Jack & Jill Politics

A couple of years ago, Greta McKinney probably wouldn’t have been at an upcoming roundtable discussion about suicide in the black community. Back then, she was one of those people who followed the party line—black folks don’t commit suicide, that’s something only white people do. In fact, that was a subject she said never came up in her circles.

“Even though I considered myself to be an educated person, that just wasn’t a discussion that came up in the community,” said McKinney, who previously had managed a group home for a local social service agency.

Her job duties included taking clients to psychiatric appointments, developing a support plan for them and making sure that they were being given medications in compliance with various regulations and doctors’ orders. While she was qualified to deal with clients suffering from various mental disorders, it wasn’t until McKinney decided on a career change that she began to learn some disturbing truths about a serious problem in the black community.

After returning to college to attend graduate school and earn licenses in marriage and family therapy and mental health counseling, McKinney secured an internship at Parkview Behavioral Health Center (PBHC). There, she received a jolt that shook her perception of mental health in the black community.

At PBHC, she started coming in contact with African Americans of various ages who had contemplated, or even tried, committing suicide. McKinney even met children as young as five-years-old, who were talking about committing suicide.

“There were five-year-olds who would openly say, ‘I did what I could to try to kill myself,” said McKinney. “I said, ‘There is a problem we as a community have not addressed.”

Mental health worker gets eye-opener: Children as young as five talk suicide

This is the biggest problem facing our society:
Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs

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By PETER S. GOODMAN
Published: February 20, 2010

BUENA PARK, Calif. — Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.
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Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“There are no bad jobs now. Any job is a good job,” said Jean Eisen, who became unemployed more than two years ago.
The New Poor
Trading Down

Articles in this series will examine the struggle to recover from the widespread strains of the Great Recession.
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Long-Term Unemployment
The New York Times

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Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.

Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.

Here in Southern California, Jean Eisen has been without work since she lost her job selling beauty salon equipment more than two years ago. In the several months she has endured with neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check, she has relied on local food banks for her groceries.

She has learned to live without the prescription medications she is supposed to take for high blood pressure and cholesterol. She has become effusively religious — an unexpected turn for this onetime standup comic with X-rated material — finding in Christianity her only form of health insurance.

“I pray for healing,” says Ms. Eisen, 57. “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got to go with what you know.”

Warm, outgoing and prone to the positive, Ms. Eisen has worked much of her life. Now, she is one of 6.3 million Americans who have been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.

Men have suffered the largest numbers of job losses in this recession. But Ms. Eisen has the unfortunate distinction of being among a group — women from 45 to 64 years of age — whose long-term unemployment rate has grown rapidly.

In 1983, after a deep recession, women in that range made up only 7 percent of those who had been out of work for six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. Last year, they made up 14 percent.

Twice, Ms. Eisen exhausted her unemployment benefits before her check was restored by a federal extension. Last week, her check ran out again. She and her husband now settle their bills with only his $1,595 monthly disability check. The rent on their apartment is $1,380.

“We’re looking at the very real possibility of being homeless,” she said.

Every downturn pushes some people out of the middle class before the economy resumes expanding. Most recover. Many prosper. But some economists worry that this time could be different. An unusual constellation of forces — some embedded in the modern-day economy, others unique to this wrenching recession — might make it especially difficult for those out of work to find their way back to their middle-class lives.

Labor experts say the economy needs 100,000 new jobs a month just to absorb entrants to the labor force. With more than 15 million people officially jobless, even a vigorous recovery is likely to leave an enormous number out of work for years.

Some labor experts note that severe economic downturns are generally followed by powerful expansions, suggesting that aggressive hiring will soon resume. But doubts remain about whether such hiring can last long enough to absorb anywhere close to the millions of unemployed.

A New Scarcity of Jobs

Some labor experts say the basic functioning of the American economy has changed in ways that make jobs scarce — particularly for older, less-educated people like Ms. Eisen, who has only a high school diploma.

Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

During periods of American economic expansion in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the number of private-sector jobs increased about 3.5 percent a year, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a research firm. During expansions in the 1980s and ’90s, jobs grew just 2.4 percent annually. And during the last decade, job growth fell to 0.9 percent annually.

“The pace of job growth has been getting weaker in each expansion,” Mr. Achuthan said. “There is no indication that this pattern is about to change.”

Before 1990, it took an average of 21 months for the economy to regain the jobs shed during a recession, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group in Washington.

After the recessions in 1990 and in 2001, 31 and 46 months passed before employment returned to its previous peaks. The economy was growing, but companies remained conservative in their hiring.

Some 34 million people were hired into new and existing private-sector jobs in 2000, at the tail end of an expansion, according to Labor Department data. A year later, in the midst of recession, hiring had fallen off to 31.6 million. And as late as 2003, with the economy again growing, hiring in the private sector continued to slip, to 29.8 million.

It was a jobless recovery: Business was picking up, but it simply did not translate into more work. This time, hiring may be especially subdued, labor economists say.

Traditionally, three sectors have led the way out of recession: automobiles, home building and banking. But auto companies have been shrinking because strapped households have less buying power. Home building is limited by fears about a glut of foreclosed properties. Banking is expanding, but this seems largely a function of government support that is being withdrawn.

At the same time, the continued bite of the financial crisis has crimped the flow of money to small businesses and new ventures, which tend to be major sources of new jobs.

All of which helps explain why Ms. Eisen — who has never before struggled to find work — feels a familiar pain each time she scans job listings on her computer: There are positions in health care, most requiring experience she lacks. Office jobs demand familiarity with software she has never used. Jobs at fast food restaurants are mostly secured by young people and immigrants.

If, as Mr. Sinai expects, the economy again expands without adding many jobs, millions of people like Ms. Eisen will be dependent on an unemployment insurance already being severely tested.

“The system was ill prepared for the reality of long-term unemployment,” said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director for the National Employment Law Project. “Now, you add a severe recession, and you have created a crisis of historic proportions.”

Fewer Protections

Some poverty experts say the broader social safety net is not up to cushioning the impact of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Social services are less extensive than during the last period of double-digit unemployment, in the early 1980s.

On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply.

“You have very large sets of people who have no social protections,” said Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They are landing in this netherworld.”

When Ms. Eisen and her husband, Jeff, applied for food stamps, they were turned away for having too much monthly income. The cutoff was $1,570 a month — $25 less than her husband’s disability check.

Reforms in the mid-1990s imposed time limits on cash assistance for poor single mothers, a change predicated on the assumption that women would trade welfare checks for paychecks.

Yet as jobs have become harder to get, so has welfare: as of 2006, 44 states cut off anyone with a household income totaling 75 percent of the poverty level — then limited to $1,383 a month for a family of three — according to an analysis by Ms. Albelda.

“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “People with more education and skills will probably figure something out once the economy picks up. It’s the ones with less education and skills: that’s the new poor.”

Here in Orange County, the expanse of suburbia stretching south from Los Angeles, long-term unemployment reaches even those who once had six-figure salaries. A center of the national mortgage industry, the area prospered in the real estate boom and suffered with the bust.

Until she was laid off two years ago, Janine Booth, 41, brought home roughly $10,000 a month in commissions from her job selling electronics to retailers. A single mother of three, she has been living lately on $2,000 a month in child support and about $450 a week in unemployment insurance — a stream of checks that ran out last week.

For Ms. Booth, work has been a constant since her teenage years, when she cleaned houses under pressure from her mother to earn pocket money. Today, Ms. Booth pays her $1,500 monthly mortgage with help from her mother, who is herself living off savings after being laid off.

“I don’t want to take money from her,” Ms. Booth said. “I just want to find a job.”

Ms. Booth, with a résumé full of well-paid sales jobs, seems the sort of person who would have little difficulty getting work. Yet two years of looking have yielded little but anxiety.

