Manic Monday News Links

Good Morning Conflucians! Here is my frantically rushed summary of the latest news. I may add a few more odds and ends.

Politics and Politicians

Paterson Says He Will Run Despite White House Pressure

At a parade in Harlem, the governor refused to discuss his conversations with President Obama’s political team, which has made clear to Mr. Paterson in recent days that it has lost confidence in him and does not believe he can be elected next fall.

Asked how he would run as a Democrat without White House support, Mr. Paterson said, “I am running for governor right now. I have no idea — I am a candidate for governor.”

“I have had a number of different conversations with a number of different people,” he added. “They are confidential.”

Still, even as Mr. Paterson publicly vowed to continue, two prominent Democrats who had spoken to him over the weekend described him as mulling his options and open to the possibility of withdrawing from the race. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because the conversations were intended to be confidential.

RNC chief thinks it’s “curious” that Obama would ask a black governor to step aside.

“I found that to be stunning, that the White House would send word to one of only two black governors in the country not to run for reelection,” Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), said on CBS’s Face The Nation.

Steele was commenting on a report in The New York Times that said an intermediary of President Barack Obama sent word to Paterson that he should not run, considering his low approval ratings. Asked by host Bob Schieffer if race played a role in the White House’s decision to ask Paterson to back off from campaigning, Steele said he didn’t think so.

“It raises a curious point for me. I think Gov. Paterson’s numbers are about the same as Gov. Corzine’s. The president is with Gov. Corzine,” Steele said. The RNC chairman was referring to Gov. Jon Corzine, the Democratic New Jersey governor who is facing a tough reelection bid this year.

Obama’s Sunday Media blitz

He made appearances on five different TV networks yesterday, and I missed every single one of them.

Speaking on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and Univision, the president spoke on everything from Afghanistan to race, but his main purpose was to continue his campaign-style push convincing Americans why health care reform is necessary this year.

Some analysts say the president inundating the airwaves is a risky strategy.

“Conventional wisdom will tell you that if you’re doing five shows as the POTUS [president of the United States] you’re doing four too many,” said political analyst David Gergen to ABC.

“No president ever wants to become video wallpaper,” said Larry Sabato, director of Center for Politics. “People do tune you out because they simply assume you don’t have anything new to say.”

President Obama is about even with Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton on the number of press conferences he’s given. However, on interviews, both Bush and Clinton gave around 40 by this point in the presidencies, but Mr. Obama has done about three times as many — 124 interviews so far.

Next up, Dave Letterman show.

This week, the world is watching Obama

Obama’s appearances at the U.N. meetings in New York, and with Group of 20 leaders later this week in Pittsburgh, offer him a “unique opportunity” to burnish his image as an effective and commanding leader, said a White House official who asked not to be named in order to speak freely. If Obama does this successfully, the White House hopes it could help the president as he wrestles for the confidence of an American public that is still deeply divided over his healthcare legislation.

John Edwards continues his downward spiral.

…a federal grand jury in nearby Raleigh is investigating whether any crimes were committed in connection with campaign laws in an effort to conceal his extramarital affair with a woman named Rielle Hunter. At the same time, Mr. Edwards is moving toward an abrupt reversal in his public posture; associates said in interviews that he is considering declaring that he is the father of Ms. Hunter’s 19-month-old daughter, something that he once flatly asserted in a television interview was not possible.

Friends and other associates of Mr. Edwards and his wife of 32 years, Elizabeth, say she has resisted the idea of her husband’s claiming paternity. Mrs. Edwards, who is battling cancer, “has yet to be brought around,” said one family friend, who like others spoke about the situation on the condition of anonymity, pointing to the complicated and delicate nature of the issue.

The situation may become more fraught, as people who know Ms. Hunter said she was planning to move with her daughter, Frances, from New Jersey to North Carolina in coming months.

Good Lord! Elizabeth needs to dump the jerk and get on with her life.

Resolution of Rielle Hunter’s paternity claim would cap John Edwards’ political career

Mike Lupica thinks the Edwards story parallels a new TV series with Chris Noth, The Good Wife. Maybe I’ll have break my TV fast and check this show out. I do like Chris Noth.

The timing for “The Good Wife” is perfect, of course, with the current wave of stories about creepy John Edwards, who reportedly might be ready to admit he fathered a child out of wedlock. Edwards is also in the news because a federal grand jury is trying to decide whether an actual crime – other than one of passion or just sheer stupidity – was committed when Edwards tried to cover up the affair.

