Majority Leader Steny Hoyer still expects the House to approve its sweeping health care bill Saturday, but conceded the vote could slip until Sunday or even early next week.
Hoyer acknowledged House leaders were still shy of the 218 votes needed, amid flare-ups among anti-abortion Democrats and immigration advocates. Hoyer also warned of Republican delaying tactics that he said could push off plans to vote Saturday evening.
U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim, received a poor performance evaluation while at Walter Reed before being transferred to Fort Hood.
Hasan, a Muslim, was disgruntled about being deployed to Afghanistan and disturbed by U.S. policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had previously stated that Muslims should “rise up” and attack Americans in retaliation for the US war in Iraq and had equated suicide bombers with a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his comrades.
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim, while shouting in Arabic, shot over 40 unarmed people today, most of them U.S. troops about to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, murdering more than ten.
James Hunt, 27, serving with the 510th Combat Engineers, was with his platoon at the base’s Soldier Readiness Center where soldiers who are about to be deployed undergo medical screening. He was scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in January.
But because James had broken his foot several weeks ago, he was sent outside and told to get some extra paperwork that would clear him for deployment. James was waiting in the parking lot of the center when the shooting started, his father said.
“Everybody started running and shouting, and he saw the wounded come out,” Tom Hunt said. “He didn’t hear the shooting, but he said it was ‘a bloody mess.’”
Hunt said his son told him he loaded up many of the wounded and drove them to the hospital. The wounded relayed what they saw inside when the shooting happened.
“They were telling him that one guy was shouting something in Arabic while he was shooting,” Tom Hunt said. “He couldn’t say much more than that.”
And to this day, we still haven’t properly thanked Iran for this act of war.
Every year on the anniversary of the Iranian seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, where 53 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, the Iranian regime sponsors mass rallies to mark the event, with bused in pro-regime crowds burning U.S. flags and chanting “death to America” for the cameras. This year, something different happened, anti-regime protesters risked their lives to take to the streets and shout “death to the dictators’, while trying to stay one step ahead of the regime police, military, and paramilitary security forces using everything up to and including reports of live ammunition to try and stop them.
Iranian security forces used clubs, teargas and paintball guns to disperse thousands of antigovernment protesters in Tehran on Wednesday who took to the streets as thousands of regime loyalists marked the 30th anniversary of the US Embassy takeover in 1979.
While a pro-government crowd chanted anti-American slogans and burned US flags at the walls of the former embassy compound — still often called the “den of spies” – antigovernment demonstrators were caught in sometimes vicious confrontations at other locations in central Tehran in the first mass protests for six weeks.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the embassy takeover anniversary has been an important event for rallying regime support, so the scale and boldness of the opposition turnout – after weeks of warnings from security officials that any attempt to gather would be harshly confronted—was seen as a test of opposition strength.
“Greens [won] by far. They proved that no longer can the government assemble people without any incident, and [the regime] has based everything since the beginning on [large] public assemblies,” said one witness who, like others quoted in this story, asked not be named for security reasons. “Also, if you bring out [security] guards in such numbers, you know you are in deep trouble. The government as expected was scared.”
And while the Islamic Republic revitalizes the anti-American pillar of its revolution with a celebration, many of the radical students who took control of the embassy have since become reformist critics.
And the pro-democracy protesters had a message for Obama.
So, it’s the 30th anniversary of one of the most humiliating episodes in American history, an act of war that Iran still hasn’t paid any price for, and Obama decides to issue a statement to mark the event. Does he lend U.S. support to the brave pro-democracy factions, risking their lives to bring freedom to the Iranian people? Hell no, he “reaches out” again to the belligerent Iranian regime that consistently spurns U.S. diplomatic overtures on a weekly basis.
President Obama today called for a new relationship with Iran in a statement that marked the 30th anniversary of the takeover by Iranian militants of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
The seizure of the embassy by radical students marked the beginning of Iran’s turn to hard-line policies. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days.
“This event helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust and confrontation,” Obama said in his statement. “I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.”
Of course, Obama’s endless all carrot, no stick apologies have become something of a running joke in international circles, his weakness is palpable. Like clockwork, the Iranians rebuked Obama’s groveling with the same response they’ve used ever since Obama took office.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday rejected any direct engagement with the United States, stressing that the Islamic Republic will not be deceived by Washington’s “apparent re-conciliatory behavior.”
