A conservative Democrat from an increasingly Republican corner of Pennsylvania who nevertheless would become a hero on the Left for his criticism of George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Rep. John Murtha has died. He was 77.
At his death serving in his 19th term, Murtha became an influential lawmaker on defense issues and a close confidant and ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. Murtha died as a result of complications from a January gallbladder surgery. This past Saturday, Feb. 6, Murtha became Pennsylvania’s longest serving member of Congress. Also, of the nearly 10,600 men and women who have served in the House since 1789, only 79 have served longer than he has, his office says in a statement announcing his death.
“Today, with the passing of Jack Murtha, America lost a great patriot. He served our country on the battlefield winning two Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star. He served his country in his community winning the hearts of his constituents and served in the Congress winning the respect of his colleagues,” Pelosi says in tribute to her friend.
From his perch as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee defense subcommittee, Murtha was a final word on military spending. A former Marine, he became the first Vietnam War combat veteran elected to Congress. Read more…
Journalists and government normally are seen as antagonists, but in reality the news business very much has relied financially on public support. Government at all levels — federal, state and local — spent more than $1 billion last to support commercial news publishers, according to a recent report the University of Southern California’s Center on Communication Leadership & Policy.
Public support for journalism is fading fast, however, and that drop-off has strong implications for a business already weakened by technology changes and the economic downturn, the report says.
The report, Public Policy and Funding the News, analyzes some of the financial tools that government has used to support the press over the years — from postal rate discounts and tax breaks to public notices and government advertising. The report documents cutbacks across a range of sectors and presents a framework for the consideration of policy options to place the industry on more secure financial footing.
“It is a common myth that the commercial press in the United States is independent of governmental funding support,” says Geoffrey Cowan who co-authored the report and is USC Annenberg School dean emeritus and director of the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy (CCLP). “There has never been a time in U.S. history when government dollars were not helping to undergird the news business to ensure that healthy journalism is sustained across the country.”
The late 1960s marked a high-water mark of government support for the news business, the report’s authors find. The postal service was subsidizing about 75 percent of the mailing costs for newspapers and magazines, roughly $2 billion in today’s dollars. Today, however, publishers’ mailing discounts for their printed news products are down to 11 percent, or $288 million. Read more…
Republicans have long howled that use of a Senate procedure known as reconciliation to approve healthcare reform would be out-of-bounds and amounts to a political act of war. An independent think tank, however, finds that use of reconciliation “would be fully consistent with past practice.”
Reconciliation becomes important because bills considered under the procedure cannot be blocked by filibuster from coming to a final vote. That means reconciliation bills need just a majority of 51 votes to pass — not the 60-vote supermajority required to overcome a filibuster.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), up until now, has worked assiduously to avoid the use of reconciliation — compromising much from his original reform proposal in order to marshal the entire 60 Democratic votes he had on Christmas Eve to pass a reform bill.
Since then, Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts has been sworn in as the 41st Republican in the Senate, giving the GOP new filibuster power over healthcare reform — and new currency to the idea of reconciliation.
“Throughout 2009, Democratic leaders in Congress stated their preference for moving health reform legislation through the normal legislative process without using reconciliation. It now seems likely, however, that comprehensive health reform legislation can make it across the finish line only if the reconciliation process is employed,” says a recent report released by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) in Washington. Read more…
A reported Republican initiative to seek campaign contributions among bankers and financial industry moneymen in exchange for a promise to block financial reforms puts the GOP squarely on the side of Wall Street over Main Street, according to the chairman of the Democratic Party.
Republicans are making their case among financial industry executives that they represent the best chance to derail the pro-consumer reforms that President Obama and other Democrats are moving, according to news reports. Those reforms include creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) designed to Protect Americans from abuses that helped lead to the 2008 economic meltdown.
The House has approved the reforms; action is still pending in the Senate. The ability for the GOP to block reforms was enhanced Thursday with the swearing in of Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts. Brown, who won the Jan. 19 special election for the seat once held by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), gives Senate Republicans their crucial 41st vote needed to filibuster Democrats. Read more…
Two decades ago, he played a funny character named Stuart Smalley on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Today, he’s a U.S. senator and Al Franken sees nothing to laugh about his former employer’s plan to merge with Comcast.
