If the GOP’s Right Wing Goes After the Party’s Lone Asian-American Congressman — a Vietnamese Immigrant Who Represents a Predominantly African-American (and Democratic) District — Over His Vote in Favor of Democrats’ Health-Care Reform Bill, It Will Risk Further Solidifying the GOP’s Image as a Lily-White, Xenophobic Party That Is Hostile Toward Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans

Standing up for his constituents: Representative Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-Louisiana), pictured here with his wife, Hieu “Kate” Hoang and their children, Sophia (left) and Betsy at their New Orleans home shortly after his history-making election last November as the first Vietnamese-American member of Congress, was the sole House Republican to vote in favor of the Democrats’ health-care reform bill. Cao’s vote has deeply angered right-wing activists both inside and outside the GOP, but in an interview with CNN, Cao — whose district is predominantly African-American and overwhelmingly Democratic — said, “I have always said that I would put aside partisan wrangling to do the business of the people. My vote tonight was based on my priority of doing what is best for my constituents.” (Photo courtesy VietCatholic News)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EST Monday, November 9, 2009)

Updated 1:20 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 10, 2009)

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A ‘SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL

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Addressing thousands of right-wing “Teabagger” activists who staged a protest on Capitol Hill Saturday against the health-care reform bill, House Minority Leader (R-Ohio) branded the measure — which was headed toward a House floor vote on Saturday night — “the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen” and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) confidently predicted that “not one Republican will vote for this bill.”

Cantor, as it turned out hours later, was a tad overconfident.

When the final tally was compiled — 220 votes in favor and 215 votes against — 219 of those “aye” votes were cast by Democrats. The 220th “aye” came from a Republican.

And not your typical Republican who represents a safe, conservative GOP district, either. The House Republican leadership had apparently forgotten that freshman Representative Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-Louisiana) represents an overwhelmingly Democratic district. Not only that, but Cao is the GOP’s only Asian-American member of Congress.

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A BLIZZARD OF RACIST INVECTIVES AGAINST CAO ON WHITE-SUPREMACIST WEB SITE — CLICK HERE

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It was just a year ago when Cao (pronounced “gow”), made history by becoming the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress. In the process, he defeated an African-American incumbent in a predominantly African-American district: nine-term Democrat William Jefferson, who was under federal indictment in a corruption and bribery scandal. Cao edged out Jefferson, 49.6 percent to 46.8 percent (Jefferson was subsequently convicted).

Cao is one of only five Asian-American members of the House. The other four, all Democrats, are Representatives Doris Matsui of California, the widow of the late Representative Robert Matsui, who died in 2005; Judy Chu of California, who won a special election in June to succeed Hilda Solis, who resigned in February to become labor secretary in the Obama administration; Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, a former lieutenant governor; and David Wu of Oregon.

Matsui and Hirono are Japanese; Chu and Wu are Chinese.

JOSEPH CAO: AN AMERICAN SUCCESS STORY

Indeed, the rise of Joseph Cao is a truly American success story. Born Quang Ánh Cao in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1967, he fled South Vietnam as an eight-year-old with his family to the United States when Saigon fell to the Communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in 1975, settling in Houston.

His father, My Quang Cao, was a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Army and was captured by the North Vietnamese when the Vietnam War ended. The elder Cao, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes, would join the rest of the family in Houston following his release from a communist “re-education camp” in 1982.

Cao earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at Baylor University in Waco, his master’s degree in philosophy from Fordham University and, in 2000, his J.D. (Juris Doctorate) from Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans. While in law school, he also taught undergraduate courses in philosophy at Loyola.

CAO: MY CONSTITUENTS HAD TO COME BEFORE MY PARTY

The Republican leadership should have known that there was no way that Cao could vote against the health-care reform bill and expect to get re-elected. Countless numbers of his constituents in Orleans and Jefferson parishes — including the hurricane-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans — were losing their health-care coverage because they could no longer afford their “exploding costs,” Cao said in a statement posted on his Web site.

“Twenty percent of the people in my district are uninsured and we have tremendous health care issues in the district, and I believe this is good for the people of my district,” Cao told Capitol Hill reporters minutes after the vote late Saturday night. “Louisianans need real options for primary care, for mental health care, and for expanded health care for seniors and children.”

In an interview Sunday with CNN, Cao said that he had to put the interests of his constituents ahead of the interests of his party.

Indeed, GOP leaders had known for months that Cao was likely to vote in favor of the bill. In an interview during the summer with The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, Cao acknowledged that voting against the measure would have been politically suicidal for him.

In February, Cao voted against President Obama’s economic stimulus package — a vote that outraged so many of his constituents back home that it put his chances for re-election in 2010 in serious jeopardy. Having been burned once, Cao has since then broken from his party on several occasions. With the health-care reform bill, Cao knew he could not afford to alienate his constituents again.

CAO AGREED TO VOTE ‘YES’ ONLY AFTER ANTI-ABORTION AMENDMENT APPROVED

But Cao had a problem. As a devout Roman Catholic who at one time had studied to become a priest, he could not bring himself to vote “yes” on the measure unless it included a provision sponsored by Representative Bart Stupak (D-Michigan) that bans federal funding for abortions in the government-financed “public option” that would create a new government insurance plan.

Torn between his commitment to his constituents and his devotion to his faith, Cao made it clear to Obama, who had actively lobbied for his support of the measure, that without the anti-abortion language, he would be compelled to vote “no” — and if that meant sacrificing his political career, then so be it. He was prepared to consign himself to being a one-term congressman, if he had to.

In the end, Cao didn’t have to make that choice.

“When that was worked out … I called the White House and said I could possibly support the bill,” said Cao, referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to allow a vote on the Stupak Amendment, which passed 290-194. Liberal House Democrats who were staunch supporters of abortion rights swallowed hard and reluctantly accepted the amendment in the interest of getting the overall bill passed.

