Daily Loaf

A plethora of Congressmen and women bombarded the television airwaves on Sunday to dissect the $848 billion health care reform legislation that (barely) passed the Senate Saturday night.

The challenges facing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are formidable.  They were leading up to this past weekend’s vote, which was simply to allow debate to continue on the legislation.    Most egregious was Reid inserting a Medicaid spending provision in Louisiana to buy, er , win over Senator Mary Landrieu’s support.

On ABC’s “This Week”, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson said if the vote Saturday was on the real deal, he would have voted no. “I would have voted not to end debate. I would have voted no on a cloture vote to end debate.  I would not let it get off the floor.”

Count Nelson as among those from both parties who says the bill doesn’t do enough to control health insurance costs.

Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn said on “This Week”  that the bill “treats the symptoms, not the disease.  This is malpractice,” he said, “We’re not addressing the costs.”

Coburn, an MD himself, asked, “Why do we have an imbalance of primary care physicians?  Because we pay them 300% lower than specialists.  One in fifty doctors decide to go into primary care…that’s a disaster.”

Speaking up for the bill was South Florida Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who in her relatively short time in Congress (she’s serving her 3rd term) has become the most called upon Florida legislator on the national talk show circuit, because she’s extremely effective in getting her (and the party’s) message across.

Wasserman Schultz got into a verbal back and forth with her GOP colleague, Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn on “This Week”, accusing her and the GOP of politicizing breast cancer.

Blackburn had said that the controversial breast cancer screening guidelines announced last week were an example of how the Democrats would ration health care, and quoted a specific section of the House bill (”Go to page 1296, in Title III, on Preventive Wellness service….”)

Wasserman Schultz came right back, saying, ” “The task force language in that bill actually makes sure that prevention services like mammograms and colonoscopies would be free.”

See the exchange:

Wasserman Schultz is a breast cancer survivor, and  last week she was as critical as anyone in Congress on the recommendations that women in their 40s don’t need routine mammograms, calling them “disturbing” and “ludicrous.”  The result she said, would be that “more women in that age range will die.”

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There was more negative news on the job front on Friday:  It was announced that Florida’s unemployment rate was at 11.2% in October, the highest level in 34 years.   According to the Labor Department, 29 states recorded unemployment rising last month, with Michigan over 15%, and California at 12.5%.

Despite all the conversation about health care, it’s painfully obvious that the economic mess needs to be attended to in a more direct way than what the Obama administration has been able to do since passing the $787 billion stimulus plan back in February.

On Capitol Hill last week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, probably the least favorite Cabinet member amongst progressives, got heat from the left and the right.  Two Texas  Republicans, Kevin Brady and Michael Burgess called on Geithner to resign, while Oregon Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio said the same thing to MSNBC’s Ed Schultz last week.

On NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday, host David Gregory tried to play a favorite Washington game of asking 3 members of the U.S. Senate  if indeed, they believed Geithner ought to go.

Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchinson (trailing to the more conservative Rick Perry in the race for the GOP nomination for Governor in Texas) initially praised Brady for calling Geithner out, but then said “we shouldn’t keep our jobs either” if people were to  look towards who to blame for the economic crises.  I wonder if Governor Perry might save that piece of video in his campaign against the Senator.

California’s Diane Feinstein and Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman said no, with Lieberman calling the economy “horrible”, but said that the $700 billion bailout and the stimulus plan were bring the economy back.  He also suggested that there were a few things that Congress and the President could do to stimulate the economy further without spending too much money.

Feinstein spoke excitedly about the prospect of high-speed rail being given more funding by the government(which Florida’s leaders are eagerly hoping for).    And she said she’d like an infrastructure bank to be created from some of the funds from the TARP program to make those plans “work quicker.”  And the California Democrat said it was time to concentrate on having U.S. citizens “buy American products.”

At the same time, MTP host Gregory unveiled a graphic that was published in Saturday’s New York Times that reported on three mainstream financial forecasting groups showing how the economy has been saved by the stimulus plan.

Those three are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers, and Moody’s Economy.com

As reporters Jackie Calmes and Michael Cooper report:

In interviews, a broad range of economists said the White House and Congress were right to structure the package as a mix of tax cuts and spending, rather than just tax cuts as Republicans prefer or just spending as many Democrats do. And it is fortuitous, many say, that the money gets doled out over two years — longer for major construction — considering the probable length of the “jobless recovery” under way as wary employers hold off on new hiring.

I’ve written a lot about the stimulus this year, because it’s only the biggest spending bill in American history.  And it’s been criticized a lot, and sometimes, as in the embarrassing revelations that surfaced last week about factually incorrect information, been blasted as a complete boondoggle.

