J's Cafe Nette

Archive for August 13th, 2007

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It looks like pork to me and the last time I checked pork wasn’t kosher.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 — Despite promises by Congress to end the secrecy of earmarks and other pet projects, the House of Representatives has quietly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to specific hospitals and health care providers under a bill passed this month to help low-income children.

Instead of naming the hospitals, the bill describes them in cryptic terms, so that identifying a beneficiary is like solving a riddle. Most of the provisions were added to the bill at the request of Democratic lawmakers.

One hospital, Bay Area Medical Center, sits on Green Bay, straddling the border between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, more than 200 miles north of Chicago. The bill would increase Medicare payments to the hospital by instructing federal officials to assume that it was in Chicago, where Medicare rates are set to cover substantially higher wages for hospital workers.

Lawmakers did not identify the hospital by name. For the purpose of Medicare, the bill said, “any hospital that is co-located in Marinette, Wis., and Menominee, Mich., is deemed to be located in Chicago.” Bay Area Medical Center is the only hospital fitting that description.

The primary purpose of the bill is to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program while enhancing benefits for older people in traditional Medicare. But a review of the bill by The New York Times found that it would also direct millions of dollars a year to about 40 favored hospitals, by increasing their Medicare payments.

The bill, for example, would give special treatment to two hospitals in Kingston, N.Y., stipulating that Medicare should pay them as if they were in New York City, 80 miles away. Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York, who worked to get this provision into the bill, said it would allow the hospitals to pay competitive wages so they could keep top health care professionals.

John E. Finch Jr., a vice president of Benedictine Hospital, one of the two in Kingston, said the bill would “make a significant difference to us financially,” increasing the payment for a typical Medicare case by $1,000.

Some Republicans have complained about what they call “hospital pork.” Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, said the bill was “littered with earmarks for hospital-specific projects.”

Republicans sometimes did the same thing when they controlled Congress. Under a 1999 law, for example, a small hospital in rural Dixon, Ill., was deemed to be in the Chicago area — 95 miles away — at the behest of its congressman, J. Dennis Hastert, who was then speaker.

When Democrats took control of Congress, they promised to be more open and accountable, saying they would disclose the purpose of each earmark, the name of the lawmaker requesting it and the name and address of the intended recipient.

But Democrats said they had no list of the projects in the recently passed bill and no explicit criteria or standards for judging which hospitals should be reassigned to an area with higher Medicare payments.

Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said people should keep the big picture in mind.

“It’s easy to criticize individual provisions of large, complex bills,” Mr. Elshami said, but “the focus should be on the huge number of uninsured children who will be eligible for life-saving health care under our bill.”

Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, who championed the provision for Bay Area Medical Center, lives in Menominee. Alex Haurek, a spokesman for Mr. Stupak, said, “The congressman will not be available for comment.”

I thought this Congress was going to be transparent when it came to pork barrel spending. I guess we were all fooled.

Now that we have established small towns within 200 miles of large cities should get higher Medicare payments to pay the workers a higher city wage, how did your hospital fare? Mine isn’t listed and I have a Democratic Congressman.

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Speaks for itself.

When Will Heaton went to work for Rep. Robert W. Ney in 2001, he was 23 years old and still in awe of the members of Congress he had come to know years earlier as a congressional page. Within six months, the Ohio Republican promoted the fresh-faced neophyte to be the youngest chief of staff in Congress.

For the next five years, Heaton stuck by Ney, even as the House Administration Committee chairman accepted free meals at super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s downtown restaurant, sports tickets in his arena skyboxes and luxurious junkets around the world. Heaton accompanied Ney on a golf junket to Scotland with Abramoff, and he helped Ney return the favors to Abramoff.

But as Ney’s political career disintegrated amid revelations of his ties to Abramoff, Heaton became disillusioned and began secretly helping an FBI task force investigating Abramoff. At first, through his attorney, Heaton handed over internal documents from Ney’s office to the FBI. Then he recorded colleagues in Ney’s office.