(Not surprisingly, the abortion-rights advocacy group NARAL Pro-Choice America denounced the Stupak amendment. Its president, Nancy Keenan, branded the amendment “an outrageous blow to women’s freedom and privacy” and vowed “to fight to remove this provision as the process goes to the Senate.”)

RIGHT-WING HARD-LINERS ATTACK CAO AS ‘TRAITOR,’ VOW TO OUST HIM

Cao’s success in including the anti-abortion amendment in the bill was not enough, however, to satisfy hard-line right-wing “Teabagger” activists, who almost immediately branded him a “traitor” to the conservative cause.

Reader comments posted to conservative Web sites, including that of The American Spectator magazine, where columnist Quin Hillyer wrote a spirited defense of Cao, were riddled with ugly racist invectives, such as one posted by “TruePatriot” that read:

“THE GUY NEEDS TO GO BACK TO LAOS. WE NEED REAL GOD-LOVING CRISTIAN AMERICANS TO RUN THIS COUNTRY, NOT SOME GOOK!”

And this insulting remark by “Spicy Joker” that read:

“The American Sphincter [sic] has lower standards for Cao because it wants to keep a token minority in the Repubic [sic] coalition. If Cao were any other RINO [Republican in mane only] – Lincoln Chafed [sic], Olympia Snowjob [sic], John McPain [sic], Kay Bailout [sic] Hutchison – The American Sphincter [sic] would denounce him as a RINO.”

STEELE WARNS REPUBLICANS WHO STRAY FROM PARTY ORTHODOXY: ‘WE’LL COME AFTER YOU’

GOP national chairman Michael Steele issued a blunt warning last week to any Republican who votes in favor of the Democrats’ health-care reform bill: “You do not want to put yourself in a position where you’re crossing that line on conservative principles, fiscal principles, because we’ll come after you.”

Cao fired back with a thinly-veiled warning of his own that while Steele has the right “to come after those members who do not conform to party lines,” he warned that the GOP would risk losing his district to the Democrats if he went after him. “I would hope that he [Steele] would work with us in order to adjust to the needs of the district and to hold a seat that the Republican Party would need,” Cao told CNN.

The GOP leadership would be making a HUGE mistake in going after Cao for standing up for his constituents instead of standing with his party. As the only Asian-American Republican in all of Congress who represents a predominantly African-American — and overwhelmingly Democratic — district, the GOP can ill-afford to drive Cao out of their ranks, as they did to Dede Scozzafava in upstate New York.

Their standing among black voters is already at rock bottom. They’ve lost the support of Latinos as a result of years of virulent anti-Latino rhetoric coming from the mouths of the party’s more hard-line right-wing firebarands on the immigration issue.

Going after Cao will only further solidify the party’s image as a lily-white, xenophobic party that is hostile toward blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans — especially after Cao’s election was hailed by Republicans only a year ago as an example of the GOP’s “Big Tent.”

It’s looking increasingly like the Republican “Big Tent’ has been torn to shreds and the party is becoming an exclusive club for conservative whites only.

By the way, did anyone notice that the crowd at the “Teabagger” rally on Capitol Hill Saturday was made up almost exclusively of middle-aged-and-older white people — the vast majority of them male? Steele said that the GOP wants to “partner as much as possible” with the “Teabaggers.”

Perhaps Chairman Steele should be thankful that his first name isn’t Thomas, for as far as I’m concerned, he’s become as tragic a figure as the protagonist in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famed pre-Civil War anti-slavery novel — whose title, for the sake of propriety, shall remain unmentioned.

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor & Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

‘Teabaggers’ Aggressively Pushing Hoffman’s Candidacy Prompt Poll Workers in Two Towns in 23rd Congressional District to Call the Cops to Stop Them From Violating State Law Against Campaigning Within 100 Feet of Voting Stations; Backlash Against $2 Million Ad Blitz By Outsiders May Have Cost Hoffman the Race

A blizzard of campaign TV ads by out-of-state political groups, such as this one by the right-wing Club for Growth that attacked both Republican Dede Scozzafava and Democrat Bill Owens as “too liberal,” — combined with aggressive “robocalls” supporting Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman — proved to be a major turn-off to many voters in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. Resentment toward the “outsiders” boiled over on Election Day, when poll workers in at least two towns called police to keep supporters of Hoffman from violating a state law that bans campaigning within 100 feet of voting stations. (Photo courtesy CNN)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EST Thursday, November 5, 2009)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Right-wing groups and conservative Republican leaders — having forced out the official GOP nominee in a special election for an upstate New York congressional seat because they considered her “too liberal” — thought they had the election in the bag with their $2 million advertising campaign on behalf of the Conservative Party candidate.

But in the end, the voters of the sprawling district, the largest in the Northeast, had other ideas — and in the process, made a bit of history.

Not since before the Civil War, more than 140 years ago, has New York’s 23rd Congressional District been represented by a Democrat — until now.

In a hotly-contested election that saw as many twists and turns as a soap opera, Democrat Bill Owens — with the dramatic, 11th-hour backing of the ousted Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava — defeated Conservative Doug Hoffman to serve the unfinished term of moderate Republican John McHugh, who resigned in June to serve as secretary of the Army in the Obama administration.

With all the ballots in the nationally-watched contest counted, Owens garnered 49 percent of the vote to Hoffman’s 45 percent. Scozzafava, who threw the race into uncertainty with her stunning withdrawal on Saturday and her equally dramatic endorsement of Owens on Sunday, still managed to draw six percent of the vote.

The race was touted as a test of strength of the right-wing “Tea Party” movement — whose members are referred to, with some derision, as “Teabaggers” — which made headlines this past summer with their noisy protests at town-hall forums on health-care reform and which has declared an all-out jihad against Republicans whom they see as too liberal.