The Senate Judiciary Committee this week began looking into the announced plan of cable titan Comcast’s plan to merge with the entertainment assets of NBC-Universal. Currently, General Electric owns a majority stake of NBC-Universal. Comcast is nation’s largest cable provider, while NBC-Universal operates the NBC TV network, as well as such cable networks as Syfy, MSNBC and USA Network.
“It matters who runs our media companies,” says Franken (D-Minn.), a member of the committee. “The media are our source of entertainment, but they’re also the way we get our information about the world. So when the same company produces the programs and runs the pipes that bring us those programs, we have a reason to be nervous.”
Although Comcast and NBC-Universal executives have already offered voluntary concessions to win federal antitrust approval of the deal, “you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t just trust their promises,” says Franken, who as a former writer and player on the long-running SNL, is in a position to know.
The main issue, Franken says, is an arrangement known as Financial Interest and Syndication. Read more…
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) say they intend this week to introduce legislation that would extend by six months the extra financial help states are receiving to help cover the costs of their Medicaid programs.
The legislation would extend by six months the increase in the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) that states currently receive from the 2009 economic stimulus bill. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided fiscal relief to state and local governments in the form of a 6.2 percentage point increase in FMAP funding as well as additional assistance for states with high unemployment.
This increase in federal reimbursement will comes to a halt on Dec. 31, which occurs in the middle of fiscal year 2011 for most states. An extension beyond that date is increasingly necessary as states are projected to face continued severe budgetary shortfalls due to the economic downturn and resulting sharp decline in tax revenues, supporters of an extension say.
“We absolutely need this six months of relief while we weather this economic storm – too many families depend on this program for us to allow a shortfall of funding,” says Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee health care subcommittee. “Medicaid is a significant economic generator in West Virginia, paying almost 20 percent of the total cost of West Virginia’s health care system and supporting an estimated 19,800 jobs in the state while providing essential health care coverage for the 390,000 West Virginians who currently rely on Medicaid each year.” Read more…
Drawing a sharp distinction between the role they played as the opposition following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that of the Republicans today, Democrats are punching back against what they see as political gamesmanship on the part of the GOP.
In an angry floor speech Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) sharply criticized Republican efforts to delay confirmation of key national security nominees for the Obama administration.
Over in the House, a member of the House Appropriations Committee subcommittee that oversees Justice Department spending denounced the “hypocrisy” in Republican attacks against President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder regarding their handling of the failed Christmas Day airline bombing attempt.
“When a young Nigerian terrorist boarded an airplane bound for America on Christmas Day, there was no permanent boss at the [Transportation Security Administration] -– the agency created after 9/11 specifically to keep air travel safe,” Reid says. “When he tried to blow up that plane, the top positions at both of the intelligence agencies within the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security were similarly empty. Read more…
As Americans seek to help, and connect with, the massive humanitarian crisis in Haiti, a new fact sheet has been posted online promising to provide seemingly helpful “information about the Haitian community in the United States.”
The reality is the document was released by a Washington policy organization using the intense interest in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake to advance a specific political agenda.
Americans are responding in an overwhelming fashion to the devastation in and around Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, caused by a magnitude 7.0 tremblor that has claimed the lives of 200,000 or more Haitians, and left millions of others injured, destitute, out on the streets — or worse.
While more than 80 million reportedly tuned into a televised fundraiser on 33 networks, raising at least $57 million for relief, the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington has been using the crisis as a means to limit immigration to the United States.
The union-haters must still be in hog heaven over an AFL-CIO-sponsored poll that showed most Massachusetts union households supported Republican Scott Brown over union-endorsed Democrat Martha Coakley in the special election to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.
The margin was 49 to 46 percent. The numbers remind me again of Pogo’s apt observation: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The Massachusetts AFL-CIO unanimously endorsed Coakley. She was clearly the pro-union candidate, according to Robert Haynes, president of the Bay State labor federation.
