Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
by DemFromCT
Mon Jul 13, 2009 at 04:39:39 AM PST
Monday punditizing, and here's Sat and Sun if you slept through the weekend.
Sen. John Ensign caused his own problems. And as word emerged Thursday that the senator's wealthy parents gave his mistress and her family $96,000 after they'd heard he'd been having an affair with his best friend's wife, Nevadans who have viewed John Ensign as a decent man and appropriate representative began to feel like villagers under an artillery barrage, cringing as they wait to see when and where the next shell will fall.
He needs to straighten out and fly right. Okay, that's been dealt with. Next we tackle and solve health reform, Middle East peace, and the US deficit.
In mid-spring, as the country grew alarmed over the swine flu, Ms. Palin skipped a briefing for administration officials on the outbreak by her chief medical officer, Dr. Jay C. Butler. A spokeswoman, Sharon Leighow, noted that the teleconference took place about a month before the first case of the flu was reported in Alaska and that at the time the governor was meeting with top staff on the issue of federal stimulus funds. Since then, the state has had 122 confirmed cases of the H1N1 flu.
Dr. Butler said he resigned his post in June in part because the administration asked one of his highly regarded division heads, the state public health director, Beverly Wooley, to resign. "I felt that it was not a good time to be downsizing," said Dr. Butler, who is now working on a swine flu vaccination at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Butler said the governor’s office apparently deemed Ms. Wooley insufficiently supportive of the parental consent bill backed by Ms. Palin.
Ms. Leighow would only say, inexplicably, that Ms. Wooley had been terminated by the health department, not the governor.
Skipped a briefing? Who is she, George Bush? Disgraceful. And disqualifying for leadership if she can't manage to schedule important events.
Now, it’s bad enough to be jobless for a few weeks; it’s much worse being unemployed for months or years. Yet that’s exactly what will happen to millions of Americans if the average forecast is right — which means that many of the unemployed will lose their savings, their homes and more.
We’re passing through the worst economic dislocation of the past 80 years. Our politics are polarized; our institutions gridlocked. The governing party is mistrusted, the minority party despised.
Yet there’s remarkably little radical thinking taking place. The Republican Party is retrenching, falling back on Reagan-era verities. His promises of post-partisan change notwithstanding, Barack Obama’s agenda looks like the same old Democratic laundry list, rewritten in a sleeker, Internet-era font.
Robert J. Samuelson: I'm gonna have a stroke. Big government is back, and I'll be damned if I'll let that pass. I don't care how necessary or effective it is. I'm right! I'm right!! Hello? Is this on?
This week's hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court represent the opening skirmish in a long-term struggle to challenge the escalating activism of an increasingly conservative judiciary.
Had I known in the spring of 1973 that this hesitant freshman from the Bronx would be nominated to the Supreme Court 36 years later, I would have taken detailed notes on our conversations and filed them away in anticipation. Unfortunately, all I have are my memories. But Sonia made a strong impression. She was not the best student I taught in my seven years at Princeton -- though she certainly was high on the list -- but she was the one who took greatest advantage of the opportunities there and emerged most transformed by her experience.
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