“Three, three, three tidbits of McNerney news for the price of one!!!”
Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, today announced he’ll be the honorary chairman of an economic summit Aug. 22 at the University of the Pacific in Stockton at which business, education, transportation, and economic development experts from across the Central Valley and the Bay Area will discuss how to spur San Joaquin County’s economic growth.
“I am committed to helping create jobs in San Joaquin, particularly in the area of new energy technology,” McNerney said in a news release. “I spent my career before arriving in Congress working with wind energy and other forms of clean energy technology. I know that San Joaquin — with both man-made and natural attributes — is well-positioned to benefit from the expanding use, investment in, and development of these energy sources.”
The “2007 Economic Summit: Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Renewable Energy” summit is being organized by the Public Forum Institute. It aims to explore ideas — including tax incentives and reduced regulatory burdens — for empowering entrepreneurs and small businesses to locate or expand business in San Joaquin; identify promising opportunities for further development of renewable energy businesses; discuss creating “smart growth” guidelines for urban planning and affordable housing; and examine what’s needed to provide sufficient job training to local residents while investing more in science, mat, engineering and technology education to create a pipeline for high-tech and entrepreneurial jobs. McNerney will kick it off with an opening address before panel discussions get underway.
All Bay Area House members except Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, were among 36 California and Oregon lawmakers who wrote yesterday to House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.V., requesting a Congressional probe of Vice President Dick Cheney’s role in the diversion of water from the Klamath River Basin. The diversion preceded the largest commercial salmon fishing disaster in U.S. history and devastated commercial and recreational fishing in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties in 2002.
“This smells as bad as 80,000 dead salmon,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, a House Energy and Commerce Committee member. “Those who depend on salmon for their livelihood, including many of my constituents, deserve to know exactly what the Vice President did to implement a water policy that circumvented the Endangered Species Act and devastated commercial, sport and tribal fishing in California and Oregon.”
The call comes even as the White House refuses to comply with Congressional subpoenas for documents and testimony relating to the firings of federal prosecutors last year, setting up a potential constitutional confrontation over its claim of executive privilege.
The 2002 salmon die-off still resonates; in 2006, low salmon eturns to the Klamath forced the closure of most Pacific Coast commercial and recreational salmon fishing, hurting fishermen at San Mateo County’s Pillar Point Harbor. Lawmakers pressed Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez to declare a fishing disaster for the West Coast, and last month secured $60 million to help the industry recover.
Registered nurses, doctors, and healthcare and community activists will be outside theaters in more than 100 U.S. cities tomorrow night for the mass-market opening of “SiCKo,” director Michael Moore’s indictment of the U.S. healthcare system. More than 20,000 RNs have already volunteered to participate, and an effort is afoot to get one million nurses to see the film.
Here in the Bay Area, California Nurses Association members will be outside Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater and San Francisco’s Empire West Portal Theater at 7 p.m. Friday, urging moviegoers to move “From SiCKO to Sanity” and act on the outrage they’re likely to feel after seeing the film by supporting HR 676, a House bill which would establish a publicly-administered single-payer healthcare system in the form of improved Medicare for all. (It’s similar to California’s SB 840.)
CodePink activist Leslie Angeline, 50, of Santa Rosa, fainted today during the 15th day of her hunger strike protesting the continued refusal of U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., to meet with her.
She launched the effort earlier this month after Lieberman appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and said “I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq.” Angeline, who’d recently returned from Iran as part of a delegation organized by the human-rights group Global Exchange, has said she’s determined to prevent a U.S. war against Iran.
The Hill reported Angeline was being treated for dehydration at George Washington University Hospital. Lieberman’s staff has not yet responded to my e-mailed request for a comment.
UPDATE @ 5:30 P.M. THURSDAY: Here’s the video of Angeline that CodePink just posted to YouTube:
Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont, chairman of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, today introduced the Medicare Advantage Truth in Advertising Act, a bill which would prohibit Medicare Advantage plans — private plans which receive payments from Medicare — from charging seniors and people with disabilities more than traditional Medicare would for any service.
“Medicare Advantage plans don’t live up to their name,” Stark said in a news release. “Though seniors and people with disabilities wouldn’t know it from the never-ending stream of insurance propaganda, Medicare Advantage plans charge more than traditional Medicare for a large number of services – everything from home health care to hospital stays and chemotherapy drugs to durable medical equipment. The Medicare Advantage Truth in Advertising Act protects beneficiaries by ensuring they won’t face higher out of pocket costs in private plans than they do in Medicare.”
Stark’s bill would continue to permit flat co-payments — which private plans charge for certain benefits or services in lieu of deductibles or co-insurance in traditional Medicare — but those charges could never exceed Medicare’s charges, as Stark says they often now do.
