Joe Barton (R-TX) was on the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee yesterday when BP officials appeared in Congress.

Barton made the following remarks to the BP company.

I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case a $20 billion shakedown.

Good old Joe. He is steadfastly sticking to the Republican plan to criticize President Obama at every opportunity. Barton added “I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday.”

…it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown…

[Source: Talking Points Memo]

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Jack Abramoff, disgraced former lobbyist, was transferred Tuesday from prison to a Maryland halfway house to serve out the remainder of his sentence. [CREW] He is scheduled for release on December 4.

Abramoff, once a high-rolling Republican lobbyist, pleaded guilty to a raft of federal corruption charges in 2006. He admitted illegally showering gifts on officials who provided favors for his clients and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Among other things, the inquiry led to prison time for a former congressman, Ohio Republican Bob Ney; for Stephen Griles, once the Bush administration’s deputy interior secretary; and for several former congressional staffers.

Citizens of Pahrump will be treated to a free showing of Michael Moore’s new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story.

Capitalism: A Love Story is a 2009 American documentary film directed, written by and starring Michael Moore. The film centers on the financial crisis of 2007–2010 and the recovery stimulus, while putting forward an indictment of the current economic order in the United States and capitalism in general.

Topics covered include Wall Street‘s “casino mentality”, for-profit prisons, Goldman Sachs‘ influence in Washington, DC, the poverty-level wages of many airline pilots, the large wave of home foreclosures, and the consequences of “runaway greed.”

The film also features a religious component where Moore examines whether or not capitalism is a sin and if Jesus would be a capitalist.

When and where is it showing for free in Pahrump?

The film runs for 127 minutes. I’ve seen it twice. I can tell you that if you are into politics at all you will find the film enlightening and it will hold your undivided attention. Be sure to go to the bathroom before the film starts.

A tip of my hat to Val Von Holt and Margery Kay Hanson for putting all this together.

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now stated “Republican lawmakers remained staunchly opposed to using the federal government to regulate health insurance.” Republicans want the current health care bill dumped in the trash and to start all over.

Goodman interviewed Trudy Lieberman (no relationship with Joe Lieberman that I know of) a contributing editor and blogger to Columbia Journalism Review. Lieberman noted, “as a country, we are still extremely divided….We have a deep cleavage in this country about how much government should do and how much government should not do.” She referred to the issue of how much regulation of insurance companies should government engage in.

Goodman quoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on President Obama: “…a year ago…you (Obama) said ‘The public option is one way to keep the insurance companies honest and to increase competition.’”

Quoting Pelosi further, “the public option, which would save $120 billion, keep the insurance companies honest, and increase competition.” Pelosi continued, referring to Senator’s Enzi, Snowe and Durbin proposing exchanges “because the insurance companies opposed the public option. They couldn’t take the competition.”

So Goodman asked Lieberman “Why did President Obama drop the public option?”

Lieberman didn’t know but speculated that it was because, perhaps, campaign contributors to the Obama campaign, stakeholders such as insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, the business community led by the Chamber of Commerce, didn’t want the public option.

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Remember all the controversy a few months back about building a fence along the US border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants? Some $2.4 billion has been spent since 2005 on a still-unfinished project to erect more than 600 miles of new fence along the US-Mexico border – a finding that is being met with surprise, anger, and consternation by immigrant groups and at least some border residents. The entire length of the Mexico-United States border is 1952 miles long. [Border Fence Project]

Last September the [Christian Science Monitor] reported that “$6.5 billion will be needed to maintain the new fencing over the next 20 years. So far, it has been breached 3,363 times, requiring $1,300 for the average repair.”

The Anderson Cooper video demonstrates that the border fence does not or will not work. The cost of building and maintaining the fence is exorbitant. Those billions of dollars can be put to better use. Health care reform certainly comes to mind. If you add in the billions of dollars spent, and still being spent in the war on Iraq, was a waste of money and lives. The cost of the war in Afghanistan is questionable as well. The United States has, during my lifetime alone, spent trillions of dollars in war. My lifetime experience includes World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The United States, as a nation, seems enamored with war. Only in World War II were we attacked by another country—Japan. We were not attacked by the countries of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

That tunnel under the border fence with Anderson Cooper was located at Otay Mesa which is at Tijuana. The tunnel would have permitted a flow of illegal immigrants and narcotics into the United States from Mexico.

Last spring President Barack Obama’s budget blueprint canceled plans to extend the border fence along the U.S.-Mexico border beyond the 670 miles already completed or planned, symbolically breaking with a much-heralded approach to border security advocated by President George W. Bush. [Dallas Morning News] That should end the waste of money for the ineffective border fence project.