ABC News was able to locate several examples on the government’s web site outlining hundreds of millions of dollars spent and jobs created in Congressional districts that have been misidentified.

Late last night the Congressional Budget Office released their scorecard on the Senate health care bill.  As the NY Times reports:

The official cost analysis released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office shortly after 11 p.m. showed that Mr. Reid’s bill came in under the $900 billion goal suggested by Mr. Obama. But 24 million people would still be uninsured in 2019, the budget office said. About one-third of them would be illegal immigrants.

The Congressional Budget Office has said the House bill would reduce deficits by $109 billion over 10 years and cover 36 million people, but still leave 18 million uninsured in 2019.

Republicans and some independent budget analysts said, however, that the savings might not be fully achieved because they were based on unrealistic assumptions about a sustained increase in the productivity of health care providers and much slower growth in Medicare spending.

The Senate bill would include a public insurance plan – states could opt out of the plan by passing legislation (which Republicans in the Florida state legislature are already intending to do, via a Constitutional Amendment passed by the voters).

The bill does not go as far as the House did in limiting access to abortion.  As far as mandates, the Times reports that the bill would require most Americans to obtain health insurance, but would impose less onerous financial penalties on those who go without.

Major parts of the bill would not kick in until 2014, a year later than the House’s plan.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now has a task equally if not more challenging than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: collect 60 votes in the 100 member chamber any way he can.

It doesn’t help when people like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are popping off about doing what ever’s necessary to reject it.

Incidentally, if you’re getting annoyed with the independent Senator from Connecticut, you must read Jonathan Alter’s column in the current Newsweek.  Two priceless paragraphs on the man Alter calls “a putz”:

The latest trouble started after Lieberman said on Fox that “as a matter of conscience,” he would filibuster any health-care bill with a public option. Flashback: when he ran for reelection in 2006, Lieberman bragged about his MediChoice plan. It would “allow anybody in our country to buy into a national health-insurance pool like the federal-insurance pool we federal employees and members of Congress have.” That sounds suspiciously like—ahem—the public option. What’s changed?

Lieberman says it’s the deficit. He now opposes any kind of public option because of cost. But the Congressional Budget Office reports the opposite—that a government-run option would save money by providing competition. Maybe the CBO is wrong. Maybe it won’t save money. Who knows? So let’s stipulate that we have no clue about how much any of this will cost, long term.

That sounds familiar. In Afghanistan we have no idea how much a “government takeover” will cost. Does that keep Lieberman from being gung-ho about escalation? No. Like other neocons, he thinks the deeper principle at stake trumps short-term cost calculations that are probably wrong anyway. But when it comes to health care, restraining hypothetical spending is suddenly a matter of conscience. Spare me. For Lieberman the only principle at stake is his stake in looking principled.

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Although the U.S. Military is cautioning about making judgments about Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born Muslim suspected of killing 13 and wounding 29 others at Ford Hood last week, Joe Lieberman calls the shooting a ‘terrorist act.“

Two Florida Democrats were among the 39 who voted against the health care bill in the House Saturday night.  So was Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich.

And on Bay News 9 yesterday, Governor Charlie Crist tried to walk back his denial of supporting the stimulus bill by talking about why he supported it.  Really.

Download the report here.

Blue Dog North Florida Representative Allen Boyd and Orlando area Congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas were the two Democrats who joined all of the Republicans in the Florida Congressional Caucus in voting against the $1.1 trillion health care reform bill.  The bill barely squeaked by in the House Saturday night on a 220-215 vote.

In a lengthy press release his office distributed before his vote, Boyd, who represents the Panhandle area, concluded:

“My vote against H.R. 3962, the House’s first attempt at a healthcare bill, is not a vote against responsible reform.  Rather, it is a signal that our work in Congress is not yet complete.  Reducing the cost of healthcare services must be the focus of any reform package, and I will continue working, as I’ve always done, to fix what’s wrong with our healthcare system, to continue what’s right, and to ensure Americans have access to affordable, quality coverage they need.”

On Fox News Sunday yesterday, Connecticut Independent Senator Joe Lieberman boldly  suggested that Major Nidal Malik Hasan  could have been an Islamic extremist, and that his violent attack at Fort Hood in which he is accused of killing 13 people and wounding another 29 was a terrorist attack.

Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, cautioned that it was too early to reach conclusions, but said that what was known was that Hasan was under personal stress “and if the reports we are receiving are accurate,” that he had turned to Islamic extremism.  If true, Lieberman told Fox News’ Chris Wallace, “the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act, and the most destructive terrorist act on U.S. soil since 9/11,” but he added at the end of that statement, “we don’t know enough to say.”

And Lieberman said yesterday that he is prepared to conduct an investigation into any signals the Army might have missed in knowing more about Hasan.