She sends out dozens of résumés a week and rarely hears back. She responds to online ads, only to learn they are seeking operators for telephone sex lines or people willing to send mysterious packages from their homes.

She spends weekdays in a classroom in Anaheim, in a state-financed training program that is supposed to land her a job in medical administration. Even if she does find a job, she will be lucky if it pays $15 an hour.

“What is going to happen?” she asked plaintively. “I worry about my kids. I just don’t want them to think I’m a failure.”

On a recent weekend, she was running errands with her 18-year-old son when they stopped at an A.T.M. and he saw her checking account balance: $50.

“He says, ‘Is that all you have?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Are we going to be O.K.?’ ”

Yes, she replied — and not only for his benefit.

“I have to keep telling myself it’s going to be O.K.,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d go into a deep depression.”

Last week, she made up fliers advertising her eagerness to clean houses — the same activity that provided her with spending money in high school, and now the only way she sees fit to provide for her kids. She plans to place the fliers on porches in some other neighborhood.

“I don’t want to clean my neighbors’ houses,” she said. “I know I’m going to come out of this. There’s no way I’m going to be homeless and poverty-stricken. But I am scared. I have a lot of sleepless nights.”

For the Eisens, poverty is already here. In the two years Ms. Eisen has been without work, they have exhausted their savings of about $24,000. Their credit card balances have grown to $15,000.

“I don’t know how we’re still indoors,” she said.

Her 1994 Dodge Caravan broke down in January, leaving her to ask for rides to an employment center.

She does not have the money to move to a cheaper apartment.

“You have to have money for first and last month’s rent, and to open utility accounts,” she said.

What she has is personality and presence — two traits that used to seem enough. She narrates her life in a stream of self-deprecating wisecracks, her punch lines tinged with desperation.

“See that,” she said, spotting a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Standing on a sidewalk, he waved at passing cars with a sign advertising a tax preparation business. “That will be me next week. Do you think this guy ever thought he’d be doing this?”

And yet, she would gladly do this. She would do nearly anything.

“There are no bad jobs now,” she says. “Any job is a good job.”

She has applied everywhere she can think of — at offices, at gas stations. Nothing.

“I’m being seen as a person who is no longer viable,” she said. “I’m chalking it up to my age and my weight. Blame it on your most prominent insecurity.”

Two Incomes, Then None

Ms. Eisen grew up poor, in Flatbush in Brooklyn. Her father was in maintenance. Her mother worked part time at a company that made window blinds.

She married Jeff when she was 19, and they soon moved to California, where he had grown up. He worked in sales for a chemical company. They rented an apartment in Buena Park, a growing spread of houses filling out former orange groves. She stayed home and took care of their daughter.

“I never asked him how much he earned,” Ms. Eisen said. “I was of the mentality that the husband took care of everything. But we never wanted.”

By the early 1980s, gas and rent strained their finances. So she took a job as a quality assurance clerk at a factory that made aircraft parts. It paid $13.50 an hour and had health insurance.

When the company moved to Mexico in the early 1990s, Ms. Eisen quickly found a job at a travel agency. When online booking killed that business, she got the job at the beauty salon equipment company. It paid $13.25 an hour, with an annual bonus — enough for presents under the Christmas tree.

But six years ago, her husband took a fall at work and then succumbed to various ailments — diabetes, liver disease, high blood pressure — leaving him confined to the couch. Not until 2008 did he secure his disability check.

And now they find themselves in this desert of joblessness, her paycheck replaced by a $702 unemployment check every other week. She received 14 weeks of benefits after she lost her job, and then a seven-week extension.

For most of October through December 2008, she received nothing, as she waited for another extension. The checks came again, then ran out in September 2009. They were restored by an extension right before Christmas.

Their daughter has back problems and is living on disability checks, making the church their ultimate safety net.

“I never thought I’d be in the position where I had to go to a food bank,” Ms. Eisen said. But there she is, standing in the parking lot of the Calvary Chapel church, chatting with a half-dozen women, all waiting to enter the Bread of Life Food Pantry.

