Giuliani Cites Bible on Personal Life – New York Times

Giuliani also addressed a cell phone call he took from his wife, Judith, last week during his speech to the National Rifle Association, an important appearance because Giuliani clashed with the group when he argued for tougher gun control as mayor of New York.

”And quite honestly, since Sept. 11, most of the time when we get on a plane, we talk to each other and just reaffirm the fact that we love each other,” he said.

Fills in some more details I find interesting, like using the government’s bargaining power to negotiate drug prices. How’s that for market based reform? Isn’t bargaining for price a central market behavior? The plan shelters small businesses from the cost of coverage for their employees:

Unlike Edwards and Obama, she does not ask of small employers what she’s asking of large employers: that they contribute to health insurance costs either by providing employees with coverage or paying a tax to help defray the cost of all those subsidies. Instead, she offers them a tax credit.

This turns a potential revenue source into an expenditure–which might not seem like such a hot idea at first blush. But campaign advisors put forward a plausible policy rationale. It goes like this: Many small employers really would struggle to bear the costs of such a mandate, even if they were adjusted to reflect firm size or income. But while a lot of individual small businesses would struggle with this, cumulatively the mandate wouldn’t generate that much money–so it’s a lot of pain for not a lot of gain. With a tax credit, which likewise wouldn’t cost much in the aggregate, those small employers who already offer coverage would have an easier time maintaining it–in keeping, again, with the idea of preserving coverage for those people who already have it.

I think this shows she has learned many of the political lessons of 1994 when small businesses strongly opposed Hillarycare 1.0. Maybe version 2.0 will fare better.

The ever reliable Ezra wonks on the Clinton proposal. Here’s my bullet point synopsis:

• Allows you to keep your current plan
• Mandated coverage
• Opens the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program to everybody (the same health plan covering members of Congress)
• Creates a new public coverage option similar to Medicare
• Eliminates price discrimination by preexisting conditions and demographic characteristics
• Requires insurers to cover anyone
• Requires coverage portability
• Provides a refundable tax credit limiting the cost of insurance to a certain percentage of family income
• The employer tax deduction will now be limited to standard plans for middle-income, gold-plated “executive” plans can be taxed
• Creates a Best Practices Institute that will vastly accelerate the amount of research done and distributed on the cost-effectiveness of treatments
• Leaves SCHIP and Medicaid intact (why?)
• Leaves out global budgets and growth caps

On balance not a bad package. She leaves out some of the more divisive bits of the 1993 “Hillarycare” plan, like centralized budgets and caps. Things like that piss off her new BFFs in the insurance industry. It does offer some sorely needed insurance market reforms. It’s unclear to me how it will address the single most obvious defect of the current system; the friggin cost. We get the least bang for the buck in world and mediocre health outcomes.

Ezra has an update.

Followers of radical Islam must be deterred from committing a nuclear attack on U.S. soil, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo said Tuesday morning, saying that as president he would take drastic measures to prevent such attacks.

“If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” the GOP presidential candidate said.

I guess we’ll have to see if Romney threatens to nuke more cities…

Especially the part where he says we need “a person of faith” to lead the country. I’ll take a secular humanist any day over a religious ideologue any day, thank you very much Gov Romney. I’m with Bill Maher on this one, I’d rather not have a president who believes in magic underwear. And it’s not about Mormons, it’s about anyone who would defer to religious authority. I’d rather not have the Prophet, Pope, Ayatollah, Dali Lama, Pat Roberts, Billy Graham or any other religious authority be the final decision maker for the president.

Senate Republicans scuttled broad legislation last night to curtail lobbyists’ influence and tighten congressional ethics rules, refusing to let the bill pass without a vote on an unrelated measure that would give President Bush virtual line-item-veto power.

This really takes some balls.

Efforts to give Bush power to strike individual items from spending bills have been struck down by the Supreme Court, but Senate Republicans insist that the latest version will pass constitutional muster.

They simply wanted political cover for protecting the tide of money that chokes the political process in Congress. Twenty-one GOP senators are up for re-election in the next cycle. I hope to God their opponents beat the hell out of them with this vote. They just handed the Dems a stick to use for bludgeoning GOP senatorial campaigns.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism.

Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a “different set of rules” may be needed to reduce terrorists’ ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

“We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade,” said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP’s takeover of Congress in 1994.

This base coward does not deserve to hold any public office. What happened to the Patrick Henry’s of the 21st century? Have they all given way to so-called conservatives who wet themselves at the thought of a handful of bomb throwing lunatics? I hope that others on the right can explain to Mr Gingrich that his position is essentially un-American. We should be willing to fight and die for our freedoms, not surrender them to a political opportunist who promises safety in exchange for freedom. Seems like it would be a better idea to restrict Newt’s freedom of speech first.

The President seems to acknowledge, somewhat petulantly, the need for bipartisanship in forging a working relationship with incoming Congressional leadership. I hope that this is more than the usual post-election pablum. There are serious issues that need to be dealt with by the federal government. I will however settle for gridlock as a better alternative to the last 6 years of runaway spending and outright stupidity in the war on the Constitution terrorism. Better they fight each other and do nothing substantive than to continue rubber stamping the whims of the White House in a disturbing display of blind “consequences be damned” partisanship.

While the Dem do have the reins in Congress, the narrow margin in the Senate allows the GOP to effectively filibuster bills they find truly objectionable. Hopefully this will force things towards the center which is, after all, where most Americans are. I think most people are sick of the atmosphere in Washington, the “my way or the highway” attitude of the executive and the slime that occasionally oozes into sight from under the doors of Congress. To Congress and the President: The people have spoken, now do your jobs damn it.

Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and the Army Times are expressing a lack of confidence in the administration’s prosecution of the war in Iraq. Also the once rock solid Christian Fundalentalist base is beginning to crack. Instead of making any kind of change in leadership or direction the White House simply dismisses it as “Monday morning quaterbacking.” Hopefully the voters will make their collective displeasure obvious on Tuesday.

This speaks to the problem I have with complete GOP control of the federal government. I think most observers would agree that the reconstruction effort was key to winning the peace in Iraq. Even if you grant that Bush meant well and was simply trying to keep America safe by invading Iraq, the reconstruction effort has been a study in corruption, greed and a near total failure of oversight. It’s wasted the good will generated by the toppling of Saddam. Even if you agree with the aims and intentions of the Bush administration, their governing skills have been disastrous. Even more troubling is a complete lack of accountability and a willful stubbornness that approaches a delusional state. One of his goal was to show the world the reach of American military might. Instead we’ve shown the world the limitations of American power.

If this situation doesn’t piss you off, you deserve to be lied to and stolen from by Bush and company. While I dont’ think that a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress will result in a sudden change in American Foreign policy, I do think that it might restore some sorely needed accountability for mounmental waste and obvious faliures.

Hillary Clinton leads her Democratic rivals in the polls and in fundraising. Unfortunately, however, the New York senator is part of a failed Democratic Party establishment — led by her husband — that enabled the George W. Bush presidency and the Republican majorities, and all the havoc they have wreaked at home and abroad.

He really lays into her. I tend to agree, Hillary has too much baggage for 2008. She’s not been a leader or a voice for change. She’s supported the Bush foreign policy agenda for fear of being seen as soft on terror. For that reason alone I think she ought to be rejected out of hand as a party leader or presidential candidate