The National Association of Postal Supervisors has fired back at President Barack Obama "Don't panic! It's just a metaphor. No reason to get the Secret Service all worked up. Ev'body just chill..."
for dragging the U.S. Postal Service further into the health care debate. In an Aug. 14 letter, NAPS President Ted Keating accused Obama of using snailmail the Postal Service as a "scapegoat" and unfairly painting it as "an example of inefficiency" during a health care town hall meeting last week. Obama told a crowd in Portsmouth, N.H., Aug. 11 that private health care insurance providers should be able to compete with a government-run public option because "UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. . It's the Post Office that's always having problems."
Thus comparing health insurance companies to FedEx and the public option to the Post Office. Smooth, Bambi, real smooth ...
Keating pointed out that UPS and FedEx revenues are falling faster than Postal Service revenues, and reiterated the overtime, management and work hour reductions the Postal Service has made over the last year: "With all of these efforts underway within the Postal Service community, it was a kick to the chest to have you take a shot at a group of federal employees who are working hard every day to support this country.
"Employees of the Postal Service are largely represented by unions and management associations, all of whom strongly supported your candidacy last year. For our support we do not expect any special consideration. However, we would like to be treated fairly and not have our current situation misrepresented, especially by the Commander-in-Chief."
Posted by: Mike ||
08/18/2009 09:04 ||
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“However, we would like to be treated fairly and not have our current situation misrepresented, especially by the Commander-in-Chief."
GeeÂ…Mr. Union honchoÂ…we see your point. The U.S. Postal Service revenues are down nearly $5 billion this year. It's on track for an operating loss of between $6 billion and $12 billion. Which means itÂ’s overall debt may surpass $10 billion. But thatÂ’s hardly "an example of inefficiency".
#4
Keating pointed out that UPS and FedEx revenues are falling faster than Postal Service revenues, ..
Ignoring the cost of operation on the other side of the equation. Take a look at the union 'bargained' retiree health care tab on the USPS side out the outflow.
#1
The latest poll numbers show him behind his Democrat primary opponent, Sleestak, by 48% to 10%, and even further behind his potential Republican opponent, Toomey.
The White House for the first time Sunday seemed to acknowledge that people across the country received unsolicited e-mails from the administration last week about health care reform, suggesting the problem is with third-party groups that placed the recipients' names on the distribution list.
In a written statement released exclusively to FOX News, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said the White House hopes those who received the e-mails without signing up for them were not "inconvenienced" by the messages.
Because only FOX News watchers would not want emails from the White House? An interesting assumptionion.
"The White House e-mail list is made up of e-mail addresses obtained solely through the White House Web site. The White House doesn't purchase, upload or merge from any other list, again, all e-mails come from the White House Web site as we have no interest in e-mailing anyone who does not want to receive an e-mail," the statement said. "If an individual received the e-mail because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the e-mail, we hope they were not too inconvenienced."
The White House previously would not answer questions on how the e-mails landed unsolicited in so many inboxes. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Thursday said he couldn't give an answer until he saw who received the e-mails because he doesn't have "omnipotent clarity."
Posted by: Fred ||
08/18/2009 00:00 ||
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White House suggests third-party groups are to blame for unsolicited health care e-mails.
Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure they are.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
08/18/2009 2:41 Comments ||
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#2
My four years old (well, almost, Sept 22) gives better excuses when asked who put toy cars in Dada's bed.
#9
The White House must keep all e-mails until the end of office and then turned over to National Archives. Whether sent in response to the fishing expedition for erroneous mail circulating re: health care or on a mass online petition, this tends to stifle any dissent or debate. Maybe the ACLU or someone will sue Axelrod? I heard Jeanene Pirro was one of those on the receiving end.;)
#10
"The White House must keep all e-mails until the end of office and then turned over to National Archives"
No, that's just the law--nothing they need to concern themselves with.
Posted by: James ||
08/18/2009 21:13 Comments ||
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#11
"I haven't seen Obama say something that wasn't a lie."
