Orlando Sentinnel, 9/11/09:

The office of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland has issued a statement, saying the teenage girl who ran away from her Muslim home in Columbus, Ohio, to evangelical Christians in Orlando, should be returned.

“Child welfare agencies and authorities in Ohio and Franklin County are fully capable of providing for the security and well-being of Ohio’s children,” said the statement. “The governor believes this is a family matter and therefore would most appropriately be handled here in Ohio with the assistance of the child welfare and foster care system.”

Fathima Rifqa Bary, 17, is currently living with a foster family in the Orlando area. She fled Columbus aboard a Greyhound bus in July, saying her father had threatened to kill her because she had abandoned his faith — Islam — and become a Christian.

Her father, Mohamed Bary, a jeweler and Amway distributor, says that never happened. A Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation supports his claim. So does Franklin County Children’s Services, the child welfare agency serving Columbus.

Rifqa was recently granted emergency jurisdiction to the Florida DCF at her last hearing.  The next hearing is scheduled for Monday, September 21.

Will she find freedom and safety from radical Islam in America?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her story in her own words:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rifqa also tells her story at her personal website: http://rifqabary.com/

President Barack Obama campaigns for ObamaCare in New York Times, joins Nancy Pelosi in making Op-Ed magic.  This is not Political?  Right.

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Are Democrats now retreating from the “public option”? (HotAir)

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Conservatives seem to be getting their message across:  Guess who is still #1 on the New York Times best seller list! And, guess who is #4 and #5!

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Music Video: “If 10% is good enough for Jesus, it oughta be good enough for Uncle Sam!”

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Congressman and Physician Phil Roe (Republican from Tennessee) accepts President Obama’s invitation to sit down together and go over health bill “line by line”

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“Obama Resistance Grows” says Lee Cary (American Thinker)

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It is a sad day. Feddie has left the building. (Southern Appeal)

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“Manufactured Health Care Crisis” (American Thinker)

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Arlen Specter is out of touch: “I think we have to bear in mind that, although those people need to be heard and have a right to be heard, that they’re not really representative of America, in my opinion”

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Child Prodigies: @between2worlds:  Something Tells Me This Kid Isn’t Spending a Lot of Time Playing Videogames

UPDATE: Wikipedia has a large list of these crazy kids.

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Usain Bolt drinks jet fuel, shoots rocket fire out of his feet: @breakingnews: Usain Bolt has won the 100 meters final at the world athletics championships in a world record time of 9.58 seconds.

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Sinclair Ferguson has resumed his Sunday night expositions on the book of Romans. Last weeks “Baptizatus Sum” was a knockout. Listen here!

Obama on a single payer system in 2003:

Click here to view the embedded video.

HT: HotAir

The ObamaCare truthers at WhiteHouse.gov have released the counter video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jekyll and Hyde:

Click here to view the embedded video.

HT: Take Your Vitamin Z

HT: HotAir, @marklevinshow, American Thinker

Mark Levin C-SPAN Interview:

part 1

Click here to view the embedded video.

Links: part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6

Levin’s bio from wikipedia:

Levin is an American radio host, author, and political commentator. He is the host of The Mark Levin Show, a nationally-syndicated talk show that airs throughout the United States on Citadel Media (formerly known as ABC Radio Networks). Levin earned his B.A. and J.D. at Temple University. His book Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto debuted at #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list (hardcover nonfiction) the week of April 3, 2009.

Beginning in 1981, Levin served as advisor to several members of President Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, eventually becoming associate director of presidential personnel and ultimately Chief of Staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese; Levin also served as deputy assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the U.S. Department of Education, and deputy solicitor of the U.S. Department of Interior. He has practiced law in the private sector, and is president of the Landmark Legal Foundationin Leesburg, Virginia. He holds a B.A. from Temple University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, and a J.D. from Temple University School of Law.

In 2001, the American Conservative Union gave Levin its Ronald Reagan Award.

