This past Wednesday, December 12, President Bush vetoed Congresses’ latest version of the SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program). Bush vetoed a previous version of SCHIP in October and in a letter , explained that the bill would move children with private health insurance to government coverage. The “move” is commonly referred to as “crowd out.” The vetoed bill, H.R. 976, did contain a crowd-out provision that said any state that covered children with a family income exceeding 300 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) would have to address the issue and implement a strategy to avoid “crowd out.” Additionally, Bush implied that H.R. 976 allowed for more adults in the SCHIP program and “raises taxes on working Americans.”

H.R. 976 called for $61.4 billion over five years, an increase of $36.2 billion over the current SCHIP law, and would have provided 4 million more people with health insurance over the 6 million the program currently insures. The increase in coverage would have been paid for by an increased tax on tobacco. Read the rest of this entry »

 by Sam Winston

There have been 211 homicides in New Orleans according to John Gagliano of the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office on Monday. Do the numbers and it’s clear that New Orleans is the murder capital of the U.S.A for the second year in a row at.

Despite having the National Guard, and intensive federal law enforcement assistance to the NOPD from the FBI, ATF, and DEA for most of the year, there is no difference in the murder rate from 2006 when New Orleans outpaced the nation’s next closest violent city by 31 percent or more.

This won’t be announced officially until sometime next year when all the FBI data is in and the year is so far gone that the announcement has much less of an impact. Until then, “plausible denials” are possible but not convincing.
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