Health care for all will take years

WASHINGTON – HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says covering the uninsured will take several years, even if Congress passes a bill and President Barack Obama signs it into law this fall.

Sebelius said in a question-and-answer session with The Associated Press Tuesday that “it won’t start the day after the bill passes.”

Nearly 50 million Americans are uninsured, and early cost estimates of congressional coverage plans have been disappointing. The $1 trillion over 10 years that the Obama administration wants to spend may not be enough.

Sebelius said the first step would be to cover people who are eligible for existing government programs. She said after that, it could take until 2011 or 2012 to set up insurance purchasing pools and start covering the rest.

Ohioans ticketed for parking in own driveways

Here is corruption from the word go, when a person gets a ticket for parking in his own driveway, just because it is  an unpaved surface, this is how dumb these people are educated today, see this is why we are having a water problem, there is to much concrete and asphalt so water can’t soak in to the ground, this is why the water table is disappearing.

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TOLEDO, Ohio – Residents of Toledo, Ohio, are complaining that they received $25 tickets for parking their vehicles in their own driveways.

Mayor Carty Finkbeiner (FINK’-by-ner) says he stands by the citations handed out last week by the Division of Streets, Bridges and Harbor. He says the tickets were issued under a city law against parking on unpaved surfaces, including gravel driveways.

During a news conference Monday, Finkbeiner ignored a reporter’s question of whether the crackdown and fines were related to the city’s budget crisis.

The three-term mayor faces a recall vote in November. Critics have claimed he’s wasted city money.

City Councilman D. Michael Collins calls the ticketing “Mickey Mouse nonsense.” He has told residents he’ll try to have the citations rescinded.

15 D.C. power couples

POLITICO:  Kenneth P. Vogel

There’s only one first couple, but Barack and Michelle Obama are hardly the only powerful pair in Washington.

The new administration is staffed by an especially large contingent of power couples.

Here are 15 of them:

Shere Abbott and James Steinberg

These connected Beltway insiders ironically spent most of former President George W. Bush’s second term in his home state of Texas, where Steinberg was dean of the public affairs school at the University of Texas and Abbott directed the university’s sustainability program.

But Steinberg, 56, who was a national security adviser in the Clinton administration, kept in the game, advising the Obama campaign and transition on foreign policy issues. In December, he was nominated to be the No. 2 official at the State Department.

Abbott, 53, was tapped in March to handle environmental and energy policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

They married in 1994 and have two young daughters they adopted from China.

Sarah Feinberg and Dan Pfeiffer