As reports are coming out that Pennsylvania is receiving $160 million from the Department of Health and Human Services to set up a new high-risk insurance pool program that will fund abortions, we are seeing, yet again, that the Obama Administration will say and do anything to pass their liberal agenda — ignoring public opinion along the way…And on the same day Sensenbrenner wrote this, we received the following from uscatholic.org (here)…
…the chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee for Pro-Life Activities praised the Department of Health and Human Services July 15 for reaffirming that no federal funds will be provided to cover elective abortions under state-run health insurance plans.Oh yes, it’s part of the “liberal agenda” to kill babies, let’s not forget.
The statement came from Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston after HHS spokeswoman Jenny Backus said that "in Pennsylvania and in all other states, abortion will not be covered in the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan except in the cases of rape or incest, or where the life of the woman would be endangered."
Please (I don’t even feel like trying to make the common-sense argument that health care reform doesn’t finance abortions anyway because women who elect it in their coverage have to pay out-of-pocket premiums for it; for the most part, our “dialogue” in this country on abortion has very little to do with common sense anyway…would men put up with such restrictions for Viagra or Cialis?).
We can’t go on pretending that the Stimulus Act is successful. Much of the money still hasn’t been spent and we should redirect these unobligated funds to better uses. If over $1 trillion of government spending can’t create jobs, then what do we need to do?This tells us the following about how stimulus funds are being used in Lancaster County, PA (Pitts’ home turf), including “Two miles of sewer line in Talmage, an outing to the symphony for city kids, (and) solar panels glinting on a Penn Township roof” (and Robert Schellhamer, head of the Lancaster City Housing Authority, described the “wonderful windfall” of $991,476 his agency received…it's replacing four aging elevators and more than 300 windows at two high-rises for senior citizens).
And as far as jobs are concerned…
It's anyone's guess whether the act's laundry list of tax cuts and spending did much to soften the recession's blow here.It’s true that the “stim” is not a panacea, and it should have been bigger. But aside from saying no and braying about the magic of tax cuts, I really didn’t hear the Repugs presenting realistic alternatives.
What can be said is nonfarm job loss in Lancaster County has slowed. Job loss averaged 1,167 jobs per month in the first half of 2009. In the second half, the rate of job loss fell to 250 per month.
If you want to “turn the page” on Joe Pitts (and God, why would you not want to do that if you live in PA-16?), click here.
If tomorrow, liberals in Congress, state legislatures, and town councils all across the nation raised taxes and increased spending in order to fund every single item on every special-interest wish list, would social-justice nirvana have arrived? No.Oy – as noted here (from a "glibertarian," it should be noted)…
Even under Ronald Reagan, who scaled back government somewhat, spending on…"human resources" grew 0.90 percent. That's far less than under most presidents, but still an increase.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter's (sic) last year as president, the federal government spent a whopping 27.9% of "national income" (an obnoxious term for the private wealth produced by the American people). Reagan assaulted the free-spending Carter administration throughout his campaign in 1980. So how did the Reagan administration do? At the end of the first quarter of 1988, federal spending accounted for 28.7% of "national income."Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…
Even Ford and Carter did a better job at cutting government. Their combined presidential terms account for an increase of 1.4%—compared with Reagan's 3%—in the government's take of "national income." And in nominal terms, there (was) a 60% increase in government spending, thanks mainly to Reagan's requested budgets, which were only marginally smaller than the spending Congress voted.
The budget for the Department of Education, which candidate Reagan promised to abolish along with the Department of Energy…more than doubled to $22.7 billion, Social Security spending (rose) from $179 billion in 1981 to $269 billion in 1986. The price of farm programs went from $21.4 billion in 1981 to $51.4 billion in 1987, a 140% increase. And this doesn't count the…$4 billion "drought-relief" measure. Medicare spending in 1981 was $43.5 billion; in 1987 it hit $80 billion. Federal entitlements cost $197.1 billion in 1981—and $477 billion in 1987.
Ferris also sneaks in a commercial for the budget proposal of Repug U.S. House Rep Paul Ryan; in response, Ezra Klein of the WaPo tells us the following here (last bullet)…
As you all know by now, the long-term budget deficit is largely driven by health-care costs. To move us to surpluses, Ryan's budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher's growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs. And beyond health care, Social Security gets guaranteed, private accounts that CBO says will actually cost more than the present arrangement, further underscoring how ancillary the program is to our budget problem.The modern-day Republican Party had its chance to remake government in the early part of this decade, and it may take us years longer to recover from it. Aside from the failure of Ferris to acknowledge that, whatever else he has to say here is pouting and sour grapes while the grownups try to fix the mess he watched unfold and did virtually nothing about. Do they have anything else to offer?