Nonetheless, Karen Ackerman, the national AFL-CIO’s political director, admitted to the Wall Street Journal that “What happened in Massachusetts is that working families did not see the Democratic candidate as being on their side.”
Apparently, more than a few union members blame the still sluggish economy on President Barack Obama and the Democrats. Jeff Wiggins and Mike Hall don’t get it. Read more…
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may be in “no rush” to complete the work that sends a finished healthcare reform bill to President Obama to sign into law, but a growing number of his colleagues disagree. Some lawmakers not only see an opportunity to enact health reform, but also a new chance to establish a federally run public option that just weeks ago had been dead politically.
Where healthcare reform was once his top priority, Reid (D-Nev.) this week put healthcare on a backburner in the face of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s surprise election which gives the GOP new filibuster power over the legislation.
Other Democrats, though, aren’t as willing to put aside a bill that just weeks ago Reid himself cast as a clock-ticking issue — the more time goes by, the more Americans die due to insufficient health coverage.
A day after Reid’s comments, Obama himself, in his State of the Union address, urged Congress not to “walk away from reform.”
A growing number of House and Senate Democrats also are looking to keep the pressure up to pass a healthcare bill despite the new GOP ability to sustain a filibuster — and are willing to go new lengths to do it. Read more…
President Obama addressed the House GOP today on Live TV and it turned out to be “An Amazing Moment” in political and perhaps television history.
Accepting the invitation to speak at the House GOP retreat may turn out to be the smartest decision the White House has made in months. Debating a law professor is kind of foolish: the Republican House Caucus has managed to turn Obama’s weakness — his penchant for nuance — into a strength. Plenty of Republicans asked good and probing questions, but Mike Pence, among others, found their arguments simply demolished by the president.
If you didn’t watch the spectacle, here’s a clip from MSNBC about the encounter:
The full video of President Obama’s opening remarks and the Q&A is available here and the transcript is available here.
Even the GOP’s pollster Frank Luntz, “who was aggressively called out by Obama at today’s televised face-off with Republicans,” conceded after the televised event, Read more…
The political right vociferously argues that much or most of the current agenda of the political left violates the intentions of the Founding Fathers, i.e. is unconstitutional. The claim being, in essence, that the genius displayed at the Convention in 1787 created a work product that was designed and intended to be a roadblock in the way of our participation in the development of a modern world.The whole problem with the backward lookers, though, is that they’re so busy trying to argue for why the world should never have been allowed to change like it has that they have no contribution to make at all to the discussion of how we order our affairs in an increasingly more complex future. That and the fact that none of them would choose an 1800’s primitive life over that of life in the U.S. in 2010.
I keep waiting for talk show hosts to propose disbanding the FCC or the FAA or the CDC (or numerous other modern federal functions). My copy of the Constitution makes no mention of the airwaves, the airways, or fighting disease epidemics. Sure there are Clauses that can be construed broadly enough to allow modern society to evolve, but doing so leaves the right without a principled leg to stand on in the current debate. Read more…
rt @PublicAdvocacy Compassion diminishes fright about your own pain and increases inner strength. ~Dalai LamaFebruary 9, 2010 3:42
rt @BorowitzReport To be honest, I'm amazed that Sarah Palin's thoughts can fill an entire hand.February 9, 2010 2:23
@Maura_Aura You too... may it be filled with many blessings!February 9, 2010 2:22
House Democrats support letting Bush tax cut expire, but see it as tough sell - TheHill.com: http://bit.ly/anGggY via @addthisFebruary 9, 2010 2:02
Food for thought: RT @huffingtonpost Thom Hartmann: Globalization Is Killing The Globe: Return to Local Economies http://ow.ly/1ojVfbFebruary 9, 2010 1:56
@Maura_Aura Always a pleasure my friend.February 9, 2010 1:53
A conservative Democrat from an increasingly Republican corner of Pennsylvania who nevertheless would become a hero on the Left for his criticism of George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Rep. John Murtha has died. He was 77.
