Friday, October 18, 2013

Losing a lot to get very little from OBAMACARE http://igor-e-kuvykin.blogspot.com/

Losing a Lot to Get Little

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Senator Ted Cruz, center, Republican of Texas, told reporters, “Unfortunately, the Washington establishment is failing to listen to the American people.” More Photos »
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Published: October 16, 2013
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WASHINGTON — For the Republicans who despise President Obama’s health care law, the last few weeks should have been a singular moment to turn its problem-plagued rollout into an argument against it. Instead, in a futile campaign to strip the law of federal money, the party focused harsh scrutiny on its own divisions, hurt its national standing and undermined its ability to win concessions from Democrats. Then they surrendered almost unconditionally.
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“If you look back in time and evaluate the last couple of weeks, it should be titled ‘The Time of Great Lost Opportunity,’ ” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, among the many Republicans who argued that support for the health care law would collapse once the public saw how disastrous it really was.
“It has been the best two weeks for the Democratic Party in recent times because they were out of the spotlight and didn’t have to showcase their ideas,” Mr. Graham added.
Now, near the end of a governing crisis that crippled Washington and dismayed a nation already deeply cynical about its political leaders, Republicans are struggling to answer even the most basic questions about the cause and effect of what has transpired over the last few weeks.
They disagree over how, or even whether, they might grow from the experience. Many could not comprehend how they failed to prevent such avoidable, self-inflicted wounds. Others could not explain why it took so much damage, to their party and the millions of people inconvenienced and worse by the shutdown, to end up right where so many of them expected.
“Someone would have to explain that to me,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. “I knew how it was going to end,” he added.
“I’m trying to forget it,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, still in disbelief that many of her fellow Republicans could not grasp that this was a losing battle. “Here we are. Here we are. We predicted it. Nobody wanted it to be this way.”
All the while, they had the public on their side on the other issues that they could have litigated in the court of public opinion, like the need to get control of the nation’s long-term debt. And though they started the process last month with major advantages — a president on the defensive over an unsteady response to the war in Syria and an agreement by Democrats to keep financing the government at levels that many liberals felt were far too low — their fixation on the health care law prevented them from ever using their leverage.
“We managed to divide ourselves on something we were unified on, over a goal that wasn’t achievable,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri. “The president probably had the worst August and early September any president could have had. And we managed to change the topic.”
The question so crucial to the Republican Party’s viability now, heading into the 2014 Congressional elections and beyond, is whether it has been so stung by the fallout that the conservatives who insisted on leading this fight will shy away in the months ahead when the government runs out of money and exhausts its borrowing authority yet again.
It is not an abstract question. The deal reached Wednesday would finance the government only through Jan. 15 and lift the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. Some top Republicans suggest that this confrontation, one some of the most conservative Tea Party-aligned Republicans have been itching for since they arrived, ended so badly for them that it would curb the appetite for another in just a few short months.
Many Republicans are already calling for a refocusing of priorities, saying the party must turn to bigger issues like revising the unwieldy and unpopular tax code and reducing the long-term deficit. As for the health law, some believe there is a more winnable fight to be had with tough Congressional scrutiny of its rollout over the next year.
“Now we’re going to shift to oversight of the health care law, and clearly there are huge problems,” said Representative Dave Camp, the Michigan Republican who leads the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. “Now we’re going to have to pursue what is this law really doing for Americans. Is it working and is it delivering?”
Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, said, “We can all take a deep breath and basically refocus.”
In the Senate, there were already signs that an emergent group of 14 centrist senators from both parties was looking to make an impact on the fiscal battles ahead. The group, led by Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, has already planned to meet in the coming weeks. Mr. McCain, also a member, said Wednesday, “We are not going to let this kind of partisanship cripple this body and injure the American people.”
Speaker John A. Boehner’s strategy always involved a gamble that his members would come away from this clash chastened. He intentionally allowed his most conservative members to sit in the driver’s seat as they tried in vain to get the Senate to accept one failed measure after another — first to defund the health care law, then to delay it, then to chip away at it. His hope was that they would realize the fight was not worth having again.
The worry among many Republicans is that the Tea Party flank will not get the message, mainly because their gerrymandered districts are so conservative they do not have to listen.
Some fear that history is repeating itself. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in which the Republicans lost the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections, the party tried to regroup. Its establishment warned that it had to stop being so shrill, so exclusionary and so narrowly focused on issues that alienate large chunks of voters who might otherwise think about being Republicans.
Certainly, the budget fight showed that Congressional Republicans have divergent ideas about how to heed that advice.
On Wednesday, Representative Mick Mulvaney, Republican of South Carolina, offered his party some thoughts on what it should do about the health care law come January and February.
“The natural inclination is to say, no, it’ll be exactly the same,” he said. “But if we can figure out a way to drive that message home that this is about fairness, this is about principle,” he added, “then the outcome may well be different.”
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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

