WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has signed a bill that temporarily spares doctors from a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments.The measure delays cuts through the end of November while lawmakers work on a more permanent solution.There was some urgency to approve the $6.5 billion bill.Medicare officials announced last week that the program would begin processing claims it had already recei
Secrecy and democracy are like oil and water.Trusting voters with the right to pass laws and the responsibility to elect lawmakers, requires trusting the public with information about the laws and candidates we vote on.After all, do we really want to live in a society where voters are kept in the dark about the issues printed on our ballots? That is the question that Washington voters answered wi
KABUL – Washington's senior military officer was due to arrive in Afghanistan on Friday to explain the sacking of the allied commander in Kabul as the Obama administration said it was not bogged down in the war.Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, left late Thursday for Afghanistan and Pakistan to reassure regional leaders that the war effort would not be derail
With Senate Republicans having killed an important jobs bill yesterday afternoon, it seems like a good time to take a quick stroll down memory lane -- to about four months ago.The Senate was getting ready to approve a jobs bill that extended unemployment benefits to jobless Americans.It would have increased the deficit a little, but under the circumstances, that was considered routine and uncontr
TBILISI, Georgia – Authorities in Georgia have torn down a monument to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in his birthplace of Gori to make way for a memorial to the fallen in the Russian-Georgian war of 2008.Gori is just a few kilometers from the separatist enclave of South Ossetia, where Russian forces crushed the Georgian army in a brief conflict in August 2008.Officials say the overnight dism
It's not every day that a children's hospital has the President of the United States visit on the same afternoon as the Governor.But last Friday, Nationwide Children's Hospital welcomed President Barack Obama to Columbus, and then hosted Ohio Governor Ted Strickland in a separate ceremony an hour later.As CEO, I was privileged to be a part of both ceremonies. What was most interesting about the t
The DISCLOSE Act didn't have to go forward this way.Not with the outrageous exemption for the NRA, which was later softened so that it would cover the Sierra Club, which didn't even want an exemption, and the AARP, which doesn't endorse candidates for political office.Congressional leaders had a reasonable goal of wanting to bring transparency to corporate and advocacy expenditures in federal e
The French gay and lesbian community has been waging a war against christian conservative leader, Christine Boutin, for over ten years.In 1998, she broke one of France's most sacred secular laws by brandishing the Bible inside the National Assembly, in order to protest against the proposal for PACS, a new civil union contract that was to be opened to same-sex couples.The PACS would eventually be