“We do not want any negotiations whose results are predefined by the U.S.,” Khamenei said Tuesday. “Iran will not be deceived by Washington’s apparent re-conciliatory behavior.”
Oh, and if Obama somehow thinks the Iranian regime is kidding when they keep telling him in no uncertain words that they have no intention of cooperating with the United States or the West, all he has to do is take a look at what Israel found today.
Open crates from a cargo ship seized Wednesday by Israel revealed dark green missiles inside. Containers from the vessel bore writing in English that said “I.R. Iranian Shipping Lines Group.”
Israel alleged that the shipment of hundreds of tons of rockets, missiles, mortars, grenades and anti-tank weapons — the largest it ever seized — was headed for Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
Israel stopped the ship, named the Francop, off the coast of Cyprus and towed it to the port of Ashdod. It carried orange, red, white and blue containers piled three deep on its deck.
Rows of crates from the vessel were displayed on the dock, and inside were rockets, hand grenades, mortars and ammunition. At least 3,000 missiles were on board, the Israeli military said.
The seizure spotlighted the dangerous tensions between Israel and Iran. Israel considers Iran a strategic threat because of its nuclear program and long-range missile development, dismissing Iranian denials that it is building nuclear weapons.
Among the weaponry displayed were Katyusha rockets. One of the long skinny missiles sat atop a pile of storage boxes the military had labeled in Hebrew “rocket 122 mm.” The 122 mm Katyusha was the main weapon used against Israel by Hezbollah in a monthlong war in 2006. During that war, about 1,200 people were killed in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and about 160 people were killed in Israel.
/how many time does the Iranian regime have to kick Obama in the nuts before he feels the pain and humiliation, man’s up to the in your face hostility, and fights back in defense of the United States’ honor and national security?
Pakistan’s army said it captured a Taliban stronghold at Sararogha in South Waziristan as troops try to complete an offensive to clear fighters from the region before winter starts next month.
“Security forces have commenced sanitization of Sararogha” and are clearing the area of explosive devices, the army said in a statement yesterday. Pakistan says the offensive in South Waziristan has cut off escape routes to prevent the Taliban from fleeing in large numbers.
The Taliban denied their forces are being defeated, saying they are withdrawing in order to fight a “long war,” the Associated Press reported yesterday, citing a spokesman for the group.
The army began its largest operation against militants in the tribal region bordering Afghanistan last month. The offensive provoked suicide bombings and attacks that have killed more than 300 people.
“There is no place for the Taliban in Pakistan,” the Associated Press of Pakistan cited Interior Minister Rehman Malik as saying in a radio interview yesterday in Islamabad. “The entire nation has said no to the Taliban.”
Chris Christie leads Jon Corzine 47-41 in PPP’s final poll of the New Jersey Governor’s race, with Chris Daggett at 11%.
Corzine had pulled to within a point of Christie on our poll three weeks ago after trailing by as many as 14 points over the summer, but his momentum has stalled since then and Christie’s built his lead back up to 4 points last week and now 6.
But, of course, if you’re a Republican in New Jersey, you already know that a six point lead against a Democrat candidate might not be safe.
The race for governor in New Jersey is so close in final polls that it may well end up in a recount — the 1981 election did and was decided by less than 1,800 votes. If there is a recount, you can bet disputes about absentee ballots will loom large. Moreover, if serious allegations of fraud emerge, you can also expect less-than-vigorous investigation by the Obama Justice Department — which showed just how seriously it takes such allegations when it walked away from an open-and-shut voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia earlier this year.
Plenty of reasons exist for suspecting absentee fraud may play a significant role in tomorrow’s Garden State contests. Groups associated with Acorn in neighboring Pennsylvania and New York appear to have moved into the state. An independent candidate for mayor in Camden has already leveled charges that voter fraud is occurring in his city. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in New Jersey is taking advantage of a new loosely written vote-by-mail law to pressure county clerks not to vigorously use signature checks to evaluate the authenticity of absentee ballots, the only verification procedure allowed.
