Can't he talk without Totus?

Illinois Policy Institutes JohnTillman talking sense about the State's Budget

Makes sense to me. HT CDO,

Wurf While: When Bipartisanship Clogs Health Care Reform…

“Doctor why have you stopped the bypass surgery - the patient is dying!”

“I’m sorry. It’s not bipartisan.”

Above via Wurfwhile from Sen Bernie Sanders.

Now, from a few years ago in the Canadian Med Society Journal about patients who never make it to the table to worry about clogs,

The fact that Canadians must regularly queue for health services - often for months - is a continuing source of frustration and dissatisfaction with the health care system. The situation is particularly fraught when patients die while waiting for services that might have prolonged their lives. Such deaths probably occur most frequently among patients waiting for coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), although patients dying of cancer while waiting for diagnostic and therapeutic services are also a source of concern.

Americans aren't going to tolerate queue's. Neither would Sanders. I have a feeling the Gov Option will turn into a regular Health Care Ghetto and US Senators aren't going to give up the Federal Health Insurance to join it. They're not going to let a clogged wait list block their access to care. No Canadian-like patiently-waiting-in-queues folks sit in the US Senate. They'll do what it takes to get to the head of the queue they'll create.

Cook County Commissioner Beavers on States more corrupt than Illinois: Utah and Oregon

Tony P getting under Beaver's skin. If Utah and Oregon are more corrupt, than we have to beat them on body count with 11 shot dead over the long weekend. We need more than a Peace Making Pledge for this City.



xp Praire Politics

Jan Schakowsky and a Truth Commission

Rep. Eshoo released Letter to CIA Dir. Panetta (PDF here) asking for Panetta to correct his previous testimony that the CIA really does lie on a systematic basis since 2001. Illinois's own Jan Schakowsky cosigned.

When folks are laying themselves on the line like this, we need a truth commission more than ever to figure out what in the world is going on between the Hill and Langley 'cause somebody's lying.

18 Tir 1388, Tehran Bolvare keshavarz

Today's protests on the anniversary of the 1999 demonstrations.

Stimulus: Done its Job?

via GOPHD,

Live RPG removed from soldier

Video over at Military Times. Pretty heroic stuff on the part of the Medical Staff not to mention the Solider who got hit.

Iran election: faces of the dead and detained

Over at The Guardian,

Hundreds, probably thousands, have been arrested in Iran since the
presidential election on 12 June. Human rights and campaign groups such as Human Rights Watch, the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran and Reporters Without Borders have been collecting and publishing the names of those dead or detained.

We have brought those lists, and reports from trusted media sources, into a database that we are asking readers and those elsewhere on the internet to contribute too.

Since we launched this exercise we have had hundreds of emails, photographs and names sent to us. Keep them coming.

Dan Proft: "The Candidate most likely to choke some people."

Well he has been working in Cicero. As my step Dad told me, he read the Cicero-Berwyn Life because the only real news was Cicero news. From NRO,

Among the Republicans running for Illinois governor is Dan Proft, who NRO reader Doug, a friend of the candidate, describes as, "the candidate most likely to choke some people."

Two minutes with VP Biden

I can't think of an American so universally disliked in Iraq. Here's two minutes of him: pre and post surge, from Mudville Gazette.

Auto Enrollment for Congress into the Gov Health Care Plan

From a Press Release,

Rep. John Fleming, M.D. (LA) has introduced new legislation to keep House Members accountable. The resolution calls for Members who support government-run health care to automatically enroll themselves. In a statement, Fleming said:

“As a physician, I am amazed at the number of bureaucrats in this House who are quick to claim a government-run health care plan is the reform this country needs. This resolution will offer members of Congress an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, and urge their colleagues who vote for legislation creating a government-run health care plan to lead by example and enroll themselves in the same public plan.”

Bill Foster and Barney Frank let the Good Times roll.

First, Byron York writes, Let's spend TARP profits before taxpayers can get them, on Frank's HR 3068 to redirect TARP money to Frank's projects,

When President Obama announced on June 9 that some financial institutions would be allowed to repay Troubled Asset Relief Program dollars, he said the massively expensive TARP bailout had made money for the federal government. "It is worth noting that in the first round of repayments from these [TARP recipients], the government has actually turned a profit," the president said. Indeed, TARP supporters have long held out the hope that the program might be profitable.

But now Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has come up with a proposal to spend any TARP profits before they can be returned to the taxpayers. Last Friday, Frank introduced the "TARP for Main Street Act of 2009," a bill that would take profits from the program and immediately redirect them toward housing proposals favored by Frank and some fellow Democrats.

