Republicans and Democrats attending the a Bipartisan Meeting on Health Reform meeting at the Blair House across from the White House have very different definitions of the event.

President Obama urged lawmakers on both sides to focus on areas of agreement. An email from the so-called GOP Action Team in turn says in part: “After pledging to listen to Republican ideas at this Thursday’s photo op- er, “bipartisan health care summit,” President Obama has decided to stick with the Senate Democrats’ health care legislation, a bill that Americans have already rejected as a massive restructuring of our economy that is a short walk down the road to government run health care. He’s rejected alternative methods of tackling our health insurance crisis before hearing them. He’s betrayed the American people’s trust.”

Republicans and Democrats admit that they remain far apart on key provisions advocated by each side. There were also major unresolved divisions within the Democratic Party itself, whose leaders were looking beyond a meeting they expected to amount to little more than political theater and focusing on a final round of negotiations within the party.

The White House said discussions at the meeting would revolve around four main themes: controlling costs, reforming insurance coverage, reducing the federal deficit and expanding coverage.

Senator Lamar Alexander, speaking for the Republican side, said, “We want you to succeed, because if you succeed, our country succeeds.” But Alexander also said Republicans want to “change the direction” that Obama is pursuing, get rid of the bills already passed by the House and Senate and aim for less ambitious reforms.

Obama has said that his latest proposal, aimed at salvaging the stalled health-care legislation, would cover 31 million Americans who currently lack insurance and would cost about $950 billion over 10 years. It would require people to buy health-care insurance and would penalize large employers who do not offer it.

Republicans reject mandating the purchase of insurance and have advanced an alternative that would cover 3 million people at a cost of $61 billion.

What will the meeting actually achieve is anybody’s guess.

In the meantime, our health care and health insurance system needs reforming quite urgently. Are the GOPistas and the tea baggers listening?!

Technorati Tags: democrats, Health, obama, republicans, summit, white house

About 50 leaders of the “tea party” movement will meet in Washington on Tuesday with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele and other top GOP honchos to discuss campaign strategies and conservative principles.

Tuesday’s meeting on Capitol Hill will mark the first time that a broad coalition of tea party organizers – who, let’s not forget – have railed against both the Democratic and the Republican establishments, will sit down and talk with GOP leaders. Top Republicans have been openly courting the organizers of the movement, looking to pick up their support before the November midterm elections.

Who are the “tea party” people? There have been all kinds of theories and statements about the movement, so it is probably time to clarify this issue a little.

The tea party movement emerged in early 2009 as a protest of President Obama’s economic policies and health-care agenda. It appears to be made up of hundreds of disparate regional groups, there doesn’t appear to be anything along the lines of a national leadership, and different organizers frequently have quarreled publicly about tactics, including at the inaugural, recent National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, where Sarah Palin became even more famous after the discovery that while she mocked President Obama’s use of a teleprompter, she actually had some simplistic notes scribbled on the palm of her hand.

Tea party participants have united around a conservative formula of smaller government, less federal spending and stronger national defense, but, despite rampant rumors, not all of them are Republicans. Many are registered independents and even disapprove of former president George W. Bush and the Republicans who controlled Congress in the mid-2000s just as much as they do of Obama and the current Democratic congressional leadership.

Although drinking hot tea might be considered anti-American by some, here in the land of iced tea and coffee, we certainly do hope that Michael Steele will have the presence of mind to actually serve some nice, hot tea during the meeting.

Technorati Tags: gop, Meeting, Michael Steele, republicans, Tea Party

We’re not sure why the GOP Chairman Michael Steele keeps sending us emails, beginning with “Dear Fellow Republican”, but some of them, including the now seemingly defunct Weekly Trunk newsletter are usually pretty funny.

The GOP’s latest effort is Valentine’s Day greeting e-cards. The mailing says among other things:” This Valentine’s Day, show the most important Republicans, Democrats and Independents in your life how much they mean to you by sending them a GOP Valentine’s E-Card.”

The email continues:” Pass along a special message from Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that they didn’t craft this Valentine’s card behind closed doors like they did with their government-run health care experiment.

Or let President Obama extend your sincerest wishes to a loved one by claiming he’s saved or created millions of Valentine’s – - (We really hate people, who use the so-called “m-dashes”. Stick to single hyphens, please.) just like his party has claimed that the wasteful, pork-filled stimulus bill has created or saved thousands, 1.5 million or 2 million jobs depending on which Obama Administration official you ask.”

The email of course ends with a plea for money. We wonder what is the money going to be used for…maybe for creating Valentine cards, or for planning to deny everything, blindly criticize and put roadblocks against everything that the president is trying to achieve?

And now let us reward you with a few of the GOP’s loving Valentine “creations”.

We certainly hope that your sweetheart will appreciate these cards, created with the usual, subtle and tasteful Republican touch

Technorati Tags: Cards, gop, Valentine

A day before President Obama’s State of the Union address, we pretty much already know that the Massachusetts Senate election results seemed to have greatly influenced what the president is going to actually address.

Under mounting pressure to curb government spending, the president is to propose in his State of the Union address a three-year freeze on federal funding that is not related to national security. That being clearly a concession to public concern about government spending and which could dramatically curtail Obama’s legislative ambitions.

The freeze would take effect in October and limit the overall budget for agencies other than the military, veterans affairs, homeland security and certain international programs to $447 billion a year for the remainder of Obama’s first term.

On the surface it sounds like a step ahead, doesn’t it? But do your math. $447 billion per year, as compared to the ever-rising national debt – as of today already surpassing $13 trillion…

At the same time, when “overseas contingency operations” expenses are added to the U.S. defense budget, it comes up to $663.8 billion for 2010 alone. As a matter of fact, the real figure is even higher, reaching between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion in fiscal year 2010.

All in all the 2009 U.S. military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined and is variously calculated as being some nine times larger than the military budget of China. The United States and its close allies are responsible for about two-thirds of the world’s military spending – of which, the U.S. is responsible for the majority of the expenditures.

Understandably, this is a huge and seemingly never-ending source of income for our overbuilt defense industry. Seemingly the very appropriate warning of President Dwight Eisenhower went unheeded. Eisenhower three days before the end of his second term has warned among other things about the military/industrial complex, saying: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

If Eisenhower only knew how much the influence of the military/industrial complex has grown since his day…

At least it could seem to be a step in the right direction for President Obama to propose some saving measures in the State of the Union address. Unfortunately, the spending freeze will only address about 1/8 of our total budget and might actually cut into programs and operational budget of needed and necessary agencies, in many case to the detriment of us all.

Meanwhile, we still have well over 100,000 troops in Iraq, along with an even larger number of mercenaries, are beefing up our forces and spending for the most likely unwinnable war in Afghanistan and are maintaining the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the FBI, recently made famous by the discovery that it has been collaborating with telecom companies to routinely violate federal wiretapping laws for four years, as agents got access to reporters’ and citizens’ phone records using fake emergency declarations or simply asking for them.

Let’s not forget the case of the Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamazares, who learned that the FBI used an online photograph of him to create an image showing what Osama bin Laden might look like today.

The image using Llamazares’ photo appeared on a wanted poster updating the U.S. government’s 1998 photo of the al Qaeda leader.

FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman acknowledged that the agency used a picture of Llamazares taken from Google Images.

Let’s hope that we are not rewarding incompetence, with ever-larger budgets.

Meanwhile, we don’t really know where more than $3 trillion in bailout money has disappeared to and whether it has done anybody – besides the people and the corporations, who have caused the crisis – any measurable good.

As the popular saying goes: “easy come, easy go”.

Technorati Tags: bailout, defense budget, military/industrial complex, money, President Obama, spending freeze, State of the Union address

The  Republican gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia, along with Scott Brown taking over Ted Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate have sprouted all kinds of suppositions, ” I told yous” and even a bit of a reshuttle at the White House.

There is no doubt that the Democrats have screwed up on many fronts. Having a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate should have given them the opportunity to take care of many, long-overdue issues, but considering the fact that too many of them – Christopher Dodd comes to mind among others – were really taking care of somebody else’s business, things simply didn’t get done and the American electorate, including a whole slew of liberal Democrats felt downright betrayed.

There is the definite possibility that the Obama voters were really under the impression that the movement created around the candidate actually represented the man. Surprisingly, the man was and is different from what the voters imagined him to be. Just look at the bailouts of the messed up financial mills, which were ostensibly “too big to fail”. Now the biggies are paying multi-million-dollar bonuses, possible only because of the taxpayer-funded bailout.

Let’s not forget that in 2009 the U.S. has reportedly printed more money than in the entire 20th century…successfully bailing out the Wall Street shysters, called by some bonus-happy executives  “their best people”. Wouldn’t these “best people” be more appropriately employed producing our license plates for the next 20 years in some federal penitentiary?

In any case, practically exit Tim Geithner and finally re-enter Paul Volcker, who seems to have saner ideas. We also welcome the return of David Plouffe,  Obama’s campaign manager. As expected Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod says that there is no major White House shakeup in the works. Why not, we wonder?

In closing, enjoy another excellent cartoon by Washington Post’s Tom Toles. If one picture is worth 1,000 words, these two combined must be worth quite a bit more

Technorati Tags: democrats, Health Care reform, obama, politics, republicans