Word: givens
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...Given the fact that the meeting took place when debate over health reform was already in full swing, it's likely that the two sides were simply hearing what they wanted to hear. Whatever the case, they have certainly been talking past each other ever since. Obama added abortion funding to the list of "myths" like death panels that he dismissed in his public appearances. When he said in his address to the joint session of Congress in September that "under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions," the President was referring to direct funding...
...abortion because some consumers would purchase those health plans using government subsidies. This fungibility argument shifted the issue from direct federal funding of abortion to indirect funding. And eliminating indirect funding of abortion is a nearly impossible standard to meet. Taxpayers already subsidize abortions through the tax break given to employers for sponsoring company-insurance plans, and technically any employer that receives a government grant - say, for laboratory research - has a fungibility issue if it uses an insurance plan that includes abortion coverage...
...bout for national honor. More substantively - and controversially - the region requires all students to be educated in the Catalan language and is engaged in an ongoing series of debates with the country's central administration in Madrid over governance of the region's infrastructure. For many, bullfighting - especially given its association with the Franco regime, which promoted it as a unifying national spectacle in the 20th century - fits squarely into an "us vs. them" mentality. (Read "Barcelona vs. Real Madrid: More Than a Game...
Zelaya warned this week that legitimizing the election "without the reinstatement of the constitutional President would only legitimize" the coup. But U.S. officials, while insisting they've not given up on restoring Zelaya before Nov. 29, acknowledge they're considering a Plan B - perhaps brokering more international oversight of the balloting while forging a deal that reinstates Zelaya after the election so that he can finish out his term, which ends on Jan. 27. "We've always preferred a restoration of constitutional and democratic order in Honduras that includes the restoration of Manuel Zelaya," one State official tells TIME...
...official concedes that recognizing an election held while an illegitimate regime is in power is a "significant challenge." It may be even harder given recent actions by that regime: in the past three weeks, Micheletti has cracked down on civil rights, shuttered pro-Zelaya broadcasters and decreed that more media will be muzzled if they "transmit messages that incite national hate." Micheletti, a devout Roman Catholic who has said he's on a calling from God, lifted many of his emergency decrees during a visit last week by U.S. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign...