links for 2009-11-18

Carly Fiorina has advice for Washington lawmakers as they tackle issues such as health care and immigration reform: Don't take on so much at once.
The newly announced candidate for the U.S. Senate in California used the nearly 2,000-page health care bill recently passed by the House to make her point before a group of reporters Wednesday. She said the sheer scope of the undertaking has made people wary about how it will affect their access to care and their pocketbooks.

"What this health care bill does is create a vast new entitlement. It tries to boil the ocean — let's throw absolutely everything we can into this bill," she said. "As a result, it's creating as many problems for people as it is solving problems for people. That's why I think it's in trouble."

In the Battle of the Health Bills, the Senate wins out, bulk-wise – weighing in at 2,074 pages.

The House health reform bill was a mere 1,990 pages when introduced.

That means the Senate bill — like the one in the House — runs more pages than War and Peace, and has nearly five times as many words as the Torah.

The table of contents alone is 14 pages.

“Read the bill!” was a rallying cry of some health reform opponents over the summer. And if Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) gets his way, senators will get a chance to hear every word of it. He’s threatening to the read the legislation from start to finish, which by some estimates could take as long as 48 hours.

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I'd give it a failing grade.

Instead of forthrightly dealing with the fundamental problems, discussion is dominated by rival factions struggling to enact or defeat President Barack Obama's agenda. The rhetoric on both sides is exaggerated and often deceptive. Those of us for whom the central issue is health—not politics—have been left in the lurch. And as controversy heads toward a conclusion in Washington, it appears that the people who favor the legislation are engaged in collective denial.

A little more than a year after his election, President Obama said his administration has laid the groundwork for success on global and domestic matters.

"I think that we've restored America's standing in the world, and that's confirmed by polls," he told CNN's Ed Henry in a wide-ranging interview this week during his trip to China.

"I think a recent one indicated that around the world, before my election, less than half the people — maybe less than 40 percent of the people — thought that you could count on America to do to the right thing. Now it's up to 75 percent."
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The world is still a dangerous place, Mr President.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid scrambled "to lock down votes" behind a health-care bill that he may present as early this afternoon, the Washington Post reports.

Reid "would not confirm that he had received commitments from all 60 members of his caucus to overcome GOP procedural objections and bring the bill to the Senate floor."

Meanwhile, the buzz on Capitol Hill is that Reid will not attempt to move the bill through the budget reconciliation process and will instead need 60 votes to end debate in the Senate — a possible indication that major concessions to moderates are coming.

Since then, however, a flurry of new polls makes clear that Democrats are facing deeper problems with independents—the swing voters who swung dramatically toward the party in 2006 and 2008 but who now are registering deep unease with the amount of spending and debt called for under Obama's agenda in an era of one-party rule in Washington.

A Gallup Poll released last week offered a disturbing glimpse about the state of play: just 14 percent of independents approve of the job Congress is doing, the lowest figure all year. In just the past few days alone, surveys have shown Democratic incumbents trailing Republicans among independent voters by double-digit margins in competitive statewide contests in places as varied as Connecticut, Ohio and Iowa.

California faces a budget gap of nearly $21 billion over its current and next fiscal years, according to the state government's budget watchdog agency, the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday.

The newspaper said California's Legislative Analyst's Office would issue an official report on Wednesday with its shortfall estimate.

The projection comes less than four months after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers agreed to a budget plan that closed a deficit of more than $24 billion largely with deep spending cuts to respond to plunging revenues amid the worst economic crisis to hit the most populous U.S. state since the Great Depression.