Month: August 2009

Martinez’s Departure Puts Crist in Awkward Spot

Trish
Martinez has left the building. It’s your ball, Charlie!

Mel Martinez has shown more life in the past few days than he has in his five years as Florida’s junior senator. First he voted with eight fellow Republicans to confirm Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Then, like a certain first-term Alaska governor, he resigned. The first Cuban-American elected senator is now the first Cuban-American to leave before his term is over.

Martinez’s desertion seems to come as a surprise to the governor of his state. Gov. Charlie Crist is running for the seat Martinez was recently keeping warm. Crist will have to appoint a replacement, and even though his pandering and selling out to win the 2010 election lately seem to know no bounds, apparently even he has moral limits. Who knew? Charlie swears he’s not going to choose himself to fill the Palin-esque vacancy. So who will he pick?

Crist says he won’t choose himself to fill the Palin-esque vacancy. Uh-oh, he might be running against an incumbent.

Crist has to be careful, first and foremost, that he selects someone who will absolutely, positively not get up to Washington and decide to stay. He must be sure they would never, ever decide to run because then he’d be campaigning against an incumbent. On the other hand, they can’t hate politics so much that they won’t participate. And — oh yeah — they need to have 16 months to waste.

The order might not be that tall. In the 24 hours or so since Martinez revealed he was outta here, several names were already being bandied. One is former state attorney general Jim Smith. Smith ran unsuccessfully for governor as a Democrat in 1986, but took his loss as a signal to change parties. Now is he is a lobbyist with one of Tallahassee’s top-billing firms, Smith & Ballard, which just happens to represent the health care industry. What could be better, from a Republican point of view, than having a health care lobbyist casting votes in the Senate while Obama is pushing for reform?

There are other names in contention, but they’re mostly people who would likely want to hold the office on a continuing basis, so I would not expect Charlie to pick one of them. In other words, don’t get your hopes up, Jeb Bush.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

I expect to be held responsible, but I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.

— President Obama, quoted by the Roanoke Times, at a fundraiser in Virginia.

RPOF’s Greer Distorts Health Care, Abortion Facts

Buck Banks

jim_greer4

Besides being unrelentingly partisan and awfully casual with written English, Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer usually is pretty careful about what he says, even if he’s careless about how he says it. But yesterday he sent out a fund-raising e-mail that, to use the polite term, distorts the current debate over health care and its nasty little sub-issue, abortion.

Here’s what Greer wrote:

Friends,

We have all seen and heard countless news stories, television interviews and advertisements regarding President Obama’s plan for a government-run health care system. It’s hard to keep track of what the bill actually does, especially since most lawmakers, like President Obama, haven’t read the massive piece of legislation, and other leading Democrats, including Florida Gubernatorial Candidate Alex Sink, won’t take a position on it. But I read something today that is worth sharing.

Today the Associated Press reported that the health care plan currently supported by President Obama and the Democrats would allow for taxpayer funded abortions. As the father of four children, I can’t imagine living in a nation where citizens willfully allow their tax dollars to fund abortion. The fact that liberal lawmakers and media pundits have ignored this portion of the legislation is deeply disturbing and has reaffirmed my belief that we must join together to put a stop to it.

He then proceeds to solicit contributions to protect “our tax dollars from funding abortion.”

[…]

WHO: 2 Billion Could Contract H1N1 Flu

Buck Banks

From PRO-MED:

Health officials raised the alarm about a strain of swine flu that is resistant to the Tamiflu treatment as the virus claimed more lives on Tuesday [4 Aug 2009], with Viet Nam reporting its first fatal case. India and South Africa both reported their first deadly cases of the A(H1N1) virus late Monday [3 Aug 2009]. Maria Teresa Cerqueira, head of the Pan-American Health Organization office in La Jolla, California, said a Tamiflu-resistant mutation of A(H1N1) [the Influenza pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus] had been found around the US-Mexico border in El Paso and close to McAllen, Texas. Experts had gathered in La Jolla, California, on Monday to discuss responses to the outbreak, and warned that resistant strains were likely emerging because of overuse of antivirals like Tamiflu.