U.S. Said to Hold Qaeda Suspect on Navy Ship

Igor Eric Kuvykin, he is a terrorist. rights? what rights? give him the rights our friends and family had on 9/11 www.erickuvykin.com


Two sons of the Qaeda suspect known as Abu Anas al-Libi, Abdullah, left, and Abdul Moheman, on Sunday near the place in Tripoli, Libya, where their father was arrested in a United States commando raid.

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Published: October 6, 2013
An accused operative for Al Qaeda seized by United States commandos in Libya over the weekend is being interrogated while in military custody on a Navy ship in the Mediterranean Sea, officials said on Sunday. He is expected eventually to be sent to New York for criminal prosecution.

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Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, who is also known as Abu Anas al-Libi.
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A file photo of the Navy transport ship San Antonio, where Abu Anas was being questioned.
The fugitive, known as Abu Anas al-Libi, is seen as a potential intelligence gold mine, possessing perhaps two decades of information about Al Qaeda, from its early days under Osama bin Laden in Sudan to its more scattered elements today.
The decision to hold Abu Anas and question him for intelligence purposes without a lawyer present follows a pattern used successfully by the Obama administration with other terrorist suspects, most prominently in the case of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a former military commander with the Somali terrorist group Shabab.
Mr. Warsame was captured in 2011 by the American military in the Gulf of Aden and interrogated aboard a Navy ship for about two months without being advised of his rights or provided a lawyer.
After a break of several days, Mr. Warsame was advised of his rights, waived them, was questioned for about a week by law enforcement agents and was then sent to Manhattan for prosecution.
“Warsame is the model for this guy,” one American security official said.
Mr. Warsame later pleaded guilty and has been cooperating with the government, providing intelligence information about his co-conspirators, who included “high-level international terrorist operatives,” federal prosecutors have said in court papers.
Abu Anas is being held aboard the U.S.S. San Antonio, a vessel brought in specifically for this mission, officials said.
Abu Anas, 49, who was born Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, was indicted in Manhattan in 2000 on charges of conspiring with Bin Laden in plots to attack United States forces in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia, as well as in the 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 224 people.
He has been described as a Qaeda computer expert and helped to conduct surveillance of the embassy in Nairobi, according to evidence in trials stemming from the bombings. In investigating the attacks, the authorities recovered a Qaeda terrorism manual in Abu Anas’s residence in Manchester, England.
The manual is a detailed treatise on how to carry out terrorist missions. It focuses on forged documents, safe houses, surveillance, assassinations, codes and interrogation techniques. It also cites “blasting and destroying the embassies and attacking vital economic centers,” and it endorses the use of explosives, saying they “strike the enemy with sheer terror and fright.”
It is not known if Abu Anas wrote the manual, but federal prosecutors introduced it as evidence in the 2001 trial of four operatives convicted in the bombings conspiracy, and in the prosecution of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first former detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to be tried in the federal system.
The manual was also used in a 2006 trial in Virginia over whether to impose the death penalty on Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot. (He received a life sentence.)
The Defense Department, in a statement on Sunday, said Abu Anas was “currently lawfully detained under the law of war in a secure location outside of Libya.”
“Wherever possible,” the statement said, “our first priority is and always has been to apprehend terrorist suspects, and to preserve the opportunity to elicit valuable intelligence that can help us protect the American people.”
Officials declined on Sunday to confirm that New York was Abu Anas’s destination, but two officials suggested it was likely.
The seizure of Abu Anas was carried out by American troops assisted by F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Navy SEALs, meanwhile, carried out a raid on the Somali coast, trying without success to capture a senior leader of the Shabab, the group that carried out the massacre at the Nairobi shopping mall two weeks ago.
Another American official emphasized that the commando raids in Libya and Somalia were designed to capture the intended targets, not to kill them with Predator drone missiles, the signature counterterrorism weapon of the Obama administration.
“If we can, capturing terrorists provides valuable intelligence that we can’t get if we kill them,” said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing interrogation.
Abu Anas is one of about two dozen defendants charged in federal court in Manhattan in a series of indictments that began in 1998, when Bin Laden was charged, and which expanded over the years to add other operatives.
With Abu Anas’s capture, only a handful of those operatives are believed to remain alive and at large, most prominently Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy to Bin Laden who succeeded the Qaeda leader after he was killed in a 2011 American operation.
One of Bin Laden’s former close aides, a Sudanese named Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl who defected from the group in the mid-1990s and became a cooperating witness for the American government, testified in 2001 that Abu Anas was a computer engineer who ran the group’s computers.
Abu Anas was also part of a small team of Qaeda operatives that in the early 1990s traveled to Nairobi and carried out surveillance of the American Embassy and other potential bomb targets, according to the indictment and other evidence.
The photographs, diagrams and surveillance report from the Nairobi mission were ultimately reviewed by Bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, the government has said.
“Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber,” another member of the surveillance team, Ali A. Mohamed, said in federal court when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2000.
News of Abu Anas’s capture was welcomed by family members of victims.
“Of course, our hearts are still very much tied to that day,” said Edith Bartley, whose father, Julian L. Bartley Sr., the consul general, and brother, Julian L. Bartley Jr., a college student working as an intern, were both killed in the attack in Nairobi.
Ms. Bartley said her mother, Sue, traveled regularly to New York from the Washington area for the Ghailani trial in 2010, and she said they would both attend any trial involving Abu Anas.
“It’s a reminder to the courts and to others involved that the person who’s on trial impacted real people, people who were serving their country abroad,” she said.

