Former Democratic Congressman William Jefferson, convicted on bribery and racketeering charges and sentenced to a Congressional-record 13-year sentence, recently received a couple of significant holiday-season gifts from Judge T.J. Ellis III.

Recently, Judge Ellis decided that Jefferson is not a flight risk and may remain free pending appeal, a process that may take a year or more. During that time, Jefferson must wear a monitor and may not travel without prior court approval.

Today, Judge Ellis agreed that Jefferson’s legal expenses will be covered by the court during his appeal. Jefferson and his wife recently filed for bankruptcy, due in large part to the legal bills incurred during his trial.

Admittedly, Jefferson might have problems paying for new legal bills out of his Congressional pension, estimated to be $40,000 to $55,000 per year. Then again, once he’s incarcerated, he won’t be shelling out a lot on food, clothing or shelter.

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Someone forwarded me this via email and it was too good not to share. I’m not sure of the original source, but if anyone can identify it for me, I’m happy to credit it.

UPDATE: Near as I can tell, the logo at the bottom appears to reference this site.

5.5 million — Number of jobs that could be lost as a result of taxes on businesses that cannot afford to provide health insurance coverage, according to a model developed by Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer

$729.5 billion — Total new taxes on small businesses, individuals who cannot afford health coverage, and employers who cannot afford to provide coverage that meet federal bureaucrats’ standards

$1.055 trillion — New federal spending on expanded health insurance coverage over the next ten years, according to a Congressional Budget Office preliminary score of the bill

0.7% — Percentage of all that new spending occurring in the bill’s first three years-representing a debt and tax “time bomb” in the program’s later years set to explode on future generations

$88,200 — Definition of “low-income” family of four for purposes of health insurance subsidies

114 million — Number of individuals who could lose their current coverage under the bill’s government-run health plan, according to non-partisan actuaries at the Lewin Group

43 — Entitlement programs the bill creates, expands, or extends-an increase from H.R. 3200

111 — Additional offices, bureaus, commissions, programs, and bureaucracies the bill creates over and above the entitlement expansions-more than double the number in H.R. 3200

3,425 — Uses of the word “shall,” representing new duties for bureaucrats and mandates on individuals, businesses, and States-also more than double the number in H.R. 3200

$60 billion — Loss sustained by taxpayers every year due to Medicare fraud, according to a recent 60 Minutes expose; the government-run health plan does not reform the ineffective anti-fraud statutes and procedures that have kept Medicare on the Government Accountability Office’s list of high-risk programs for two decades

Zero — Prohibitions on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid from using cost-effectiveness research to impose delays to or denials for access to life-saving treatments

$634 Billion — Amount that could be saved by denying individuals access to treatments that are not “cost-effective,” according to a report by the liberal Commonwealth Fund; Section 1160 of the bill gives bureaucrats in the Obama Administration virtual free rein to develop a new “high-value” reimbursement system for Medicare by May 2012

2017 — Year Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be exhausted-an entitlement crisis exacerbated by the bill, which according to the Congressional Budget Office will increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care by $598 billion in its first ten years alone

$2,500 — Promised savings for each American family from health reform, according to then-Senator Obama’s campaign pledge-savings which the Administration’s own actuaries have confirmed will not materialize, as the Pelosi health care bill would increase the growth of health care costs

Go here and enter your zipcode. You’ll get a quick talking point and the local office number of your United States Senators.

Tell them to vote NO on cloture.

I’ll be on Sean Hannity’s Great American Panel tonight at 9:30 with Gov. Bob Ehrlich and Rev. Jacques DeGraff.

It’s going to be a really good panel tonight, so I hope you’ll tune in to it.

Consider this an open thread.

From a reliable staffer:

Phone calls are not going through at all now. Try calling my phone or any phone. It is not even the switchboard anymore. The entire Senate phone system has collapsed.

Keep melting the phones!

If you’re wondering where health care dollars go in this country, the invaluable Phil Klein reminds us:

Raymond Raad, a resident in psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and co-author of a new Cato study, presented evidence showing that the United States leads the world in the development of drugs, medical devices, and other advanced treatments. For instance, between 1969 and 2008, 57 of the 97 Nobel Prizes in medicine and physiology — or nearly 60 percent — were awarded to people who did their research in the U.S., and nine of the top 10 medical innovations between 1975 and 2000 were developed here. But … once these products are developed in the U.S., they become widely available and improve health care outcomes around the world.