But in the end, at least for this year, the “Teabaggers” — nearly all of whom came from outside the state — lost. They lost because they simply didn’t know the district. In fact, they ruffled more than a few feathers with their overly aggressive campaign against Owens and Scozzafava and in favor of Hoffman.

HOFFMAN SUPPORTERS VIOLATE ‘NO-ELECTIONEERING’ ZONES AT POLLING STATIONS

In turns out that some of Hoffman’s supporters weren’t following the rules — and ended up getting the cops called on them. According to the Watertown Daily Times, elections officials in at least two towns in the district called police to get members of an anti-abortion group supporting Hoffman to move beyond the 100-foot perimeter of the voting stations.

State law prohibits overt campaigning — or, as the law defines it, “electioneering” — within 100 feet of a voting station. Members of the anti-abortion group were distributing pamphlets urging voters to cast their ballot for Hoffman, a hard-line social conservative who declares on his campaign Web site that “I am pro-life, period” and that he strongly opposes same-gender marriage.

Joy Yearout, a spokeswoman for the group, the Susan B. Anthony List, disputed the elections officials’ reasoning for calling the police, telling the Daily Times one of her volunteers in Fowler encountered police officers without incident. “The police came and said he was fine,” she said.

Yearout accused elections officials of being “overzealous” and of “using the only tool they have, and that’s intimidation.”

OTHER VIOLATIONS BY HOFFMAN PARTISANS REPORTED IN DISTRICT

The 23rd Congressional District in the northeastern portion of the state, is a sprawling area that includes all or parts of Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lewis, Madison, Oneida, Oswego and St. Lawrence counties. It includes the cities of Ogdensburg, Oswego, Plattsburgh (part of the Greater Burlington, Vermont metropolitan area) and Watertown. The district includes most of the Adirondack Mountains and the Thousand Islands region, and borders Canada to the north.

In Watertown, the county seat of Jefferson County, the two county commissioners in charge of elections personally responded to complaints of violations of the 100-foot rule by Hoffman partisans at three voting stations. Noting that the pro-Hoffman volunteers were from out-of-state, the commissioners informed them of the 100-foot rule, set up signs marking the voting station boundary and politely told the Hoffman partisans to stay outside the boundary lines.

In Lewis County, elections officials ordered the removal of Hoffman campaign signs that were placed within the 100-foot perimeter of a Lowville voting station.

Elaine McLear, a Lewis County elections commissioner, was unhappy with what she saw as a lack of discipline by the Hoffman campaign. “I just feel like the candidate should have their workers under control,” McLear told the Daily Times. “There are ways to handle things, and we had to do what we thought was proper.”

BLIZZARD OF TV ATTACK ADS, ‘ROBOCALLS’ A HUGE TURN-OFF TO VOTERS

The apparent overzealousness of Hoffman campaign workers on election day may have had an  adverse effect on the final outcome. Although there were no exit polls conducted in the district, local newspapers were filled with editorials and letters to the editor complaining bitterly about what many in the district said was a level of campaign nastiness they had never seen before in a local election.

Local TV and radio stations across the district — from Syracuse to Burlington — were saturated during the final two weeks of the campaign with campaign attack ads in a frenzied blitzkrieg by right-wing out-of-state groups to the prevent the House seat from going to either Owens or Scozzafava — concentrating their fire most heavily on Scozzafava.

Some of the nastiest ads were by the right-wing Club for Growth, which saturated the airwaves with ads attacking both Owens and Scozzafava as “too liberal.”

But by far the single most controversial ad of the campaign was one that, at first glance, appeared to be an endorsement of Scozzafava by a liberal group — but turned out instead to be a “dirty trick” ad by conservative billionaire Arkansas businessman Jackson T. (Steve) Stephens, Jr., member of the board of directors of the Club for Growth — which heavily backed Hoffman.

Stephens, president and CEO of the Little Rock, Arkansas-based pharmaceutical company ExOxEmis, Inc. and a longtime contributor to conservative Republican candidates, personally donated $4,800  — the legal maximum under New York state election law — to Hoffman’s campaign, and is one of the Club for Growth’s leading donors, according to records on file with the Federal Election Commission.

Also annoying to voters was a massive blitz of automated telephone calls — known as “robocalls” — featuring the recorded voices of former Alaska Governor and GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and former Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tennessee), who urged voters to cast their votes for Hoffman.

The right-wing activists tried their best to scare voters by bringing up House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a liberal bogeyman. But although the 23rd Congressional district has been a solidly Republican district for more than 140 years, it’s not a solidly conservative one — as evidenced by President Obama carrying the district in last year’s election and Owens’ victory on Tuesday.

Moreover, McHugh, the wildly popular Republican who vacated the seat — he won re-election last year by a 65 percent landslide — is a moderate.

HOFFMAN IS NO JAMES BUCKLEY — OR BARRY GOLDWATER

Conservatives were hoping to repeat the feat of James L. Buckley, the older brother of  the late conservative commentator and National Review magazine publisher William F. Buckley, who in 1970 was elected to the U.S. Senate on the Conservative Party line with 38 percent of the vote, defeating a liberal Republican incumbent, Charles Goodell and a liberal Democrat, Richard Ottinger, to become the first — and to date, the only — third-party candidate to win a statewide election in New York.

Buckley was ousted six years later by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Ironically, Buckley, now 86 and a retired federal judge, would be considered a “squishy moderate” or even a “liberal” by the hard-line conservatives of today — as was the late former Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), the 1964 Republican presidential nominee considered “the godfather of the conservative movement.”

Although considered a right-wing extremist in the 1960s for his strident opposition to nuclear arms control and civil-rights legislation, Goldwater was really an old-fashioned libertarian conservative — whose libertarian views on social issues in his later years outraged many social conservatives. He endorsed Democrat Karan English in an Arizona congressional race in 1994, urged Republicans to lay off President Bill Clinton over the Whitewater scandal and criticized the military’s ban on gays.

“Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar,” he said. “You don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.” He further angered social conservatives by testifying before the city council of his hometown of Phoenix in favor of an ordinance to ban discrimination against gays and backing a statewide voter initiative to legalize medical marijuana.

In a 1994 interview with the Washington Post the retired senator said, “When you say ‘radical right’ today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.”

Goldwater finally broke outright from social conservatives — particularly the Religious Right — a few months before his death in 1996 when he bluntly warned them: “Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you’ve hurt the Republican Party much more than the Democrats have.” He told Bob Dole, whose own presidential campaign that year received lukewarm support from social conservatives, “We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?”

The ideological rigidity of today’s conservatives — as embodied in the “Tebagger” movement — may prove fatal to the Republican Party in the long run.

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Volume IV, Number 84

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

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Republican Candidate Pulls Out a Day After Right-Wing Group Pulls Dirty Trick With TV Ad Disguised as Liberal Group Praising Her Support for Abortion Rights and Same-Gender Marriage; With Less Than 24 Hours to Go Before Voters in Upstate New York’s 23rd Congressional District Go to the Polls, Can Democrat Bill Owens Prevent the Right’s Takeover Of a District That Obama Carried a Year Ago?

Conceding defeat to the Far Right: Republican Dede Scozzafava announced Saturday that she had halted her campaign in Tuesday’s House special election in New York’s 23rd congressional district, after pre-election polls showed her losing badly to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman — and a day after a right-wing group pulled a dirty trick by airing a last-minute TV ad under the guise of a liberal group praising Scozzafava as “the best choice for progressives,” citing her support for abortion rights and same-gender marriage. Scores of right-wing out-of-state groups, including the Club for Growth and the Republican Trust Political Action Committee, have thrown their support behind Hoffman — a stunning demonstration of the right-wing domination of the national GOP. (Photo: AP)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EST Monday, November 2, 2009)

By SKEETER SANDERS

In a stunning victory for the right-wing “Teabagger” movement’s all-out jihad to purge the Republican Party of its last remaining moderates and Northeastern liberals, GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava announced Saturday that she was dropping out of the campaign for Tuesday’s hotly-contested special election in upstate New York’s 23rd congressional district.

Scozzafava — citing polls showing her badly trailing both Democratic candidate Bill Owens and Conservative Party nominee Douglas Hoffman — said that she was pulling out of the nationally-watched contest because her campaign lacked the money to respond to a last-minute blizzard of  TV and radio ads by right-wing, out-of-state groups backing Hoffman and attacking both Owens and Scozzafava.

Her withdrawal announcement also came just a day after an ostensibly pro-Scozzafava TV ad hit the airwaves, urging liberal voters to support her candidacy, specifically citing Scozzafava’s support for abortion rights and same-gender marriage — which are both anathema to hard-line social conservatives who form the backbone of the GOP’s still-shrinking voter base.

SCOZZAFAVA: I DON’T HAVE THE MONEY TO FIGHT BACK SMEARS AGAINST ME

In a sometimes-emotional press conference, Scozzafava told reporters that “The reality that I’ve come to accept is that in today’s political arena, [is that] you must be able to back up your message with money — and as I’ve been outspent on both sides, I’ve been unable to effectively address many of the charges that have been made about my record.

“It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support,” she said. “Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so. I am and have always been a proud Republican.”

Scozzafava’s decision to pull out came just hours after the release of a Siena Research Institute poll showing  that her support had crumbled since September.

The poll, conducted from Tuesday through Thursday of last week, showed Owens holding a razor-thin one-point lead over Hoffman, 36 percent to 35 percent. Scozzafava trailed far behind at 20 percent, with only nine percent of voters still undecided.

The results marked a dramatic reversal from the end of September, when Scozzafava led with 35 percent, owens second at 28 percent and Hoffman trailing with 16 percent.

Many observers attribute Scozzfava’s reversal with the blizzard of attack ads against her by the Club For Growth and other right-wing groups, including the highly combative National Republican Trust Political Action Committee — which became notorious last year for its last-minute fusillade of attack ads against Obama that brought up the president’s controversial former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in open defiance of GOP nominee John McCain’s strict ban on his campaign bringing up the now-retired minister, out of fear of being accused of “race-baiting.”

A LAST-MINUTE ‘DIRTY TRICK’ AD MAY HAVE SEALED SCOZZAFAVA’S FATE

Scozzafava’s fate, however, may have been sealed on Friday, when a last-minute TV ad hit the airwaves that appeared, at first glance, to be an endorsement of the liberal Republican, calling her “the best choice for progressives.”

The ad, which claimed to have been produced and paid for by a group calling itself “Common Sense in America LLC,” praised Scozzafava for her support of Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package. But then it also lauded her support for abortion rights and cites her as “the only candidate who supports marriage equality” — same-gender marriage — as a rainbow flag, a universally recognized symbol of the gay community, appeared in the background behind a pair of wedding rings.

Within hours after the ads began airing, “Common Sense in America LLC” — not to be confused with the conservative media watchdog Common Sense America or with the libertarian group Common Sense For America —  was quickly exposed as a front group for billionaire Arkansas businessman Jackson T. (Steve) Stephens, Jr., a board member of the right-wing Club for Growth — which is heavily backing Hoffman.

Stephens, president and CEO of the Little Rock, Arkansas-based pharmaceutical company ExOxEmis, Inc. and a longtime contributor to conservative Republican candidates, personally donated $4,800  — the legal maximum under New York state election law — to Hoffman’s campaign, and is one of the Club for Growth’s leading donors, according to records on file with the Federal Election Commission.

A trace of the telephone number for “Common Sense in America” displayed near the end of the ad turns out to be that of the Little Rock headquarters of ExOxEmis.