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Obamacare, Government shutdown, Share your thoughts with Igor Eric Kuvykin www.erickuvykin.com

Share your thoughts with Igor Eric Kuvykin www.erickuvykin.com

From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal

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Published: October 12, 2013 1222 Comments
WASHINGTON — In March, Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the Obama administration’s new online insurance marketplace, told industry executives that he was deeply worried about the Web site’s debut. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience,” he told them.
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"So much testing of the new system was so far behind schedule, I was not confident it would work well."
—RICHARD S. FOSTER, who retired as chief actuary of the Medicare program in January
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Two weeks after the rollout, few would say his hopes were realized.
For the past 12 days, a system costing more than $400 million and billed as a one-stop click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance has thwarted the efforts of millions to simply log in. The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.
Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low.
“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.' ”
Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles.
Politics made things worse. To avoid giving ammunition to Republicans opposed to the project, the administration put off issuing several major rules until after last November’s elections. The Republican-controlled House blocked funds. More than 30 states refused to set up their own exchanges, requiring the federal government to vastly expand its project in unexpected ways.
The stakes rose even higher when Congressional opponents forced a government shutdown in the latest fight over the health care law, which will require most Americans to have health insurance. Administration officials dug in their heels, repeatedly insisting that the project was on track despite evidence to the contrary.
Dr. Donald M. Berwick, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2010 and 2011, said the time and budgetary pressures were a constant worry. “The staff was heroic and dedicated, but we did not have enough money, and we all knew that,” he said in an interview on Friday.
Administration officials have said there is plenty of time to resolve the problems before the mid-December deadline to sign up for coverage that begins Jan. 1 and the March 31 deadline for coverage that starts later. A round-the-clock effort is under way, with the government leaning more heavily on the major contractors, including the United States subsidiary of the Montreal-based CGI Group and Booz Allen Hamilton.
One person familiar with the system’s development said that the project was now roughly 70 percent of the way toward operating properly, but that predictions varied on when the remaining 30 percent would be done. “I’ve heard as little as two weeks or as much as a couple of months,” that person said. Others warned that the fixes themselves were creating new problems, and said that the full extent of the problems might not be known because so many consumers had been stymied at the first step in the application process.
Confidential progress reports from the Health and Human Services Department show that senior officials repeatedly expressed doubts that the computer systems for the federal exchange would be ready on time, blaming delayed regulations, a lack of resources and other factors.
Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.
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Obamacare: The Rest of the Story. Kuvykin

