Hmmm...I wonder what lobby encouraged this decision?

This should help contain healthcare costs:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama said Friday the U.S. will overturn a 22-year-old travel and immigration ban against people with HIV early next year. The order will be finalized on Monday, Obama said, completing a process begun during the Bush administration.

The U.S. has been among a dozen countries that bar entry to travelers with visas or anyone seeking a green card based on their HIV status.

"If we want to be the global leader in combatting HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it," Obama said at the White House before signing a bill to extend the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program. Begun in 1990, the program provides medical care, medication and support services to about half a million people, most of them low-income.

The bill is named for an Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion at age 13. White went on to fight AIDS-related discrimination against him and others like him and help educate the country about the disease. He died in April 1990 at the age of 18.

His mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, attended the signing ceremony, as did several members of Congress and HIV/AIDS activists.

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Silently slipped into a defense bill

I thought this administration and Congress was supposed to be different? The expanded hate crimes bill was snuck into a $700 billion defense appropriation so representatives and senators had the choice of signing the bill with the hate crimes bill or not signing it and leaving our troops high and dry. To discourage such lack of integrity, President Obama would have been right to veto this bill, but that would take integrity as well.

I sent this note to both of my senators; worked real well - they both voted for it:

I am completely ashamed of the conduct of the U.S. Congress. That the recent hate crimes bill - which seeks to expand federal hate-crime protection to homosexuals – was slipped into the defense authorization bill to ensure passage is deceitful and totally inappropriate. Hate crimes supporters in the House, realizing that the expanded hate crimes bill could not pass on its own merits, used deceitful tactics to get it passed. And the Senate seems willing to do the same. As it has abandoned its integrity, I am quickly losing confidence in the legislative branch of our federal government. I thought that the new administration and Democrat led legislature were supposed to preside over an exceptionally open and honest approach to government. Those promises have sadly faded.

I implore you as my representative not to succumb to this pressure. Let the debate over additional hate crimes be discussed honestly in the light of day, not in the shadows of another bill which has nothing to do with this issue. Please give me some hope that there is some integrity left in the Senate.

If you do vote for this bill as is, I can assure you that you will never receive my vote for any public office candidacy again, and I will do whatever I can to convince my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to do the same. I could not support a candidate who lacks the integrity to vote “No” on this bill.

Into the abyss

This is from an article by Dr. Albert Mohler. I highlighted a few critical points:

In a significant portion of his address, President Obama spoke of the fact that gay and lesbian concerns “raise a great deal of emotion in this country.” He did not counsel the homosexual community to be patient, but he did ask for understanding. He spoke of advances made over the last three decades, but then reflected that “there’s still laws to change and there’s still hearts to open.” Furthermore, “There are still fellow citizens, perhaps neighbors, even loved ones — good and decent people — who hold fast to outworn arguments and old attitudes; who fail to see your families like their families; who would deny you the rights most Americans take for granted. And that’s painful and it’s heartbreaking.”

The President’s promises were sweeping. Nevertheless, the most remarkable section of his address included a truly unprecedented promise. The President told the group that his expectation is that when they look back over the years of his administration, they would “see a time in which we put a stop to discrimination against gays and lesbians.”

Then he spoke these words:

You will see a time in which we as a nation finally recognize relationships between two men or two women as just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman.

Those words represent a moral revolution that goes far beyond what any other President has ever promised or articulated. In the span of a single sentence, President Obama put his administration publicly on the line to press, not only for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, but for the recognition that same-sex relationships are “just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman.”

It is virtually impossible to imagine a promise more breathtaking in its revolutionary character than this — to normalize same-sex relationships to the extent that they are recognized as being as admirable as heterosexual marriage.

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You say you want a revolution...

If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow!

Bringing down the Fourth Estate?

The White House is calling on other news organizations to isolate and alienate Fox News as it sends out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece.

Top political strategists question the decision by the Obama administration to escalate its offensive against Fox News. And as of Monday, the four other major television networks had not given any indication that they intend to sever their ties with Fox News.

But several top White House officials have taken aim at Fox News since communications director Anita Dunn branded Fox "opinion journalism masquerading as news" in an interview last Sunday.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN on Sunday that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox."