Read the whole thing, and remember: that’s the system the Democrats are trying to tear down and replace with one more like the European countries that depend almost as heavily on American medical and pharmaceutical innovations as they do on American military protection. In both cases, the arguments for the superiority of a European model that is unsustainable on its own depend on somebody else assuming the role of America. And nobody’s volunteering for the job.

Michael E. Hammond is one of three mentors I have been lucky enough to work for during my career. When I worked for him, he was the General Counsel of the U.S. Senate Steering Committee. He has run for Congress twice in New Hampshire and is now the General Counsel of Gun Owners for America. He is one of the two smartest political strategists I know. He is brilliant, a genius (literally, scored perfect on his SAT.) And the only thing I know about his work in the Army is he cannot talk about it.

REDSTATE WEB EXCLUSIVE

November 19, 2009
MEMORANDUM
FROM: Michael Hammond
RE: The Reid Bill: The Mandates, Public Option,
Regulation, Rationing, and Taxes

EDITORS NOTE

Harry Reid’s objective has been to secret the provisions of the most important piece of legislation in our lifetimes until he could cram it down Americans’ throats because there was insufficient time to analyze and mobilize against it. To some extent, he has succeeded. I have done what I could, given the need to disseminate this at least a day before the Senate moved to cloture on the motion to proceed. I have therefore focused on the mandates, the public option, regulation, rationing, and taxes.

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Got this from a high level source:

I just came from dinner and recognized the voices beside me. It was Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and three other Democrats. I knew the other faces but names escape me.

They were strategizing on how to raise the gas tax. Congressman Blumenauer said he knew a way to get at least 20 Republicans on board a gas tax increase. The place was loud and that’s about all I could make out. They talked about other times when they manages to split us. It was not fun nor easy to hold back.

Over the last few days, speculation concerning Rudy Giuliani’s plans for 2010 has run rampant.  I have seen stories variously claiming with certainty that Rudy will run for governor, that he won’t run for governor, that he hasn’t decided whether to run for governor, that he will run for Senate, and that he hasn’t decided anything yet.  Provided that Rudy hasn’t already made up his mind and is just being coy with everyone, this poll released today from Marist (.pdf) may perhaps be informing his thinking. 

It indicates, among other things, that Rudy would plaster current sitting governor David Paterson.  However, Paterson is pretty much a dead man walking at this point, and the general assumption is that Andrew Cuomo will get the D nomination.  Against, Cuomo, Rudy currently trails by 10, 53-43.  Both men are relatively widely-known quantities in New York, so it’s difficult to imagine a radical shift in either’s favor. 

On the other hand, Rudy’s path to the Senate appears substantially easier.  First, the Marist poll indicates he would easily win a hypothetical primary against Pataki (71-24), and that he holds a substantial lead (54-40) over Gillibrand. This would seem to indicate that if Rudy enters this race, it would promptly become one of the GOP’s best pickup opportunities in 2010, perhaps better than NV, AR, CT or DE. 

In talking to several New Yorkers, most of them would prefer to see Rudy run for the Governor’s mansion, where his talents would be put to a more direct use.  However, as a matter of pure political calculus, Rudy can doubtless see where the easiest path back to elective office lies. And if he has designs on a run for 2012 or beyond, the Senate might be the best place for him to mend fences with the portions of the national GOP electorate that cost him the 2008 primary, as well.

Call your Senator right now. Use this link to bypass the congressional switchboard.

Tell your Senator to vote NO on cloture for the motion to proceed to debate.

If the health care legislation goes to debate, Harry Reid will start offering amendments to pick off votes.

Call your Senator right now. Tell them both that a yes vote on cloture is a vote for the health care bill. The Congressional Research Service’s latest study proves that.

Roger Hedgecock has the top story at Human Events today.

Though private fraud gets the bigger headline (think Bernie Madoff), fraud in federal government programs is now so pervasive that even the Obama press is taking notice. The scope of fraud in all federal programs dwarfs the corruption in the private sector the media loves to sensationalize.

Consider the fraud in the Wall Street bailout. Here’s just one example.