Unless you’ve been bamboozled by the frantic fictions of the right wing, you know that the Affordable Care Act, familiarly known as Obamacare, has begun to accomplish its first goal: enrolling millions of uninsured Americans, many of whom have been living one medical emergency away from the poorhouse. You realize those computer failures that have hampered sign-ups in the early days — to the smug delight of the critics — confirm that there is enormous popular demand. You have probably figured out that the real mission of the Republican extortionists and their big-money backers was to scuttle the law before most Americans recognized it as a godsend and rendered it politically untouchable. Share your thoughts with Igor Eric Kuvykin www.erickuvykin.com
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What you may not know is that the Affordable Care Act is also beginning, with little fanfare, to accomplish its second great goal: to promote reforms to our overpriced, underperforming health care system. Irony of ironies, the people who ought to be most vigorously applauding this success story are Republicans, because it is being done not by government decree but almost entirely with market incentives.
Using mainly the marketplace clout of Medicare and some seed money, the new law has spurred innovation and efficiency. And while those new insurance exchanges that are now lurching into business will touch roughly 1 in 10 Americans (the rest of us are already covered by private employer plans or by government programs like Medicare), these systemic reforms potentially touch every patient, every taxpayer.
“This is the 90 percent of the story that doesn’t make the headlines,” said Sam Glick, who follows health care reform for the Oliver Wyman consulting firm.
Since the Affordable Care Act was signed three years ago, more than 370 innovative medical practices, called accountable care organizations, have sprung up across the country, with 150 more in the works. At these centers, Medicare or private insurers reward doctors financially when their patients require fewer hospital stays, emergency room visits and surgeries — exactly the opposite of what doctors have traditionally been paid to do. The more money the organization saves, the more money its participating providers share. And the best way to save costs (which is, happily, also the best way to keep patients alive) is to catch problems before they explode into emergencies.
Thus the accountable care organizations have become the Silicon Valley of preventive care, laboratories of invention driven by the entrepreneurial energy of start-ups.
These organizations have invested heavily in information technology so they can crunch patient records to identify those most at risk, those who are overdue for checkups, those who have not been filling their prescriptions and presumably have not been taking their meds. They then deploy new medical SWAT teams — including not just doctors but health coaches, care coordinators, nurse practitioners — to intervene and encourage patients to live healthier lives.
Advocates of these reforms like to say that they are transforming medicine from the treatment of disease to the treatment of patients — and ultimately the treatment of populations.
At Cornerstone Health Care, a 250-doctor organization in North Carolina, patients with a history of congestive heart failure get a daily phone call from a nurse asking them to step on a scale and report their weight, the best early indicator of an impending emergency. The next stage, Grace Terrell, the president of Cornerstone, told me, will be to give these patients scales that automatically transmit their weight directly to the nurse. (“If the N.S.A. is Big Brother, we’re Big Mother,” Terrell says of the weight surveillance program.) Diabetes patients are invited in for low-cost pedicures. Why? Because diabetics are notoriously vulnerable to infections that lead to amputation, and a common cause of those infections is ingrown toenails. (Both of these practices were pioneered by CareMore, a California-based company that runs clinics for Medicare patients and that has become a major role model since Obamacare.)
The Heritage Provider Network, a huge accountable care organization in California, offers Medicare patients free dance lessons, healthy cooking classes and casino excursions that feature “brain power” activities on the bus. The Greater Buffalo United Accountable Healthcare Network, a new, seven-doctor practice in upstate New York, is building a gym and a teaching kitchen for its patients, who are mostly inner-city minorities.
“Most doctors were on treadmills,” plodding through their routines, said Raul Vazquez, the chief executive of the Buffalo venture. Now they’re reinventing health care for the inner city with an invigorated sense of mission.
This is not the heroic medicine that turns surgeons into gods and emergency rooms into Hollywood material. Don’t expect to see a toenail-clipping episode on “Grey’s Anatomy.” But these services address the embarrassing fact, reiterated in study after study after study, that Americans pay much more for medical care than other developed countries, with no better results. Obamacare addresses this problem by going, as Willie Sutton famously advised, where the money is. It concentrates resources on the unhealthiest. According to Kaiser Health News, the sickest 1 percent of patients account for 21 percent of health care costs; 5 percent account for half of the total costs. Share your thoughts with Igor Eric Kuvykin www.erickuvykin.com
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Senators Near Fiscal Deal, but the House Is Uncertain