Now we have Frank and Foster teaming up on an internet gambling bill to get what's ever left from taxpayers,

Congress has their sights set on cleaning up the economic mess in the US these days, but they still have their eye on Internet gambling. Five new co-sponsors have signed on to Representative Barney Frank's proposed online gambling legislation.

Representative Frank has acknowledged that the online gambling legalization issue will have to wait until at least September before his committee begins discussions. That has not stopped Frank, however, from gaining support for when those discussions do take place.

The latest co-sponsors include Rep. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, Rep. Bill Foster of Illinois, Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York. The group of Representatives that have now signed on to be co-sponsors is a bipartisan collection.

Viva Las Vegas I guess with Frank & Foster. Get a feeling we'll all be fleeced when these two get done with America?

Stimulus Swindle

The latest GOP Graphic, and Louis Woodhill's 14% unemployment forecast.

Virtually everything the Obama administration wants to do will have the effect of increasing unemployment. As bad as joblessness is now, be prepared for it to get much, much worse.

It looks like a huge train wreck's coming.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) Delivers Weekly GOP Address On July 4th And The Iranian Protests

Tony Blair's speech The Chicago Council on Global Affairs on Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The conclusion from a speech made by a real Socialist in Chicago a few weeks ago,

Finally, we are required to do something that it seems rather odd to have to say. We have to re-discover some confidence and conviction in who we are, how far we've come and what we believe in. By the way, I think this even about the economic crisis. It is severe. It's going to be really, really hard. But we will get through it and not by abandoning the market or open economic system but by learning our lessons and adjusting the system in a way that makes it better. But on any basis, this system has delivered amazing leaps forward in prosperity for our citizens and we shouldn't, amongst the gloom, forget it.

The same is true for the security threat we face. We are standing up for what is right. The body of ideas that has given us this liberty, to speak and think as we wish, that allows us to vote in and vote out our rulers, that provides a rule of law on which we can rely, and a political space infinitely more transparent than anything that went before ; that body isn't decaying. It is in the prime of life. It is the future. And though the extremists that confront us have their new adherents, we have ours too, nations democratic for the first time, people tasting freedom and liking it.

And that is why we should not revert to the foreign policy of years gone by, of the world weary, the supposedly sensible practitioners of caution and expediency, who think they see the world for what it is, without the illusions of the idealist who sees what it could be.

We should remember what such expediency led us to, what such caution produced. Here is where I remain adamantly in the same spot, metaphorically as well as actually, of ten years ago, that evening in this city. The statesmanship that went before regarded politics as a Bismarck or Machiavelli regarded it. It's all a power play; a matter, not of right or wrong, but of who's on our side, and our side defined by our interests, not our values. The notion of humanitarian intervention was the meddling of the unwise, untutored and inexperienced.

But was it practical to let Pakistan develop as it did in the last thirty years, without asking what effect the madrassas would have on a generation educated in them? Or wise to employ the Taliban to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan? Or to ask Saddam to halt Iran? Was it really experienced statesmanship that let thousands upon thousands die in Bosnia before we intervened or turned our face from the genocide of Rwanda?

Or to form alliances with any regime, however bad, because they solve 'today' without asking whether they will imperil 'tomorrow'? This isn't statesmanship. It is just politics practiced for the most comfort and the least disturbance in the present moment.

I never thought such politics very sensible or practical. I think it even less so now. We live in the era of interdependence; the idea that if we let a problem fester, it will be contained within its boundaries no longer applies. That is why leaving Africa to the ravages of famine, conflict and disease is not just immoral but immature in its political understanding. Their problems will become ours.

And this struggle we face now cannot be defeated by staying out; but by sticking in, abiding by our values not retreating from them.

It is a cause that must be defeated by a better cause. That cause is one of open, tolerant, outward-looking societies in which people respect diversity and difference in which peaceful co-existence can flourish. It is a cause that has to be fought for; with hearts and minds as well as arms, of course. But fought for, nonetheless with the courage to see it through and the confidence that the cause is just, right and the only way the future of our world can work.

HT Tom Bevan's: 10 Years On, Blair Restates the Case

Progressive Fox: Bill Foster and the Gambling Mystery

The Fox writes,

Foster has signed on as a co-sponsor of Barney Frank’s Internet gambling bill.

and wonders about the impact on the Fox Valley's 2,332 gaming jobs between the Elgin and Aurora Casinos. (And I'd like to add all that revenue generated from those casinos to spruce up downtown in Aurora and Elgin.)

Foster's office is saying no public statement yet. Wonder what the attraction is to this bill for our Scientist and Businessman in Congress?