This past week, the Inspector General for the TARP $700 billion bailout reported that taxpayers will “almost certainly” lose money on their investments in the “too big to fail” financial institutions.  One reason, it’s safe to say, is contained in Neil Barofsky’s revelation that he is conducting 65 separate investigations of possible fraud involving TARP funds.

Keep up the calls!

Quoting the email:

CIO Customer Service Bulletin – Problem Notification —
Assistant Sergeant at Arms; Chief Information Officer

Date: November 20, 2009
Time: 11:30 AM
Affected Service: Telephones

Problem/Symptom/Status: We are experiencing a high volume of calls which is having an impact on call transfers and voice mail. We are continuing to monitor the situation. Whenever possible offices are encouraged to retrieve and delete messages from the voice mail system throughout the day and evening.

Affected Location(s): All
Master Ticket Opened: No
Estimated Time to Restore: Unknown

HOE-HOE-HOE, oh, it’s not Christmas — yet. But Harry Reid is playing the sit-on-my-lap-Santa to lap-dog Senator Mary Landrieu, with a $100 million surprise. (They look so cute.)

Why not buy Senator Landrieu for $100 million, since the United States is electronically creating $1 trillion a year to finance our debt, what’s another $100 million?

When the crash comes, this is will be Exhibit A of how the Democrats do not care about your tax money, how they are greedy and irresponsible with public monies and why they cannot be trusted with their hands on the U.S. currency printing press. They cannot say no. They keep spending and spending and spending and they will never stop.

Aside from the moral and financial implications of this sorid tale — the politics of it make little sense.

(Here is the let me get this straight moment:) giving Mary Landrieu $100 million for Medicaid (the Federal and State funded program to provide health care to the low-income) will help her politically because (please take the multiple choice quiz below):

a) Medicaid voters will have voted against her in the 2010 mid-term election, this will help with that wavering constituency;

b) Medicaid voters make up the independents and moderate Democrats and Republican voters who oppose the health bill;

c) Medicaid voters who left the state after Katrina by the hundreds of thousands, have moved back to Louisiana;

d) None of the above.

And the answer is d), none of the above.

This $100 million is the cover story for her yes vote, and she will no longer be a U.S. Senator, since the demographics of Louisiana have changed so profoundly, and the vast majority of voters who have left are Democrats.

The prayers of her Republican opponent have been answered — she is going to vote YES.

Good-bye Senator Landrieu.

The truth is out there: Harry Reid has no idea what to do to create jobs.

Via Jim Geraghty

• Olympus BioScapes Competition Winners (9 Images)
  Fascinating.

And threats don’t get more direct than this: either AG Holder starts investigating ACORN, or Breitbart dumps what he still has on the scene in time to make a difference in the 2010 elections.

And this message is to Attorney General Holder: I want you to know that we have more tapes, it’s not just ACORN, and we’re going to hold out until the next election cycle, or else if you want to do a clean investigation, we will give you the rest of what we have, we will comply with you, we will give you the documentation we have from countless ACORN whistleblowers who want to come forward but are fearful of this organization and the retribution that they fear that this is a dangerous organization.  So if you get into an investigation, we will give you the tapes; if you don’t give us the tapes, we will revisit these tapes come election time.

Italics in original. If this is a bluff… well.  Every time somebody thought that Andrew Breitbart has been bluffing on the ACORN scandal, he’s turned out not to be.  The latest one has Patterico almost gibbering in glee as he rakes the LA Times and James Rainey over the coals for their uncritical willingness to believe Lavelle Stewart; it doesn’t seem particularly safe to hope that this time is the time that Breitbart’s got nothing left.

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From the diaries, by Erick. Call 202-224-3121 right now.

People. Today should be a busy day since the Statists have once again scheduled a cowardly, nightime, weekend vote on healthcare.

Contact your Senators today urging them to vote ‘No’ tomorrow night to even begin debate. We can kill this thing tomorrow night if they can’t get 60 votes.

I just sent this to Senator Webb in Virginia, who being a veteran who fought for liberty and freedom I hope would still be open minded about this bill.

Senator Webb,

I am writing you to encourage you to vote ‘No’ on the Senate health care coming up for debate tomorrow night.

Vote ‘No’ so debate cannot proceed.

Vote ‘No’ to end debate should debate proceed.

Vote ‘No’ on the bill should it ever come up for a final vote.