RIGHT-WING ATTACK ADS SATURATE TV, RADIO STATIONS ACROSS DISTRICT

The 23rd Congressional District in the northeastern portion of the state, is a sprawling area that includes all or parts of Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lewis, Madison, Oneida, Oswego and St. Lawrence counties. It includes the cities of Ogdensburg, Oswego, Plattsburgh (part of the Greater Burlington, Vermont metropolitan area) and Watertown. The district includes most of the Adirondack Mountains and the Thousand Islands region, and borders Canada to the north.

Local TV and radio stations across the district — from Syracuse to Burlington — have been saturated for the past two weeks with campaign attack ads in a frenzied blitzkrieg by right-wing groups to the prevent the House seat vacated by John McHugh from going to either Owens or Scozzafava — but have concentrated their fire most heavily on Scozzafava.

McHugh, a popular moderate Republican who easily won re-election by a 65 percent landslide last year, stepped down in June after he was nominated by President Obama to serve as secretary of the Army, but wasn’t confirmed by the Senate until September. Before moving to the Obama administration, McHugh was the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.

McHugh’s departure from Capitol Hill left the 29-member New York House delegation with only two Republicans. A Hoffman victory in tomorrow’s special election would be a major upset, in that Republicans are nearly invisible in the two regions of the country — the other is the West Coast — where Democrats dominate not only its congressional delegation, but also the region’s state legislatures and governorships.

Moreover, Republican officeholders in the Northeast — because Democrats so thoroughly dominate the region — have, out of electoral necessity, been more moderate than Republicans in the rest of the country, particularly on social issues.

N.Y. RACE PART OF RIGHT-WING PURGE OF GOP NATIONWIDE

Scozzafava’s apparent defeat is the most dramatic display yet of what appears to be a nationwide attempt by the hard-line right-wing “tea party” movement to purge the GOP of all of its last remaining moderates and Northeastern liberals. The movement asserts that Scozzafava, because of her support for abortion rights and same-gender marriage, is far too liberal and does not belong in the party.

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele appeared to give at least tacit approval Friday to the purge, telling Politico.com that a Hoffman victory is essentially a Republican Party victory. “You’ve got two Republicans running in that race. My upside is that one of them will likely win,” Steele said. “We want to be supporting the one that wins.”

In Missouri, Liz Lauber, running in the Republican primary to unseat five-term Republican incumbent Representative Todd Akin, made support for Hoffman a major campaign issue last week, issuing a direct challenge to Akin to endorse and donate money to the Conservative Party nominee — which Akin promptly did.

A spokesman for Akin, however, insisted that the congressman’s endorsement was not a response to Lauber’s challenge, but rather to “calls received from constituents asking where the congressman stood on the race.”

Spokesman Steve Taylor told The Washington Times that “It would be difficult to surpass the lawmaker when it comes to conservative credentials — he has a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union and has routinely voted to limit the size of government.”

In Florida, moderate Republican Governor Charlie Crist is being challenged in the 2010 GOP Senate primary by conservative Marco Rubio, a former speaker of the Florida House or Representatives, who has made an issue of Crist’s outspoken support for the president’s economic stimulus package.

But Rubio could be hurt by another hot-button issue among conservatives — immigration.

Rubio is a Miami-born Cuban-American contesting for the Senate seat that was vacated by another Miami-born Cuban-American: Mel Martinez, who resigned in August for what he said were “personal reasons,’ but amid widespread rumors that Martinez had become disillusioned with the GOP after a bitter feud with hard-line right-wing nativists within the party over immigration during his tenure as GOP national chairman from November 2006 until he quit the post in October 2007.

The nastiness over the immigration issue, with thinly-disguised overtones of anti-Latino bias, has caused a deep rift to develop between the GOP and Latino voters, including the conservative, longtime Republican-friendly Cuban-American community in southern Florida — and may have been a factor in Martinez’s resignation.

(Crist appointed George LeMieux to serve out the remainder of Martinez’s term. LeMieux declared he would not seek a full six-year term in his own right.)

WITH SCOZZAFAVA OUT, CAN OWENS DRAW ENOUGH MODERATES TO STOP HOFFMAN?

With Scozzafava now out of the race — although her name will remain on the ballot — the question immediately arises: Can Owens draw enough support from moderate Republicans and independents in the district turned off by Hoffman’s social views — and his strong backing from hard-line right-wing outsiders — to stop him tomorrow?

With polls showing the race too close to call, a last-minute push by top Democratic heavyweights for Owens — including an Election Eve campaign swing  through the district today (Monday) by Vice President Joe Biden — is certain to add to the drama.  

And in a new round of TV and radio ads, liberal groups, including Accountable America, attempt to tie Hoffman to the Wall Street financial crisis. Meanwhile, MoveOn.org has launched a fundraising drive to defeat Hoffman, who the group says represents “teabaggers and hate groups.”

It could become a very long night on Tuesday.

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Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

With Lieberman Vowing to Join GOP Filibuster to Block the Public Option in Open Defiance of Public Opinion — and House Democrats Vowing They Won’t Pass Health-Care Reform Bill Without It — Senate Democrats Have No Choice But to Invoke the So-Called ‘Nuclear Option’ and Force a Vote on the Bill by a Simple Majority

Senate Democrats should have known that Democrat-turned-independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut — photographed above with Republican presidential nominee John McCain (left) on the campaign trail last year — could not always be counted on to support them on important domestic legislation. Now that Lieberman has declared that he will join a Republican filibuster against a government-run health-insurance plan to compete with private insurers — robbing Democrats of a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority — Senate Democrats have no choice now but to invoke a parliamentary maneuver known as the “nuclear option”  — which Republicans threatened to use in 2005 to stop Democratic filibusters against then-President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees — to force a vote on the bill by a simple majority. (Photo: Matt Rourke/Associated Press)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Thursday, October 29, 2009)

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A ‘SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL

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If Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) proved anything, he showed Senate Democrats on Tuesday that he cannot be trusted.