“While MA plans are required to cover everything that Medicare covers, they do not have to cover every benefit in the same way,” said National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare president Barbara Kennelly. “For example, private plans may create financial barriers to care by imposing higher cost-sharing requirements for benefits that protect the sickest and most vulnerable beneficiaries. Preventing private plans from imposing greater cost-sharing requirements than traditional Medicare would better protect beneficiaries from higher and unexpected out-of-pocket costs.”
And marketing agents have been found to lie about MA premiums and physician participation in private plans, Stark claims. They’ve also taken advantage of individuals with serious language barriers or cognitive impairments and enrolled beneficiaries who thought they were signing up for new Medigap plans in Medicare Advantage. “Press reports confirm that a number of beneficiaries have joined such plans with little or no understanding that their out-of-pocket expenses may actually be higher, rather than lower compared to traditional Medicare,” said Bill Vaughan, Senior Policy Analyst at Consumers Union.
The U.S. Department of Labor will provide $150,000 in grants to three Oakland groups as part of a $3.8 million commitment to faith-based and community organizations helping hard-to-serve populations prepare for and succeed in finding work, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, announced today.
“These programs are helping people who are most in need of employment to get the skills and assistance that they need to find and keep a job,” Lee said in her news release. “We all have a stake in making sure that everyone, and especially people in vulnerable communities, has access to employment opportunities. These grants for these programs are helping us to do that and should be seen as an important investment in the health of our community.”
The Labor Department says projects receiving these awards serve welfare recipients, high-school dropouts, ex-offenders, and others who facing challenges in finding work. Grantees will provide career counseling, life-coaching, mentoring, links to their local One-Stop Career Center, and other services designed to prepare people to enter the workforce. Out of 348 applicants, 59 new awardees were chosen to receive funding of up to $60,000 each, and 14 previous recipients successfully competed to expand their work with grants of $30,000 each. Grassroots faith-based and community organizations with annual social services budgets under $500,000 were eligible to apply.
Ace Smith, the Bay Area-based director of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign in California, this week announced Maisha Everhart as his Northern California director and Mather Martin as deputy field director, both working out of San Francisco.
Everhart has worked with local and state government officials including Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums; Assemblyman Sandre Swanson, D-Oakland; former San Francisco District Attorney Terrence Hallinan; and Georgia State Senator Horacena Tate. A Web search also reveals that she was a legal intern in the Drug Policy Alliance’s Office of Legal Affairs in Berkeley, and is a 2004 graduate of Rutgers School of Law in New Jersey. She’ll be working with local and state government officials to build support for Clinton.
Martin has served in the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and as an associate at the Breast Cancer Fund, a national organization founded by her mother, the late Andrea Ravinett Martin. She’ll be working to recruit supporters and mobilize voters on primary election day, Feb. 5.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, was among House members who held a Capitol Hill news conference before going to get tested for HIV today, in an effort to call attention to National HIV Testing Day.
Debra McCrae, from Unity Health Care Inc.’s Project Orion, at left, watches as Lee places an oral HIV Test swab in its receptacle; rapid tests provide accurate results in about 20 minutes. Lee’s staff confirms that she has her results, and that they’re completely confidential.
Lee has been an outspoken advocate of efforts to reduce HIV infections both here in her district — where Alameda County in 1998 became the nation’s first municipality to declare a state of emergency over the disproportionate number of AIDS cases in its African-American community — and abroad, particularly in Africa.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States today is as high as 1.2 million, and more than a quarter of those infected don’t know it. Increasing test availability and encouraging people to seek out counseling and testing can significantly reduce the disease’s spread, but the stigma around HIV/AIDS and anxiety involving the test itself have proved to be barriers. So the National Association of People with AIDS works with the CDC to produce National HIV Testing Day; this year’s theme is “Take the test, take control,” emphasizing that just getting tested can change behavior regardless of the diagnosis. For more information on National HIV Testing Day, or to find a local testing site in your area, visit the CDC’s website at http://hivtest.org/
“I came to Washington committed to being open and accountable to Californians - and to change the way business is done here,” he said in a news release. “For too long, the earmark process has been shrouded in secrecy, allowing lawmakers to fund expensive boondoggle projects that benefit the special interests, as opposed to the public interest.”
These are only requests; many might go unfunded. And anyway, McNerney claimed, he’s not spending irresponsibly: “I am fully committed to fiscal discipline and responsibility. I am proud to have voted to restore the important principle of Pay-As-You-Go budgeting, which helped lead to the economic surpluses of the 1990s. And in the past few weeks, since the House began considering appropriations bills for the next fiscal year, I voted against nearly $3.5 billion in federal spending because of my commitment to reign in the federal deficit.”
Dunno how I missed this one at the time that it happened, but we’ll put it up today in honor of Paris Hilton’s release from jail. It’s from May 23, when the governor appeared on the Tonight Show and was asked by Jay Leno about whether he would pardon Paris…
This clip cuts off just a moment too early to catch Schwarzenegger’s pithy follow-up: “Obviously we both do action movies.”
“Three, three, three tidbits of McNerney news for the price of one!!!”
