links for 2009-07-31

Five years after he put his money behind the Swift Boat ads that helped tank John Kerry’s presidential campaign, Senate Democrats gave T. Boone Pickens a warm welcome at their weekly policy lunch Thursday.

Or at least most of them did.

Kerry skipped the regularly scheduled lunch; his staff said the Massachusetts Democrat “was unable to attend because he had a long scheduled lunch with his interns and pages.”

Sen. Al Franken managed to make time for the lunch — but then let Pickens have it afterward.

The House has voted to rush an additional $2 billion into the popular but financially strapped "cash for clunkers" car purchase program.

The bill was approved on a vote of 316-109. House members acted within hours of learning from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that the program was running out of money.

Called the Car Allowance Rebate System, or CARS, the program is designed to help the economy and the environment by spurring new car sales. Car owners can receive federal subsidies of up to $4,500 for trading in their old cars for new ones that achieve significantly higher gas mileage.
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What a mess!

Federal health statistics indicate that around 44 million people in the United States have no health insurance. But 108 million Americans have no dental insurance, and 26 million of them are children. The American Dental Association is trying to solve this problem by adding an oral health amendment to the health-care legislation currently under discussion in Congress.

"The government is completely separating dentistry and medical health in its proposed overhaul," says Dr. Thomas Connelly, a dentist based in New York. "It doesn't make sense to do so."

But FOX News Medical Contributor Marc Siegel says adding more to the health-care reform bill is a terrible idea. "We need less, not more. We don't want the government to be able to tell us what kinds of procedures we can and can't have, dental or otherwise."
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Yeah, so Americans can have a National Health Service Dentistry like Britain?

No way

The first 12 months of the U.S. recession saw the economy shrink more than twice as much as previously estimated, reflecting even bigger declines in consumer spending and housing, revised figures showed.

The world’s largest economy contracted 1.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the last three months of 2008, compared with the 0.8 percent drop previously on the books, the Commerce Department said today in Washington.

“The current downturn beginning in 2008 is more pronounced,” Steven Landefeld, director of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, said in a press briefing this week. The revisions were in line with past experience in which initial figures tended to underestimate the severity of contractions during their early stages, he said.