The Democrat-turned-independent infuriated many of his former fellow Democrats last year when he endorsed and campaigned openly for Republican presidential nominee John McCain. And he remains a sharp critic of President Obama’s foreign policy — particularly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now he’s joined the Republicans in an expected filibuster against the health-care reform bill in an effort to block the so-called public option, a government-run health-insurance plan that would compete directly with private insurers.

That Lieberman is openly defying public opinion, in which a solid majority of Americans support a public option, is beside the point. By siding with the GOP in their implacable opposition to a public option, Lieberman has robbed the Democrats of the filibuster-proof 60-vote majority they need to pass the bill.

NO MATTER WHAT, HEALTH-CARE REFORM MUST PASS — OR ELSE

On any other issue, the Democrats would bow to political reality and concede defeat. But in the case of health-care reform, defeat is not an acceptable option. The demand for health-care reform by the American public is too overwhelming to be denied.

Too many Americans are literally going broke because they cannot afford the skyrocketing cost of health care.

A growing number of businesses — both large and small — are being forced to stop offering health-care plans to their employees because they can no longer afford the soaring cost, either.

That threatens to prolong the recession for months — even years — by slamming the door on job creation. Consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of the U.S. economy, cannot and will not grow back to its pre-recession levels as long as 15 to 20 million Americans remain out of work and another five to ten million fear losing their jobs.

And for Americans in potentially life-threatening situations, the increasing unaffordability of health care can literally be a matter of life or death.

The bottom line is that health-care reform must pass — and it must pass this year — or else.

Obama has staked his presidency on it. Many House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have vowed that they won’t allow any health-care reform measure without a public option to reach the president’s desk — even though the most aggressive of the three public-option plans most favored by liberals lacks the necessary 218 votes to pass.

Under these circumstances, therefore, Senate Democrats no longer have any choice but to do something that up to now they have been loathe to do — something that the Republicans, when they controlled the Senate, threatened to impose in 2005.

That something is the so-called “nuclear option” — a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver whereby the majority votes to change Senate rules and force a vote on a measure by a simple majority.

‘NUCLEAR OPTION’ BASED ON 1957 NIXON OPINION WHILE VEEP

The “nuclear option” — so named by then-Senator Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) in 2005 — is based on a 1957 advisory opinion by then-Vice President Richard Nixon, serving in his capacity as president of the Senate, that no Senate may constitutionally enact a rule that deprives a future Senate of the right to approve its own rules by the vote of a simple majority.

The Constitution specifies that, except for the ratification of treaties and constitutional amendments and the override of presidential vetoes of legislation — in which case, a two-thirds majority is required — the Senate is free to establish its own rules for parliamentary procedure.  

Although legally nonbinding, Nixon’s opinion has been treated by the Senate ever since as a definitive precedent.

Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled as far back as 1892, in United States v. Ballin, that both houses of Congress are parliamentary bodies, implying that they may make procedural rules by a simple majority vote.

HOW THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION’ WORKS

The “nuclear option” is used in response to a filibuster or other dilatory tactic. A senator makes a point of order calling for an immediate vote on the measure before the body, outlining what circumstances allow for this.

The presiding officer of the Senate — usually the vice president of the United States or the president pro tempore — makes a parliamentary ruling upholding the senator’s point of order. The Constitution is cited at this point, since otherwise the presiding officer is bound by precedent.

A supporter of the filibuster may challenge the ruling by asking, “Is the decision of the Chair to stand as the judgment of the Senate?” This is referred to as “appealing from the Chair.” An opponent of the filibuster will then move to table the appeal. As tabling is non-debatable, a vote is held immediately. A simple majority decides the issue.

If the appeal is successfully tabled, then the presiding officer’s ruling that the filibuster is unconstitutional is thereby upheld. Thus a simple majority is able to cut off debate, and the Senate moves to a vote on the substantive issue under consideration.

GOP THREATENED TO ‘GO NUCLEAR’ TO HALT FILIBUSTERS OF BUSH’S JUDICIAL NOMINEES

The one danger with invoking the “nuclear option” is the fact that it is not limited to the single question under consideration, as it would be in a cloture vote. Rather, the “nuclear option” is a change in the rules of the Senate that would effectively bar future filibusters.

It was fear of the “nuclear option” doing away with filibusters altogether that prompted fourteen moderate senators — seven from each party — to join forces in 2005 to block an attempt by then-majority Republicans to invoke the “nuclear option” to force confirmation votes on ten judicial nominations made by then-President George W. Bush who were blocked by filibusters by minority Democrats.

Democrats blocked the confirmation of the ten on the grounds that they were too “out of the mainstream” — in other words,  too far right-wing — for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. At the beginning of his second term, Bush resubmitted seven of the 10 names.

Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), then the Senate minority leader, vowed to fight their confirmation. Senator Bill Frist (R-Tennessee), then the majority leader,  threatened to use the “nuclear option” to get the nominees confirmed.

The fourteen centrist senators — who came to be known as the “Gang of 14” — forged an agreement whereby the seven Democrats among them would no longer vote along with their party on filibustering judicial nominees (except in “extraordinary circumstances”), and in turn the seven Republicans among them would break with the Republican leadership on voting for the “nuclear option.”

The agreement by the “Gang of 14” robbed both parties of their leverage and forced them to back down. As a result, five of the filibustered Bush nominees were confirmed. The other five withdrew after it became clear that their nominations would not be voted on.

FAILURE IS NOT ACCEPTABLE — HEALTH-CARE REFORM WITH PUBLIC OPTION MUST PASS

For Democrats, failure to pass a health-care reform bill with a public option is simply not acceptable. A solid 57 percent majority of Americans supports it, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News Poll, with senior citizens and independent voters — two important voting blocs whom Democrats cannot afford to alienate — favor a public option most strongly.

For Republicans, stopping a health-care reform bill — with or without a public option — is not acceptable, either. Nearly two-thirds of Americans strongly disapprove of the GOP’s performance in the health-care debate, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, with nearly four times as many Americans likely to blame Republicans than to blame Democrats if health-care reform fails to pass.