The state has received a flood of 180,000 absentee ballot requests. On some 3,000 forms the signature doesn’t match the one on file with county clerks. Yet citing concerns that voters would be disenfranchised, Democratic Party lawyer Paul Josephson wrote New Jersey’s secretary of state asking her “to instruct County Clerks not to deny applications on the basis of signature comparison alone.” Mr. Josephson maintained that county clerks “may be overworked and are likely not trained in handwriting analysis” and insisted that voters with suspect applications should be allowed to cast provisional ballots. Those ballots, of course, would then provide a pool of votes that would be subject to litigation in any recount, with the occupant of New Jersey’s highest office determined by Florida 2000-style scrutiny of ballot applications.
Fearing a potentially devastating Democratic loss, the highly controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) group and its affiliated organizations are gearing up to tip the scales and re-elect embattled incumbent in the hard-fought New Jersey gubernatorial race, sources tell Newsmax.
“Acorn is heavily involved in Gov. Jon Corzine’s get-out-the-vote operation, but is maintaining a low profile at the insistence of the Corzine campaign,” Matthew Vadum, senior editor of the conservative Capitol Research Center think tank, tells Newsmax. “If Corzine manages to win reelection, he doesn’t want the victory tainted by his close association with Acorn.”
Wall Street Journal columnist and author John Fund wrote Tuesday that “Plenty of reasons exist for suspecting absentee fraud may play a significant role in tomorrow’s Garden State contests.”
In the upstate New York House race that has attracted national attention, Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate now embraced by the GOP, leads Democrat Bill Owens by 41 percent to 36 percent with 6 percent backing Republican Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, who dropped out of the race on Saturday, according to a Siena College poll conducted Nov. 1. Eighteen percent are undecided, The margin of error is 4 points.
The number of undecided voters is now double what it was in Siena’s last poll, when Scozzafava was still in the race.
“Hoffman continues to demonstrate momentum, picking up six points since Scozzafava pulled out,” said Siena’s Steven Greenberg. “It appears, however, that the majority of Scozzafava’s supporters have gone to neither Hoffman nor Owens, but rather into the undecided column.”
The NY-23 special election on Tuesday has the attention of the White House at the highest levels, with White House sources saying that the endorsement of Democrat Bill Owens by “Republican” Dede Scozzafava came only after a call from White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel asking that she throw her support behind the Democrat.
NY 23, are you going to let the Obama White House control your Republican candidates?
Ain’t but one Republican still in the NY 23 race, vote accordingly.
And, if you live in Virginia, you can phone the win in, but you still have to actually get off your collective Republican asses and vote for McDonnell, nuke the election from orbit, just to make sure.
/finally, if you’re a Democrat, remember, you get to vote on Wedbesday, 11/4/09
Last week was a bad week, the Nasdaq cratered 5.1%, the NYSE composite plunged 4.6%, the S&P500 dipped 4%, and the Dow, the only index that managed to close above its ten week average, gave up 2.6%. To make matters worse, last’s week’s downturn came on higher volume, indicating substantial institutional selling, and the IBD outlook was changed to “market in correction”. Avoid new purchases and don’t let any gains turn into losses, raise cash where appropriate. Be sure and limit all losses to no more than 7-8%, just sell, no questions asked, and live to invest another day, when the market returns to an uptrend.
This week, no watch list stocks are in a buy range.
/as usual, your mileage may vary, always do your own homework
Everyone surfing for last-minute Halloween costumes and pictures of black Lolcats today—what you might call the 40th anniversary of the Internet—can give thanks to the simple network message that started it all: “lo.”
On October 29, 1969, that message became the first ever to travel between two computers connected via the ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet.
The electronic dispatch was supposed to be the word “login,” but only the first two letters were successfully sent before the system crashed.
Still, that humble greeting marked the start of a phenomenon that has become such an important part of modern life that many experts argue access to it should be a right rather than a privilege.
The ARPANET was the first wide area packet switching network, the “Eve” network of what has evolved into the Internet we know and love today.
The ARPANET was developed by the IPTO under the sponsorship of DARPA, and conceived and planned by Lick Licklider, Lawrence Roberts, and others as described earlier in this section.
The ARPANET went into labor on August 30, 1969, when BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to Leonard Kleinrock’s Network Measurements Center at UCLA. The IMP was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, designed to handle the ARPANET network interface. In a famous piece of Internet lore, on the side of the crate, a hardware designer at BBN named Ben Barker had written “Do it to it, Truett”, in tribute to the BBN engineer Truett Thach who traveled with the computer to UCLA on the plane.
