Day: October 18, 2007

CBS News:

Eight in 10 Americans favor expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-CHIP, including large majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

And:

[The] poll finds that only about one in five Americans (22 percent) approve of the president’s handling of health care. That’s lower even than his approval rating on Iraq (26 percent).

These new numbers come hot on the heels of the vote today by House Republicans to rubberstamp Bush’s veto of the S-CHIP program.

As we noted earlier, a GOP pol who predicted his colleagues would sustain the veto was incredulous. “I don’t know why our guys are following [Bush] into the sea like lemmings,” he said.

Both CNN and MSNBC are reporting that as many as 10 people have been killed by a pair of bombs that exploded in Karachi, Pakistan, during homecoming celebrations for former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

The bombs exploded near Bhutto’s motorcade, but she was not injured, according to preliminary reports.

Update: CNN now says it has confirmed that at least 48 people are dead, 60 wounded.

As governor of Texas, George Bush opposed the S-CHIP program:

In the 1990’s, then Texas Governor George W. Bush opposed a bi-partisan effort to expand S-CHIP in his state. Despite Texas’ worst-in-the-nation status (then and now) in the percentage of residents without insurance, Bush (then as now) opposed the broadened program on both fiscal and philosophical grounds. As Salon reported in July 2000, Bush tried to limit eligibility to families with incomes at 133 percent of the poverty line, compared to the 200 percent standard adopted in most states (and over Bush’s opposition, in Texas). Bush’s hard line would have kept 200,000 kids off the program’s rolls. As it was, the difficult and cumbersome application process limited sign-ups to only 28,000 of the 500,000 children eligible by mid-2000.

But in 2000, Bush, the presidential candidate, took credit for the program’s success in Texas:

In Bush’s press release it says: “When the CHIPs program was first implemented, Governor Bush embraced it as an opportunity to help deliver health coverage to thousands of uninsured children, and signed legislation providing health insurance for more than 423,000 children.”

Three months ago, Bush’s administration tried to strangle S-CHIP in its crib:

Just two weeks after the House and Senate each approved major expansions of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), the Bush administration announced draconian new eligibility rules that would trim thousands of low income children from the rolls…

As the New York Times described, the White House quietly dispatched a letter at 7:30 PM on Friday evening outlining its new curbs on S-CHIP eligibility. With Congress out of session, Dennis Smith of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations notified states that they must reach 95 percent enrollment of families below 200% of the poverty level before they can expand their programs. Of course, no state currently approach the 95 percent figure today (nationally, almost 30 percent of eligible children remain unenrolled in S-CHIP). Worse still, several states previously received the federal government’s OK to extend their coverage to even higher income levels and more are considering further expansion still…

Last week, of course, he vetoed a Democratic proposal that would have expanded S-CHIP’s coverage to millions more lower income children. Today, the mindless drones in his party in Congress are set to follow him over the cliff again by sustaining his veto.

What this proves — again — is that George W. Bush doesn’t give a damn about middle-class and poor Americans or their children. It’s all politics to him. If passing this legislation helped line the pockets of his buddies who running the U.S. healthcare system into the ground, he’d be all for it.

Carpetbagger Report:

One GOP lawmaker [asked, rhetorically], “It’s stupid politics. The leadership is putting pressure on Members [to sustain the veto], promising to rebuild the brand. I don’t know why our guys are following [Bush] into the sea like lemmings.”

Maybe out of habit?

Carpetbagger Report also cites reports that Bush’s flying monkeys in the West Wing message shop were unpleasantly surprised when they summoned GOP congress people to the White House for spine-stiffening last week.

“We are not happy, no doubt about it,” the Republicans told Dear Leader’s message-meisters. The main cause of their discontent was the White House attack on the children’s health insurance program.

In another report, a veteran GOP strategist told a reporter:

“It’s just stunning to me … that after seven years of Republicans complaining that the president won’t use his veto, [the White House and Republican Congressional leaders] choose their big showdown to be over children’s health care. Good Lord, it probably polls at 80 percent!”

For an opposing views on GOP lemmings, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review — the newspaper owned by Richard Melon Scaife, the wealthy rightwing ideologue who funded the Arkansas Project that paid people to smear about the Clintons in the 1990s — published an editorial that offers a glimpse into the howling, soul-less darkness of the conservative mind:

The new S-CHIP, should GOP “leaders” convince more lemmings to take the plunge and override a promised presidential veto, will have the perverse effect of encouraging those already with private coverage to opt for “the government plan.”

Even more perverse — the increase is funded by a higher cigarette tax that hits the poor the hardest; the very families that S-CHIP was designed to help will be paying for families that can help themselves.

The S-CHIP 63 should be ashamed. As should be Republican “leaders” promising to make the Socialist-CHIP program veto-proof.

The word this morning is that there won’t be enough lemmings of either stripe to over-ride the president’s veto of the children’s health insurance program when the vote is held later today.

Let’s just hope voters will remember this day when they go to the ballots in November 2008.