On Wednesday the President will visit Raleigh, North Carolina and hold a town hall meeting at Broughton High School.  North Carolina has been noted to be a “crucible for health care“.  The Times & Observer sets the scene for what the President will be walking into on Wednesday:

Rallies, phone banks and door-to-door canvassing are under way, TV commercials blast on the airwaves, and petitions appear beside ripe tomatoes at farmers markets. It’s July in a nonelection year, but the political machinery is fully engaged, complete with letter-writing campaigns and statewide bus tours….

…Though the health-care debate is national, it is particularly loud in North Carolina because of the concentration of moderate Democrats that both sides see as potentially persuadable, particularly freshman Sen. Kay Hagan.

The Tar Heel State is also the home of some major players in the health-care industry, including GlaxoSmithKline, one of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

Moreover, North Carolina is now seen as one of the nation’s newest battleground states, having gone for Obama last November after voting Republican in the previous seven elections.

One night last week at Raleigh’s RBC Center, home of the Carolina Hurricanes hockey team, opponents were trying to fan opposition to Obama’s health-care proposal, literally.

The 350 people who packed into the club room were given fans that bore a drawing of a hand and the slogan: “Hands Off My Health Care.”

Following the Raleigh event on Wednesday, the president will travel to Bristol, Virginia to have a town hall meeting inside a Kroger grocery store.  This is a key location because it is in the heart of Appalachia, a region that is frequently talked about in the health care reform debate.  The President’s visit to Bristol comes one week after an annual free clinic which was held in the region called RAM (Remote Area Medical).  The event was attended by Virginia Governor Tim Kaine.  RAM is an event that provides free medical, vision, and dental care and is highly attended each year in the region.  This year, the event reportedly served a record number of people.  The Bristol Herald Courier sets the scene for what the President will be walking into at this town hall meeting:

President Barack Obama is expected to talk health care in Bristol, Va., on Wednesday, just days after thousands of uninsured people received free health and dental care at the 10th annual Remote Area Medical clinic in Wise County.
The president, who is pushing Congress to adopt sweeping health care reform legislation this summer, will appear at a town-hall-style meeting with Kroger employees at the grocery store at 31 Midway St. about 4 p.m.

In his last ObamaCare campaign event before a congressional recess and potential congressional vote, the President will attempt to sell his version health care reform to the nation and to Congress.  I look for him to especially use the Bristol event for this purpose.  It may be of interest to note that Bristol is very close to Appalachia, Virginia which is the home of Debby Smith whose  story made headlines during the first town hall meeting in Annandale, Virginia.  I look for the President to use these events as his “Exhibit A” in his final push for Obama Care before a possible congressional vote later this week.

Which of the following do you trust?

A)

B)

(pic from: My Man Mitt)

C)

D)

Gallop performs an Annual Honesty and Ethics poll that rates different professions.  Each year there is little change.  Physicians are usually in the top 3 or 4 and politicians are near the bottom.  The most recent Gallop poll was conducted in 11/08 and reported results that were consistent with this claim.  The question was asked:  Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields — very high, high, average, low, or very low? This particular poll looked at 21 professions among them were nurses, pharmacists, teachers, medical doctors, congressmen, lobbyists, and journalists.  The results were typical of years past and showed physicians were near among the most trusted and politicians were near the bottom of the list.  At the very bottom were lobbyists.

Nurses were at the top with 84% of Americans giving their honesty and ethical standards as very high.  70% of Americans rated pharmacists very high and 64% rated physicians very high while only 6% rated them very low.  Looking further down the list shows journalists received 25% very high and 31% very low, and only 12% of Americans rate congressmen very high while 46% rate their ethical standards and honesty very low.  At the bottom of the list were lobbyists with scores of 5% very high and 64% very low.

The Gallop report broke down the results even further into three categories of professions for honesty and ethics: top-rated, neutral, and least well-rated.