“In the United States Tamiflu is sold with a prescription, but in Mexico and Canada it is sold freely and taken at the first sneeze. Then, when it is really needed, it doesn’t work,” said Cerqueira late Monday. Cases of A(H1N1) that were resistant to the anti-viral medicine have now been found in the United States, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong and Japan.

As the northern hemisphere autumn approaches, and with it the onset of seasonal flu, the WHO is working with drug companies to ensure vaccines to cope both with H1N1 and seasonal flu will be available. World Health Organization spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said the agency hoped to give an update on its vaccine plans later this week. Leading flu vaccine makers include Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis , Baxter, GlaxoSmithKline and Solvay.

Novartis has started human testing of H1N1 swine flu vaccine candidates while Sanofi-Aventis, the world leader in flu shots, will commence within days, company officials said on Tuesday [4 Aug 2009]. The launch of clinical trials is a key part of a widening program of work being undertaken by big pharmaceutical companies as they prepare for mass vaccination from next month. GlaxoSmithKline, the other “big three” flu vaccine supplier, said it would initiate clinical studies later this month. Health care officials are relying on a vaccine to contain the spread of disease, providing a potential sales windfall for those companies that are able to deliver quickly and in large volume.

[…]

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

You couldn’t sell this script in Hollywood… A pregnant woman leaves her home to go overseas to have a child — who there’s not a passport for — so is in cahoots with someone… to smuggle that child, that previously doesn’t exist on a government roll somewhere back into the country and has the amazing foresight to place birth announcements in the Hawaii newspapers?

— White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, quoted by ABC News , on polls that shows large numbers still question where President Obama was born.

Republican Phone Prank Denies Citizens’ Voices

Buck Banks

As Jon so eloquently pointed out in the preceding post, the Republican Party is all about not allowing citizens to enter into a reasoned, informed conversation about health care reform. They prefer to shout reasonable people down, and that’s the point the Democratic National Committee was making with its “Enough of the Mob” video, released this morning.

Unfortunately, the RNC remains determined not to allow conversation on the issue. When callers dialed the RNC phone number given in the video, they were prompted to press 1 to speak to an RNC representative, but instead the RNC redirected those calls to the DNC’s telephone number.

DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse described the RNC’s redirection to CNN as a “neat trick”:

“The RNC is inciting angry mobs to shout out legitimate discussion at public events across the country and now they want to ignore people who deplore their tactics,” Woodhouse said. “Republicans don’t want to have a discussion about the future of health care reform — they want to shout out — and now completely ignore — anyone who disagrees with them.”

According to the Washington Independent, RNC Chair Michael Steele took full credit for the prank:

[This was in] response, said Steele, to the White House arrogantly blaming regular Americans “like my mother, like my sister” for the health care impasse.

“I thought it was a good idea,” Steele said. “Don’t sit there and think you’re going to direct a bunch of angry liberals to call the RNC when I know full well what that’s all about. I get the joke. My response was, talk to your own party, because they’re the ones ginning this up.”

Typically, the Republican Party remains unaccountable for its obstructionism and unaccounted for in the essential debate over health care.

DNC Ad Goes After GOP’s Astroturf Tea-Bagger Anti-Reform Flash Mobs

Jon Ponder

The Democratic National Party has released a web ad that unmasks this summer’s Republicans astroturf campaign of deploying tea-baggers to disrupt health-care town halls and other events. The ad exposes the fact that the people shown in cell-phone videos of the disruptions are not the angry constituents confronting their elected representatives they pretend to be, but rather are tea-baggers bussed into the districts to shut down discussion about reform.

While the current GOP campaign seems to be working so far — meaning the visuals from the videos are likely duping millions of low-info voters — the party’s record on astroturfing has had mixed results over the past decade.

