Former Bush Speech Writer Discusses Republican Mistakes During Healthcare Reform Debate

Prez Obama Signs Healthcare Overhaul Into Law!

OBAMA WINS ON HEALTHCARE FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!

Healthcare fight was Obama's proving ground

The president chose a goal and held to it steadfastly. Now he must build on that momentum.


Rarely does a president bet everything on a single card, but Barack Obama did it on healthcare. Almost from the beginning, the White House was guided by one priority: Nothing must get in the way of healthcare. Everything else would have to wait.




Sunday night, the president who was criticized for winning a Nobel Prize without much of a record finally won a signature achievement -- victory on the kind of massive healthcare overhaul that Democrats had sought and failed to achieve for nearly half a century.


In the months ahead, Obama will face the question of whether his healthcare victory is a high-water mark for a now-exhausted administration, or instead becomes the leaping-off point for victories on other big issues, such as energy, immigration and financial regulation.


But what became clear in the healthcare debate is that Obama is a president with a combative stubbornness, one that was not often visible in his cool, above-the-fray public demeanor. And he has demonstrated that a president who picks a goal, adopts a battle plan and sticks with it, come what may, is not easy to knock out.


In the 14 months of the healthcare fight, Obama saw his popularity plunge 20 percentage points. Voters, whipsawed by high unemployment, lost savings and the other ravages of a devastating recession, boiled over in anger at a president seeming obsessed with his own priorities.


From the beginning, GOP strategists saw the healthcare debate as a chance to cripple Obama's presidency. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) cast the stakes in military terms, predicting that a defeat would be Obama's "Waterloo."


In perhaps the White House's darkest hour, Obama suffered a stinging rebuke -- and lost the Democrats' filibuster-proof Senate majority -- when Massachusetts spurned a last-minute presidential appeal and gave the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's seat to a Republican in a special election dominated by healthcare.


Yet if Obama wavered, it was only briefly. Even some Democrats counseled him to drop the attempt at massive change and settle for smaller healthcare goals. Although he toyed with the idea at least once, in the end he held fast.


And while he was criticized even within his own party for delegating to Congress the early shaping of the healthcare bill, Obama mobilized in the weeks after Republican Scott Brown won the special election in Massachusetts.


From that day, it was clear that the endgame for Obama would come in the House of Representatives. He fought with a combination of tactics that played to his strength -- campaigning -- but also required a skill that was less tested -- negotiating.


On both fronts, he showed a level of pragmatism that frustrated some of his most liberal and idealistic supporters -- a willingness to trade a perfect bill for a somewhat less ambitious one that could pass.


Exploiting the bully pulpit, he traveled to places like St. Charles, Mo., and Cleveland, and exhorted rank-and-file supporters with the rhetoric he honed during his 2008 campaign. He invited both Democrats and Republicans to a televised healthcare "summit" -- notable not for any breakthrough accomplishment but for underscoring just how far apart the Democrats and Republicans were on the issue.


As late as Saturday, he traveled to Capitol Hill to lead a rally of House Democrats.


In between such events, he and his aides tirelessly lobbied fence-sitting members of the House.


Obama bluntly told skeptical members that for his presidency to be strong, he needed them to pass the bill.
 
READ MORE http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-na-health-obama22-2010mar22,0,5513125.story

TRON (2010)

PATRIOTISM

Lady Gaga - Telephone ft. Beyoncé

TECH TALK- The HP "Slate" with Windows 7

Kate Clinton: QUEER THE CENSUS

For the first time in history, the 2010 U.S. Census will allow same-sex couples to self-identify as either married or unmarried partners. The data collected is poised to have a huge impact for the gay, lesbian, bi and trans community in coming years.


Andrew McIlrath of the U.S. Census Bureau, and partnership specialist for gay, lesbian, bi and trans communities in Oregon, has supplied a great F.A.Q. to ensure that the pesky questionnaire is filled out correctly by the LGBT community.


Check it out, and make sure you’re represented correctly! Census forms will be delivered to households, and completed forms should be mailed back.


From April through July, census takers will visit households that did not submit a form through the mail, and the Census Bureau delivers population information to the President for apportionment in December.


Each of the 10 questions on the census form helps to determine how more than $400 billion will be allocated to communities across the country.


For more information, check out this UCLA Williams Institute presentation on the importance of an accurate count of LGBT Americans. Even more info here.

Exercising them ABS

Urgency Of Healthcare Reform- Prez Obama today March 8th 2010

A FEW WEEKS AGO THE PREZ TRIED AGAIN TO GET REPUBLICAN ASSISTANCE..



HELP THE PRESIDENT, CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES AND TELL THEM TO VOTE FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM!

FLASHBACK- Barack Obama Victory Speech

"...I know you didn't do this just to win an election, and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.


The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year, or even one term, but America — I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you: We as a people will get there.


There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, callused hand by callused hand.


What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek — it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.


So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers. In this country, we rise or fall as one nation — as one people.


Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long....."

Calvin Klein X: Nakata, Verdasco, Brooks, Lutz

Chad Ocho Cinco running naked through the woods?

 Just two days after Ocho Cinco announced he’s going to be on Dancing with the Stars – this video surfaces of the ripped Bengals’ receiver running through the woods and up a hill naked. The video was purportedly taken in Hollenbeck Park in LA 

Ludacris - "My Chick Bad" ft. Nicki Minaj

Sexiest Animated Black/Jewish Man- CONWAY STERN of FX's "Archer"

Archer is a half-hour animated comedy series created by Adam Reed (Sealab 2021, Frisky Dingo, The Xtacles) for the FX network.

Set at the International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS), suave master spy Sterling Archer deals with global espionage, a domineering, hypersexual, late middle aged mother/boss Malory Archer, his agent ex-girlfriend Lana Kane, and a less-than-masculine code name—"Duchess"

Conway Stern is a "Diversity Hire", Black and Jewish and Sexy.. take a peak..

ARCHER: Pilot Episode

Episode Two

Episode Three (Conway Stern)

Episode Four