Meanwhile, Jordan Gets In On The Protest Fever And…

    ….it is being reported that  King Abdullah II has dismissed his  government due to the street protests which started on Tuesday over prices and reforms. They’ve protested in previous weeks but today the people took it up a notch.

Jordanians had been calling for the resignation of prime minister Samir Rifai who is blamed for a rise in fuel and food prices and slowed political reforms.
A Jordanian official said the monarch officially accepted the resignation of Rifai, a wealthy politician and former court adviser, and asked Marouf Bakhit to form a new cabinet.  

"[Bakhit] is a former general and briefly ambassador to Israel who has been prime minister before. He's someone who would be seen as a safe pair of hands," Rosemary Hollis, professor of Middle East policy studies at London's City University, said.      Al Jazeera

    Many of the people of Jordan are getting bolder after having watched the Egyptian citizens take on the establishment there with some pretty good results. Jordanians blame  free market corruption  for the sad state the poor in the country.

   Sort of like what has been going on in the United States with the middle class and the poor.

Technorati Tags: Jordan,Egypt,Middle East,Democracy,Protesters,Current Events

Health Care Reform

                      Original Article

Mitt: No apology for HIS individual health care mandate

by Jed Lewison Tue Feb 01, 2011

While all this focus on the constitutionality of the individual health care mandate might be an annoying political distraction for the White House, for Mitt Romney it's an absolute f^$#!ng disaster because now, every time the subject of health care reform comes up, the first thing Mitt has to do is explain why it was okay for him to sign the individual health care mandate into law, but it was really horrible for Barack Obama to do the same thing. Case in point:

Mitt Romney: No Apology for Individual Health Care Mandate

On the kick off to his "No Apology" book tour Mitt Romney is on message – refusing to apologize for the Massachusetts health care law that, like President Obama’s federal legislation, requires citizens to buy health insurance.

“I’m not apologizing for it, I’m indicating that we went in one direction and there are other possible directions. I’d like to see states pursue their own ideas, see which ideas work best,” Romney told me.

That stand seems to reject the advice of Karl Rove and others who say that Romney can’t get the GOP nomination in 2012 unless he finds a way to distance himself from "Romneycare", but Romney did concede that his Massachusetts plan is imperfect.

So, basically, Mitt's answer now boils down to this: my individual health care mandate was okay because I was a governor. Barack Obama's wasn't okay because he was president. In other words, it's a state's rights issue.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Health Care,Individual Health Care Mandate,current events