House's Budget Blueprint Draws Up Party Lines

House Republicans passed their 2012 budget Friday without a single Democrat voting for it. Its prospects in the Democratically controlled Senate appear dim at best, but it will likely provide plenty of fodder for next year's campaigns.

To begin with, House Republicans are not all that crazy about the 2011 budget deal approved on Thursday — it was, after all, a compromise with Democrats to prevent a government shutdown. Fifty-nine Republicans, about a quarter of the GOP caucus, voted against it, and Speaker John Boehner had to rely on the votes of Democrats to get it passed. On Friday, Boehner portrayed that budget as an opening for Republicans to do what they really want to do.

"It was an imperfect bill, but it was a positive step that has cleared the decks and allowed us to focus on cutting trillions of dollars — not just billions," he said.

And that's exactly what the Republican budget for 2012 does. It cuts nearly $6 trillion in spending over the next 10 years and chops 10 percentage points off the top tax rates. The new health care law gets axed in the budget, and, perhaps most significantly, the document proposes transforming Medicare.

Medicare's Future In The Balance

The House's 2012 budget proposes a system in which elderly people would buy private health insurance with a government-issued voucher. Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) says that part of the plan, which would take effect 10 years from now, is all about protecting Medicare.

"We save Medicare, prevent its bankruptcy, and what does the other side do? They sit by and watch the program go bankrupt," he said.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/16/135464222/house-passes-2012-budget-sets-campaign-stage?ft=1&f=1014

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Russian Journalist's Writing Lives Past Her Murder

In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block in Moscow. She was perhaps the most famous journalist in Russia, vividly reporting on the brutalities of the war in Chechnya and the intricacies of government corruption in a place where investigative reporters are vulnerable to imprisonment and attack. Host Scott Simon talks with Politkovskaya's sister, Elena Kudimova, about the final writings of her sister, which appear in the collection, Is Journalism Worth Dying For?

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/16/135464238/russian-journalists-writing-lives-beyond-her-murder?ft=1&f=1004

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Obama brilliant politician, timid leader

In his budget speech yesterday, President Obama showed once again that he is a more masterful politician but less courageous leader than we might have imagined. What that will mean for the country's economic future remains deeply uncertain.

The president entered this year confident of re-election, but just to be sure, he adopted a clever political strategy to deal with a growing debt crisis: His budget would duck the hard question about deficits, leaving a vacuum for Republicans to fill. Around the White House, the thinking was that whoever went first in the budget wars would leave themselves vulnerable to heavy attack.

Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_allpolitics/~3/FSNjzmHoOcY/index.html

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The Nation: Obama Should Fight For 'People's Budget'

President Obama responded to the GOP budget plan on Wednesday, outlining his own proposal to curb the rising deficit. But Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation argues that there is another, more viable option: the budget offered by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/15/135435883/the-nation-obama-should-fight-for-peoples-budget?ft=1&f=1057

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NASA Announces Permanent Homes For Shuttles

The lucky museums are New York's Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum; the California Science Center; the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; and the Kennedy Space Center. Some family members of astronauts who died in shuttle tragedies said they were heartbroken by the fact that Space Center Houston was left out.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/12/135343702/nasa-announces-permanent-homes-for-shuttles?ft=1&f=1007

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