When her name is called, she steps into a windowless alcove, where a smiling woman hands her three bags of groceries: carrots, potatoes, bread, cheese and a hunk of frozen meat.

“Haven’t we got a lot to be thankful for?” Ms. Eisen asks.

For one thing, no pinto beans.

“I’ve got 10 bags of pinto beans,” she says. “And I have no clue how to cook a pinto bean.”

Local job listings are just as mysterious. On a bulletin board at the county-financed ProPath Business and Career Services Center, many are written in jargon hinting of accounting or computers.

“Nothing I’m qualified for,” Ms. Eisen says. “When you can’t define what it is, that’s a pretty good indication.”

Her counselor has a couple of possibilities — a cashier at a supermarket and a night desk job at a motel.

“I’ll e-mail them,” Ms. Eisen promises. “I’ll tell them what a shining example of humanity I am.”

Excuse me for my ignorance.How can you crash a party that you were invited to?
Leader Boehner: We’re Going to Crash Health Reform Party
http://www.rumproast.com/index.php/site/comment…

The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Salon
by James Wolcott February 23, 2010, 1:17 PM
Vanity Fair colleague Michael Wolff, though not a licensed clinician or chiropodist, renders what seems to me an inarguable diagnosis of the current conservative condition, i.e., they've gone loco:

Republicans, once the party of boring sobriety and solidness, are now the party of the kooky, the cracked, the unhinged. Republicans are not conservative in the least. Rather, they act out in the most deranged and dramatic ways.

Having whipped themselves into dishrag fatigue over the socialist-fascist-satanic-nanny statism-TelePrompter totalitarianism cheese doodlies of the Obama administration, they've now revived to turn on each other, writing and pasting nasty things all over freshman Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown's high-school yearbook for voting for cloture on the jobs bill, thus betraying everything conservatism has stood for since the late William F. Buckley first lifted a salad fork and speared asparagus. How dare he, or as Wonkette's Ken Layne put it:

Handsome nudist truck driver Scott Brown was the GOP’s BFF until he started “going rogue” on Monday with that whole “I’ll just give a helping hand to the Socialists, because we are the Communist Brotherhood” thing he pulled right there on C-SPAN, as if teabaggers didn’t even matter. Why doesn’t Scott Brown respect his Facebook friends and the, uh, Constitution?

Scott Brown is but the latest of the beauty-salon graduates driving conservatives to spazzy distraction. As NYCweboy argues, the Republican Party has become the fan club for attention-deficit teenage girls of all ages and sexes, unable to decide between Fabian and Frankie Avalon, infatuated with Zec Efron one month and all moony over Rob Pattison the next, smitten with Mitt Romney one campaign and pining over Marco Rubio the next. “[If] if Republicans have a crisis of leadership, it may be because conservatives have become some of the most fickle lovers of new faces: as fast as a new handsome dude (usually white, but occasionally tan) enters the room, their love of last year's model goes out the window.”

So many male starlets have strutted the gangplank, only to splash into the briny deep, given the nudge by political purists and the easily bored. Why, I can recall–it wasn't that long ago–when Norm Coleman was going to be the new savior, with National Review types suggesting that his inquiry into George Galloway might do for him what the Alger Hiss case did for Richard Nixon–launch him into national prominence on a wave of vindication–and then there was that other NRO man-throb crush, Rick Santorum, and the on-again off-again romance with Bobby Jindal. That anyone could ever get a tingling sensation from the beaky-geeky Tim Pawlenty is just so weird, a sign of desperation.

Further proof that the Republican Party's “big tent” has become a bughouse.
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2010/0…

Years ago, after slow realization neo-cons had co-opted the R's and the resulting damage, members within the R's of all stripes began abandoning the party as each confessed 'The Republican Brand is Dead'. The kooks attempting to fill the vacuum and the R's internal fratricide is further evidence.

POTUS' bill is too short…

PLEASE post a link to the audio.

On Broken Promises

by BooMan
Tue Feb 23rd, 2010 at 11:41:16 PM EST
Ezra has been talking to staffers on the Hill, which is something I have not been doing for several months now. I've been preoccupied. So, I put a lot of stock in what Ezra has to say when he talks about the mood of the Democratic caucus. He made a point in his piece today that hadn't occurred to me. One reason the Democrats don't want to revive the public option is because it would basically constitute a broken promise and that is not something Harry Reid wants to do if he plans on being able to retain his position and effectiveness as Majority Leader:

Caucus politics present another dilemma: The public option died due to the opposition of Nelson, Landrieu, Lincoln, Lieberman and a handful of other conservative — and vulnerable — Democrats. Reid cut a deal with them, and they signed onto the final product. For many, that was a big political risk. The price was letting them say they killed the public option. Bringing it back to the bill will mean they voted for a bill that ended up including something they'd promised their constituents they'd killed. Cross them on this and you've lost their trust — and thus their votes — in the future.

It's actually a kind of depressing realization, but I fear Ezra is right here. Of course, one of the advantages of using the reconciliation process in the first place is that it allows some red-state Democrats to vote against the bill. But, I don't know that it would help a Blanche Lincoln or a Ben Nelson to vote against the health care bill now that they've already voted for it once. It seems to me that that would create a kind of worst-of-both-worlds type of situation where the base is upset and the opponents still can argue truthfully that they voted to pass a health care bill that has x, y, and z problems with it.

I don't know exactly what Reid promised to get those 60 votes on Christmas Eve, and I don't know if resuscitating the public option would cause a rift, with some members feeling they had been betrayed. But I think it's a possible explanation for why Jay Rockefeller and Robert Gibbs say that the Democrats don't have the votes to pass the public option. The other possibility is that it doesn't make any sense to talk about a public option prior to the health care summit, since bringing it up undermines the whole point of the summit, which is to show a willingness to compromise on the Senate version of the bill, not to ram home something even stronger than what we can't pass right now under regular order.

So, after the Republicans react with a bunch uncooperative nonsense, the rhetoric will change. How much will it change? I wish I knew.

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2010/2/23/23…

The General made an interesting point.

by Dennis G.

Face the Nation last Sunday had Colin Powell as their guest. He made an interesting point that seemed spot on to me when it comes to the HCR debate. He was asked if President Obama had tried to do too much in his first year and said (emphasis added):

COLIN POWELL: You know, the—if I could use my military experience again, and then I’ll get to my political and diplomatic experience. But we’re taught have a main attack. What you’re really after. What’s most important. Then you could have a secondary attack. And you can have economy of force operations where you keep your eye on it but you don’t jump into it. And the main attack the American people wanted to see him lead, and I hear it everywhere I go—fix the economy; fix the mortgage system; fix the credit problem; get us our jobs back; get trade moving.

Later in the conversation he returned to the point with greater emphasis:

COLIN POWELL: But you have to make it clear what we’re trying to achieve and what the main attack is. You talk about our history. In Philadelphia, when they were writing the Constitution, the great problem they had was what to do with slavery. And, they essentially said the main attack has to be creating a country, not solving the problem of slavery, one of the great compromises in our history. And so, sooner or later, no matter how strongly you feel about issues, you’ve got to find areas of compromise to keep the country moving forward.

I think this makes the progressive case for just passing the damn HCR bill and moving on. It will be compromised legislation—it always is and always has been the case when it comes to legislative progress in America. You start and then you build upon the foundation that you create. No bill: no foundation. The perfect is always the enemy of the good. Some flair-up issues are only distractions—secondary battles that are not worth losing the core goal over. The Public Option is one of those secondary battles. It is worth fighting for but not worth losing or giving up on HCR if you can not get the votes to pass a PO. HRC is too important for such tantrums, we need this change.

Any attempt to get the economy going again can not happen if we do not deal with HCR. It must be done. It is the core strategic goal at the moment, but it is not the main event.

