In the least surprising development of the Senate health care reform debate, some Republican senators are basing their opposition on the issue of abortion. No matter how many times they say otherwise, the Senate bill ensures a separation between federal funds and abortion coverage and protects the consciences of those Americans who are morally or religiously opposed to the issue.

Victory For Health Care Choice: Senate Bill Will Let People Leave Their Employers' Plan For Better Option

The purpose of the establishment clause in the First Amendment was to insure that organized religion had no say in the affairs of state. With the Catholic Conference of Bishops having authored the abortion amendment in the House health care bill, its time to say, give up your tax exempt status and your filing for bankruptcy protection or give up your massive lobbying organization in Washington.

More often than not, whenever you turn in an application your credit is checked. It’s commonly known that when you apply for a loan to finance a home, automobile, etc your credit is checked; but this is can also be the case when you turn in a job application. Potential employers checking your credit is completely legal and they do it for several reasons. Mostly employers look at your credit report as a representation of your character. They use your credit history to try and figure out if responsibility (or irresponsibility) with personal finances can follow you into to the position you are seeking. This is especially true if you are applying for a job that requires bookkeeping, the handling of money, or even high security clearance. bad credit help If you are unsure as to whether this is legal, the next time you turn in a job application make sure you take a look at the fine print right above your signature. Federal law requires employers to obtain permission to acquire credit reports, and you agree when you sign off on the application. If you know that your credit is not in good shape, there are steps you can take.

But for all their expensive efforts to sell the public on the wonders of clean coal, ACCCE isn't working quite as hard to make the technology a reality. The coalition's members have committed the comparatively paltry sum of $3.6 billion to research the technology between 2003 and 2017, according to an April report from the Center for American Progress. That's just $257 million on average each year to develop the technology to capture and sequester carbon. To put that in perspective, ACCCE's members made a combined total of $297 billion in profits between 2003 and 2008—meaning, as the report notes, that they're spending less than two cents on clean coal research for every $1 of profit.

Talk about a short news cycle. A Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) appointed “best practices” task force dismissed the value of “routine” mammograms as a cancer prevention technique for women 40 to 49 years on Tuesday, November 17. A day later, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a statement dismissing the committee recommendations.

In-Vitro Meat -- aka tank steak, sci fi sausage, petri pork, beaker bacon, Frankenburger, vat-grown veal, laboratory lamb, synthetic shmeat, trans-ham, factory filet, test tube tuna, cultured chicken, or any other moniker that can seduce the shopper's stomach -- will appear in 3-10 years as a cheaper, healthier, "greener" protein that's easily manufactured in a metropolis.

Just to be clear, I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person and, as I spend a good deal of time with my husband the communist and my parents, the super-liberal and the skeptic, I am also especially well disposed to a great deal of distrust for anyone who stands to make money from a negative situation. All of this considered, I would love to believe that the H1N1 vaccine is some international conspiratorial plot to either a) fill tax paying citizens with mercury and poisonous neurotoxins or b) turn out the near-empty pockets of a world economy choked by recession for those last few coins and some lint. But no matter what I read or hear, I just can’t make the leap.

When my wife had a prescription of Levaquin filled and the cost for seven 500 mg. pills was $90.42, I just couldn't believe it. I went to Canada Drugs and found their cost for the same medication was $43.04. My wife needed the medication immediately and there wasn't time to wait for a Canada Drugs mail order and since she's in the Medicare Part D Doughnut hole, she had to pay the full price. Thanks Big PHARMA. Big PHARMA has made, what I consider a, phony self serving, effort to get in the Health Care Reform debate. Who do these folks think they're fooling? The cost of medications through Medicare Part D have been and continue to be over inflated. If seniors could get their medications at the prices charged in Canada (see graphic below) many of them would never fall in the infamous "doughnut hole" and while we're on the subject of "doughnut holes". Why is a "doughnut hole" necessary? I suggest real reform would eliminate the "doughnut hole" entirely. Just more smoke and mirrors as far as I'm concerned, thanks to Big PHARMA and Congress.