Originally, one of Edwards’ aides, someone named Andrew Young, claimed to be the baby’s father. Now Young, with a book to sell, is ready to tell the whole story about that, how he even “facilitated” an affair between Edwards and a political groupie/ documentary filmmaker named Rielle Hunter that took place while Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, was already battling cancer.

So first Young fixes Edwards up on the road. Now he is willing to throw Edwards under the nearest bus to sell a book. You know what brought a sleazebag like this together with Edwards? Destiny, that’s what.

Health Care

Amid health reform, massive Medicare agency is still headless

Nine months into his term, President Barack Obama has yet to nominate someone to head an agency that will play an enormous role in implementing any healthcare reform legislation Congress passes this year.

The agency has 4,400 employees, a $676 billion annual budget and a duty to provide healthcare to 44.6 million people enrolled in Medicare, 51 million in Medicaid and 6.3 million in the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). In effect, the nation’s largest health insurer has been without a CEO for three years.

New York Health Care Workers Resist Flu Vaccine Rule

Across the country, federal health officials say, only about 42 percent of all health care workers get an annual flu shot. That is little better than the overall national average of 33 percent and far below the 65 to 70 percent rate for the elderly.

That’s why the emergency regulation adopted this summer by the State Health Department making all hospital, home health and hospice workers get seasonal and swine flu vaccinations was a startling and radical step….Local unions reacted angrily, saying they had not been consulted.

Joel Shufro, executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a coalition of 200 union locals, said the change was presented to them “as a done deal” on Aug. 17. His coalition is still debating suing to stop it, he said.

The unions do not oppose vaccination “but we oppose a mandatory program,” he said. “This is: ‘You don’t get the shot, you’re fired.’ ”

Economics

Another bailout?

Obama open to newspaper bailout bill

The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

The prez says he’s worried about blogs:

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said.

Oh brother! Doesn’t Obama’s administration already have enough influence on the so-called news media?

Obama wants G20 to rethink global economy

“We can’t go back to the era where the Chinese or the Germans or other countries just are selling everything to us, we’re taking out a bunch of credit card debt or home equity loans, but we’re not selling anything to them,” Obama said in an interview with CNN television.

For years before the financial crisis erupted in 2007, economists had warned of the dangers of imbalances in the global economy — namely huge trade surpluses and currency reserves built up by exporters like China, and similarly big deficits in the United States and other economies.

With U.S. consumers now holding back on spending after house prices plunged and as unemployment climbs, Washington wants other countries to become engines of growth.

Afghanistan

This even brought out Bob Woodward. I haven’t seen any stories by him lately, have you? He’s on this one:

McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure’

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

I wonder who leaked this to Woodward? Something tells me it wasn’t the Obama administration. Lately it’s been sounding like the generals aren’t too happy with Obama’s policies. I wonder if he’ll start firing them like Bush did? My guess is he’ll just give them whatever they want. Vietnam II here we come!

Changes Have Obama Rethinking War Strategy

Although Obama endorsed a strategy document in March that called for “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy,” there have been significant changes in Afghanistan and Washington since then. A disputed presidential election, an erosion in support for the war effort among Democrats in Congress and the American public, and a sharp increase in U.S. casualties have prompted the president and his top advisers to reexamine their assumptions about the U.S. role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.

Instead of debating whether to give McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, more troops, the discussion in the White House is now focused on whether, after eight years of war, the United States should vastly expand counterinsurgency efforts along the lines he has proposed — which involve an intensive program to improve security and governance in key population centers — or whether it should begin shifting its approach away from such initiatives and simply target leaders of terrorist groups who try to return to Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, back in the other endless war:

US military deaths in Iraq war at 4,345

Is there a news blackout on Iraq or what? It seems the focus is all the focus on Afghanistan, and there seems to be no coverage of what’s happening in Iraq. It’s disquieting.

Odds and Ends

The Lost Symbol and The DaVinci Code Author Dan Brown’s 20 Worst Sentences

Pretty funny. Dan Brown is a terrible writer!

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

Even if the turnout wasn’t the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck’s life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite “death panel” wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing “socialism.” In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck’s favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, “The 5,000 Year Leap.” A once-famous anti-communist “historian,” Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

“Palinite?” How did Sarah Palin become part of this? Did I miss something?

Ex-Miss California says she’s not a “hater”

Tallest man in the world – 8-foot-1 Sultan Kosen – visits New York City

Insane killer recaptured after escaping during field trip

Bears upset Steelers

The Bears never led the Steelers until 15 ticks remained on the clock Sunday. And then Robbie Gould made it all good with a 44-yard field goal that gave the Bears a 17-14 victory over the defending Super Bowl champion Steelers.

Have a great Monday, even if you’re feeling manic like I am!