The core struggle is proving that Government can work—this is the main battle. Restoring functionality and the usefulness of government in solving problems is the main battle that President Obama is fighting. Meanwhile, Republicans are focused on perpetuating failure as the only possible legacy of government. They seek to ensure that America is a failed and ungovernable state because that is a better environment for the grifters who control the GOP and the modern conservative movement. This endless Republican embrace of failure as success should be an easy thing to defeat, but way too many Democrats are easily distracted by this or that secondary battle. Minor battles like the fight over a PO distracts attention from the main battle like passing HCR and proving that government can actually work. These minor battles always risk handing the GOP yet another “government can only fail” victory—especially when they are engaged prematurely.

Colin Powell has a lot to answer for due to his misplaced loyalty to Bush the younger. Still it was nice to hear him finally be an honest voice in Washington. Better late than never.

We shall see if the Democrats in Congress have the backbone to pass HCR and get serious about doing the work they were elected to do. It should be easy, but they are always distracted by so many shiny objects. I hope the meeting on Thursday will work. We shall see.

Cheers

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/02/23/the-gen…

LINK TO AUDIO for Roland's Commentary

http://www.rolandsmartin.com/blog/index.php/cat…

Republican spin on reconciliation is wrong. GOPers used it to pass health reform many times.
by Joe Sudbay (DC) on 2/24/2010 09:28:00 AM

This morning, I awakened to a report on NPR about the use of reconciliation on issues involving health care. By the way the GOPers, particularly the Senate GOPers are squawking, one might think that reconciliation has never been used for health related legislation. That's what Republicans want people to think. But, it's wrong:

Budget reconciliation, Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) told reporters Tuesday, “was never designed for a large, comprehensive piece of legislation such as health care, as you all know. It's a budget exercise, and that's why some refer to it as the 'nuclear option.'”

“The use of expedited reconciliation process to push through more dramatic changes to a health care bill of such size, scope and magnitude is unprecedented,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) wrote in a letter to President Obama on Monday, urging him to renounce the possibility of trying to pass a bill using the procedure.

But health care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. “In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process,” says Sara Rosenbaum, who chairs the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University.
NPR provided a table noting when reconciliation has been used. I put in bold the pieces of legislation passed when Republicans controlled at least one chamber of Congress:
For 30 years, major changes to health care laws have passed via the budget reconciliation process. Here are a few examples:

1982 — TEFRA: The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act first opened Medicare to HMOs

1986 — COBRA: The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act allowed people who were laid off to keep their health coverage, and stopped hospitals from dumping ER patients unable to pay for their care

1987 — OBRA '87: Added nursing home protection rules to Medicare and Medicaid, created no-fault vaccine injury compensation program

1989 — OBRA '89: Overhauled doctor payment system for Medicare, created new federal agency on research and quality of care

1990 — OBRA '90: Added cancer screenings to Medicare, required providers to notify patients about advance directives and living wills, expanded Medicaid to all kids living below poverty level, required drug companies to provide discounts to Medicaid

1993 — OBRA '93: created federal vaccine funding for all children

1996 — Welfare Reform: Separated Medicaid from welfare

1997 — BBA: The Balanced Budget Act created the state-federal childrens' health program called CHIP

2005 — DRA: The Deficit Reduction Act reduced Medicaid spending, allowed parents of disabled children to buy into Medicaid
So, reconciliation isn't new. And, when Republicans controlled, they sure used it to pass health care laws.

The hypocrisy from Republicans knows no limits. Fortunately, at least one media outlet chose to fact check their talking points.
http://www.americablog.com/2010/02/republican-s…

This is a nice slide show, I'm okay with all the choices except Rihanna, I dont' think she's quite there yet! And how can anyone forget Pam Greer: Foxy Brown herself.

“The Most Stylish Black Women in History”
http://lifestyle.msn.com/your-look/celebrity-st…

BLACK HISTORY MONTH OPEN THREAD IS UP