The UCLA team responsible for installing the IMP and creating the first ARPANET node included graduate students Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, Bill Naylor, Jon Postel, and Mike Wingfield. Wingfield had built the hardware interface between the UCLA computer and the IMP, the machines were connected, and within a couple of days of delivery the IMP was communicating with the local NMC host, an SDS Sigma 7 computer running the SEX operating system. Messages were successfully exchanged, and the one computer ARPANET was born.
. . .
The first full ARPANET network connection was next, planned to be with Douglas Engelbart’s NLS system at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), running an SDS-940 computer with the Genie operating system and connected to another IMP. At about 10:30 PM on October 29′th, 1969, the connection was established over a 50 kbps line provided by the AT&T telephone company, and a two node ARPANET was born. As is often the case, the first test didn’t work flawlessly, as Kleinrock describes below:
At the UCLA end, they typed in the ‘l’ and asked SRI if they received it; ‘got the l’ came the voice reply. UCLA typed in the ‘o’, asked if they got it, and received ‘got the o’. UCLA then typed in the ‘g’ and the darned system CRASHED! Quite a beginning. On the second attempt, it worked fine!
If you start now and read several hundred pages a day, you might be able to get through it by the time they start to debate it on the House floor next week. As with all these bills, written in legislative gibberish that would make a challenging read for a lawyer, pack a lunch and leave a trail of bread crumbs.
Oh look, PBS has already posted a summary of the bill only a few hours after it was unveiled. I wonder who they got that from, Pelosi and the Democrats? PBS staffers certainly haven’t had time to read the bill for themselves yet.
House Democrats on Thursday unveiled the Affordable Health Care for America Act. The 1,990-page legislation is a combination of bills passed by three House committees earlier this year. Key tenets include:
· New regulations | New insurance industry regulations would prohibit insurers from rejecting customers based on pre-existing conditions. The regulations would also prohibit annual or lifetime caps on benefits.
· Insurance exchange | The bill would set up a new national health insurance exchange, a marketplace where individuals who do not have employer-sponsored insurance would be able to shop for plans. The exchange would also be open to small businesses, and more would be able to join each year. Companies with 25 or fewer employees would be able to join in 2013, companies with 50 or fewer employees could join in 2014, and companies with fewer than 100 employees could join by 2015.
· Public insurance option | The health insurance exchange would include a government-run public plan. Federal officials would negotiate payment rates with doctors and hospitals that accept the plan.
· Employer mandate | Employers with annual payrolls greater than $500,000 would be required to either provide health insurance for their employees, or contribute 8 percent of their payroll to a federal fund to help subsidize employees who purchase coverage through the exchange. Employers with payrolls less than $500,000 would be exempt from the mandate.
· Individual mandate | Individuals will be required to purchase health insurance, or pay a penalty fee. Some people would be eligible to apply for a hardship waiver.
· Medicaid expansion | Medicaid would be expanded to cover everyone whose income is below 150 percent of the poverty line, or about $33,000 per year for a family of four.
· Affordability subsidies | People who earn between 150 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level would be eligible for subsidies on a sliding scale to purchase insurance through the exchange. Those subsidies would ensure that people who make 150 percent of the poverty level would not have to pay more than 3 percent of their income in premiums, while those who make 400 percent of the poverty level could pay up to 12 percent of their income in premiums.
· Out-of-pocket expenses caps | New regulations would cap yearly out-of-pocket medical expenses for individuals at $5,000 and families at $10,000. Those who earn less than 400 percent of the poverty level would have lower caps, on a sliding scale.
· Tax surcharge | The bill would help pay for itself by imposing a 5.4 percent tax surcharge on individuals earning more than $500,000 per year and families earning more than $1 million.
· End-of-life counseling | The bill retains a controversial provision that allows Medicare to pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling
Oh yeah, and did you catch the part where Pelosi said that the House bill would cost less than $900 billion? Would it surprise anyone to know that she’s lying her ass off through her Botox induced permagrin teeth?
The Congressional Budget Office is out with its analysis of the House Democrats’ health care bill. The headline number — likely to be widely cited in media accounts — is that the bill costs $894 billion over 10 years. But in reality, the CBO says that the gross cost of the bill will be $1.055 trillion. The $894 billion number reflects the taxes being paid by individuals who don’t have insurance and employers who don’t provide insurance.
