to control spending than to improve health. In addition to prompting fewer doctors to recommend mammograms to their patients, they worried that the move would prompt insurers to deny coverage for many mammograms.

Less than a year ago, these same people were decrying the decline in mammograms among women in their 40s. And now, suddenly, with Obamacare looming, this panel just coincidentally came to this conclusion? Not shockingly, Ed Morrissey examines the doctors on this panel, and finds not a single oncologist present.

Barack Obama claimed that he would be championing increased screening and prevention. Yet now we’ve got a federal panel wanting to just cut back the number of mammograms performed, mammograms that could potentially be life-saving, because you could get a false positive and feel anxiety? I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’d rather be safe than sorry. I’d rather get the mammogram and have the doctors look into that suspicious lump, false positive or not, than just shove it off for a few years and end up having cancer in a more severe stage. Isn’t that what Obama’s panel here is basically recommending?

And they aren’t even going after just mammograms. They don’t even want women doing self-exams anymore! I guess they don’t want to take the risk of a woman who is “too young” finding a lump on her breast and getting it checked out, just to be safe. I mean, jeez, that would just be waaay too costly. The motivation here is clearly not to save lives or decrease some imagined anxiety women get over their mammograms. (After all, what person wouldn’t be anxious if they thought they had cancer? It seems perfectly natural to me.) It’s just pathetic and extremely depressing to me that Obamacare hasn’t even passed yet — and already, we have federal panels recommending rationing care.

I keep asking — are you happy you voted for change now? Is this the hope you wanted?

No more of this if Obama has his way.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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Obama’s purple shirted SEIU cronies are his favorite people. They’re his most frequent visitors, after all, and they stand ready and willing to do whatever Comrade Obama asks of them. If you want to know what direction this country is headed in, just look at the shenanigans the Service Employees International Union thugs are pulling.

For example, Obama is supposedly all about volunteering. He wants young people to be willing to devote their lives to service. He likes that idea so much, that he even floated the idea of instituting a Hitler youth brigade, and for all I know, is still keen on the idea. But Obama and his SEIU pals are only fans of volunteer service performed by young people if they toe the Obama line. Boy Scouts, for example, are far too traditional and they cling to such old, antiquated, conservative values — and therefore, they must be destroyed.

Starting with a seventeen-year-old boy who was doing volunteer work to try to earn his Eagle Scout badge.

In pursuit of an Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, 17, has toiled for more than 200 hours over several weeks to clear a walking path in an east Allentown park.

Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city’s largest municipal union.

Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.

“We’ll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails,” Balzano told the council.

Balzano said Saturday he isn’t targeting Boy Scouts. But given the city’s decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said “there’s to be no volunteers.” No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.

“We would hope that the well-intentioned efforts of an Eagle Scout candidate would not be challenged by the union,” said Mayor Ed Pawlowski in an e-mail Friday. “This young man is performing a great service to the community. His efforts should be recognized as such.”

Balzano said Saturday the union is still looking into the matter and might cut the city a break.

“We are probably going to let this one go,” Balzano said .

The possible entanglement of a local Boy Scout in a union dispute underscores the frustration and anger SEIU members feel after being the lone city union to suffer layoffs in the ongoing financial crisis. It may also serve as a preview of future labor battles as the city tries to outsource some necessary jobs as a result of the layoffs.

Anderson, a junior and varsity soccer player at Southern Lehigh High School, is a member of Boy Scout Troop 301 of Center Valley.

He got the idea for the trail while taking hikes along the partially complete, 165-mile Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor. He noticed there were a few missing connections to the trail in Kimmets Lock Park, which is on the Lehigh River near Dauphin Street. He already has logged 250 hours trying to carve out a walking and biking trail along the river.

“I decided to do my part in completing this part of the trail. In that way, others could enjoy walking along the river, without having to walk on the busy road,” Anderson said in an e-mail Friday.

Selfless service? Apparently, this poses some kind of imaginary threat to SEIU workers. And if Balzano isn’t targeting the Boy Scouts, then what is he targeting? People who just do things for the sake of others without asking anything in return? This is typical of liberals to attack the Boy Scouts and a teenage boy trying to do a good thing. And what comes next? Will SEIU members be the only people allowed to mow our lawns? Paint our walls? And then of course, if we do it ourselves rather than letting Obama’s crony pals do it, will Balzano threaten to come after us, too?

Balzano said that he would let this one go — because of the holiday spirit. It’s more likely that he let it go because of all the bad PR he’s getting. It’s sad, though, when you think about it. What would’ve happened if he hadn’t been threatened by bad press filled with the holiday spirit? We all know the answer — he happily would have persecuted a seventeen-year-old kid who was just trying to do a good thing, and Obama would just look the other way. And if we don’t stand up to their thuggery, then our capital could remain looking like this.

Hat Tips: Moonbattery and Michelle Malkin

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

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