Last summer, Heaton began secretly recording his conversations with the six-term congressman, according to documents filed in court last week by the government and Heaton’s lawyers. Heaton taped numerous phone calls and wore a hidden wire to a 2 1/2 -hour, face-to-face meeting with Ney that provided “exceptionally important” help to the FBI’s investigation of Abramoff.

Heaton’s cooperation was crucial because of constitutional obstacles involved in prosecuting a member of Congress, according to a memo by Justice Department attorney Mary Butler.

A congressional aide choosing to wear a wire on his boss is a Washington rarity, according to legal experts — especially for an aide such as Heaton, whose entire career was spent working in Congress, mostly for Ney.

Story

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Speaks for itself.

Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) — Mitt Romney, who won the Iowa Republican straw poll yesterday, said he “misspoke” when he suggested that his sons’ work on his presidential campaign was comparable to serving in the military in Iraq.

I misspoke,” the former Massachusetts governor said today on “Fox News Sunday.” “It’s not service to the country, it’s service for me, and there’s just no comparison there.”

At an event in Iowa last week, Romney was asked why his adult sons hadn’t enlisted in the military and responded by saying: “One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I’d be a great president,” according to the Associated Press.

Story

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Speaks for itself.

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he misspoke when he said he spent as much time, if not more, at ground zero exposed to the same health risks as workers combing the site after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I think I could have said it better,” he told nationally syndicated radio host Mike Gallagher. “You know, what I was saying was, ‘I’m there with you.’”

The former New York mayor upset some firefighters and police officers when he said Thursday in Cincinnati that he was at ground zero “as often, if not more, than most of the workers.”

“I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them,” he told reporters at a Los Angeles Dodgers-Cincinnati Reds baseball game.

Fire and police officials responded angrily, saying Giuliani did not do the same work as those involved in the rescue, recovery and cleanup from the 2001 terrorist attacks, which left many workers sick and injured.

On Friday, Giuliani said he was trying to show his concern for the workers’ health.

“What I was trying to say yesterday is that I empathize with them, because I feel like I have that same risk,” he said.

“There were people there less than me, people on my staff, who already have had serious health consequences, and they weren’t there as often as I was,” Giuliani said, “but I wasn’t trying to suggest a competition of any kind, which is the way it come across.”

Giuliani’s explanation further angered his ground zero critics, prompting several to issue a statement demanding an apology.

“He is such a liar, because the only time he was down there was for photo ops with celebrities, with politicians, with diplomats,” said deputy fire chief Jimmy Riches, who spent months digging for his firefighter son.

“On 9/11 all he did was run. He got that soot on him, and I don’t think he’s taken a shower since.”

Story

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In an eerily similar situation to the space shuttle Columbia, that burned upon re-entry a little over three years ago, the space shuttle Endeavour has a serious problem.

The other coincidence is this shuttle, like Challenger, has a teacher onboard.

Upon liftoff a chunk of foam broke off the fuel tank, and was probably frozen into ice from the cold fuel being fed into the rockets. It caused a three and a half inch gouge in the underbelly of the shuttle, and has penetrated the heat shield. NASA says since Columbia all shuttles are equipped to handle repairs of such problems.

HOUSTON — A close-up laser inspection by Endeavour’s astronauts Sunday revealed that a 3 1/2-inch-long gouge penetrates all the way through thermal tiles on the shuttle’s belly, and had NASA urgently calculating whether risky spacewalk repairs are needed.

A chunk of insulating foam smacked the shuttle at liftoff last week in an unbelievably unlucky ricochet off the fuel tank and carved out the gouge.

The unevenly shaped gouge — which straddles two side-by-side tiles and the corner of a third — is 3 1/2 inches long and just over 2 inches wide. Sunday’s inspection showed that the damage went all the way through the 1-inch-thick tiles, exposing the felt material sandwiched between the tiles and the shuttle’s aluminum frame.

Mission managers expect to decide Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, whether to send astronauts out to patch the gouge. Engineers are trying to determine whether the marred area can withstand the searing heat of atmospheric re-entry at flight’s end, and actual heating tests will be conducted on similarly damaged samples.

“We have really prepared for exactly this case, since Columbia,” said John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team. “We have spent a lot of money in the program and a lot of time and a lot of people’s efforts to be ready to handle exactly this case.”