Including "a," "and," and "the," Darth. :-(
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
08/18/2009 22:53 Comments ||
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An administration official said tonight that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius "misspoke" when she told CNN this morning that a government run health insurance option "is not an essential part" of reform. This official asked not to be identified in exchange for providing clarity about the intentions of the President. The official said that the White House did not intend to change its messaging and that Sebelius simply meant to echo the president, who has acknowledged that the public option is a tough sell in the Senate and is, at the same time, a must-pass for House Democrats, and is not, in the president's view, the most important element of the reform package.
A second official, Linda Douglass, director of health reform communications for the administration, said that President Obama believed that a public option was the best way to reduce costs and promote competition among insurance companies, that he had not backed away from that belief, and that he still wanted to see a public option in the final bill.
"Nothing has changed," she said. "The President has always said that what is essential that health insurance reform lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and increase choice and competition in the health insurance market. He believes that the public option is the best way to achieve these goals."
A third White House official, via e-mail, said that Sebelius didn't misspeak. "The media misplayed it," the third official said.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/18/2009 00:00 ||
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Kept the chair warm, totally fornicate the prospect of large economic growth and a chance for Kansas to be on the leading edge og energy technology. Hey but other than those few things she was just ______________ (you fill in the blank).
#7
...not to mention fighting the super-clean coal plants, shutting down schools (at one point wondering if students were going to be bussed 60 miles outside and into Dodge City) when millions could be found to renovate KU bathrooms, could make a 2 day event out of 20 basketball players winning NCAA but twice missed welcoming home KANG soldiers you know the ones she claimed would have helped the Greensburg tornado victims, taking 2 days to respond to the Greensburg night tornados, the farce Green Greensburg, campaigning for Obama during a budget crises then trying to ram an illegal money transfer through, not defending Wichita vs. the EPA fine threat, ignoring west Kansas farmer rancher and infastructure issues, not defending Kansans from the typical racists comment, da da da...
I wonder if she even knew she was going to be used as a target with this statement. What she could be is loose barbed wire for that bus to run over. Ever seen an axle wrapped with barbed wire?
(CNN) -- A key Senate negotiator said Sunday that President Barack Obama should drop his push for a government-funded public health insurance option because the Senate will never pass it.
Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota said it was futile to continue to "chase that rabbit" due to the lack of 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
"The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been," Conrad said on "FOX News Sunday."
Conrad is one of six Senate Finance Committee members -- three Democrats and three Republicans -- who are negotiating a compromise health-care bill that would be the only bipartisan proposal so far.
Three House bills and another Senate version have all been proposed by Democrats, and all contain provisions for a public health insurance option intended to compete against private insurers.
Republican opponents argue the public option is a step toward the government taking over the health care industry. Many Democrats argue that it would not have that effect.
Conrad has proposed creating non-profit health insurance cooperatives that could negotiate coverage as a collective for their members.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/18/2009 00:00 ||
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I am hoping to soon read the headline "Health Insurance 'Reform' Dead for This Session: Congress Gives Full Attention to the National Financial Crisis" Once that occurs it will be fun to read the papers again.
#2
Yeah, and "Congress pledges to read bills before voting", "Courts agree not to legislate", and "Obama to take oath of office seriously". Don't hold your breath.
Representative Eric Massa (D- NY) addressed an intimate group of Netroots activists during their annual Netroots Nation gathering in Pittsburgh this weekend. Mr. Massa reiterated his support for a single payer health care bill. He discussed the risks he takes for wanting to support such a measure in his "right wing Republican district."
According to Swing State Project, Mr. Massa won his 2008 race by two percentage points. The district's voting pattern index (PVI) is a Republican +5 seat. The National Republican Congressional Committee has the upstate New York congressman in their sights for 2010 along with 69 other House Democrats as reported by Politico.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/18/2009 00:00 ||
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NY Rep. Massa: "I will vote against the interests of my district"
2009-08-18
Talk about arrogant a$$holes. Someone needs to remind this idiot that in a Representative government the elected official is there to REPRESENT the people's interests, not his own overblown sense of importance.
