Authorities have charged four people with aiding the man accused of killing four Washington state police officers and plan on indicting two more in what investigators call a network of friends and relatives that helped Maurice Clemmons avoid capture.
In the book, the story opens with the revelation that Seattle, Washington is being plagued by a string of unsolved murders, which Edward suspects is caused by a new vampire that is unable to control its thirst for human blood. As Edward and Bella app…
WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Obama trying to put a lid on the embarrassing “Party Crashers Gate” incident has invited the ‘culprits’ Tareg and Michaele Salahi to attend a White House “Beer Summit.”
The president has called the “BS” at the insisten…
WASHINGTON — It’s alive.
The Medicare end-of-life planning provision that 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said was tantamount to “death panels” for seniors is staying in the latest Democratic health care bill unveiled Thursday.
The provision allows Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling to help beneficiaries deal with the complex and painful decisions families face when a loved one is approaching death.
For years, federal laws and policies have encouraged Americans to think ahead about end-of-life decisions, and make their wishes known in advance through living wills and similar legal documents. But when House Democrats proposed this summer to pay doctors for end-of-life counseling, it touched off a wave of suspicion and anger. Prominent Republicans singled it out as a glaring example of government overreach.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, at the time a lead negotiator on health care legislation, told constituents at a town hall meeting they had good reason to question the proposal.
“I don’t have any problem with things like living wills, but they ought to be done within the family,” he said. “We should not have a government program that determines you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”
Thursday, the sponsor of the provision said the barrage of criticism may have actually helped.
“There is nothing more basic than giving someone the option of speaking with their doctor about how they want to be treated in the case of an emergency,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore. “I think the outrageous and vindictive attacks may have backfired to help raise awareness about this problem, which is why it’s been kept in the bill.”
The legislation would allow Medicare to pay for a counseling session with a doctor or clinical professional once every five years. The bill calls for such sessions to be “completely” voluntary, and prohibits the encouragement or promotion of suicide or assisted suicide.
The counseling provision is supported by doctors’ groups and AARP, the seniors’ lobby. It was not included in health care bills passed by two Senate committees.
WASHINGTON — The House’s health care reform bill runs 1,990 pages and. It’s filled with gullies and eddies of arcane, cryptic language that are hard to understand.
But one of the chief architects of the measure wants to be clear about one provision: “No government funds will be used to pay for illegal immigrants to get health care coverage,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA).
Waxman points out that the Democrats’ health care reform bill unveiled Thursday contains a “verification status” check if anyone is to receive any federal health care subsides.
But there’s a distinction between illegal immigrants being eligible for government-run components of the health care legislation versus what they would be permitted to purchase from private insurance providers.
“Yes,” exclaimed Waxman when a reporter asked the California Democrat if he personally thought illegal immigrants should be permitted to purchase health insurance. “Can they buy a car? They’re people doing business in the U.S.”
Coverage for illegal immigrants is one of the most vexing questions in the health care reform debate . But from Waxman’s vantage point, it’s alright for illegal immigrants to participate in the proposed health care reform regime, so long as their care isn’t subsidized.
“Should an illegal immigrant be allowed to drive down the Dulles Toll Road, paid for by federal dollars?” Waxman asked, referring to a major highway that links the nation’s capital with Dulles International Airport in suburban Virginia. “Should illegal immigrants be allowed to buy health insurance from a private insurance company?”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) says he expects the House of Representatives to vote on the health care reform bill no earlier than Thursday, November 5.
WASHINGTON — The White House is promising that new figures being released Friday will be a more accurate showing of progress in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. It aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far.
Ed DeSeve, serving as Obama’s stimulus overseer, said the administration has been working for weeks to correct mistakes in early counts that identified more than 30,000 jobs paid for with stimulus money. He said a new stimulus report Friday should correct many mistakes an Associated Press review found that showed the earlier report overstated thousands of stimulus jobs.
“I think you’ll see a pretty good degree of accuracy,” DeSeve said in an interview.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs downplayed errors in job counts identified by the AP’s review, telling reporters, “We’re talking about 4,000, or a 5,000 error.”
The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or nearly 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.
Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.
For example:
– Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Georgia day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.
– A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times.
– The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114.
Those errors were included in an early progress report on the stimulus released two weeks ago that featured numerous mistakes, including a Colorado business’ claim that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. In fact, the actual count was less than 1,000.
Some businesses actually undercounted jobs funded with stimulus money, the AP’s review shows, because they reported only new jobs created, not existing jobs saved. But by far the most reporting errors were found in the number of jobs credited to the stimulus.
Gibbs said that early data couldn’t be reviewed as carefully as new data will be. “Three days after the data was received, it was required to be put on the Web site,” he said, referring to the government’s recovery.gov site that serves as the official accounting of stimulus data.
The Colorado business’ job count, along with many others, has been corrected, Gibbs said, and will be updated in Friday’s report.
“We disputed, as the AP disputed, the report that came in that calculated a number of jobs but didn’t accurately account, the way we account for, a full-time, yearlong employee as being a job,” Gibbs said.
His comments during his daily meeting with reporters came hours after the White House issued a midnight press release complaining about the AP’s review of jobs the government credits to stimulus spending.
DeSeve, who criticized the AP’s review as misleading, said the administration is aware of problems with the early data. Agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.
“As a result, whatever problems the early and partial data had, the full data to be posted on Friday will provide the American people with an accurate, detailed look at the early success of the Recovery Act,” DeSeve said in a statement the White House issued just after midnight Thursday.
BEDFORD HEIGHTS, OH – Will he give up the blackberry or won’t he? That’s one of the (not relatively speaking) big questions facing President-elect Barack Obama as he is set to take office next week.
At a recent press conference he told reporters he fired off an email to one of his Secret Service detail leaders to congratulate his son for winning a football championship game, but presidents have not traditionally used email – even those in the email age. But Mr. Obama has been hesitant to give up the crackberry, thinking it will isolate him from the real world.
Well, four days from his inauguration, President-elect Obama is still using the device. As he was getting out of his Secret Service limo at Ronald Reagan airport today, reporters caught a glimpse of the storied blackberry when it tumbled from his grasp onto the tarmac.
A Secret Service agent standing nearby quickly picked up the blackberry, which had separated from its plastic holster, and returned it to the president-elect. Clutching it tightly, he soon boarded the plane which would ferry him to Cleveland for a speech on the economy.
On board incoming press secretary Robert Gibbs joked with reporters that Mr. Obama has been “discombobulated” due to the recent move to Washington, DC. “He can’t seem to find anything.”
