As Republican presidential hopefuls continue to self-destruct, Srah Palin looms larger and larger. But a great article in Vanity Fair raises lots of questions about her:
Here’s one:
Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency?
It boggles the mind that someone “totally unfit for the vice-presidency” is being seriously considered as a presidential candidate.
Here’s another tidbit from Vanity Fair:
Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life—neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.
The New York Times reports that the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel advised the administration that detainees can claim some constitutional rights if they are tried in military commissions within the United States.
“While the Justice Department is correct that the Constitution must apply to trials of terrorism suspects, it is gravely wrong to think that this can happen in the context of revived military commissions. The commissions system is inherently illegitimate, unconstitutional and incapable of delivering outcomes we can trust. It is designed to ensure convictions, not achieve justice.
“If the Obama administration truly intended to try the detainees in a system that provides fundamental rights and protections, it would do so within the tried-and-true federal court system where both national security evidence and fundamental rights can be protected. The only conceivable reason to design an alternative legal system would be to evade due process requirements. The proposed fixes to the Bush-era military commissions are thoroughly insufficient; there is no such thing as ‘due process light.’ If the Obama administration chooses to proceed with the commissions, it will find itself mired down in the same morass of legal challenges that the Bush administration did.
“It is also becoming increasingly clear that Obama’s ‘cabinet of rivals’ is devolving into intramural squabbling – with the Defense Department trouncing and shooting down the policy positions of the Justice Department. Pentagon officials who object to affording detainees their full constitutional rights if they are brought onto the U.S. mainland seem to be merely making a behind-the-scenes play for keeping the military commissions in operation at Guantanamo – hoping to force the president’s hand into breaking his clear promises in the executive orders he signed his first day in office.”
Some comments and analysis on Governor Rell’s threatened veto:
“On the eve of June 30, the end of the state’s fiscal year, the Governor is still threatening to veto a workable budget that will help our state get out of this economic mess,” said Sharon Palmer, President of AFT Connecticut. “It is inexcusable that she is putting us all at risk to protect millionaires and others who should be part of the solution.”
Palmer is referring to the Governor’s threat not to include a progressive income tax as part of her budget but to plug economic holes through drastic cuts in public services and public spending. Public services and public spending are vital to economic recovery, and that her veto puts our long-term economic health in peril.
“The Governor proposed cuts in healthcare for children, services for the blind and support for the elderly. Also on her chopping block are funds for community services, job training, road repair and public safety” said Bill Buhler, a pupil services specialist in the Department of Children and Families. “How can the Governor propose such harsh cuts, without first asking Connecticut’s top income earners to help balance the budget?”
The budget bill increases income taxes for those with taxable incomes over $500,000 for joint filers or over $265,000 for single filers. Connecticut’s middle-income and lower-income families currently pay much more of their income in state and local taxes than do the wealthiest families. After federal tax deductions, the wealthiest 1% of Connecticut’s families pay 4.5% of their income in state and local taxes. This is less than half the share of income paid in these taxes by the state’s middle-income families (9.3%) or low-income families (12.1%). It is worth noting that Governor Rell proposed an increase in the income tax in 2007 and urged her to adopt the current legislative proposal.
The budget proposal also would begin to scale back public subsidies to the entertainment industry through the “film tax credit” and increase cigarette taxes to help close the state revenue gap.
If Governor Rell vetoes the legislative budget proposal and no new budget is passed before the end of the fiscal year on June 30, many public and private service providers could be left with no guarantee of funding when the new budget year begins on July 1. After July 1, the Governor can suspend funding for services she deems to be “non-essential.”
“Health and human services for the state’s most vulnerable residents were, with a few exceptions, mostly protected in the budget approved by the House and Senate,” said Liza Andrews, Public Policy Specialist at the Connecticut Association of Nonprofits. “We encourage Governor Rell to sign this bill and ensure that private providers are properly funded immediately at the start of the fiscal year on July 1.”
“I know that Governor Rell cares about family values,” said Jeffrey Freiser, Executive Director of the Connecticut Housing Coalition. “But I don’t understand what kind of family values would lead her to impose greater hardship on struggling families, seniors and people with disabilities, in order to protect the wealthy from a tax increase.
According to CQ Politics ( CQ = Congressional Quarterly):
Investor and financial commentator Peter Schiff is doing polling in Connecticut to gauge support for a potential Republican Senate run. Schiff has signed on prominent Republican polling firm Wilton Research Strategies to survey the state, his brother and spokesman Andrew Schiff told CQ Politics.
It’s probably Wilson Research Strategies, an “opinion research firm serving Republican candidates, conservative organizations, public affairs campaigns, and major corporations.”
Here’s more on Shiff’s plans from CQ politics:
“We do think there’s certainly room for the fiscally conservative, libertarian wing of the party to attract a lot of attention in the Northeast,” Andrew said, adding that Peter is prepared to develop a policy portfolio not just on finance and monetary policy, his speciality, but also on hot-button issue like health care and energy. But economics will remain is major focus.
“We’re leaning towards a run,” he said, however, “Peter doesn’t want to spend a lot of time and money if there’s really no chance.”
Mike Brown and I share a unique distinction: we were trashed together in a very odd, and completely off-base post by a blogger whose qualifications you can judge for yourself.