Igor Eric Kuvykin From NY Times The Senate could vote on an agreement as soon as Wednesday if the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, above center, and the minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, discuss the deal with their members on Tuesday.

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Published: October 14, 2013 1134 Comments
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WASHINGTON — Senate leaders neared the completion Monday night of a bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling and end the government shutdown while the rest of the world braced for the possibility of an American default that could set off a global financial disaster.
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Mr. McConnell, right, shown with Senator John Cornyn, and Mr. Reid praised progress made in the Senate on Monday.
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President Obama, shown at a Washington-area food bank, warned on Monday of a default.

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"I'm still puzzled over what [Republicans] think Democrats are getting out of the deal. Opening the government?"
FF, Montreal
Negotiators talked into the evening as senators from both parties coalesced around a plan that would lift the debt limit through Feb. 7, pass a resolution to finance the government through Jan. 15 and conclude formal discussions on a long-term tax and spending plan no later than Dec. 13, according to one Senate aide briefed on the plan.
But while both Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, praised the progress that was made in the Senate, it was already clear that the most conservative members of the House were not going to go along quietly with a plan that does not accomplish their goal from the outset of this two-week-old crisis: dismantling the president’s health care law.
“We’ve got a name for it in the House: it’s called the Senate surrender caucus,” said Representative Tim Huelskamp, Republican of Kansas. “Anybody who would vote for that in the House as Republican would virtually guarantee a primary challenger.”
There have been other showdowns between Republican lawmakers and President Obama that went to the last minute; in 2011, lawmakers reached a deal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling two days before officials said a default was possible, resulting in a stock market plunge and the downgrading of the nation’s credit rating. But the real possibility that as of Thursday the government would not be able to meet its obligations prompted grim warnings of an economic catastrophe that could ripple through stock markets, foreign capitals, corporate boardrooms, state budget offices and the bank accounts of everyday investors.
“If Republicans aren’t willing to set aside their partisan concerns in order to do what’s right for the country, we stand a good chance of defaulting, and defaulting could have a potentially devastating effect on the economy,” Mr. Obama told reporters at Martha’s Table, a Washington-area food bank.
Officials in several states said a default would mean unprecedented but unknown consequences to federal programs that are administered by the states, like Medicaid and food stamps. They also said that a market collapse could undermine state pension plans. And higher interest rates from a default on federal bonds could make short-term borrowing more difficult and costly for states.
“This has us pretty nervous; it’s just a mess,” said John E. Nixon, the budget director for the State of Michigan. “We are taking it very seriously, and we have our agencies preparing contingency plans. But obviously nobody really knows how it’s going to unfold, so you can only plan so much.”
Scott D. Pattison, the executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, spent Monday morning fielding calls from anxious members across the country.
“A lot of these folks are looking into ‘What kinds of options do we have if there is a cash crunch?’ ” Mr. Pattison said. “They are very, very nervous. It’s uncharted territory.”
Investors on Monday reacted in tandem with the real-time reports of halting progress, with stocks falling in the morning before drifting into positive territory by the end of the day in response to reports of a possible deal in the Senate. At the same time, asset managers and banks began taking steps to be ready if the Treasury Department is unable to pay back its short-term debt on time. And world leaders expressed concern about the impact on their countries.
In Britain, Jon Cunliffe, who will become deputy governor of the Bank of England next month, told members of Parliament that banks should be developing contingency plans to deal with an American default if one happens.