In addition, the bill relies on some of the same budgetary gimmicks as the Senate Finance Committee’s bill. Once again, we see that the Democrats backload the spending provisions into the final six years of the CBO’s 10 year budget window to make it appear cheaper. Specifically, the CBO says the bill’s gross spending will be $60 billion in the first four years, and $995 billion in the next six years (or 94 percent of the total).
Also, while the CBO says that the bill will reduce deficits by $104 billion over 10 years and keep reducing the deficit (albiet slightly) beyond that, it cautions that these estimates assume that proposed budget cuts will actually get enacted by future members of Congress. “These longer-term projections assume that the provisions of H.R. 3962 are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation,” the CBO director Douglas Elmendorf wrote. “The long-term budgetary impact of H.R. 3962 could be quite different if those provisions generating savings were ultimately changed or not fully implemented.”
The CBO estimate doesn’t include the more than $200 billion it will cost to prevent scheduled cuts to doctors’ payments under Medicare, which Democrats intend to pass through separate legislation.
The bill would also add 15 million people to the Medicaid rolls, costing states an additional $34 billion over 10 years.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the CBO report doesn’t say anything about whether the bill actually bends the health care cost curve. To be clear, while it estimates — with caveats — that the bill will reduce deficits, that isn’t the same thing as reducing national health care expenditures, which is how people derive all those statistics about how high of a percentage of GDP we spend on health care compared with other countries. If you hike taxes high enough, you can get the CBO to say it reduces deficits on paper, but that’s a lot different from bringing down the actual costs of health care to our nation.
Wait a minute, it’s not just Pelosi who’s lying about the 2000 page path to socialized medicine . . .
Of course, this monsterous sham has to be passed by the House and then Reid has to come out from behing his closed office doors and unveil the Senate’s gigantic mockery of health care “reform”, which will have to be passed by the Senate. Next, Pelosi and Reid will have to take the ~4000 pages of both bills behind closed conference doors, to conjure the final bloated shamockery bill, that’ll need to pass both houses of Congress.
/hopefully, there’s still enough hoops to jump through and divisions between Democrat factions that, somewhere along the line, they’ll come up short on needed votes and the entire national debt boosting travesty will collapse under it’s own socialist weight
The leader of a Detroit mosque who allegedly espoused violence and separatism was shot and killed Wednesday in an FBI gun battle at a Dearborn warehouse.
Luqman Ameen Abdullah, imam of the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque in Detroit, was being arrested on a raft of federal charges including conspiracy, receipt of stolen goods, and firearms offenses.
Charges were also filed against 11 of Abdullah’s followers. Eight were in custody Wednesday night awaiting detention hearings today; three remained at large.
A federal complaint filed Wednesday identified Abdullah, 53, also known as Christopher Thomas, as “a highly placed leader of a nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group.” His black Muslim group calls itself “Ummah,” or the brotherhood, and wants to establish a separate state within the United States governed by Sharia law, Interim U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg and Andrew Arena, FBI special agent in charge in Detroit, said in a joint statement.
“He regularly preaches anti-government and anti-law enforcement rhetoric,” an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit. “Abdullah and his followers have trained regularly in the use of firearms, and continue to train in martial arts and sword fighting.”
The Ummah is headed nationally by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, who is serving a state sentence for the murder of two police officers in Georgia.
Early Wednesday afternoon, FBI agents and local police from the Joint Terrorism Task Force surrounded a warehouse and trucking firm on Miller Road near Michigan Avenue where Abdullah and four of his followers were hiding, said Special Agent Sandra Berchtold, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Detroit.
When agents entered the warehouse, four of the men obeyed orders to surrender but Abdullah opened fire and was shot to death, Berchtold said. An FBI dog was also shot and killed, she said.
Through a 45-page complaint filed in the case alleges Abdullah “calls his followers to an offensive jihad” and preaches that every Muslim should “have a weapon and should not be scared to use their weapon when needed,” charges in the case to not include terrorism or national security crimes.
So, Abdullah and his nationwide group Ummah advocate violent “offensive jihad” against the United States to establish a separate state governed by Sharia law, they engage in active weapons acquisition and training and encourage every Muslim to have a weapon and be prepared to use it in furtherance of the jihad, and today he kills an FBI dog while shooting at law enforcement. Phew, I’m sure relieved that there was no no need to file terrorism or national security crime charges against anyone in this case. That might look like we’re acknowledging that we have some type of larger problem with Muslim jihadis within our own borders.