The damaged thermal tiles are located near the right main landing gear door. In a stroke of luck, they’re right beneath the aluminum framework for the right wing, which would offer extra protection during the ride back to Earth.

This area is subjected to as much as 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit during re-entry. A hole, if large and deep enough, could lead to another Columbia-type disaster.

Let’s remember these brave seven people who went into space knowing they could lose their lives in the effort. Let us pray for a safe return of these six Americans and one Canadian.

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Tommy Thompson has dropped out of the presidential race.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Saying he had no regrets, former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson on Sunday dropped out of the crowded race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination after a poor showing in a straw poll in Iowa.

Thompson, 65, finished sixth in Saturday’s nonbinding mock election. He had said he needed to finish in the top two to continue his campaign.

“I have no regrets about running. I felt my record as governor of Wisconsin and Secretary of Health and Human Services gave me the experience I needed to serve as president, but I respect the decision of the voters,” Thompson said in a statement.

“I am leaving the campaign trail today.”

One down and how many more tens to go?

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With or without Mitt Romney the CNN/YouTube debate with Republican presidential candidates is on again.

This just in: The Republican CNN/YouTube debate, in limbo for the past few weeks, is on again.

But Mitt Romney, who won Saturday’s Iowa straw poll and has criticized the debate format, has yet to commit to the Nov. 28 event.

Romney, the lone GOP holdout, has posted more videos on his YouTube channel (283 as of Sunday afternoon) than any other presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat. But he has resisted the debate, in which videotaped questions are submitted through YouTube. In an interview with Manchester Union Leader, Romney said, “I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman.”

That drew a video response from Billiam, the snowman who questioned the Democrats on global warming last month in their YouTube debate. This time, he riffed on another Romney quote from the campaign: “Lighten up slightly.”

Sources at CNN said the debate, co-hosted with the Republican Party of Florida, will be held at the Mahaffey Theatre in St. Petersburg. Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, said that more than 1,100 videos have been submitted, and the popular video-sharing site will allow YouTube users to upload their videos until Nov. 27.

The process is the same as the Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C.: Questions can’t be more than 30 seconds long, and CNN’s political team, led by Washington bureau chief David Bohrman, will select the 30 or so videos for the debate. CNN drew some criticism for including the Billiam question, but Bohrman, the mastermind of the YouTube-CNN marriage, defended the call in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “It was a really good question, and it was funny. I think running for president is serious business … but we do want to know that the president has a sense of humor.”

Many of the questions already submitted for the GOP candidates, from a diverse set of YouTubers, are thoughtful. A 21-year-old asks the thrice-married Rudy Giuliani if he really has the character for the presidency. A 26-year-old Mormon asks Romney, also a Mormon, to explain his changing views on abortion. A 69-year-old asks how the candidates to detail their plans to reduce the size of the U.S. government.

Now let’s see how many people actually watch one of these endless “debates” which really debate no one but are question and answer sessions.

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Senator Clinton, are you black enough?

The question usually aimed at her darker opponent from Chicago triggered a burst of laughter from Hillary Rodham Clinton. She recovered from the barb and proceeded by not answering it.

This campaign moment occurred Thursday before the Las Vegas convention crowd of the National Association of Black Journalists. CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux pinned back the former First Lady to explain how she could “sustain black support ” while running against an African-American. Ironically, thanks to Sen. Barack Obama’s mixed white and Kenyan parentage and campaign mischief, it is he who usually gets to field the “black enough” question.

This is what our campaigns have decended into.

Story, if you care to read it.

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I believe this Washington Post article by Monica Hesse was meant to be her version of funny, but somehow I find it unhumorous.

Titled Fred, Fred, Fred: Thompson’s Challenge Has a Name she goes on to make fun of his name as some stupid hick from the back woods of the South.

I suppose a lot of people could and have made fun of my name, including me. The thing is, we didn’t name ourselves (except my sister who decided to take her first and middle name and have it be her full name. It sounds quite funny.)

For all we know Fred Thompson may have been named for a relative his parents loved.

To make fun of a name is getting pretty low, especially when your first name is Monica. Read the rest of this entry »

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