Under the House plan, we will gamble as we choose a plan, decide which corporation will be the best for us, hoping we pick one that is not dominated by corporate bureaucrats focused on rationing care to maximize their profits. Imagine real reform, as simple as adding people ages 55 to 65 years old to Medicare in 2010, 35-55 in 2011, and so on until everyone is included by 2013. If the Democrats can't stand up to insurance companies now, it will be even harder in the future when they have billions in more profits from Americans forced to buy their product.

Tom Harkin assured Ed Shultz last night that after a 2 hour closed door meeting, Harry Reid had the 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster and guaranteed there would be a floor vote on the health care reform bill with a public option before the senate recesses for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Benjamin’s family happens to live in Michigan, one of 33 states where insurance companies are allowed to set annual and lifetime caps on prosthetic coverage. The family’s policy with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan covers a maximum of $30,000 per lifetime for prosthetics, plus $1,000 per year for repairs. In states such as Colorado and Maryland, the law says there can be no such cap on prosthetics.

[FWIW, this is an extended comment I made to Selise in my last FDL diary.] Selise, why am I the only person in America wearing a black arm band? A woman, an acquaintance, yesterday asked me if I had a death in my family. I said the arm band was for my country. I put it on back in mid-May for the illegal torture travesty, vowing as soon as the Obama administration cleaned up that travesty I would take it off. I told her I also keep it on now for the travesties of the wars. So many deaths of Americans and Middle Eastern peoples for power and money. Not for helping humanity. I told her I am also now wearing it for the 45,000 premature American deaths each year for lack of health care.

In pitting the 10-year cost of Democrats' health care bill against the 10-year projected cost of the bloated Pentagon budget, my newspaper column last week made a simple comparison rarely ever made in politics today - a comparison that might provide citizens with much needed context, but a comparison that is ignored. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2010270762_sirota16.html. Is the comparison's omission deliberate? It's hard to say, but when you read this typical New York Times piece, it's hard to argue that it isn't being irresponsibly ignored:---Kudos, of course, to the Times for even reporting on the unfathomably large costs of intensifying militarism and adventurism. But as you'll see in the story, there's no attempt to put the costs into any context - specifically, there's no mention that an escalation in Afghanistan would mean outlays for the one-year Pentagon budget is approaching the total outlays of the entire 10-year health care bill.

Fox News has reported that Republican lawmakers are planning on holding town hall meetings on health care reform for no other reason than to invite protestors to show up and show their rage.

Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union said: "It's obscene that Wall Street bankers think they are entitled to private shipments of H1N1 vaccinations while health-care workers, pregnant women, and other at-risk Americans are either waiting in line for hours or getting turned away because of shortages. She suggested the recipients should donate the vaccine they have received to local hospitals where it could be distributed to a more worthy population. (It is likely that Ms. Burger may have been motivated in part by the thought that poetic justice would be served if those serving at the banks were to perish from a disease with the name of pig.)

I know you're in a tough spot. It would be bad enough if you only had to get Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, and Blanche Lincoln on board, but anyone who has to kiss Joe Lieberman's derriere deserves a congressional medal of honor. But Harry, you really need to take on future health-care costs. The House bill fails to do this. The public option in the House bill is open only to people without employer-provided health insurance. That will be too small a number to have bargaining clout to get good deals from drug companies and medical providers. And it will mainly attract people who have more expensive medical needs, which is why the Congressional Budget Office decided it would cost more than it would save. You also know a public insurance option that's open to everyone would cut future health costs dramatically by imposing real competition on private for-profit insurance plans. That's why the private insurers hate the idea. Even if states were allowed to opt out of this robust public option, the big states would almost certainly opt in, giving it the scale needed to negotiate great deals from drug companies and medical providers. This would put pressure on any state that opted out because their citizens would soon discover they're paying far more. [Note: Good suggestions, even if I don't agree with everything this author says.]

