1.12 TRILLION budget “deemed to have passed” as Congress to chicken to vote
Your congress has just spent 1.12 TRILLION of your dollars without even voting on it, because they think that will make you less mad about the ravenous spending. I hope they’re wrong.
Last night, as part of a procedural vote on the emergency war supplemental bill, House Democrats attached a document that “deemed as passed” a non-existent $1.12 trillion budget. The execution of the “deeming” document allows Democrats to start spending money for Fiscal Year 2011 without the pesky constraints of a budget.
The procedural vote passed 215-210 with no Republicans voting in favor and 38 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote against deeming the faux budget resolution passed.
Never before—since the creation of the Congressional budget process—has the House failed to pass a budget, failed to propose a budget then deemed the non-existent budget as passed as a means to avoid a direct, recorded vote on a budget, but still allow Congress to spend taxpayer money.
1 - House Democrats ‘Deem’ Faux $1.1 Trillion Budget ‘as Passed’
Gibbs dodges “Redistribution” Question
You don’t dodge what you don’t need to hide, folks.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has evaded answering the question of whether President Barack Obama agrees with Dr. Donald Berwick, his newly appointed administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, who has insisted that health-care systems must redistribute wealth.
“Excellent health care is by definition redistributional,” Berwick said in a speech delivered on July 1, 2008.
When asked directly at the July 7 White House press briefing whether Obama agreed with this, Gibbs would not answer the question. Instead, he parried it with jocular statements about the provenance of the quote.
Your new Medicare chief is an “Expert on Rationing”
For all you that are fans of rationed health care, this guy will be right up your ally.
n an interview last year with Biotechnology Healthcare, Berwick said society makes decisions about rationing all the time, and that the “decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly.“
He has also praised the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which he said had “developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn.“
Said Berwick, “You can say, ‘Well, we shouldn’t even look.‘ But that would be irrational. The social budget is limited—we have a limited resource pool. It makes terribly good sense to at least know the price of an added benefit, and at some point we might say nationally, regionally, or locally that we wish we could afford it, but we can’t. We have to be realistic about the knowledge base.“
Why does the FIFA World Cup have a court with Judges?
Does this mean you’ll be see Major League Baseball courts soon?
The socialite appeared late Friday in a FIFA World Cup courtroom after being arrested on suspicion of possession of marijuana at a quarterfinal match between Brazil and the Netherlands.
1 - World Cup court in South Africa drops marijuana case against Paris Hilton
NASA’s new mission - Better Muslim Relations??
Wow. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.
Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA’s orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.
1 - NASA Chief: Next Frontier Better Relations With Muslim World
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