Nurses have no peer in the Gallup rankings today, but they are followed by pharmacists, high-school teachers, and medical doctors, all with close to two-thirds of Americans rating them highly. Just over half of Americans consider the honesty and ethics of clergy members and the police high or very high.

While fewer than half of Americans consider funeral directors or accountants to be highly ethical, these professions are much more likely to be viewed positively than negatively.

…Indeed, several professions suffer from a heavily negative tilt in their image ratings. The worst of these are lobbyists, telemarketers, and car salesmen, all of which are considered to have low or very low honesty and ethics by a majority of Americans.

Although several other professions — congressmen, stockbrokers, advertising practitioners, business executives, lawyers, and labor union leaders — are not as negatively viewed as the bottom three, the ratings for them skew negative by more than a 2-to-1 ratio.

Politicians  have attempted to make the claim that the “the doctors are behind us” by pointing to the support of the AMA.  However, they are now finding that the majority of doctors are not falling in line.  Doctors aren’t against this plan for their own selfish reasons.  No, we actually care for our patients and are bound to an oath.  Physicians, who are trusted with their patient’s lives and families, have a special connection with the American people that President Obama covets….a trusted relationship.

I think that the next effective communicative effort to stop this destructive health care “reform” proposed by Obama must be a campaign of physicians, nurses, and pharmacists speaking the truth to the American people in the various forms of media.  The president has called us out and now it is time to give an answer.

Studies show blacks and whites are treated differently.

While it’s extremely difficult to tell in any given situation how much race — consciously or unconsciously — plays a role in a doctor’s decision making, multiple studies over several decades have found doctors make different decisions for black patients and white patients even when they have the same medical problems and the same insurance.

“It’s absolutely proven through studies that a black man and a white man going to the hospital with the same complaint will be treated differently,” Dr. Neil Calman, a family physician and president of the Institute for Family Health in New York, said. Calman is also Reid’s regular physician.

For example, a 2005 study found African-American cardiac patients were less likely than whites to receive a lifesaving procedure called revascularization, where doctors restore the flow of oxygen to the heart. The study authors at RTI International, a research institute, noted that all of the patients had Medicare, which covers the cost of revascularization.

In a study conducted in 2007, Harvard researchers showed doctors a vignette about a 50-year-old man with chest pain who arrived at the emergency room, where an EKG showed he’d had a heart attack. Sometimes the researchers paired the medical history with a photo of black man and other times with a photo of a white man.

The doctors were significantly more likely to recommend lifesaving drugs when they thought the patient was white than when they thought the patient was black.

Is it racism or something else?

Video link: here.

I think this is a bunch of bull.

Elsewhere today, a group representing the nation’s ENT surgeons responded to President Obama’s press briefing with remarks on tonsillectomy procedures:

(HT: HotAir)

Responding to a question, President Obama said, “Part of what we want to do is to make sure that those decisions are being made by doctors and medical experts based on evidence, based on what works…. Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. … the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out … I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out, or whether … something else would make a difference…. So part of what we want to do is to free doctors, patients, hospitals to make decisions based on what’s best for patient care.”

In reply, the AAO-HNS stated, “We, too, are in favor of evidence-based medicine that supports quality patient care. President Obama’s statement highlights the complexity of medical decisions like this. However, the AAO-HNS is disappointed by the President’s portrayal of the decision making processes by the physicians who perform these surgeries. In many cases, tonsillectomy may be a more effective treatment, and less costly, than prolonged or repeated treatments for an infected throat.

“For the past several years, the Academy has been developing clinical guidelines based on evidence and outcomes research, including ‘Quality of Life after Tonsillectomy,’ a January 2008 supplement to the journal Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery. We are in agreement with the President’s statement that physicians, patients, and hospitals should make the decisions, based on the evidence, about what’s best for patient care.”

As I said yesterday, I am not surprised at these sort of attacks at this time:

The majority of physicians are against socialized medicine. Likewise, the majority of patients don’t like the government making their health decisions for them. Neither the American people nor their doctors are interested in forming a doctor-government-patient relationship. This relationship is a big obstacle to ObamaCare, and I think the democrats know this. Therefore, I am not surprised when dumb and offensive statements like this are made.