And Chinese leaders called on a “befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.” In a commentary on Sunday, the state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua blamed “cyclical stagnation in Washington” for leaving the dollar-based assets of many nations in jeopardy. It said the “international community is highly agonized.”
The Senate could vote on an agreement as soon as Wednesday if Mr. Reid and Mr. McConnell discuss the deal with their members on Tuesday. That would leave little time for the House to debate and vote on what will be a contentious measure.
If a deal is not completed by the end of Thursday, Treasury officials have said, the United States government will have exhausted “extraordinary measures” for managing its debt, meaning that its ability to pay its bills will be limited to the uneven flow of cash that comes into the Treasury on a daily basis. On some days, officials warned, the amount coming in will be less than the amount that is supposed to go out.
But even that deadline provides no real sense of clarity. It remains unknown how long the federal government could operate beyond that day, what programs it might choose to suspend, or how quickly the global financial markets would pronounce judgment.
Wall Street sentiment may be in evidence even before a vote, when the Treasury Department sells new 13- and 26-week bonds. If investors are hesitant to buy them, it could set a negative tone for the day, as was the case after an auction last Tuesday. George Goncalves, a Treasury strategist at Nomura Securities, said investors might not immediately panic if all signs were pointing toward a positive vote.
“If it’s clear it’s going to happen by midnight, people will give them the benefit of the doubt because everyone knows it’s not a hard deadline,” Mr. Goncalves said.
Staff members at the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Federal Reserve Bank of New York are working together behind the scenes to prepare, officials said. Because of the government shutdown, now two weeks old, about four in five staff members are furloughed at the Treasury Department, including officials from the Office of Fiscal Projections, which is critical in determining the balances in the government’s accounts. But a Treasury official said that a team of core staff members was closely monitoring the department’s debt management and fiscal projections.
Officials at the White House and the Treasury have said that contingency plans are in place, though they have repeatedly declined to provide details about which obligations would be met and which would be abandoned. Market participants said such plans would most likely include a plan to shore up short-term funding markets that rely on government debt.
As they drafted their deal, Senate negotiators in both parties were hoping that House Republican leaders would have no choice but to let a bipartisan agreement come to a vote, even if it could pass only with votes from Democrats and a minority of the Republican majority. But John A. Boehner, the House speaker, provided no assurances on Monday that an arrangement hammered out by his Senate colleagues could pass muster among his conservatives.
Senate Republicans had pushed for an agreement that included a provision to delay or repeal a tax on medical devices, but that became a sticking point in the negotiations and will almost certainly be excluded from the final deal, Senate aides said. But the deal is likely to include a one-year delay of another tax associated with the Affordable Care Act known as the reinsurance tax, which employers pay.
Another Republican-backed measure likely to be in the deal would require tighter income verification standards for people who receive subsidies under the new health care law. Under the new guidelines, the Health and Human Services secretary would have to certify that the department can verify income eligibility. The two provisions are the only mentions of the health care law whose defunding has been at the core of Republican demands over the past two weeks.
Many Republicans have argued that if the Senate proposal passes with the solid backing of Republican members — a possibility that seemed probable given Mr. McConnell’s support — it would be an easier sell in the House. But with the country just hours from what could be a crippling default, many Republicans believe that Mr. Boehner will have no choice but to ignore his most vocal members and put whatever passes the Senate up for a vote.
“We’re now backed into a corner,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York. “We have to do this by Thursday. We have to make it work, but it’s not going to be perfect.”

