With legislation encompassing almost 3,000 pages, it will take time to find out exactly what the mandates in the newly passed health care law mean for America. After all, it wasn’t until the end of last week that the reconciliation bill was even made public. But here’s something we already have uncovered. And it’s shocking. — In addition to all the special favors doled out to various congressional districts, it turns out that the congressional staff who wrote the health care bill put in special favors for themselves, too.
While everyone else in the United States — from the top corporate executives to the grocery store checkout clerk — will be forced to buy their insurance through heavily regulated state-run exchanges, the health care bill excludes one group: the leadership and committee staff. Yes, that’s right. The very people who wrote up this bill are refusing to be included themselves. Given the narrow definition of “congressional staff” on page 158 of the health care bill, the Congressional Research Service memo believes that courts will not require “professional committee staff, joint committee staff, some shared staff, as well as potentially those staff employed by leadership offices” to go through the exchanges. President Obama and his family are also exempt from the law
HAVANA (AP) — It perhaps was not the endorsement President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress were looking for.
Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform “a miracle” and a major victory for Obama’s presidency, but couldn’t help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago.
Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said Tuesday that people who do not take the threat of climate change seriously remind him of those who downplayed the growing threat of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s.
The climate change debate “reminds me in some ways of the debate taking place in this country and around the world in the late 1930s,” Sanders said during a Senate hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2011 budget…
He continued: “And during that period with Nazism and fascism growing — a real danger to the United States and Democratic countries all over the world — there were people in this Congress, in the British parliament saying, ‘don’t worry! Hitler is not real! It’ll disappear! We don’t have to be prepared to take it on.’”
A Christian teacher told today how he lost his job after complaining that Muslim pupils as young as eight hailed the September 11 hijackers as ‘heroes’.
Nicholas Kafouris said he was forced from his £30,000-a-year post because he would not tolerate the ‘racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ behaviour of children.
He said the predominantly Muslim youngsters openly praised Islamic extremists in class, and hailed the terrorists of the 2001 atrocities as ‘martyrs’.
Mr Kafouris, 40, told how one pupil said to him, ‘Don’t touch me, you’re a Christian’, when the teacher accidentally brushed against him with his arm.
Others said, ‘We want to be Islamic bombers when we grow up’, and ‘the Christians and Jews are our enemies, you too because you’re a Christian’, he added.
Mr Kafouris, who had taught at Bigland Green Primary School, in Tower Hamlets, East London, for 12 years, said there was a change in attitude of pupils at the school - where the majority of pupils are Muslim - after the World Trade Center attacks.
