Obama goes prime-time to pitch healthcare, again.  U.S. President Barack Obama shifts his effort to convince the American people healthcare reform is the right thing to do right now to prime time Wednesday. In an evening news conference, Obama is expected to outline the case for healthcare reform as well as provide an update on what has been accomplished since he took office in January.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told The New York Times Obama intends to use the news conference as a “six-month report card,” to talk about “how we rescued the economy from the worst recession” and the legislative agenda moving forward, including health care and energy legislation.

Political observers said Obama is at a pivotal moment in his presidency because how he handles the healthcare issue during the next few weeks could help shape the rest of his presidency and his relationship with Congress, among other things.

He is loosing power and he knows it.

“He’s got to be careful that while he ratchets up the pressure, he doesn’t bet his whole presidency on whether this gets done before the August recess,” said Kenneth Duberstein, who molded President Ronald Reagan’s first-term legislative strategy. “He has a broad, broad agenda that he’s in a rush to enact, and if he’s not careful he will be viewed as a steamroller who tries to get things fast and not necessarily right.”

Face Fwd Comment:

Hey Rahm, come and eat Hamburger Helper at my house and tell me how you rescued the economy.  My income is about half of what it was last year.  So I know you haven’t helped me.  But wait, there are all the car dealers and their staffs whom you have given new life to…..oh, sorry, they are out of work as well because you had their dealerships shut down.   But wait, there are the honest bankers who compensation is based on bonuses, nope sorry, their bank won’t pay them for fear of ACORN marching outside of their homes.

What about the people that were poor and/or in financial straits prior to the election.  They were all hoodwinked by your boss’s “hope and change” propaganda.  While they are now able to enjoy everyone’s misery, sadly, they are no better off now than they were.  With the failure of his attmepts to fix the economy do you really want the same team designing a health care plan for you?  I bet the GM and Chrysler delarships that were closed would say, “NO”!  And I say, NO as well.

I have a simple fix.  Get the government out of my life.  Build roads, protect our borders, and manage foreign relations but stop trying to be my nanny.  I don’t want you and I don’t need you.  By the way, please note the item mentioned by Ram  just after health care, it’s energy.  They are coming after your thermostat so be prepared.

The Food and Drug Administration—which has struggled to fulfill its mission of regulating food, drugs and other consumer goods that make up nearly a quarter of the U.S. economy—does not have the expertise to forecast its own budget needs, according to congressional investigators.
While many lawmakers and consumer advocates have long complained that the agency lacks the staff and equipment to accomplish its mission, the Government Accountability Office says the agency doesn’t even have “the data to develop a complete and reliable estimate of the resources it needs.”
The GAO places some of the blame on the FDA’s lopsided budget—which dedicates significant resources to approving new products, but far less to tracking their safety once they’ve reached the market.

FDA officials acknowledged the problems uncovered by the GAO, saying they are working to get a better picture of the agency’s spending and how much additional funding it needs.

“We have to be able to talk about the funds we need, and how we’re using the money, with more detail than FDA has in the past,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the agency’s deputy commissioner.

The GAO report, due out Monday, is the latest in a series to document the problems facing the agency. The FDA has spent the last few years careening from one public health crisis to the next. They have included the recall of the painkiller Vioxx—which was linked to heart attacks, contaminated blood thinners imported from China, and an investigation into a salmonella outbreak that dragged on for weeks before peppers were identified as the culprit.

The agency’s product review program is largely funded by user fees from drug and medical device companies, while the company’s safety inspections are funded by taxpayer dollars. Over the last 10 years, funding from private companies increased nearly 270 percent, while funds from the U.S. government grew less than 70 percent.

Currently, the federal government pays for just over 30 percent of the FDA’s medical products budget. As a result, the FDA is approving more new products but is spending far less to make sure they are being used safely.

“The approval of new products has increasingly become the beneficiary of the agency’s budget,” according to the GAO report.

Between 2004 and 2008 the agency failed to inspect all U.S. drug manufacturing plants every two years, as required by law. In other areas, such as reviewing reports of negative drug side effects, the FDA could not even say how much money and manpower it spent.

Face Fwd Comments:
Hang on America this is part of the Obama Heath Care Plan.

By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON – House Democratic leaders, pledging to meet the president’s goal of health care legislation before their August break, are offering a $1.5 trillion plan that for the first time would make health care a right and a responsibility for all Americans. Left to pick up most of the tab were medical providers, employers and the wealthy.