From DU: Identities of Brooks Brothers “rioters” revealed

The GOP’s first astroturf action was the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000, when a handful of paid operatives were parachuted into Miami to as part of its campaign to shut down the Bush v. Gore recounts. (There’s a list of the operatives and who they worked for here.)

At the time, the hapless mainstream media portrayed the “riot” as if it were a legitimate outburst of outrage by concerned Floridians. It was just one in a series of successful tactics that helped the GOP abscond with the presidency in 2000, with disastrous results for the country and the world over the ensuing eight years.

[…]

Clear Channel to Palin: ‘No Thanks’

Buck Banks

sarahpalinwink

Despite ex-veep candidate and ex-gov Sarah Palin’s deep-rooted hatred of the media (“Quit makin’ things up!”), she is being quietly shopped around as a possible radio or cable TV show host.

It’s not going so well. According to Broadcasting & Cable, mega-radio giant Clear Channel passed on an opportunity to have Palin host a radio program. The reason:

The main objection to Palin as radio talk-show host is that she would have to hold forth for three hours a day. While some of her recent remarks may indicate a talent for improvisation, anyone who’s listened to Rush Limbaugh or Thom Hartmann or Don Imus or Howard Stern or even Ryan Seacrest knows it’s the rare personality who can blab extemporaneously for 15 hours a week. And relying on callers to get you through won’t help, because as we’ve all experienced, callers-in are usually more embarrassing than compelling.

We think Clear Channel is selling Sarah short. As Trish pointed out recently, Palin’s farewell speech as Alaska governor was, besides being her first non-ghost-written public utterance, oddly poetic — at least when recited by William Shatner. Palin proved that she could string words together in novel ways, unencumbered by grammar, syntax or that pesky bugbear, meaning.

We believe that someone who has spent so much time bashing, trashing and threatening to sue the media should be welcomed into its ranks and promptly fired in the next round of layoffs. Then she’d actually have something to complain about.

Hillary Clinton Just Can’t Catch a Break

Trish

What Kim Jong Il really wanted: a formal portrait with the former president

News from North Korea is always bizarre, but the Bill-Clinton-saving-the-journalists story is the wackiest in awhile. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos said what ruler Kim Jong Il really wanted was some quality time with the Big Dog.

The secretary told reporters that she was ‘very pleased that my husband’s plane had taken off with two young women on board.’

The big break came just two weeks ago during a phone call home when the women said the North Koreans would let them go if Bill Clinton would come to North Korea as an envoy.

“The North Koreans made it clear they wanted a former president, they wanted Clinton,” ABC News chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos reported…

All of this must come as a bit of a slap to the head of the State Department. Poor Hillary can’t catch a break.

The story that Bill Clinton was en route to North Korea broke as the secretary of state arrived in Kenya hoping to highlight her commitment to Africa.

Instead, the spotlight was on her husband on a different continent and Hillary Clinton, who had been calling for the release of Ling and Lee for months, was left trying to catch some of the reflected glow from that spotlight.

The secretary told reporters in Nairobi today that she was “very pleased to get the news that my husband’s plane had taken off with the two young women on board.”

I hate to think what late night talk show hosts will do with the statement that Sec. Clinton was glad her husband’s plane took off with two young women on board, but I’ll leave it to them to elaborate.

All of this comes just a couple of weeks after the North Koreans insulted the former president’s wife.

At a meeting of southeast Asian nations in Phuket, Thailand, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman blasted Clinton for what he called a “spate of vulgar remarks unbecoming for her position everywhere she went since she was sworn in,” according to the state-run KCNA news agency.

The spokesman called Clinton “by no means intelligent” and a “funny lady.”

“Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, Il was said to have accomplished his goal: he had a 75-minute one-on-one with Bill Clinton, followed by a two-hour dinner, a photograph of the former president chatting with him, and a formal portrait of the two. Mrs. Clinton, of course, was not included.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

I think that he is a good person, and good-intentioned. But I believe he didn’t serve in government long enough to understand really how things work … He really does not have an understanding of how Congress operates.

— Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), in a radio interview, on President Obama.