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is "not a news organization."

"Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way," Axelrod counseled ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "We're not going to treat them that way."

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Funny

It's more than cheap doctor visits

This is an excerpt from an article in the Wall Street journal on reasons why countries adopt - or don't adopt - universal health care:

I discovered Victor Fuchs's analysis during a dive into my PC's hard drive, where years ago I stored a paper the Stanford economist did in 1976 called "From Bismarck to Woodcock: The 'Irrational' Pursuit of National Health Insurance." That it was delivered to mark the 65th birthday of the conservative economist George Stigler suggests the eclectic flavor of the liberal Prof. Fuchs's thinking.

His paper is mainly a meditation attempting to explain why so many countries adopted national insurance programs, and why it is resisted in the U.S. Several broad points help explain the tides running against the Obama plan.

He notes, for instance, that the national health insurance movement rose alongside a larger transfer of responsibility from the family to the state: "Every time the state assumes an additional function such as health insurance, child care or benefits for the aged, the need for close family ties becomes weaker."

But even the state must bond: "It may be that one of the most effective ways of increasing allegiance to the state is through national health insurance." This would have been Bismarck's purpose. "We live at a time when many of the traditional symbols and institutions that held a nation together have been weakened and fallen into disrepute. A more sophisticated public requires more sophisticated symbols, and national health insurance may fit that role particularly well." Updating the public symbols, Mr. Obama says health care is one of the two "pillars" of U.S. prosperity in the 21st century.

Because this is how good Christians respond to sin

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama reaffirmed his campaign pledge to end the ban on homosexuals serving openly in the military in a speech Saturday, but offered no timetable or specifics for acting on that longstanding promise.

He acknowledged to a cheering crowd that some policy changes he promised on the campaign trail are not coming as quickly as they expected.

"I will end 'don't ask-don't tell,"' Obama said to a standing ovation from the crowd of about 3,000 at the annual dinner of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay civil rights advocacy group.

The law was passed by Congress in 1993 and signed by President Bill Clinton, who also promised to repeal the ban on homosexuals in the military but was blunted by opposition in the military and Congress. Obama said he's working with Pentagon and congressional leaders on ending the policy.

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The results are in...what results?

CNN) -- President Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

Less than nine months into his presidency, Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

The first African-American to win the White House, Obama was praised by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

The committee also said Obama has "created a new climate in international politics."

The announcement came as a surprise -- Obama's name had not been mentioned among front-runners -- and the roomful of reporters in Oslo, Norway, gasped when he was named.

In his short time in office, Obama has acted on a wide range of issues from the economy to terrorism and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Man...that's a lot of bread

WASHINGTON -- The federal budget deficit tripled to a record $1.4 trillion for the 2009 fiscal year that ended last week, congressional analysts said Wednesday.

The Congressional Budget Office estimate, while expected, is bad news for the White House and its allies in Congress as they press ahead with health care overhaul legislation that could cost $900 billion over the next decade.

The unprecedented flood of red ink flows from several factors, including a big drop in tax revenues due to the recession, $245 billion in emergency spending on the Wall Street bailout and the takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Then there is almost $200 billion in costs from President Obama's economic stimulus bill, as well as increases in programs such as unemployment benefits and food stamps.

The previous record deficit was $459 billion and was set just last year.

The Obama health plan would be "paid for" with new revenues and curbs in spending. But the overhaul effort would eat up tax increases and spending cuts that could be used to bring the deficit down.

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Just to be clear...

WASHINGTON - -- Despite months of seeming ambivalence about creating a government health insurance plan, the Obama White House has launched an intensifying behind-the-scenes campaign to get divided Senate Democrats to take up some version of the idea in the weeks just ahead.President Barack Obama has long advocated a so-called public option, while at the same time repeatedly expressing openness to other ways to offer consumers a potentially more affordable alternative to health plans sold by private insurers. But now, senior administration officials are holding private meetings almost daily at the Capitol with senior Democratic staff to discuss ways to include a version of the public plan in the health care bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to bring to the Senate floor later this month, according to senior Democratic congressional aides.Among those regularly in the meetings are Obama's top health care adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, aides to Reid, and Senate finance and health committee staff, both of which developed health care bills.

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