You see, this bill is simply un-Constitutional. Nowhere in the founding document does it empower Congress to mandate the free (for now) citizens of this great country to purchase a product or service. Not the Commerce Clause. Not the ‘general welfare’ language. Nothing.

Not.A.Word.

I would encourage you and the junior Senator from our great Commonwealth to look back in time to 2 1/2 weeks ago, where the people of this great state overwhelmingly voted against the leftist policies of the junior Senator when he was Governor, and Gov. Kaine, and President Obama. The people of this country want MORE freedom not less. MORE opportunity not less and this health care bill robs the people who are the engine of this economy their ability and desire and means to produce and grow our economy. People want to be free and independent. You, of all people being a decorated veteran, should know this since you bravely fought for the very freedoms and liberties this bill would take away.

Resist the urge to vote with your leftist colleagues. Vote with the people you represent. Vote to kill this bill.

The people will not forget a ‘Yes’ vote in 2012.

Thank you.
Stephen Halsey

RedState Morning Briefing
For November 20, 2009

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

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There is a study out today that is damaging to the Democrats efforts to pass health care in the Senate.

On Saturday, when constituents cannot contact their Senators’ offices because they’ll be closed, the United States Senate will vote on a cloture motion to debate the health care legislation.

This is important — a vote in favor of cloture on the motion to proceed (a parliamentary issue) is, in effect, a vote for the health care legislation. Why? Because Harry Reid has enough votes to pass the health care legislation by a simple majority, but he does not have the 60 votes necessary to proceed to debate, any Senator voting for cloture is voting for the health care plan.

Roll Call reports that according to the Congressional Research Service, “[a] study of Senate voting patterns shows the chamber has approved more than 97 percent of all bills subject to a cloture motion to begin debate — a finding that could undercut Democratic efforts to paint a key health care vote on Saturday as procedural.”

In fact, “since 1999 the Senate has approved 97.6 percent of all bills when lawmakers first voted to begin debate.”

Some Senators, like Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, want the health care legislation to pass, but know politically she would lose if she voted for it. So unless pressure is brought to bear on her and others, she may vote “yes” on cloture for the motion to proceed and then try to hide behind a no vote later.

We cannot let that happen. Call your two Senators all day today and demand they vote no on the motion to proceed. The phone number to call is 202-224-3121.

Note: A year or so ago I published a diary of “Frequently Asked Questions” about RedState.  Erick’s recent “Dear RedState Reader” post reminded me that I needed to publish this.  This is a total re-write and expansion on that original.  Numerous new members have asked for an “instruction guide” on how to use RedState.  So - here’s a go at it.  If you have suggestions, please comment and I’ll try to update.

So, you want to be a part of the RedState community?

Here’s how.

Getting Started:

You have probably already been browsing the site, or “lurking”.  You’ll note that Redstate.com is a “community blogging” site, which means that community members can write their own blog entries and interact/comment on the “diaries” created by both front-page contributors and by site members.  Now you would like to participate.

Register and join RedState.com

1. Click the “Sign Up” link on the home page and you’ll be presented with a page where you can enter your new username and an email address where we can send you your site password.  Also you will be given the option to sign up for the various mailing lists that we at RedState use to pass along information about the site and about various key issues that arise periodically.  Note:  when chosing a user name, don’t use a name of a famous person - we don’t allow impersonations…
2. Once you click the “Next” link on the first page of the registration process, you’ll get a message verifying your new user name and will be sent a “verification” email that contains a web link for activating your ID.
3. Open your email, click the link, and your new RedState account will be activated.  You’ll also be given a new password.  Make a note of this password!
4. Click the “Log In” link and log in using your new username and password.
5. Once you’ve logged in, click the “My Profile” link, and then “Edit” to update your profile information.  On the Profile page, you can update your password to one that’s more to your liking (unless, of course, you like the one we assigned to you!
6. Also, under “My Profile”, you can enter information about yourself, such as your email address, personal web site, general info (”Biographical info”), and a “Signature” that will appear at the end of your comments.

You’re now a member of the community!

(Important note: You will not be able to enter any comments or diaries for 24 hours after signing up.  This is to discourage “trolling” by those who sign up merely to cause trouble.)

Participate in RedState.com

Of course you’ve already been able to read the content on the RedState site.  But how do you get involved in conversations and post your own contributions?

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