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Politics : PRESIDENT JOHN FORBES KERRY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (785)	3/12/2004 10:14:19 AM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 1017

The Bush Medicare Plan is another big lie slipped past us. They underestimated its cost by at least 20% and now they're using taxpayer dollars to run TV ads selling the program to us. Amazing. Not allowing the government to negotiate for lower drug prices is just the height of cronyism.

To: PartyTime who wrote (785)	3/12/2004 10:14:52 AM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1017

Ginsburg's conflict Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg retains close ties with a feminist advocacy group that often makes arguments before the high court, the Los Angeles Times reports. Mrs. Ginsburg has lent her name and presence to a lecture series co-sponsored by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, an advocacy group that often argues before the high court in support of women's rights that the justice champions, the newspaper said. She gave opening remarks for the fourth installment of the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Distinguished Lecture Series on Women and the Law. Two weeks earlier, she had voted in a medical screening case, taking the side promoted by the legal defense fund in its friend-of-the-court brief. Mrs. Ginsburg was a member of the board of the legal defense fund for a brief time in the 1970s.

To: PartyTime who wrote (785)	3/12/2004 10:45:30 AM
From: PartyTime	Respond to of 1017

Didn't Congress pass its preemptive war resolution based on the same technique: the withholding of crucial information? Yet another example of the GOPwinger administration performing an omission and perversion of truth! >>>Members of Congress and congressional staffers complained that Scully's handling of Foster has deepened congressional mistrust of the Bush administration and that withholding information makes it harder for Congress to draft good legislation.<<< >>>WASHINGTON - The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.<<< >>>Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina, one of the 13 Republicans, said she was "very upset" when she learned of the higher estimate. "I think a lot of people probably would have reconsidered (voting for the bill) because we said that $400 billion was our top of the line," Myrick said.<<< >>> Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which produced the $551 billion estimate, told colleagues last June that he would be fired if he revealed numbers relating to the higher estimate to lawmakers.<<< >>> "This whole episode which has now gone on for three weeks has been pretty nightmarish," Foster wrote in an e-mail to some of his colleagues June 26, just before the first congressional vote on the drug bill. "I'm perhaps no longer in grave danger of being fired, but there remains a strong likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding of important technical information from key policy makers for political reasons." Knight Ridder obtained a copy of the e-mail. Foster didn't quit, but congressional staffers and lawmakers who worked on the bill said he no longer was permitted to answer important questions about the bill's cost.<<<