Reporting was contributed by Ashley Parker and Jonathan Weisman from Washington, Annie Lowrey from Boston and Nathaniel Popper from New York.
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Monday, October 14, 2013

Edward Snowden did a great service for the nation.

Edward Snowden did a great service for the nation. He opened a debate about how the national security state has turned us all into potential targets and real targets for surveillance.Makes you wonder about the integrity and purpose of our governemt.

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Saturday, October 12, 2013

The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage

Igor Eric Kuvykin www.kuvykin.com ,

The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage

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The first meeting, 1987: In June, George W. Bush goes to Capitol Hill to garner support for his father’s presidential campaign. Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, tells him he won’t endorse anyone for fear of jeopardizing his own House leadership ambitions.
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Published: October 10, 2013 358 Comments
In the final days of his presidency, George W. Bush sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum and staring into the distance as two White House lawyers briefed him on the possible last-minute pardon of I. Lewis Libby.
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“Do you think he did it?” Bush asked.
“Yeah,” one of the lawyers said. “I think he did it.”
In March 2007, Libby, who had served as Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, was convicted of lying to federal officials who were investigating the leak of the identity of a C.I.A. officer. For the past two months Cheney had been pushing the president to grant Libby a full pardon before they left office. He would not let it go. Cheney brought it up again and again, first before Thanksgiving, then again around Christmas and finally throughout January 2009 as they prepared for the transition to the incoming Obama administration. His lobbying was so intense that the president made clear to his aides that he did not want to talk with Cheney about it anymore.
Troubled by the decision hanging over him, Bush had asked the White House lawyers to re-examine the case to see if a pardon was justified. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and his deputy, William Burck, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers had raised in his defense. Their conclusion was that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty.
“If I were on that jury,” Burck told Bush, “I would probably have agreed with them. You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that’s a crime.”
The case had its origins in the politically fraught summer of 2003, when American troops had just invaded Iraq but were unable to find the unconventional weapons they had been told were there. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, suggested that the White House ignored contrary evidence about Iraq’s nuclear program in the months before the invasion, a charge Cheney would deny. When the news media reported that Wilson’s wife worked at the C.I.A., the F.B.I. opened an investigation into whether her identity was illegally divulged.
Libby testified that he first learned Valerie Plame Wilson was a C.I.A. official from Tim Russert, the NBC journalist. If true, this would mean he did not disclose secret information he learned as Cheney’s chief of staff — which would undercut the common theory that the leak came from Cheney’s office and that Cheney was trying to take retribution against Wilson by blowing his wife’s cover. Libby’s story clashed not just with Russert’s version, but also with those of eight other people, including fellow administration officials, who testified that they talked with Libby about Wilson before his conversation with Russert. When Russert disputed Libby’s depiction of events, Libby said simply that he must have misremembered what had transpired, hardly an indictable offense.
“All right,” the president said when the lawyers concluded their assessment. “So why do you think he did it? Do you think he was protecting the vice president?”
“I don’t think he was protecting the vice president,” Burck said.
Burck figured that Libby assumed his account would never be contradicted, because prosecutors could not force reporters to violate vows of confidentiality to their sources. “I think also that Libby was concerned,” Burck said. “Because he took to heart what you said back then: that you would fire anybody that you knew was involved in this. I just think he didn’t think it was worth falling on the sword.”
Bush did not seem convinced. “I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney,” the president said. If that was the case, then Cheney was seeking forgiveness for the man who had sacrificed himself on his behalf.
“Now I am going to have to have the talk with the vice president,” Bush said. That was the sort of unpleasant business that for eight years he had left to Cheney. It was the vice president who delivered the bad news, for instance, to Paul O’Neill and Donald Rumsfeld when they were fired.
Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff, was also in the room, and he volunteered to handle it.
“Nah, nah,” Bush said. “I can do it.” But as several people close to him would later attest, the president was dreading it.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times and a contributing writer for the magazine. This article is adapted from his new book, “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.”
Editor: Joel Lovell
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