We don’t know enough to say now, but there are very, very strong warning signs here.  The U.S. Army, the Department of Defense has a real obligation to convene an independent investigation to go back and look at whether warning signs were missed, both the stress he was under, but also the statements he was making that have led people to believe he was an Islamist extremist.”

Meanwhile, ABC News is reporting that the U.S. intelligence agencies were aware that Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with Al-Qaeda.

Investigators want to know if Hasan maintained contact with a radical mosque leader from Virginia, Anwar al Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen and runs a web site that promotes jihad around the world against the U.S.

In a blog posting early Monday titled “Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing,” Awlaki calls Hassan a “hero” and a “man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

Representing the military on three different talk shows yesterday was the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff, General George Casey Jr., who admitted he was concerned about the possibility of Muslim troopers experiencing a backlash of Hasan’s violent act.  And Casey said, “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

And yesterday on CBS’ Face The Nation, Rhode Island Democratic Senator Jack Reed said that in the wake of the Fort Hood tragedy, Congress needs to take a closer look at what the Army has been doing in terms of adequate care for U.S. soldiers.

South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham said it was “easy to second guess” at this juncture, but that he wouldn’t do so. He said to wait for the evidence to unfold and not overreact. He said, “You can be in the military and disagree with policy (which Hasan reportedly did). It’ s not about his religion, it’s not about Islam, it’s about him.”

In trying to reinforce Graham’s point, host Bob Schieffer added that “Christians have had their full helping of nuts” as well.  Schieffer also asked what the Fox News analysts suggested yesterday: That the military had been afraid to investigate Hasan because of fears they’d be accused of discrimination.

Graham said, “His action’s don’t reflect the Muslim faith.  …let’s not take this to another level.  Let’s not suggest that we gave him a pass because he’s a Muslim.”

Nidal Malik Hasan remains in critical condition, but was removed from his ventilator on Saturday.

There will be no runoff election in Afghanistan this weekend (I know, we were all looking forward to the revote between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah).  Karzai’s in, but what, if anything, will this mean for the U.S. interests?  Reportedly President Obama will meet at least two more times with his advisers on the strategy going forward.

As those discussions continue, the  young State Department official whose resignation was made public is getting  lots of face time.  Matthew Hoh appeared this morning on The Today Show, and yesterday on CNN

St. Pete Times/Miami Herald/Bay News 9 released a series of polls over the weekend, and it’s policy more than policy-makers that is most provocative in those results.

And on Sunday talk, Fox News gave Rush Limbaugh a platform for the first half of their one-hour program yesterday.  Too bad nothing interesting came out of it, other than the odious comment that President Obama’s appearance at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware last week was nothing more than a publicity stunt, according to Rush.

Most interesting was Joe Lieberman on CBS, saying he’d rather have nothing happen with health care reform than to allow for a government-run public option.

Download the report here.

This blatant rip-off of Leno’s “Jaywalking” segment is making some waves this week. Remember, the Republicans think that if you voted for Obama you’re stupid but if you voted for Bush twice you’re a great American, so maybe take their opinion with a grain of salt. (Oh, and the related Zogby poll is pure hogwash.)

• Eric Holder for A.G. But can he sing “Let the Eagle Soar”?
• Down goes Ted Stevens.
• Joe Lieberman hangs on to his committee.
• Arrrgh! Somali pirates strike again.
• Come on GM, begging isn’t becoming of an auto giant.
• Mark Cuban’s legal team blogs his side of the insider trading story.
• NBC’s Dan Abrams forms a media consulting firm.
• The candidates to be the next leader of the hapless Pinellas Democratic Party.
• FLA isn’t blue, as idiots in the media insist, it is purple.
• New Springsteen disc due in January.
• Here’s why the Democrats forgave Traitor Joe.
• Oswald didn’t do it.
• The tiny man from Boston wins AL MVP.

Day two for the Republicans was another bust. Bush via satellite? Fred Thompson droning on in prime time? Yawn. (Remember: The Dems had the Hillary psychodrama on day two.) So, instead of convention speeches, here’s the (brutal) first six minutes of the CBS Evening News.

• Joe Lieberman puts ‘em to bed at the RNC.
• WaPo headline: “Palin Slashed Funding for Teen Moms.” Are the Republicans now touting Palin’s handing out of her kid’s allowance as budget experience?
• Tonight, the lady speaks.
• Poor, marginalized Republican Ron Paul can still raise a hearty crowd.
• Republicans, sensing imminent defeat, reignite the culture wars.
• Oil prices continue their temporary, election year decline.
• What does Apple have up its sleeve for next week?
• Tom Brady’s ready to go.