“We cannot allow this issue to be delayed. We cannot put it off again,” Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee, said Tuesday. “We, quite frankly, cannot go home for a recess unless the House and the Senate both pass bills to reform and restructure our health care system.”

In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid said he wanted floor debate to begin a week from Monday. With the Senate Finance Committee still struggling to reach consensus, that timetable could slip. Even so, it underscored a renewed sense of urgency.

Obama himself was driving the action, going off-script to push the issue during a speech in Michigan and scheduling a Rose Garden news conference for Wednesday to make more comments on the topic.

“There’s going to be a major debate over the next three weeks,” Obama said in Warren, Mich., deviating from his prepared text on new spending for community colleges. “And don’t be fooled by folks trying to scare you saying we can’t change the health care system. We have no choice but to change the health care system because right now it’s broken for too many Americans.”

Obama’s political organization is launching a series of 30-second television ads on health care, which will begin airing Wednesday in Washington, D.C., and on cable TV nationally. A version will run on local stations in eight states — Arkansas, Indiana, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, North Dakota, Nebraska and Ohio — to prod senators to back the health care effort. They will run for two weeks.

Rest of the Article Here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090715/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_overhaul

Face Fwd Comments:

They have heard the American Public speak…………………………….and they don’t care

This “right” will give control of the health care to the government.  Do you really want the same organization that cannot run a city (Washington D.C.) making decisions on what medical procedure you should have?

Who is that sneaking up on our healthcare system

Danny Powell writing for Facefwd.com

I have been in the recruiting and staffing world for over 20 years.  I have lived though the S&L bail out, the oil bust and the dot com bomb.  The recent activity by the last half of the Bush administration, Barney Frank with the MAE/MACs and the power grab by the Obama administration have me very concerned that we are not yet near the bottom. 

In the staffing industry, we normally see employment following somewhere between 6-9 months behind a recovery.  Just prior to the recovery, a 3 to 6 month period, the unemployment will flatten out and remain flat until it starts to drop as the recovery takes hold. Because we see unemployment continue to creep upward, our best estimate is that we are at least 12 to 16 months before we see any recovery in jobs/employment.

The role of the Federal reserve in this whole mess is criminal.  While they are portrayed as being the kind gentle savior working in the American public’s best interest, they are much closer to a parasite who has pulled too much life force from their victim and is desperately working to revive them.  The Fed has toyed with our economy, recorded incredible returns on their money (actually our money), and helped fill the coffers of their cohorts, Goldman Sachs and others.

Even while the American public is suffering from record unemployment, Goldman Sachs is posting record profits enabled because the US government loaned them money that it had borrowed and we (the tax payer) will repay.  The administrations said it was for the suffering public and had to be done.  We now know it was for the banking industries and a slush fund to provide capital for the Obama administration’s takeover.  Rahm Emanuel said, “you can’t let a good crisis go to waste”. As far as the banks go, he sure didn’t.  I just wonder what the American public thinks now that they are out of work?

How many of you reading this have actually seen any of those shovel ready public projects started?  Other than 18 million dollars to remake the website, “recovery.org”, I haven’t really seen an impact.  (are they out of their mind? $18MM to rebuild a website?).  Don’t expect to see any of the stimulus package unless you are a bank, the automotive industry, an new industry targeted for takeover or one of the Obama “fave” organizations i.e. ACORN.  If you wish that your industry was getting some of that money, you might want to rethink your position.  Just ask the people now not working who were laid off at car dealerships, banks and investment firms because some appointed CZAR demanded it.

Just as I have advised the people that come to me looking for work, if you are currently in need of a job you should consider taking a step down in salary to land something.  This is not a great time to be holding out for a dream job.

I am not the only one to see a problem with unemployment dropping anytime soon.  Here are 10 reasons given by the Wall Street Journal we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% unemployment rate indicates:

- June’s total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don’t count on the unemployment roll.

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn’t searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That’s 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water, and factories are operating at only 65% of capacity. If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

- The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs — 223,000 in the last report alone.

- The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time. Many unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because many layoffs have been permanent. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have shut down whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way they conduct business. General Motors and Chrysler, closed hundreds of dealerships and reduced brands. Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of thousands of positions and exited many parts of the world of finance.

Be patient America and work hard if you have a job.  You are going to have to wait a while before we return to a normal employment environment.