The Bush administration has promulgated new standards that make it much more difficult for states to extend health insurance coverage to children in middle-income families. “Continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program,” the administration is thwarting states’ attempts to expand SCHIP beyond the poverty level.
“U.S. military officials are narrowing the range of Iraq strategy options and appear to be focusing on reducing the U.S. combat role in 2008 while increasing training of Iraqi forces.”
Members of the National Guard are just as likely as active duty soldiers to develop post-traumatic stress after leaving Iraq. Guard members who have had “deployment-linked money trouble,” which affects approximately 26 percent of the soldiers, are six times more likely to have mental-health problems.
“Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year” that the average income was less than pre-Bush levels. Incomes have been on the rise since 2002, but “the growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million” while “more people were dividing up the national income pie.”
Vice President Cheney’s office responded separately from the White House to a Senate subpoena for documents on warrantless wiretapping. “[T]he response from the vice president was more surprising, because the White House was believed to have abandoned the argument that Cheney is a hybrid entity with both executive and legislative powers.”
Reflecting the priorities of the Democratic majority, Congress is moving to spend as much as $6.7 billion next year to combat global warming, an increase of nearly one-third from the current year.” New spending initiatives include efforts “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and oil dependency” with new and expanded “federal research initiatives.”
One in five: Number of Medicare enrollees who “said they had put off or even skipped getting some medications because of the program’s high costs,” according to a new Health Affairs poll of more than 16,000 seniors.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner “held talks yesterday with Iraqi leaders in the first visit by a French minister to Baghdad since Paris’s opposition to the US-led invasion in 2003. … Kouchner said France was ‘ready to play a role in the fight against the violence,’ but did not explain how.”
And finally: Obama girl has upset Obama’s girls. The senator said that his six-year old daughter, Sasha, noticed news coverage of the online video that features a “scantily clad actress pledging her affection for the Democratic presidential candidate.” “Sasha asked Mommy about it,” Obama said Monday. “She said, ‘Daddy already has a wife’ or something like that.”
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