It’s promising that a balanced two year budget has been put forth by the Legislature, and I commend the Democrats on getting this done. While agreeing on a budget is never easy, their jobs were made exponentially harder during this cycle by two things: first, a Governor who refused to perform her constitutional duty by putting forward a balanced budget at the beginning of the legislative session, and two, the worst economy this generation of Americans has ever faced.
This is unfortunately more than can be said for Gov. Rell – who, to this day, has still not produced a balanced budget – an incredible dereliction of duty on her part.
For Gov. Rell to attack the Democratic budget as being ‘neither balanced nor remotely realistic’ is just ridiculous. Gov. Rell proposed a ‘budget’ – and I use that term loosely – in February that she knew was out of balance by more than $2 billion, and there’s a video that proves she knew it was out of balance. It was, therefore, by definition unrealistic.
Gov. Rell’s Alice-in-Wonderland statement then goes on to say the Democratic budget ‘…squanders a golden opportunity to reshape and reduce the size of state government.’ This from a Governor who, through mismanagement and inattention, has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, and who imposed a hiring freeze that somehow allowed almost 1,000 new state employees to be hired.
There’s one piece of the Governor’s statement with which I agree: she says that ‘all state budgets should be blueprints for the future.’ She’s 100% right. Unfortunately, the budget she proposed months ago was a blueprint for a future in which a state would exist in perpetual fiscal crisis, with mounting debt, continued job loss, and with its most vulnerable citizens, including children, being left out in the cold.
Governor, you’ve been sent a balanced budget. You’ve already said you’re going to veto it. Perhaps now you’ll stop issuing irresponsible statements, you’ll stop lecturing other people to do your job for you, you’ll produce a balanced budget of your own, and you’ll negotiate a compromise with the Legislature the way 49 other governors do.
People who voted for Barack Obama tend to fall into one of two camps: Trusters, who believe he’s a good man with the right values and he’s doing everything he can; and cynics, who have become disillusioned with his bailouts of Wall Street, flimsy proposals for taming the Street, willingness to give away 85 percent of cap-and-trade pollution permits, seeming reversals on eavesdropping and torture, and squishiness on a public option for health care.
Calling the bill “extraordinarily important”, Barack Obama on Thursday said its enactment would “finally spark a clear energy transformation that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and confront the carbon pollution that threatens our planet…”
“In order to get the votes, the bill’s managers have taken off most of its environmental edge,” said Rob Shapiro, chairman of the US Climate Task Force, which backs a carbon tax. “If we were to pass a toothless bill like this, we would probably have to wait five or 10 years for another chance to do it right.”
For example, in contrast to Mr Obama’s campaign promise that 100 per cent of the permits would be auctioned off, the bill gives away 85 per cent for free and only moves to a full auction in 2030.
Likewise, an EPA study this week said the large volume of foreign “offsets” – projects such as tree planting that count towards domestic emissions credits – meant US emissions could actually increase between now and 2025.
In addition, in a recent compromise with Collin Peterson, the centrist chairman of the House agriculture committee, Democratic leaders allowed the definition of an offset to be set in some cases by the US agriculture department – a much softer challenge than the EPA.
Finally, lawmakers have diluted the “20 by 2020” clause, which mandates power generators to produce a fifth of output from renewable energy by 2020.
Republicans are fighting hard against the bill, even though they seem to have won every battle in writing it.
The questions is why. The answer is posturing. The Democrats want to look like they have accomplished something, even if it really is nothing. And the Republicans don’t want the Democrats to look like the can accomplish anything at all.
There’s an awful lot of interesting new health research published this week –the most exciting to me was the news that Overweight People Live Longest! My weight has always been pointed out as an increased health risk, and is probably the reason I try to do everything possible to protect my health (except lose weight, which I simply cannot seem to do, and even if I could, I am convinced that I would gain it back soon anyhow.) It’s great to know that it’s not such a problem after all – now if I could only convince my life insurance company.
Selenium can prevent prostate cancer, or make it worse, confirming other research that has suggested that antioxidants could be protective if you don’t have cancer, but once you do, then antioxidants may be a bad thing, but green tea fights prostate cancer.
I had previously written about the benefits of the Mediterranean diet here and here.
Now new research focuses in on what parts of the diet are actually beneficial:
“Eating more vegetables, fruits, nuts, pulses (beans, peas and lentils) and olive oil, and drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, while not consuming a lot of meat or excessive amounts of alcohol is linked to people living longer.
However, the study also claims, that following a Mediterranean diet high in fish, seafood and cereals and low in dairy products were not indicators of longevity.”
Vitamin D may go beyond its traditionally known role in maintaining bone integrity. It may play a role in preventing autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, , some types of cancer (breast, ovarian, colorectal and prostate), types I and II diabetes—possibly even schizophrenia…
Research also shows a correlation between high vitamin D status and improved lower body muscle function in men and women over 60 years old.”
Chris Dodd is continuing his fight for consumer rights, and getting passionate about it:
At the same time, he is fighting for health care reform. Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts, praises his colleague and good friend, Chris Dodd, for his leadership and work in the ongoing debate on healthcare reform. Kennedy, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, tapped Dodd to lead the committee’s effort on healthcare reform in his absence.
Says Senator Kennedy: “Quality healthcare as a fundamental right for all Americans has been the cause of my life, and Chris Dodd has been my closest ally in this fight.”
Like his work on behalf of families in Connecticut and across the country on credit card abuse, keeping our children safe from tobacco, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, Chris Dodd’s leadership to help bring about accessible, affordable healthcare is something that affects us all.
