Daily news sites

GALLUP - The most recent data were collected in Gallup's annual Health and Healthcare poll, conducted Nov. 7-10. The percentage of U.S. adults who said it is the federal government's responsibility to ensure all Americans have healthcare coverage peaked at 69% in 2006. Attitudes began to shift significantly in 2007, and continued to change through the time President Barack Obama took office in 2009. Americans who feel healthcare coverage is not the federal government's responsibility have been in the clear majority the past two years.

Most Republicans Now View Ensuring Healthcare Coverage as Outside Government Purview

Attitudes across all three partisan groups have shifted away from the view that ensuring healthcare coverage is a proper role of government, but most significantly among Republicans and independents. In September 2000, 53% of Republicans believed the government should not be responsible for ensuring all Americans had health coverage; today, 86% feel that way, an increase of 33 percentage points in 13 years. Over the same period, the percentage of Republicans believing the government should ensure healthcare coverage for all has fallen from 42% to 12%.

Fifty-five percent of independents currently say the government should not be involved with healthcare -- an increase of 28 points since 2000.

The percentage of Democrats who hold this view is now 30%, its highest level since Gallup first asked the question and an 11-point increase since 2000 -- with the largest change in opinion occurring between 2006 and 2008. [Read More]

Zimmerman, 30, is the former Neighborhood Watch volunteer who was acquitted in July on a charge that he murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year.

Orlando Sentinel - George Zimmerman was arrested on domestic violence charges Monday after pointing a shotgun at his girlfriend, breaking a table and pushing her out of her Seminole County home, deputies said.

Zimmerman is being held without bail at the Seminole County Jail, charged with aggravated assault with a weapon — a felony — domestic violence battery and criminal mischief.

Deputies received a call from 27-year-old Samantha Scheibe around 12:30 p.m. Monday and when they responded to the home three minutes later, Zimmerman was there and was not armed

Zimmerman was arrested and booked, said Chief Deputy Dennis Lemma of the Seminole County Sheriff's Office.

Lemma said Scheibe told deputies that Zimmerman pointed a shotgun at her Scheibe. He also broke a table, pushed her out of the home and barricaded the door with furniture.

Zimmerman offered no resistance when he was taken into custody, Lemma said. Scheibe did not suffer any injuries, he said.

"She was concerned for her safety, certainly from having the weapon pointed at her," Lemma said.

According to an arrest report released late Monday, Schibe called police after she and Zimmerman got into a "verbal dispute," at her home on Topfield Court in western Seminole County. She asked Zimmerman to leave, and he "began packing his items, which included a Shotgun and a AR Assault Rifle," the report said.

When Scheibe told Zimmerman that she was calling the police, he pointed the shotgun at her "and asked her if she really wanted to do that," according to the report.

Lemma said that if a judge decides to grant Zimmerman bond, the Sheriff's Office has asked that he be placed on electronic monitoring.

"This is an additional step we ask for in every domestic violence case in Seminole County," Lemma said.

Lemma said deputies are seeking a search warrant so they can gain entry into the home, where he said Zimmerman and Scheibe appear to have been living together for several months. {Read More}

He is for The People.

He is for civil rights.

He is for one race -the human race.

He is for a healthcare system that brings hope and healing to the hurting.

He is for the middle class.

He is for women's rights.

He is for doing away with pomp and circumstance.

He is for the environment.

He is for veterans.

He is for peace.

He is for education.

He is for entertaining the masses.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spoke to the press on the vote to limit filibusters on presidential nominees on Capitol Hill on Thursday in Washington.

WASHINGTON — The curtailment of the filibuster, probably the most well-known aspect of the Senate in popular culture, came in a politically charged vote Thursday that had been years in the making. It will have significant ramifications for the Senate, as well as for President Obama and future presidents.

The decision represents a new curb on the Senate’s constitutional power of “advice and consent,” a power that Democrats said Republicans had been abusing in their determination to deny Mr. Obama his choices for the federal bench and high-level administration offices. Under the action precipitated by Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, opponents will no longer be able to require the majority to produce 60 votes to advance a judicial or executive branch nomination short of the Supreme Court.

“It’s time to get the Senate working again — not for the good of the current Democratic majority or some future Republican majority, but for the good of the country,” said Mr. Reid, who in the past had been reluctant to force through a rules change. “It is time to change the Senate, before this institution becomes obsolete.”

Skip

The change does not extend to legislation, which lawmakers can still resist and require supporters to gather 60 votes to pass. But given the new willingness to alter the rules, senators in the future could conceivably reach that point.

Inside the Senate, furious Republicans who portrayed the Democratic action as a blatant power grab will no doubt try to exact revenge by further slowing the chamber’s activities and making life as complicated as possible for Democrats. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and an expert student of Senate rules, made it clear that Democrats would rue this day.

Skip

Many Democrats had been very hesitant to act, fearing that the move would boomerang when Republicans won back control of the Senate and the White House. But they say the level of obstruction had gone too far, including the unsuccessful filibuster of the nomination of Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, as defense secretary.

“The Senate now enters the 21st century,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa. “This is a good day for the Senate.”

Both parties had moved to the brink of rules changes over judicial nominations for the past eight years, but always stepped back out of fear of threatening the nature of the Senate and bringing Congress to a halt. The Democratic action on Thursday will now test whether anxiety about that scenario was warranted. [Full Article]

Washington (CNN) – House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said Sunday neither she nor President Barack Obama misled the American people when they said, during the run-up to the passage of Obamacare, that people could keep their health insurance plans.

Pelosi clarified their remarks, saying they only meant people could keep their plans if they had already signed up before Obama signed the bill in 2010.

He said it over and over again.

Like this time:

“So let me begin be saying this to you and to the American people: I know that there are millions of Americans who are content with their health care coverage. They like their plan and, most importantly, they value their relationship with their doctor. …And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like you healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away from you, no matter what.” … President Obama at the annual conference of the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009.

The catch was the Administration knew that many of these policies would be changed by the insurance carriers. In 2010 HHS estimated that 40% to 67% of individual plans would lose their grandfather status.

And yet, despite this estimate Obama kept repeating his mantra that if you liked your plan, you can keep it, leading many, including the Washington Post Fact Checker to conclude that, at best, the president was being disingenuous, and, at worst, deceitful.

POLITICO - “What this is, it’s a mess, clearly, but what it isn’t, and I think you have to look at the question of motive. And the president’s motive here, even though there were deep problems with the implementation, he wants to do something good for 30 million people and get them health insurance,” Woodward said on “Fox News Sunday.” “So this isn’t Watergate, this isn’t [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.”

Asked by Fox host Chris Wallace if the Obamacare implementation revealed “rank incompetence,” Woodward agreed.

“There’s no question about that,” he said. “But you see all of these stories and this frenzy out there, the game over, the presidency is over some people are saying, and I think that’s not the case.”

“When you go down the road, it’s going to get worse,” he said. “It’s going to blow a hole in the budget when you go two or three months from now… All of a sudden this is going to come on the table and people are going to say, ‘My God it’s going to cost much more money than we thought before. How you disentangle this is now on Obama’s head.”