Word: republican
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...Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, one of the key men drafting a final Senate bill behind closed doors this week, on Tuesday called the doctors' legislation "very important" to ensuring final passage of health-care reform. Republicans counter that that is precisely the problem. Not only is the move a transparent ploy to get physicians onboard the reform bill, said Senator Jon Kyl, the No. 2 Senate Republican, "I also see it as a transparent way to take the deficit off the table." Republicans have called the move a budget trick, one of many Democrats are using, they...
...keep temporarily fixing doctors' Medicare reimbursements by going deeper in debt, they argue the problem is more than a decade old and is not actually related to the current health-care reform debate. And indeed, the issue reaches all the way back to 1997, when President Clinton and a Republican Congress altered the complicated formula that dictates Medicare payments. At the time, the so-called sustainability growth rate (SGR) was depegged from inflation to wage growth. That was fine with doctors until the recession hit and wage growth ground to an abrupt halt, posing the threat of real cuts...
...Driving the call for more stimulus efforts is the unemployment rate, which now sits at 9.8%, and is expected to rise into next year, even though the recession may have already officially ended. Republicans, who have long been critical of the $787 billion stimulus that passed in February, are likely to support some, if not most of these new spending programs, in part because they are politically popular. Texas Republican John Cornyn, a vocal opponent of the February stimulus, said recently that he was in favor of some more federal spending efforts. "I think there are things we need...
...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 Affairs Committee and a Micheletti supporter. But human-rights groups like Amnesty International say police and soldiers are still blocking street protests...
...Washington think tank, says backing away from restoring Zelaya "sends an ugly signal that the U.S. doesn't really consider the era of using military coups in the region to be over." He adds it would fuel charges that Obama has been cowed by a small group of conservative Republican Cold Warriors in Congress. Led by South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, they recently journeyed to Honduras to show their support for Micheletti and are holding up diplomatic appointments to protest Obama's opposition to the coup. (Read "Honduras Quagmire: An Interview with Zelaya...