#2
The reason people in fly-over land are thoroughly pi$$ed with Washington. Can we ex-communicate Washington from the rest of the country since they tax us without representing us. Didn't we fight a war over such things?
#4
Naah They'll just whine "I was attacked for NO REASON".
The only clue is to be voted OUT.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
08/18/2009 13:04 Comments ||
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#5
Any representative is free to choose to do something contrary to the the wishes of their constituents. If they turn out to be right, they will earn honors for vision and leadership. If not, then they'll earn unemployment.
Hope someone remembers to ask the unemployed Mr. Massa in 2011 - "So how'd that work out for ya?"
Sen. Arlen Specter (D) will welcome President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to Pennsylvania in the coming months as he looks to build his financial lead in his race for reelection.
The president will attend a Sept. 15 fundraiser for Specter at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, while the vice president will join the new Democrat for an event in Western Pennsylvania later this fall.
Fundraisers for Specter's campaign hope to raise $2.5 million during the event in Philadelphia, according to an e-mail invitation obtained by the Philadelphia Daily News. The event has already raised $600,000, and backers have committed another $700,000 to organizers, wrote David Cohen, executive vice president of Comcast and a major Specter donor.
Obama and Biden both pledged to support Specter after he bolted the Republican Party in late April. Biden, who as a Delaware senator had a close working relationship with his Pennsylvania colleague, had long worked to convince Specter to jump ship.
"We asked the president to help us [by] campaigning with us and doing a fundraiser, and they were gracious enough to say yes," Chris Nicholas, Specter's campaign manager, told The Hill.
Specter has worked to consolidate his support within his new party, aiming to cut off a primary challenge from Rep. Joe Sestak (D). Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (D) and Gov. Ed Rendell (D), two prominent Specter backers, will also be at the Sept. 15 event with the president.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/18/2009 00:00 ||
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"What we need is a backer."
"What's that?
"Someone with money who's stupid"
-Ten things I hate about you
#2
Perfect! He's pretty much dead meat in Pennsylvania, which means it's wasted fundraising. Throw on top of that how it pisses off the actual Democratic base in the state, and it couldn't be better if the Republican Party of Pennsylvania planned it. In fact, considering the predominance of Scrantonites among the leadership and Paultard loons in the base, I figure that the state GOP would have come up with a much worse plan than this.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
08/18/2009 16:41 Comments ||
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#3
OK with me as long as it's not taxpayer's money. While they're at it, raise some for Chris "Mortgage Deal" Dodd and any of the other crooks who are going to get booted in 2010.
Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., a leader of the moderate "Blue Dog" Democrats, held a town hall meeting in Arkadelphia on Friday over the issue of health care. Local coverage pegged attendance at between 700 and 800, with partisans on both sides in attendance.
Of the town halls held so far, this one was particularly interesting, and not just because Ross was such a central figure in the health care debate prior to the August recess. Most interesting was Ross's use of an excuse that I'd anticipated but which, especially in his case, makes no sense. He pleaded that he had yet to endorse any particular bill; that there was no final bill yet; that he would still make up his mind as to whether he would support the final bill.
According to one person in attendance, Ross also pleaded repeatedly that he was just one out of 535 members of Congress, and therefore could do little on his own.
The problem is, there is a final bill in the House, HR 3200. And Ross's was one of the key votes that moved it to the House floor from the House Energy and Commerce Committee prior to the August recess. Ross, as a de facto leader of a group of seven moderate Democrats on the committee, was uniquely positioned among the 535 to change HR 3200. And yet he did vote for it in its current form on July 31, right before the House's August recess began. It passed narrowly, 31-28.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/18/2009 00:00 ||
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Ja, ja, ja I had a life subscription to Der Stuermer and read it every night just after dinner, but I never agreed with it. No, no, no, not once!
#2
I'm sure that whatever health care legislation comes out of our esteemed 'spit' national legislature will look & smell like a dog's breakfast. The 'health care bill' is a nebulous, ever-changing Frankenstein monster.
Former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean is arguing that there can be no meaningful overhaul of the health care system without a public option for coverage. A leading player in the party's liberal wing, Dean said in a nationally broadcast interview Monday he thinks providing a government role in insurance coverage is fair. He likened it to Medicare and the Veterans Administration, which he called "two very good programs."
Posted by: Fred ||
08/18/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Yes! I agree! No half messures please. This is your giant new patronage constituency of affirmative action employees. keep digging donks. KEEP DIGGING!
#5
He likened it to Medicare and the Veterans Administration, which he called "two very good programs." Clueless. I would support modifications to Medicare, VA health & the Indian Health Service, but that's not what this whole brouhaha has been about, never was.
A Palestinian Chicago resident and student:
When cryptic posters portraying President Obama as the Joker from "Batman" began popping up around Los Angeles and other cities, the question many asked was, Who is behind the image?
Was it an ultra-conservative grassroots group or a disgruntled street artist going against the grain?
Nope, it turns out, just a 20-year-old college student from Chicago.
Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe's Photoshop software.
Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he'd found online about how to "Jokerize" portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.
Four or five hours later, he happily had his product.
Obama-joker-time On Jan. 18, Alkhateeb uploaded the image to photo-sharing site Flickr (shown at right). Over the next two months, he amassed just a couple thousand hits, he said.
Then the counter exploded after a still-anonymous rogue famously found his image, digitally removed the references to Time Magazine, captioned the picture with the word "socialism" and hung printed copies around L.A., making headlines.
Alkhateeb's original Flickr page surpassed 20,000 views. The Times found his Flickr site last week thanks to a tip left by a loyal reader of The Ticket. By Friday, the page had been taken down.
On Alkhateeb's page, a manipulated image condemning fellow Chicagoan and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (captioned "epic fail") was mixed in with parodies of the "Guitar Hero" game franchises -- dubbed Quran Hero -- and of Napoleon riding a motorcycle (pictured after the jump).
Flickr had removed the Joker image due to copyright-infringement concerns, Alkhateeb says the company told him in an e-mail. A Flickr spokeswoman declined to comment due to a company policy that bars discussing inquiries about individual users.
Alkhateeb says he wasn't actively trying to cover his tracks, but he did want to lay low. He initially had concerns about ...
... connecting his name with anything critical of the president -- especially living in Chicago, where people are "very, very liberal," he said.
"After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ," Alkhateeb said. "From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him."
#1
This is amazing...most Arabs are conservative in their dailey lives, but when it comes to American politics they buddy up with the left, but here's a guy who doesn't seem to be doing that.
#6
This is amazing...most Arabs are conservative in their dailey lives, but when it comes to American politics they buddy up with the left, but here's a guy who doesn't seem to be doing that.
#8
He may have had the idea, but the general public picked it up and ran with it, probably in directions the creator never imagined. All the cartoonish demonizing of W will be transmogrified & turned against the 0.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The White House for the first time Sunday seemed to acknowledge that people across the country received unsolicited e-mails from the administration last week about health care reform, suggesting the problem is with third-party groups that placed the recipients' names on the distribution list.
An administration official said tonight that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius "misspoke" when she told CNN this morning that a government run health insurance option "is not an essential part" of reform. This official asked not to be identified in exchange for providing clarity about the intentions of the President. The official said that the White House did not intend to change its messaging and that Sebelius simply meant to echo the president, who has acknowledged that the public option is a tough sell in the Senate and is, at the same time, a must-pass for House Democrats, and is not, in the president's view, the most important element of the reform package.
(CNN) -- A key Senate negotiator said Sunday that President Barack Obama should drop his push for a government-funded public health insurance option because the Senate will never pass it.
Former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean is arguing that there can be no meaningful overhaul of the health care system without a public option for coverage. A leading player in the party's liberal wing, Dean said in a nationally broadcast interview Monday he thinks providing a government role in insurance coverage is fair. He likened it to Medicare and the Veterans Administration, which he called "two very good programs."