The US-Mexico border will re-emerge again as soon as Congress can get back to it from their arguing over health care reform. The question about security of the border will center around illegal immigration and Mexican drug cartel’s entry into the United States. [Politico]

It may well be that the security of the United States is in more danger from the drug cartels than either illegal immigration, terrorists or Al Qaida in Afghanistan/Pakistan. You might want to add citizens of the United States who are addicted to drugs and buy them from the drug cartels as threats to national security.

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The Associated Press is reporting this morning that Pfizer’s profits increased 26% over last year’s. Pfizer attributes the increase in profits from cutting costs.

The maker of cholesterol fighter Lipitor, impotence treatment Viagra and smoking cessation drug Chantix slashed costs on everything from manufacturing and marketing to research and development to produce a profit of $2.88 billion.

The $68 billion acquisition of Wyeth last Thursday cements Pfizer’s position atop the industry, and the combined company is expected to eliminate nearly 20,000 jobs by the time integration is complete.

The CEO of Pfizer is Jeff Kindler. He is also Chairman of the Board of Directors. While CEO of Pfizer in 2008, Kindler earned a total compensation of $14,788,302, which included a base salary of $1,575,000, a cash bonus of $3,000,000, stocks granted of $7,553,015, and options granted of $2,222,026.

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The following story appeared in the St. Petersburg Times:

Monique Zimmerman-Stein and her husband, Gary Stein, have Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance through Stein’s job at the Hillsborough County Health Department. They pay $90 a week for coverage. But the insurance isn’t nearly enough.

Monique tries to picture what her girls must look like now that they’re 10 and 13. She hasn’t been able to see their faces in two years. Her days are long and dark and quiet

“I know I won’t ever see again. I’m not even asking for that,” Zimmerman-Stein said. “I just don’t think we should have to deal with constantly being harassed.”

Monique is 48. She and her two youngest daughters have Stickler’s syndrome [Wikipedia], a rare genetic disorder that causes joints to dissolve and retinas to detach. Monique lost her right eye at 16 and now sees only enough light through her left eye to tell night from day. She and her children are constantly in and out of doctors’ offices.

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Campaign contributors, current and former staffers and even lobbyists may be re-considering their ties to a man who once served as the GOP’s primary fund-raiser in the Senate.

At least three high-profile staffers have left Ensign’s orbit after the news broke of his affair with Cynthia Hampton. This includes the departure of ex-chief of staff John Lopez, ex-communications director Tory Mazzola and Mike Slanker, who worked with Ensign as the political director of the Republican National Senatorial Committee, which Ensign chaired.

OpenSecrets has a long dissertation about Ensign’s money contributors which is well worth reading, particularly if you live in Nevada. [Source: OpenSecrets]

Early last year, Senator John Ensign contacted a small circle of political and corporate supporters back home in Nevada — a casino designer, an airline executive, the head of a utility and several political consultants — seeking work for a close friend and top Washington aide, Douglas Hampton.

“He’s a competent guy, and he’s looking to come back to Nevada. Do you know of anything?” one patron recalled Mr. Ensign asking.

Reports the New York Times.

Photo: Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

The job pitch left out one salient fact: the senator was having an affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife, Cynthia. Ensign was looking for a way to get Doug Hampton out of Washington D.C.

Ensign told Michael Slanker that Mrs. Hampton was ill and Doug Hampton was weary of flying back and forth between Washington and Las Vegas; that Hampton would be returning to Nevada. None of that was true. Ensign was enlisting Slanker’s help in finding Doug Hampton a job in Las Vegas.

Slanker suggested Hampton could revive “Ensign Inc.,” where Slanker had served as Ensign’s top fund-raiser and political consultant. The company Mr. Slanker and his wife had formed to help run these campaigns, November Inc., had become dormant after the couple moved to Washington to help Mr. Ensign run the Republican committee in 2007.

Mr. Slanker said he proposed that the firm could be revived, giving Mr. Hampton a well-known base in Nevada political circles to start a small government affairs practice. “That afternoon, the senator and Mr. Slanker met with Mr. Hampton.”

“Whatever clients you can get — you can eat what you kill,” Mr. Slanker recalled telling Mr. Hampton of the deal.

Ensign agreed to help line up three or four clients who would pay Mr. Hampton enough to match or surpass his $144,000 Senate salary as an administrative assistant, Mr. Hampton said.

