Obama, Congress struggle to find budget deal, Posted by Meosha Eaton

* Obama says aides will work through night to get deal

* Boehner, Reid say differences have narrowed

* Fourth White House meeting in three days

* Midnight Friday deadline looms
* (Updates after Obama, Reid, Boehner talks)

By Richard Cowan and Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and congressional leaders failed to reach a deal but narrowed their differences on Thursday in a bitter budget dispute that could lead to a government shutdown.

Obama said negotiators would work all night and he expects an answer on Friday morning on whether it is possible to avoid a government closure at midnight on Friday that would idle hundreds of thousands of workers and potentially put a crimp on the U.S. economic recovery.

He met for an hour with Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and the top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker John Boehner at the White House. It was their fourth meeting in three days.

"I'm not prepared to express wild optimism," Obama told reporters after the nighttime meeting, the second night in a row he has made an evening foray into the White House briefing room to talk about the difficult search for a budget deal.

Neither side seemed willing as yet to make the final compromise necessary for an agreement.

"We have narrowed the issues, however, we have not yet reached an agreement. We will continue to work through the night to attempt to resolve our remaining differences," Reid and Boehner said in a joint statement.

Democrats blamed the impasse on a Republican push for policy provisions that would block public funding of birth control and stymie environmental protection efforts.

But Boehner said the divisions did not stop there.

"There are a number of issues that are on the table. And any attempt to try to narrow this down to one or two just would not be accurate," he said.

Their deadline to avoid a shutdown: Midnight on Friday night. Some cable television news broadcasts included a shutdown clock ticking the time down. (Additional reporting by Kim Dixon, Donna Smith, David Alexander, Andy Sullivan, Thomas Ferraro and David Morgan; Writing by Steve Holland; Editing by Vicki Allen and Deborah Charles)

MACTV NEWS From Captial Hill

MACTV News: Senator Rockefeller Introduceed by Menelik Zeleke

Washington, D.C., March 8, 2011

By Williams Ekanem

Chirman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care on Tuesday presented a bill to Congress which aims to prevent the unsafe use of prescription drugs.

Addressing Congressional Reporters later in the day, the Senator said that, “I have heared far too many drugs abuse is hurting young people, children, families and local business. Although this is a serious problem throughout the country, it is heratbreaking that prescription drug deaths have been particulary devasting in West Virginia.”

According to Rockefeller, “my bill aims to change this course and help reduce the number of deaths from prescription drugs. As well as better assist those facing problems with abuse. I will continue to make this initiative a top priority.”

At the media briefing, Rockefeller, who was joined by Senators Schumer, Casey, Nelson and Brown said the bill would also help reduce the number of deaths from prescription drugs, as well as help states create and maintain prescription drug monitoring programs that all states can access.

Rockefeller’s bill aims to combat prescription drug related deaths andoverdoes by amongst others: requiring that health care professionals receive speciallised training on safe pain management in order to be licensed to prescribe these powerful drugs.

Giving consumers potentially life-saving information by funding a competitive grant program to states to educate consumers on the proper use of prescription drugs and how to prevent abuse.

It also proposes creating a commision to establish appropraite and safe guidelines for all dosing of prescription drugs, benchmarks to reduce abuse, and patient education guidelines.

It also proposes providing $25 million annually to establish prescription drug monitorng programs within each state where sates can share information with each other.

After vote, Virginia's abortion clinics face new regulation, Posted by Meosha Eaton

Reported by Richmond News, 6 hours ago:

With the backing of two Democrats and a tie-breaking vote cast by Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, Republicans in the Virginia Senate on Thursday won approval of an amended health bill that will require the state's abortion clinics to be regulated like hospitals. The 20-20 vote on Senate Bill 924, which now heads to Gov. Bob McDonnell, represents a significant victory for anti-abortion activists, who have been trying for years to restrict access to abortion in Virginia, only to have bills killed in the Democratic-controlled Senate Education and Health Committee. McDonnell said he will sign the bill, calling it a "clinic safety issue."

"It's still going to have to be reviewed to see if there are any legal issues that need to be addressed," he told reporters Thursday. "But I think it's fair to say that all outpatient surgical hospitals or clinics should be regulated in the same way, and I think this bill will do that." Democratic lawmakers and women's rights advocates decried the legislation. They said it effectively would restrict a woman's access to abortion services by forcing the state's 21 clinics to meet standards set by the Board of Health regulating hospitals — standards currently not required of other physician's practices performing similarly invasive medical procedures.