With Lieberman’s defection to the GOP on the public option, Senate Democrats have no choice: They must “go nuclear” and force a simple-majority vote. With the “Gang of 14” — its ranks reduced to 11 since 2006 — unlikely to intervene, the only way to stop the “nuclear option” is with a quorum call requiring 51 senators to be present. With only 4o senators, the Republicans cannot muster the 51 absent senators required to stop business.

Americans cannot wait another generation for health-care reform. It must pass, with a public option, this year — or else there will be hell to pay in next year’s midterm elections.

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor & Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Like Cheney Before Him, Biden Is Using His Long Expertise in Washington to Influence Obama on Both Foreign and Domestic Policy and Is Keeping Much of the Power Cheney Amassed, But Unlike His Predecessor — Who Raised Questions About Who Was Really in Charge of the Bush White House — Biden Isn’t Throwing His Weight Around

When Barack Obama chose Joe Biden as his vice-presidential running mate last year, many commentators at the time believed that on many issues — particularly foreign policy — Biden’s long experience would compensate for Obama’s perceived weaknesses. Sure enough, after ten months in office, Biden has emerged as the president’s right-hand man on both foreign and domestic policy, while at the same time retaining much of the power that was amassed by his predecessor, Dick Cheney — without displaying the kind of arrogant hubris that caused many to question who was really in charge of the Bush administration. Biden has even succeeded to a certain extent in curbing his notorious habit of making shoot-from-the-hip public remarks that have gotten him in trouble in the past. But the Obama-Biden partnership faces a real test in the coming days over the war in Afghanistan. (Photo: Reuters)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, October 26, 2009)

By MATTHEW MOSK

The Washington Times

Shortly after he took office in January, Joe Biden invited a handful of experts on the vice presidency into his newly-occupied official residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory to seek their advice.

“He essentially said, ‘Look, previous vice presidents seem to leave office somewhat diminished from when they come in,’ ” recalled Jody Baumgartner, a professor of American politics at East Carolina University, who flew in for the gathering. “He made it clear, this is not necessarily a thing of protecting my legacy, but more, ‘What is the job, and how could I do it better?’ ”

What has emerged after ten months in office, Baumgartner and others agreed, is a powerful version of the vice presidency by the former Democratic senator from Delaware that bears its most striking — if unlikely — resemblance to the one that immediately preceded it, that of Republican Dick Cheney.

In short order, Biden has, like Cheney, turned the office into a central hub for a dizzying array of political and policy decisions, ranging from advising President Obama on Iraq and his Supreme Court pick to helping devise strategy on the economic recovery, on relations with Russia and, most recently, on the approach to war in Afghanistan.

Call it “Cheney Lite” – a vice presidency that has retained much of the power, while so far escaping the role of lightning rod for partisan critics and avoiding any whiff of ambiguity about who is really running the country. Much like the man who came before him, Biden has dipped repeatedly into a deep reserve of Washington experience to help the president push his policies.

“I would say that Dick Cheney and Joe Biden have brought the vice presidency to a new level,” said Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a close friend of Biden. “It’s unusual for vice presidents to play as big a role as Cheney did for Bush, or that Biden is playing for Obama. It’s up a notch from [former Vice President Al] Gore, for example. They’re playing bigger roles and gaining much more public exposure.”

That exposure was on full display last week, when Biden hustled to Eastern Europe after the administration had botched its announcement of a major shift in the missile-defense installations championed by former President George W. Bush.

BIDEN CAPITALIZES ON HIS LONG EXPERIENCE

Trading on long-standing friendships built during his years as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden — who’ll turn 67 on November 20 — quickly defused the flap, providing the precise reassurance that Poland and the Czech Republic needed to feel comfortable with the new approach.

Specialists on the region said they can think of few figures in Washington who would have carried into office the trust of so many foreign leaders.

“He’s more credible with these countries than anybody,” said Daniel Hamilton, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs. “He’s it. He’s the guy.”

It is a byproduct of that experience that has led Obama to rely heavily on his second-in-command. He repeatedly has been dispatched overseas to smooth over sticky situations. He flew to Iraq when local officials began to express concerns that their conflict was being pushed to the back burner. He went to the Ukraine after the president rattled nerves with his outreach to Russia. He went to Lebanon and Bosnia to reassure government officials that they were not going to be forgotten.

Antony J. Blinken, the vice president’s top national security adviser, said recently that he has seen Biden assume “a central role” on the foreign-policy team.

“You’ll recall that he went to, at the [then-]president-elect’s request, went to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq in January before the inaugural. He gave the — again, at the president’s request — the first major foreign-policy speech of this administration, February at the Munich conference,” Blinken said.

“And since then,” he continued, “at the president’s request, he’s been virtually all over the world as a core member of the team, to the Balkans, to Europe, repeatedly to Iraq, where the president has asked him to oversee the Iraq policy, to South and Central America, and now to Central Europe.”

BIDEN, OBAMA FORMING A CLOSE ‘TAG TEAM’

When in Washington, Biden sees the president almost every day. They attend the same economic and security briefings, dine together often, and appear outwardly to be very much on the same page.

That bond has occasionally been tested by Biden’s renowned lack of discipline when speaking publicly. (At the very moment Obama was trying to thaw relations with Russia, Biden told the Wall Street Journal he saw Russia’s economy as “withering.”) Last week, when Biden tried to pull back a dismissive comment about Cheney he made during an interview with The Washington Times, he insisted he was “getting a little bit better” at holding his tongue.

The relationship could face a much more serious test in coming days.

Biden has emerged on one side of a roiling debate within the president’s national security team over how best to proceed in Afghanistan. While the president’s top military advisers have been urging the president to adopt a far more aggressive approach to the conflict — one that would involve sending tens of thousands of additional troops — Biden has advised a different strategy.