Did you unnecessarily remove anyone’s tonsils today?

House Democrats want to give doctors a $245 billion sweetener that helps ensure their critical support for a health care overhaul bill. Next up: Trying to explain how they could do it without breaking President Barack Obama’s promise that health legislation won’t increase the federal deficit.

Obama reiterated the pledge in a “CBS Evening News” interview Tuesday, saying: “It’s got to be deficit neutral. It can’t add to our deficits.”

So what of the Congressional Budget Office’s conclusion that the House bill does add to the deficit?

Democrats and the Obama administration argue that the $245 billion included for doctors — the approximate 10-year cost of adjusting Medicare reimbursement rates so physicians don’t face big annual pay cuts — does not have to be counted in the overall cost of the health care bill.

Their only-in-Washington reasoning is that they already decided to exempt it from congressional “pay-as-you-go” rules that require new programs to be paid for. In other words, it doesn’t have to be paid for because they decided it doesn’t have to be paid for.

The administration also says that since Obama already included the so-called “doc fix” in his 10-year budget proposal, it doesn’t have to be counted again in the health overhaul bill.

“It so happens they added that to this piece of legislation, but that’s sort of already baked into our fiscal trajectory,” White House budget director Peter Orszag said last weekend on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We’re looking at what’s happening with regard to new policy,” Orszag added. “And with regard to new policy, this is deficit neutral over the first decade.”

Old policy or new, no one disputes that the “doc fix” does in fact add to the deficit. And the administration’s position carried no weight with the CBO when it released its analysis of the House Democrats’ bill.

The CBO, Congress’ nonpartisan budget scorekeeper, said Friday that enacting the legislation “would result in a net increase to the federal budget deficit of $239 billion over the 2010-2019 period.” The increase is mostly because of Democrats’ failure to pay for the “doc fix,” but CBO didn’t even bother to entertain the notion that its cost should be excluded.

The response from House Democrats? A slough of triumphant press releases claiming — misleadingly — that CBO’s estimates backed up their claims that their bill was deficit neutral.

The issue is providing ammunition for Republicans, who are accusing Obama of breaking his deficit-neutrality promise. And health experts scoff at the Democrats’ fuzzy math.

“Of course it adds to the deficit,” said Alex Vachon, a health policy analyst. But at the same time, Vachon and others give the Obama administration and congressional Democrats some credit for attempting to permanently fix the doctor payment issue.

Since its enactment in 1997 the so-called “sustainable growth rate” mechanism, which uses a complex formula to establishes annual target costs for physicians’ services under Medicare, has not kept up with actual costs.

That’s required Congress to step in almost annually with one-year fixes to prevent doctors from facing ever-bigger potential cuts in payment rates. The cut that loomed for doctors in 2010 was 21 percent. Without a permanent redo of the payment formula Congress would presumably have had to continue to do one-year fixes, something that would also have cost money and that doctors hated because of the uncertainty involved.

The “doc fix” has been a top priority for the American Medical Association, which cited its inclusion as a key reason in its endorsement of the House Democrats’ sweeping health care bill.

In the Senate, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who is presiding over negotiations aimed at a bipartisan agreement on health care, said the issue of paying for the “doc fix” has not yet come up in the talks.

Robert Laszewski, a former insurance company executive who’s now a consultant to industry, contended doctors were “paid off” to support the House bill.

“The AMA would not have endorsed the House bill without the doc fix,” Laszewski said. “The fact that the CBO has said the doc fix would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the cost of the bill makes clear how much it is worth to the docs.”

Asked to comment, the AMA provided a written statement from the group’s president, Dr. James Rohack: “Expansion of health care coverage, elimination of denials for pre-existing conditions and repeal of the flawed Medicare physician payment formula are all reasons the AMA supports the House bill.”