The federal government Tuesday granted Maine a waiver of a key provision in President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, citing the likelihood that enforcement could destabilize the state’s market for individual health insurance.

The U.S. Health and Human Services department said in a letter it would waive the requirement that insurers spend 80 cents to 85 cents of every premium dollar on medical care and quality improvement. Instead, the letter said, the state could maintain its 65 percent standard for three years, with the caveat that HHS intends to review the figures after two years.

The decision makes Maine the first state to receive a waiver of the requirement. Similar requests are pending from Kentucky, Nevada and New Hampshire….

PatRiotic

The Emir and I have been working on this page overlap issue for a couple daze now and are getting nowhere. I know there are certain things that the reader has to set on their own specific browsers but I also know that various readers using various browsers visit various other blogs all the time without encountering this problem. If anyone has a clue how we may rectify this I and countless others will be truly grateful…

or 300,000 fun facts

A Republican-led motion to bring a vote on a bill that would have restricted access to driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and attempted to stop identification fraud was defeated Monday in the state Senate, dealing a major defeat to proponents of the measure…

…Washington state is one of two in the country that let illegal immigrants obtain driver’s licenses. New Mexico is the other state that still allows such practice, but lawmakers there are also considering bills to close the access…

…The bill would have required applicants for driver’s license to provide proof of residency and a Social Security number. Supporters had said the bill aimed to stop identification fraud.

Haugen said that there are 300,000 more driver’s licenses in this state than there are drivers…

I’m working on a national initiative to unionize all people not in unions into a union to lock horns with the unions.

Whereas S is a dog, B is her owner and G is B’s caregiver.

This greeted me this afternoon arriving at one of my jobs:

“Qaddafi’s grandmother is my grandmother’s sister,” explained Boaron. “His grandmother is my father’s grandmother. She was Jewish, became Muslim and married the town sheikh. She had children and he’s her grandson so he’s considered Jewish because his mother was born to a Jewish mother. So it means he’s Jewish.”

A Northwest woman is three months into a one-year challenge to purchase everything she needs at Goodwill.

“I’ve been thrifty my whole life and it came up in mind, seeing other people do challenges, wondering if I could do this for myself, and my family, and my children,” says Beautiful Existence, (Beautiful Existence is her real name).

Existence tells KIRO Radio’s Ross and Burbank Show that she hasn’t heard any complaints from her family yet.

“The youngest is a baby, so he doesn’t have very many words right now, but my older son is 11, and he loves it. He’s been thrifting his whole life. He’s getting gift cards to the Goodwill and he’s really excited…

…”I did need to go in and find unmentionables, and one of the things I found out through this process, is that Goodwill only sells brand new unmentionables, so you can still find those things there,”…

…be a shame if someone called it racist…

…LaRose, a 31-year-old Iraq war veteran, was the tiebreaking vote in Ohio’s Senate, which just sent a bill similar to Wisconsin’s budget bill to the State’s House of Representatives. That caused Michael Piotrowski, the general counsel for the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), to siege LaRose’s Facebook page.

“Funny thing about cops,” Piotrowski posted on LaRose’s Facebook wall, “they hold a grudge.”…

…Perhaps most surprisingly, though, the cop union’s top lawyer compared Republicans calling union violence “union thugs” to using the “n-word.” “When Republicans talk about ‘Union Thugs,’ they may as well be calling people the n-word.”…