"This is a sad, sad day for the women of Virginia," said Sen. Janet D. Howell, D-Fairfax. "What we are doing is taking Virginia, which has a well-deserved reputation as being a moderate state, and radicalizing it." Sen. John Watkins, R-Powhatan, said the legislation does not impose "any undue burden" on the ability of a woman to obtain an abortion in Virginia. "This is all about the quality-of-care issue — this is all about patient health and patient safety."

But backers of abortion rights dismissed the argument as masking the bill backers' opposition to abortion. "You know and I know there isn't but one issue involved here," thundered an angry Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw, D-Fairfax. "It's abortion. ... It isn't women's health." He said anyone trying to convince themselves that they are voting on a women's health issue should "get a life."

Howell said most of the state's abortion clinics are likely to close because of the regulations, which could require retrofitting of their facilities and a lengthy and costly certification process that most clinics could not afford. "The people pushing for this amendment are the same people who don't want women to have any access to abortion," she said. NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia said the bill "represents a shameful level of political interference in the doctor-patient relationship.

"The politicians behind this plan falsely claim they are protecting women's health, yet their ultimate goal is to make it even more difficult for women to access abortion care in Virginia," said Tarina Keene, the group's executive director. Victoria Cobb, president of The Family Foundation of Virginia, hailed the vote. "After more than two decades, with today's vote Virginia's abortion centers will no longer be able to hide behind a veil of politically motivated secrecy," she said.

"We look forward to working through the regulatory process on ensuring that the regulations imposed by the Board of Health ensure that these centers are safe for the women who make the unfortunate choice of abortion." Currently, first-trimester abortions are considered medical procedures that can be performed in physicians' offices, similar to medical procedures such as colonoscopies, vision correction surgery, cosmetic surgery and dental surgery.

Abortions in the second trimester or later must be performed in a hospital setting. Opponents said the legislation will make Virginia the only state in the country to require first-trimester procedures to be performed in a hospital. Under the legislation, any physician's office performing five or more first trimester abortions a month would be classified as a hospital, subject to special regulations established by the state Board of Health within the next 280 days.

The 15-member board includes 10 members appointed by former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, a Democrat, and four members appointed by McDonnell, a Republican. One seat is vacant. The vote came after a long and impassioned debate on the floor of the Senate, where Democrats hold a 22-18 majority. It was swung by the votes of two anti-abortion Democrats in moderately conservative districts — Sens. Phillip P. Puckett, D-Russell, and Charles J. Colgan, D-Prince William. Neither rose to speak on the bill.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, an anti-abortion Republican, said he believes the legislation is constitutional and called its passage a "victory for life and the dignity of women" that will upgrade health and safety standards in Virginia's abortion clinics.

Democrats and women's rights advocates said the legislation, once signed into law, will almost certainly face a legal challenge. Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said that if someone challenges the statute, "the litigation could take years to resolve." After the vote, a number of Democratic senators privately blamed their own caucus for allowing the bill to pass out of committee. "We were outsmarted," said one senator. "The pro-choice groups were outsmarted, too. This should never have come to this."

Senate Bill 924, sponsored by Sen. Ryan T. McDougle, R-Hanover, originally dealt with the need for emergency plans for security and infectious-disease issues at hospitals and nursing facilities. But it applied to a section of the Virginia code where any legislation governing the regulation of abortion clinics would have to be entered, which protected the clinic amendments proposed on the House floor by Del. Kathy Byron, R-Campbell, from being stripped from the bill for not being relevant.

Howell said Senate Bill 924 was clearly "a plant" designed to make it through the Senate so it could go to the House and be amended by the Republican majority. She said that as a result of what happened with the legislation, it is likely that committees will end up "killing more bills" to prevent amendments from being slapped on after the committee process is completed.

"If it's got the potential, it probably ain't going to get out," Saslaw said after the vote.

"When you deal with major legislation like this, this is not the way it should be done," he continued. "The Family Foundation has that crowd in an absolute death grip — the Republican party. An absolute death grip. Their stated goal is to strip the women in Virginia and in the nation ... of their ability to get an abortion."

Cobb, the Family Foundation president, is married to Matt Cobb, deputy secretary of health and human resources in the McDonnell administration. Saslaw said the Democrats who voted for the clinic regulation amendments — Colgan and Puckett — did so out of their personal beliefs, not to enhance their chances for re-election this November, when all House and Senate seats are up for election.

"One thing we don't do is we don't take caucus votes," said Saslaw. "That's what (they) believe, and I can't argue with that."