I never thought I'd find myself thanking the women-loathing, Christian fundamentalist-pandering Democrats in Congress for anything, but here it is: Thank you Congressman Bart Stupak (D-Mich), for your outrageous amendment to the House version of the health insurance reform legislation in Congress, which bars any insurance company in the proposed health insurance exchange from offering a health insurance plan that includes abortion coverage. This amendment, which would actually bar women or families from buying even with their own money and no government subsidy health insurance that includes funding for a medically recommended abortion, was supported by 64 Democrats along with all but one Republican in Congress. Because it passed and was attached to the House health reform bill, it gives hope to the notion that the disastrous so-called health reform legislation in Congress will die. And so it should. Because of an utter lack of leadership from the president, and because of the massive corruption in Congress, which is wallowing in lobbying money from the insurance industry and other parts of the Medical-Industrial Complex, a historical opportunity to finally bring the US out of the dark ages on health care has been blown.

Here we go again. Whenever conservative stalwart Jesse Helms didn't like something in a bill, he would pull out an abortion amendment to slow things down. Helms is dead and gone but the tactic is alive and well and may just kill health care reform. On the Senate side, the hurdle is the public option. For 30 years, Jesse Helms, the former senator from North Carolina, was the biggest thorn in the Democrats' side. Now that title goes to the senator that many call "Traitor Joe" Lieberman. While many Democrats were declaring victory last Saturday night with the passage of a health care reform bill, Republicans, too, had a victory of sorts. They may have successfully passed the "poison pill" that will kill health care reform down the road.

Did Baxter Release a Bioweapon in Ukraine? Baxter has a facility in Ukraine. Given the above evidence, it may be behind the current outbreak. A November 1 David Rothscum infowars.com article headlined: "Has Baxter International released a biological weapon," in citing an earlier Huffington Post report on a man named Joseph Moshe, a Mossad biological warfare expert. True or not, he warned, on an August radio program, about "a biological weapon....being made by Baxter International('s Ukraine facility) that would be spread through vaccine and would cause a plague upon its release." Having reported this two months before the outbreak lends credence to his story. --- Did Baxter Release a Bioweapon in Ukraine? Baxter has a facility in Ukraine. Given the above evidence, it may be behind the current outbreak. A November 1 David Rothscum infowars.com article headlined: "Has Baxter International released a biological weapon," in citing an earlier Huffington Post report on a man named Joseph Moshe, a Mossad biological warfare expert. True or not, he warned, on an August radio program, about "a biological weapon....being made by Baxter International('s Ukraine facility) that would be spread through vaccine and would cause a plague upon its release." Having reported this two months before the outbreak lends credence to his story. --- Is the Ukraine outbreak "the plague? A mutated virus? Or is the plague the cover for introducing a mutated virus?" Citing the South African web site fto.co.za., it wondered if the Ukraine Swine Flu strain "might have mutated (to) pneumonic plague." -- It reported Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Health saying his nation has a different H1N1 strain than the rest of the world because of how many were infected so fast. Other officials disagree and suggest this one may have mutated to something else because it "has a much bigger rate of filling the lungs with blood....The plague or virus in the Ukraine has 10 times the mortality rate (attributed to) normal swine flu." --- Burgermeister suggests that Baxter, the: "WTO and the international corporate crime syndicate that funds them may have decided they could go ahead with their plan to trigger a pandemic in Europe and the USA because the public awareness of the dangers of the vaccine has become too great, not least as a result of WHO and Baxter being caught contaminating 72 kilos of vaccine material with the live bird flu virus in February." --- Ukraine Outbreak Spreads: On November 6, innworldreport.net headlined, "Pneumonic Plague Outbreak in China Follows Outbreak in Ukraine." The town of Ziketan (population 10,000) reported two deaths and a dozen others infected. The "area inside a 17-mile radius" was quarantined to contain it. - The "highly contagious disease, one of the most virulent and deadly diseases on earth, (is) usually fatal within 24 hours. It attacks the lungs and kills nearly everyone who catches it unless treated rapidly with antibiotics." --- Consider the implications. On October 23, Obama declared a H1N1 national emergency. The Pentagon will be in charge if conditions warrant it. Civil liberties may be suspended. Martial law may be declared. Mandatory toxic, dangerous vaccinations may be ordered, known to cause auto immune diseases ranging from annoying to debilitating to life-theatening. -- The situation in Ukraine bears watching. It may signal what's soon heading everywhere.