US Politics News

WENDELL POTTER: The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you're heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern. [...]

You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.

And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don't want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It's more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you're in now to one that you don't want. You might be in the plan you like now.

But chances are, pretty soon, you're going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you're going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined.

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

Former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden angrily struck back Saturday at assertions the Bush administration's post-9/11 surveillance program was more far-reaching than imagined and was largely concealed from congressional overseers.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Hayden maintained that top members of Congress were kept well-informed all along the way, notwithstanding protests from some that they were kept in the dark.

President Barack Obama promised Pope Benedict on Friday that he would do everything possible to reduce the number of abortions in the United States, the Vatican said.

Obama and Benedict held private talks for about 40 minutes in the Pope's frescoed study in the Vatican's apostolic palace and the Vatican said bioethics and life issues were a central part of the discussion.

There are tentative signs from Democrats in Congress of support for the forces that removed Honduras President Manuel Zelaya from power at the end of June.

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of a key House subcommittee with jurisdiction over Honduras, roundly criticized both factions at a Friday hearing. But he also stopped short of calling for Zelaya’s immediate reinstatement, which he’d done in previous statements.

The refusal of China and other emerging economic powers to agree to emissions limits this week will make it tougher for key Senate Democrats to support a global warming bill.

Both Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) say they are skeptical of the climate change bill that passed the House last month. The legislation has an uncertain future in the Senate, and Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) announced on Thursday that she is delaying the bill until after the August recess.

In a speech on the House floor Friday afternoon, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) attacked the idea of a public health care plan, saying “this program of ‘government option’ is being touted as being the panacea, the savior of allowing people to have quality health care at an affordable price is gonna kill people.” He used Canada and the United Kingdom as examples against the public option, claiming that those countries “don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society.” What is typical of politicians and many Americans who use such arguments, is that they don't do any homework.

Oh, and doesn't Broun have, ahem, publicly funded healthcare of his own?

Statistically, both Canada and the U.K. have longer lifespans and lower infant mortality rates than ours.

A new survey by the Pew Research center focuses on science. While the survey says Americans like science, it also confirms, by asking scientists themselves, what we already knew: the Bush Administration suppressed any results scientific research which did not comform to its own narrow POV.

California, which began issuing IOUs on July 2nd, tried on Thursday to shore up confidence in those IOUs. These moves came as banks prepared to stop accepting the IOUs, after today.

In an interview with AP on Thursday, Levi Johnston continued his feud with Sarah Palin and her family. His view, he said, on why Palin resigned: money.

Oops again. This time the oops is on the media. While a widely circulated photo (above) seems to implicate both French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama in an ogling incident, further investigation by MSNBC shows (via video tape) the "look" was taken out of context.

Ooops. Let's hope U.S. President Barack Obama has the same deal with Michelle that I do with my wife: looks are fine. Here's a photo of the Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy apparently checking out the nicely proportioned rear of a 16-year-old Brazilian junior G8 delegate, Mayara Tavares, at the G8 summit yesterday.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. in 1948, states the following:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Apparently, conservatives may not agree.

Some right-wing blogs have been pushing a USA Today analysis — which found that counties that supported President Obama in the election are getting more stimulus money, per person, than counties that backed John McCain — to claim that the stimulus is actually “an Obama-supporter-payoff scheme.” Steve Benen noted, though, that the conservatives crowing about this article clearly didn’t read all of it, as it includes these sections:

Much of [the money] has followed a well-worn path to places that regularly collect a bigger share of federal grants and contracts, guided by formulas that have been in place for decades and leave little room for manipulation…The imbalance didn’t start with the stimulus. From 2005 through 2007, the counties that later voted for Obama collected about 50% more government aid than those that supported McCain, according to spending reports from the U.S. Census Bureau.

GOP senator John Ensign, (R-NV), 51, who in mid-June acknowledged an earlier extramarital affair with a former campaign staffer, has now admitted that his parents gave his mistress and her family nearly $100,000 "out of concern for the well being of longtime family friends during a difficult time."

The federal government's most secure prison has determined that two books written by President Barack Obama contain material "potentially detrimental to national security" and rejected an inmate's request to read them.

The cap-and-trade bill to curb carbon emissions has passed the House of Representatives, but there's "not any way in the world" that it will pass the Senate, Sen. Jim Inhofe tells Newsmax.

The Oklahoma Republican, Ranking Minority Member on the Committee on Environment and Public Works, says the bill — strongly backed by the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — currently has only 34 supporters in the Senate.

Leaders of Cuban and Venezuelan communities across the U.S. have become among the loudest supporters of the military ouster of Honduras' president because they see it as a strike against socialist influence in Latin America.

The Senate wants to force the Homeland Security Department to stick with a proposed Bush administration policy requiring employers to fire immigrant workers whose names don't match their Social Security numbers.

The lead Democrat steering an immigration overhaul through the Senate said Wednesday he expects to have a bill ready by Labor Day that is more generous to highly skilled immigrant workers than those who are lower skilled and is tough on future waves of illegal immigration.