But there could be a vote Saturday if they get over the abortion hurdle.

According to Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, he and other abortion opponents will be given a chance to insert tougher abortion restrictions into the legislation during debate on the House floor.

The issue is whether federal funds will pay for abortions.

House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter said she expected the rule-setting guidelines for the healthcare debate would incorporate anti-abortion language proposed by Representative Brad Ellsworth, a moderate Democrat.

His amendment would prohibit the use of federal funds to cover abortions and also guarantee access to insurance plans that would agree to refrain from covering abortion.

But the anti-choice crowd says this isn’t good enough, as evidenced by a press release quoting Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

“We are very disappointed that someone who claims to support the protection of unborn children would offer language designed to ensure the government pays for elective abortions behind smoke and mirrors. However cleverly worded the proposal might be, Rep. Ellsworth’s plan would authorize a government run public option to fund elective abortion and subsidize private plans that cover elective abortion.

• Alan discusses the Fort Hood tragedy with military analyst Col. David Hunt.

• As unemployment hits its highest level in 26 years, It’s Your Time author Joel Osteen tells Alan how people can still achieve their dreams in times of trouble.

• It’s the Friday Night Free-For-All!

Swift Boat enabler and Obama basher Jerome Corsi is portraying accused Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan as a transition team adviser to President Obama.

The Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University published a document May 19, entitled “Thinking Anew – Security Priorities for the Next Administration: Proceedings Report of the HSPI Presidential Transition Task Force, April 2008 – January 2009,” in which Hasan of the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine is listed on page 29 of the document as a Task Force Event Participant.

Corsi tries to make his case by saying Hasan “attended meetings” of the Homeland Security Policy Institute Presidential Transition Task Force.  And he raises a question as to “whether or not Hasan made comments from the audience that influenced the task force recommendations or not.”

In his World Net Daily article, Corsi claims that a new book claims, “Hasan is just the tip of a jihadist Fifth Column operating within the ranks of the U.S. military – which is too blinded by political correctness to see the threat.” And guess where you can buy this shocking book? Yes, World Net Daily.

A small amount of investigation reveals:

Significantly, Nidal was not the author of the document. He was not a member of the HSPI’s “Presidential Transition Task Force.” Nor was he a member of the HSPI’s “Task Force Staff.” He was not a member of the HSPI’s Steering Committee or a briefer to the task force.

Also, the activities of the HSPI here do not in anyway constitute official transition advice to the White House, despite the fact that a committee got named the “Presidential Transition Task Force” and the HSPI’s activities involved identifying homeland security priorities and offering advice.

Corsi admits that it’s a non-issue by writing:

While the GWU task force participants included several members of government, including representatives of the Department of Justice and the U.S Department of Homeland Security, there is no indication in the document that the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition, other than to serve in a university-based advisory capacity.

And, yet, this story is hyped with the headline:  

Shooter advised Obama transition
Fort Hood triggerman aided team on Homeland Security task force.

Nidal Malik Hasan was harassed by his fellow soldiers and was called names like “camel jockey.”  Ironically, Hasan was suffering from the same kind of stress he was trained to treat.

Hasan is an American citizen of Palestinian descent and after the 9/11 attacks, his cousin says he was the target of constant harassment from others in the military. His tormentors called him a “camel jockey,” said his cousin, Nader Hasan. He wanted out of the Army, so he paid back his military student loans and hired an attorney.

Nader Hasan believes that what ultimately set his cousin off was his imminent deployment to Iraq.

A GOP-led tea party protest in DC Thursday portrays the participants as out-of-touch, politically ignorant, and infantile.  And while they were marching around with signs and banners comparing the effort to provide health care to Hitler’s Holocaust, a number of them had to be medically treated…by government health care.

Many of the demonstrators chanted “Weasel Queen,” their pet name for the speaker of the House. Others wore masks of Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); they were covered in fake blood and carrying dolls representing aborted fetuses, as the Grim Reaper led them in chains to hell.

In the front of the protest, a sign showed President Obama in white coat, his face painted to look like the Joker. The sign, visible to the lawmakers as they looked into the cameras, carried a plea to “Stop Obamunism.” A few steps farther was the guy holding a sign announcing “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds” [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist.

Other signs featured slogans like “Waterboard Congress” and “A Commie is in the House.”

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was in pig heaven as la grande dame of the event.

…the best of Bachmann’s recruits were a few rows into the crowd, holding aloft a pair of 5-by-8-foot banners proclaiming “National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945.” Both banners showed close-up photographs of Holocaust victims, many of them children.

Because they couldn’t get a permit for a demonstration, this sick showing was billed as a “press conference,” even though no questions were taken. Twenty minutes into the event a man suffered a heart attack, quickly attended to by the Capitol physician’s office which delivered oxygen and an IV drip. Thank God for government health care.

This turned into an unwanted visual for the speakers, as a D.C. ambulance and firetruck, lights flashing, pulled in just behind the lawmakers. A path was made through the media section, and the patient, attended to by about 10 government medical personnel, was being wheeled away on a stretcher just as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) stepped to the microphone. “Join us in defeating Pelosi care!” he exhorted.

[...]

By the time it was over, medics had administered government-run health care to at least five people in the crowd who were stricken as they denounced government-run health care. But Bachmann overlooked this irony as she said farewell to her recruits.

“You,” she said, “are the most beautiful sight any of us freedom fighters have seen for a long time.”

There are 15.7 million Americans who can’t find jobs.

The Labor Department said Friday that jobless rate rose to 10.2 percent, the highest since April 1983, from 9.8 percent in September. The economy shed a net total of 190,000 jobs in October, less than the downwardly revised 219,000 lost in September, but more than economists expected.

Economists say it could go as high as 10.5% next year if employers are reluctant to hire.

Colonel Terry Lee, who worked at Fort Hood with Major Nidal Malik Hasan, spoke with Fox News’s Shepard Smith. He says Hasan believed we shouldn’t be in Iraq, and became increasingly agitated about our involvement there.  Lee says Hasan made comments about how Muslims needed to stand up to the aggressor, and seemed almost happy when there was a shooting at a recruiting office in Little Rock that resulted in one death and one injury.  Lee says Hasan was trying to get his deployment to Iraq canceled.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who has been identified as a shooting suspect at Fort Hood, is believed to be a mental health professional.

A source tells CBS News investigative producer Len Tepper that Hasan is a licensed psychiatrist in Bethesda, Md. He is a drug and rehab specialist who got his Virginia psychiatry license July 12, 2005.

There is also word that he was about to be deployed to Iraq and was upset about it.  Officials who had access to his records say he received a poor performance evaluation while at Walter Reed.

The Virginia-born soldier was single with no children. He was 39 years old.

Sources told News 8 [WFAA in Dallas] that Hasan was born in 1970 and is of Jordanian descent.

He is a graduate of Virginia Tech University, where he was a member of the ROTC and earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry in 1997. He received his medical degree from the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., in 2001. At Walter Reed, he did his internship, residency and a fellowship.

Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, pandering to a crowed of tea partiers on Capitol Hill, asserts how important it is that “God” has been in the Pledge of Allegiance since 1954.  So intent was he to proclaim “God” as key to the Pledge, that he forgot what came next.  And he failed to note that the original Pledge dates back to 1892, written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist, expressing the ideas of his cousin, Edward Bellamy, to promote the concept of a socialist utopian world. Also ignored is that “under God” was added to the Pledge in reaction to McCarthyism, communist witch hunts, and the cold war.