An important note to understanding how Ryan's budget saves money: It's not through privatization, though everything does get privatized. It's through firm, federal cost controls. The privatization itself actually costs money.
No.
Update 7/31/10: And in the matter of Ryan...tee hee hee.
To be sure, the White House plans to continue to try to impact the national environment by touting its accomplishments, blaming Republicans for stopping other measures, and railing against the Bush legacy. They will also continue to work aggressively on the mechanics of victory, hoping to save their incumbents with their customized, race-by-race tactics. Vice President Joe Biden on ABC News' This Week crowed about Senate majority leader Harry Reid's back-from-the-dead strength in his Nevada race, credited largely to Reid's shaky Republican opponent, who landed her nomination in part because of Democratic shenanigans.Oh, so it’s the Dems’ fault that Nevada’s presumptive Repug U.S. Senate nominee Sue Lowden turned into The Chicken Lady (here) and lost the Repug nomination to teabagger Sharron (Wrong) Angle, huh?
And concerning Angle, I suppose this is the fault of the Dems also.
(Oh, and I meant to include this for Halperin's benefit also.)
Update 7/20/10: Halperin should give this a read also.
In a May 2009 op-ed piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Toomey argued for tolerance among Republicans on party members' abortion views. He outlined a vision of a GOP with room for vigorous debate on how to achieve the "unifying idea" of individual freedom and limited government, but "I would certainly not suggest that those who disagree with the pro-life position be banished from the Republican tent."Funny that Club-For-Growth Pat is saying that now, since, as noted here, he said, in so many words, that he would ban abortions and put doctors in jail for performing them.
Oh, but he’s a “moderate” now.
Sure he is (and to help Admiral Joe, click here).
PHILADELPHIA — The critic Clement Greenberg once described Thomas Eakins’s signature brand of darkness as “an ideal chiaroscuro.” Eakins was known to knock down even the brightness of a cheerful blue sky with a sober dimming wash.As noted here, there was quite a buzz when the smiley-faced-yellow-button people tried to get their filthy mitts on Eakins’s masterwork, aided in no small part by the utter cowardice of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, which, but for a furious bit of last-minute fundraising by some of the city’s deep-pocketed arts patrons, would have sold this precious piece of Philadelphia history.
So it often struck scholars as odd that his greatest symphony of darkness and light — the huge, still unsettling “Gross Clinic” from 1875, showing an operation in a surgical theater, a bloody union of human progress and frailty — always seemed to have a little too much light in it, in all the wrong places. The two figures standing in a corridor behind the godlike surgeon Dr. Samuel D. Gross appeared to be emerging from an orange inferno, with parts of their clothes aflame, drawing the viewer’s eye away from the drama at the painting’s center. Many of the medical students arrayed in the darkened galleries above were too bright and reddish, as if some were fiddling with flashlights.
“This is the picture that’s been in a thousand textbooks,” said Kathleen A. Foster, senior curator of American art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, staring despondently last week at an image of the work on a computer screen. “It’s the painting everyone knows. Unfortunately it’s not the one Eakins painted.”
But on the wall next to the computer towered the one he did, the original, out of its frame and glowering once again with all the menace and murk its creator intended. Over the past 10 months, in a high-ceilinged conservation lab, Ms. Foster and Mark Tucker, the museum’s chief paintings conservator, have led an ambitious restoration effort to reverse extensive changes made to the work sometime between 1917 and 1925 under the direction of its former owner, Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. The painting, which has not been seen in public since last July, will go back on view Saturday at the museum in the exhibition “An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing ‘The Gross Clinic’ Anew,” which will continue through Jan. 9.
The show will mark a rebirth in another sense as well. It will be the formal reintroduction of the picture to the public since a dramatic fund-raising effort in 2007 and 2008 that ensured the painting would stay in Philadelphia. The museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts raised the $68 million needed to keep it after Thomas Jefferson University, the medical school’s parent, announced plans to sell it for that price in a joint deal to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, being built in Bentonville, Ark., by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton.
Fortunately, because the painting was kept where it originated, it was able to undergo this faithful restoration. And I can’t wait to see it again (trying to describe the detail of it here really doesn’t do it justice).
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