Saying the Senate Health Care bill “pits working Americans who need health care for their families against working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families”, AFl-CIO president Richard Trumka is part of the large opposition from labor leaders to Obama’s plan. Union leaders are concerned about provisions that would tax many hard fought health care plans enjoyed by union workers. While the unions prefer House provisions that would tax “the wealthy”, the Senate version could trap union employees in it’s tax increases.
That health care bill may have trouble passing the Senate depending on the outcome of next week’s special election to fill the seat of former Senator Ted Kennedy – who passed away in August.
A Boston Globe survey released this weekend showed Ms. Coakley with a 15-point lead, but a survey by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling found the race a dead heat, with Mr. Brown up 48% to 47%. The scary prospect for Democrats is that the race is even this close on their home ideological turf, and turnout is always difficult to predict in special elections.
That’s especially true in midwinter and with a voting public that is increasingly opposed to the Democratic agenda in Washington. The Public Policy Poll found that likely Bay State voters oppose the Democratic health plans by 47% to 41% and that they give President Obama only 44% job approval. This in a state he carried by 26 points only 14 months ago. It also found Republicans much more motivated to vote than Democrats.
Mr. Brown, a state senator who is little known state-wide, has been running against Washington’s blowout spending and has called for a freeze on the wages of federal employees. “It’s not right that less-paid private sector workers suffering through a recession have to pay for expensive government salaries,” he says, noting Ms. Coakley’s many union endorsements.
Should the election tip in Brown’s direction, the Democrats would be one vote short of being able to ram their health care bill through.
In two other stories of interest, Miep Gies, the last survivor of the group that protected Anne Frank and her family has died in the Netherlands. Gies was 100 years old. When asked about their efforts to protect the Franks and others Gies said, “”We did our duty as human beings; helping people in need.”
Finally, Mojib Latif, who wrote the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, indicates that the cold weather gripping much of the world is just the beginning of 30 years of cold – a mini ice age.
At a U.N. conference in September, Latif said that changes in ocean currents known as the North Atlantic Oscillation could dominate over manmade global warming for the next few decades. Latif said the fluctuations in these currents could also be responsible for much of the rise in global temperatures seen over the past 30 years.
Latif is a key member of the UN’s climate research arm, which has long promoted the concept of global warming. He told the Daily Mail that “a significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles — perhaps as much as 50 percent.”