Senator Ensign lined up several donors as Hampton’s lobbying clients. Ensign and his staff then repeatedly intervened on the companies’ behalf with federal agencies, often after urging from Mr. Hampton. Hampton was lobbying the Senator though federal criminal laws prohibited him from doing so, and Ensign knew it, but they decided to ignore the law.

…trying to clean up the mess from the illicit relationship and distance himself from the Hamptons, he entangled political supporters, staff members and Senate colleagues, some of whom say they now feel he betrayed them.

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Senator Ensign of Nevada is no friend of Nevadans. He posted the following on his website:

Photo from the Las Vegas Sun: Senate Finance Committee members Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., left, and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., talk Tuesday on Capitol Hill before the committee’s debate on health care legislation. Ensign spoke at length about his opposition to a government-run insurance plan.

ENSIGN HELPS DEFEAT DEMOCRAT PUBLIC PLAN AMENDMENTS

Schumer and Rockefeller amendments would have included version of government takeover of health care in bill

Washington, D.C. – Senator John Ensign, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, today voted to defeat two amendments that would have attempted to include a version of a government-run plan in the healthcare reform bill.

“I strongly oppose a government takeover of our healthcare system in America and will continue to fight against Democrats’ attempts to include it in the bill,” Ensign said.  “A government takeover could force private insurers out of the industry and could force hundreds of millions of Americans, against their will, into government-run health care. A public plan, with one signature from President Obama, could destroy our healthcare industry as we know it and turn every one of our healthcare decisions over to government bureaucrats.”

Because the federal government will act as a competitor, a regulator, and a funder, a government-run plan would ultimately force private insurers out of business. The Congressional Budget Office Director has testified that it would be “extremely difficult” to create “a system where a public plan could compete on a level playing field” against private coverage.  The two amendments, offered by Democrat Senators Chuck Schumer and Jay Rockefeller, would have included a version of the public plan in the Senate healthcare bill.

Fact is the healthcare insurance industry IS the problem.

The Las Vegas Sun carried the following in today’s news coverage:

John Ensign: Public option would be popular, so let’s not do it

WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. John Ensign delivered one of the more curious arguments against a government-run, public health care option during a long and lofty Senate committee debate Tuesday.

People might like it and use it.

Then it would become popular, and too big to fail.

And the government would have to support it.

“Does anyone really believe this Congress will let this government program go away if it has a constituency?” Ensign asked his colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee. “To have a large program like this, once it’s started, you’re never going to get rid of it.”

The public option would be a government-run health care alternative to the private insurance market. It’s intended to provide an option for those currently without health insurance, and, through competition, rein in rising insurance costs.

It has become perhaps the most contentious element in the proposed health care legislation — dividing not only Democrats and Republicans, but also Democrats and Democrats — and is the focus of those trying to defeat the health care bill.

Supporters argue the public option would force insurance companies to compete for all the new business that health care reform would create. The insurance companies stand to gain millions of new customers as both the House and Senate bills require Americans to carry health insurance, just as most states require automobile insurance. More than 30 million Americans are uninsured.

The uninsured could choose to buy the government-run plan or private insurance (and the poor would qualify for an expanded Medicaid program). Those who ignore the new law and go without insurance would face fines.

Tuesday provided a first major test of the public option during an hours-long debate in the Senate Finance Committee, which is the final congressional panel to consider the bill. Committee members were considering two amendments to add the public option.

Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the leading advocate of the public option, delivered an impassioned speech.

Ensign helped hold up the Republican side of the opposition, sometimes drawing on his experience as a veterinarian. For the most part, his argument reflected Republicans’ contention that the new option would be a step toward socialized health care — that the public option would put private insurers out of business.

“All of this is a slippery slope toward complete government-run health care, complete government-run takeover of our health care system,” Ensign said.

Ensign scoffed at the suggestion, proposed in the amendments, that the public option would operate autonomously, relying on premiums paid by customers rather than federal funding. Once the plan got up and running, Ensign said, it would create its own constituency, and Congress would be afraid to kill it off even if it needed federal funding to survive, he said.

“As Ronald Reagan said, ‘The best way to ensure a life is to become a government program,’ ” Ensign said.

“These government programs start and they grow and they grow and they grow and they grow,” he said. “Government was set up to do the things we need it to do, not the things we want it to do.”

The amendments failed. Public option supporters vow to continue fighting on the Senate floor.

Ensign might be right. Should it be adopted, the public option might become too big to fail. Polls show most Americans — 65 percent, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News survey — support a public option.

Lisa Mascaro can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at lisa.mascaro@lasvegassun.com.

What a reason to defeat the public option proposed by Senator Rockefeller! People might like it? It is pretty clear who Senator Ensign is representing – the health insurance industry.