Sen. Ben Nelson’s decision to vote tonight in favor of bringing a health care bill to the Senate floor reflects what he describes as his long-standing aversion to obstructionism.

The Nebraska Democrat also said that he fully intends to block an up-or-down vote on final passage of the legislation if the parts that he opposes have not been sufficiently improved through amendments.

“If they don’t get fixed, I’ll vote no,” Nelson said.

Assuming all 40 Senate Republicans stand united against the bill, Democrats need 60 votes tonight as well as on a later vote to end debate before the bill could get a final vote.

Among the areas of the legislation that Nelson has criticized: new excise taxes, creation of a new government health insurance plan and its approach to abortion coverage.

Republicans, including Nebraska’s Sen. Mike Johanns, have been working to define tonight’s vote as for or against the actual legislation. Johanns has argued that there are not enough votes to fix the abortion coverage provisions in the bill and that it would be difficult to derail the legislation at the end of the debate, which is expected to consume much, if not all, of December.

(Senate Nelson can play all the politics he wants to with this bill but his vote tonight along with the vote of the other Democrats was a vote for this bill. It will now take 60 votes to change the bill. Sen. Nelson voted tonight for more taxes, forced government health care, and voted to pay for abortions. He can no longer tell the voters of my state Nebraska that he is pro life. This is something I hope the good people of my state will recall when he asks them to keep him in the Senate or another office. He and the other Democrats also said by this vote they don't care what the America people think. Shame on them. The next election can't come soon enough. Read more on this story Nelson: This isn't a vote for or against health plan.)

White House at odds with bishops over abortion

U.N. says the world needs fewer children 

Research provides a co-ed college lesson 

'Tricks' and 'gimmicks' in Senate healthcare bill 

Conservative Christians issue declaration, warning 

Abortion coverage a major sticking point 

The White House is on a collision course with Catholic bishops in an intractable dispute over abortion that could blow up the fragile political coalition behind President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

A top Obama administration official on Thursday praised the new Senate health care bill's attempt to find a compromise on abortion coverage - even as an official of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said Sen. Harry Reid's bill is the worst he's seen so far on the divisive issue.

The bishops were instrumental in getting tough anti-abortion language adopted by the House, forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to accept restrictions that outraged liberals as the price for passing the Democratic health care bill. Reid, D-Nev., now faces a similar choice: Ultimately, he will need the votes of Democratic senators who oppose abortion to get his bill through the Senate. (White House at odds with bishops over abortion  )

(What compromise? The government under the Senate plan is going to cover abortions. Why should us tax payers who have values which teach us that abortions are wrong have to pay for them with our hard earn money. Shame on the Sen. and President Obama for supporting a bill which will cover abortions.) 

The U.N. Population Fund has declared that having fewer children would help reduce so-called global warming...but added it is difficult to proof a connection between the two.

 

The agency said the battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available. ( U.N. says the world needs fewer children )

 

The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: "Women with access to reproductive health services ... have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions."

 

"As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth's capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic," the report said.

(The problems in the world today is not because we have too many  people but how people act and treat others. When we get down to it  the problems are moral and spiritual and have nothing to do with overpopulation but groups like the UN will use that as an excuse to push things like abortion. ) 

About 90 percent of dormitories on the nation's college and university campuses are now co-ed. Pat Fagan of the Family Research Council reports that a study in the Journal of American College Health suggests looking into several factors, including abuse of alcohol.
 
"As one would expect, it's highest in the co-ed dorms, [as it is] two and a half times higher." Fagan mentions that this "is rather significant because these students are binge drinking over once a week."
 
Other studies have shown that college-aged binge drinkers become alcoholics later in life on a higher level than non-binge drinkers.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has unveiled his more than 2,000-page healthcare bill with an estimated price tag of $849 billion.  However, as Grace Marie Turner of the Galen Institute points out, one of the reasons the bill was scored under President Obama's $900 billion cost goal is because no one gets any benefit from the program until 2014. ('Tricks' and 'gimmicks' in Senate healthcare bill  )

 
"So they start collecting taxes and fees now, and...the first ten years of full implementation of this bill is $2.5 trillion, and that's only the beginning," Turner explains. "So this does not in any way...meet President Obama's budget specification.  And there are all sorts of tricks that they have pulled in this bill to try to pretend that it's deficit-neutral."
 
Turner says although the bill is a "carefully crafted" document designed to garner as close to 60 votes as Senator Reid can, it contains lots of new taxes and $500 billion in cuts to Medicare.

"They're assuming that Congress is going to have the will to make those cuts, which they have no track record in doing -- which means they're going to have to come back to taxpayers for more and more taxes to pay for these alleged promises of accessible healthcare for more Americans," Turner suggests.
 She further says that many promises President Obama made to the American people are broken in the Senate healthcare bill, including the notion that "if you like your current health insurance you'll be able to keep it."  The Congressional Budget Office predicts that under the Senate's proposal, millions of Americans will lose the employer-based coverage they currently have.

(This bill should be defeated! All of us need to contact our    Senators  and tell them in a respectful way that they should vote no and we will be watching to see how they vote.) 

Conservative Christian leaders are releasing a declaration and warning today on what they're calling "moral issues of great concern."

 

 

Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, helped draft the Manhattan Declaration, which affirms the sanctity of human life, marriage as the union of one man and one woman, religious liberty, and freedom of conscience. Where those values are threatened, the document endorses civil disobedience under some circumstances. ( Conservative Christians issue declaration, warning )

(If  the souls who names are  on  this declaration  are putting their faith in politics they and those who support them  will again not see their goals fulfilled. On the other hand if they call for America and her leaders to get back to the Bible and faith they are headed up the right tree.) 

Pro-lifers are being called into action now that the release of the Senate's misleading version of healthcare reform has been presented.

 

The Senate version of the legislation is not inclusive of the House's Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which bans federal funds for abortions. Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, tells OneNewsNow this was done in spite of the fact that several polls indicate a wide majority of Americans do not want their tax dollars spent on abortion. 
 
"And that's why the White House and many top congressional Democrats like [Senator] Harry Reid and [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi are trying so desperately to disguise what they're doing," Johnson explains. He says they are "trying to conceal these pro-abortion provisions behind layers of misleading, convoluted language and rhetoric."

( I for sure am going to be watching how my Democrat  Sen. Ben Nelson votes.  Anyone who votes for this health care bill can no longer say they are pro life. Obama told us abortion would not be covered in government health care. What changed Mr. President? Read more on this issue Abortion coverage a major sticking point.)