Word: blues
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...efforts of the lawyers, doctors and treaty writers, it's at the grass roots that the fight against tobacco will be won. On a hot Friday afternoon not long ago, a group of students in blue-and-yellow uniforms gathered for a lecture at the Shepherd Secondary School in Ketu, a poor neighborhood in Lagos. "Have you seen anybody smoking on TV?" asks James-Odiase, the antitobacco counselor. The class nods, and one boy admits that he admires the way male actors look when they smoke. "With each puff he takes," the counselor warns, the actor's "life reduces...
Others are veteran members of the so-called Blue Dog Coalition, which consists of Democrats from less-than-liberal districts. Seven of the eight Blue Dogs on the crucial House Energy and Commerce Committee have threatened to block health-care legislation unless it puts a lid on costs. Resistance strengthened after the head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office testified that the current House proposal would push costs up, not down, and would add some $240 billion to the federal deficit by 2019. That, in turn, has some Senators pushing back against the White House's early-August goal...
...Moore, a former prosecutor with a tinge of Hal Holbrook's hangdog air, such speeches are painful. As he explains, he has been a deficit hawk since joining Congress in 1998. Moore and his fellow Blue Dogs tried to win the Bush Administration's support for a budget-balancing proposal they called pay-as-you-go. "President Bush and the Republicans in Congress refused to support us," Moore says. "And in eight years of the Bush Administration, our debt went up $5 trillion...
...bill tonight; instead, the only one of the three health-related House committees that hasn't yet produced a bill has suspended its drafting sessions, while committee chairman Henry Waxman tries to work out his differences with a rebellious group of fiscally conservative Democrats known as the Blue Dogs. And in the Senate, Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus remains sequestered behind closed doors with a small group that includes Republicans; no one expects to see a bill out of their efforts until next week at the earliest. (Read the transcript...
...press conference is only one of the signs that Obama is in fact getting more engaged. On July 21, he met for more than two hours with the Blue Dog faction. At the end of the session, the Blue Dogs agreed to press House leaders to include in the bill a provision that would take the job of setting Medicare rates out of the hands of Congress and give it to an independent agency. Presumably, that agency would have more expertise and be less susceptible to political pressure. Obama Budget Director Peter Orszag has called such a move a "game...