House Vote Is Too Close To Call

"People say business expenses are all about waste and the three martini lunch.But the fact is that doing business costs money and you have to jump throughany hoop the client wants you do to get his business. Maintaining businesscontacts is hard work. Developing a business take's time"
Spoken today by one entrepreneur.

President Obama may be confident of the passage of this Health Care bill but nobody else is. Today FOX announces that Democrats may be giving up on the "deem and pass" rule calling it too contraversial. This bill may do a lot of good for many people but I believe it just throws too much money around all over the place, and raises taxes "accross all income tax brackets" according to one source. If you're the President you do have certain perogatives at your disposal. The same thing could be said of Don Corlione. He can do all of the deal making and arm twisting he wants. All he needs is for that one moment when his cause is ahead in the nose count, and he can have Nancy Pelosi call a vote. It's too bad the rest of the world doesn't work like that. There is a saying that "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's impossible to get it back in". And once this bill is passed it will be historic precident. It may make the history books as a good thing, but others say it will be the cammel's nose in the tent to get government that much more intrusively into our lives. It has been suggested that if the government wern't in bed with the drug companies to begin with, insurance rates would not be so high. People should be encouraged to avoid drugs whenever possible in favor of proper nutrition and exercise, and even meditation and yoga. Also I think that mal practice laws could be tweaked so that some of the more bizzare cases never go before a jury. Don't you "sign away your rights" in many cases before surgery is even performed? I know in one dentist I was at it contained in the language of the forms the possability of failure of treatment (that I decided not to have anyway) We know for instance you give up the right to self incrimidation before you get behind the wheel. Could it not be committed to statute that in certain cases you agree to defer to a doctor's judgement? Also having a national exchange of providers would increase competetion and "bend the cost curve". There seem to even be in question whether anti trust provisions are in or out of this final bill. May I suggest getting rid of anti trust exemption is of the highest priority? Others, and I am one of them, have concerns about abortions now being allowed and funded with federal money. Why not remove this "non starter" and win back those anti abortion congressmen? Many house members did not want to go on record as having voted FOR the senate bill so that's why "deem and pass" was come up with. But they won't be fooling the people in their home district. They will know what he or she did. And now here is a little something from the buffer from yesterday.

I watched the Kyle guy from Arizona talk about bogus accounting, and counting dollars twice. Assumptions were made doctors would take a 23% cut in salaries, when doctors are leaving Medicare and Medic-aid even as we sprak right now. It seems just about everything will be taxed. We know a lot of money is going to be thrown around all over the place. The thing is that a lot of taxes will kick in immediately and yet many of the benefits won’t kick in till 2014. Obviously this would affect the deficit in the short term. Kyle says “Nobody trusts the figures in the congressional accounting office. My stance on the bill is “thy will be done”. But as for me, I would not be the vote to push the bill over the top. If the bill were to pass it would have to be done without my vote.

Tomorrow is the day of the LA marathon from Dodger Stadium to the sea. It will be a bogus race because it won't be ending where you begin it. Also the race is all down hill and so times will of course be faster, despite the forecast heat, for this time of year. It will be the first time in the Marathon's history that the race course went outside LA city limits. This course goes through West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica. Supposedly they picked this course because it goes past a lot of sites that tourists like to see. But if I were a tourist come to watch the race I might want to be able to camp out on the same site for both the beginning and end of the race.

Google, at least on my machine, has dropped a lot of their links on "even more" including "blogger". I have no idea what their game is. One of the links dropped was web search tools, which informs you of all sorts of shortcuts and tools. When I reentered this blog just now I went via Chrome and Chrome still retains the page with the whole grab bag of goodies on it. Interestingly, Chrome did not remember my password from when I just used it in Firefox. I didn't expect that it would. I think it's important that Google retain the long list as reference.

I guess you heard that story about the guy who got on the Wal-Mart PA and said "All black people are requested to leave the store now". That would certainly make a good Candid Camera gag just to photograph people's reactions. It's hard to imagine that people would not know that it was a gag. As to those people on the French game show who were giving what they thought were lethal electric shocks to contestants, It's hard to imagine that they did not suspect in the back of their minds that something wasn't kosher about the whole set-up.

Pope Benedict has apologised for the fact that he helped cover up a child molestation case, and allow a priest to be returned to the ministry. Of course the Catholic church is quick to offend and slow to apologise. It took decades to apologise for not speaking out against the Nazi Holocaust, and it took centuries to reinstate Galileo. Personally, if I were Pope Benedict I would resign for the sake of my church and urge them to pick a younger, more progressive figure sensitive to today's issues, to lead the Church into the 21st Century. As long as the Catholic Church only has in mind "saving face" it is doomed to being a follower, and never a leader, as it should be.