His recommendations have focused more on bulking up the effort in Pakistan, while limiting efforts in Afghanistan to securing urban areas and targeting the limited population of al-Qaida who still operate there.

The vice president’s supporters believe it is a sensible approach — the least bad of a series of unforgiving choices facing the president in Afghanistan. Critics, such as conservative author and blogger Tom Ricks, argue that Biden has been consistently wrong on Iraq, starting with his opposition to the 1991 Gulf War and continuing with his support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then with the various policy recommendations he made that followed.

“That doesn’t mean he certainly is wrong on Afghanistan,” Ricks said. “But it means that his track record should be kept in mind.”

After five lengthy review sessions and another expected, it remains a fight the vice president very well could lose.

A BREAK FROM CHENEY ON STYLE, IF NOT ON SUBSTANCE

Much as Cheney did when Bush ignored his strong advice against talking to the Iranians and went against his advice in making a deal with the North Koreans, Biden says he will fight his battles privately, not in public. When asked by The Washington Times whether he would consider his role diminished if the president dismisses his advice on the Afghan strategy, Biden said it’s not ever something he considered.

“I’d be surprised if he publicly dismissed anything I had to say, number one. Number two, look, I knew when I signed on as vice president that he is the president. The only thing, the only guarantee I got, and that he’s kept, is that I get the opportunity on every important decision to be in on the deal, to give him the benefit or lack thereof of my opinion.

“The truth of the matter is,” Biden continued, “that he has kept that deal. He has sought my opinion; not generically, but in detail. And if he reaches a different conclusion than I do, that’s OK. He’s the president.”

Baumgartner, the professor who met early on with the vice president about his approach to the job, said he thinks Biden may have attempted to portray himself as someone ready to dial back the profile of a job that had become supercharged under Cheney.

Given Cheney’s dismal popularity ratings — and the former vice president’s continuing public sniping at the Obama administration’s foreign policy — that move seemed almost a given.

“He made it sound like he was going to be going back to the traditional vice president,” Baumgarten said. “The surprise has been, I think, that he’s actually taking a far more active role than anyone expected.”

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Volume IV, Number 81

Special Report Copyright 2009, News World Communications, Inc. Re-posted by permission.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. all rights reserved.

Washington Post/ABC News Poll Finds 57 Percent Favor Government-Run Health-Care Plan to Compete With Private Insurers; Separate Poll Finds Even Stronger Support, at 77 Percent; Republicans in Deep Trouble as Identification With Party Falls to 20 Percent — and Americans Are More Likely to Blame GOP if Health-Care Reform Fails to Pass

What’s a Republican elephant to do? The GOP’s efforts to scuttle the Democrats’ plans for health-care reform in Congress — particularly a government-run plan that would compete directly with private insurers — is running up against public opinion. Two new polls have found solid majorities of Americans supporting a “public option” by wide margins. Even worse for the GOP, the polls also show that the party’s voter base has shrunk to 20 percent — the lowest in more than 25 years — and that most Americans have no confidence in Republicans’ ability to make the right decisions for the future of the nation. (Illustration courtesy FreedomsPhoenix.com)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Thursday, October 22, 2009)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Republicans on Capitol Hill who are fighting to prevent the Democrats’ proposals for health-care reform, particularly the so-called “public option,” from becoming law are finding themselves on the outs with public opinion –again. At least three new polls show that the public strongly disapproves of the GOP’s performance in the health-care debate.

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has bounced back from losses incurred over the summer and now stands at a solid 57 percent majority. Forty percent are opposed.

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows a nearly two-thirds majority disapproves of how congressional Republicans are handling the issue of health care overhaul, while just 21 percent said they approve.

The poll also found that nearly four times as many Americans would blame the GOP than would blame the Democrats if Congress fails to pass health-care reform.

More alarming for Republicans in the long run, the Washington Post/ABC News poll found that fewer Americans now identify themselves as Republicans than at any time since 1983, with Republicans now comprising only 20 percent of the electorate.

The findings represent a seven-point drop in voter identification with the GOP since a similar poll released 20 months ago by the Pew Center for the People and the Press.

The Post/ABC poll found that a staggering 79 percent of Americans expressed a lack of confidence in the GOP’s ability to make the right decisions for the future of the nation, while just 19 percent expressed full confidence in the the Republicans.

Among independent voters — without whom neither party can win the White House or a congressional majority — Republicans fare even worse, with more than four out of every five independents voicing no confidence in the GOP.

INSURANCE MANDATE WITH ‘PUBLIC OPTION’ POPULAR, BUT SPLITS REMAIN ON OTHER PLANS

Support for a “public option” is running particularly strong among two voting blocs the GOP has been targeting for weeks in their drive to defeat it: Independents and seniors, with the poll showing the option drawing particularly strong support if it is administered by the states, rather than by the federal government, and if it is targeted specifically to Americans who can’t afford private health insurance.

Under those two circumstances, support for a “public option” soars to 76 percent — with even 56 percent of Republicans in favor.

Despite what appears to be solid support for the “public option” and for a proposal to make health insurance mandatory for all Americans, the public remains sharply divided about the five health-care reform bills now pending in Congress, according to the Post/ABC poll, reflecting a sharply partisan split over what President Obama has called his top legislative priority.

The Post/ABC News poll found that the bills have 45 percent support, while 48 percent oppose them, roughly unchanged from a previous poll released in August. The partisan divide over the bills is both predictable and stark: Over 70 percent of Democrats support the plans, while nearly 90 percent of Republicans oppose it. Independents have more mixed feelings about the plan, with 42 percent in favor and 52 percent opposed.

LIBERALS ADAMANT: NO REFORM WITHOUT ‘PUBLIC OPTION’

However, the proportion of Democrats in favor of the plan is down from 46 percent recorded in September, perhaps reflecting a growing impatience among liberals with President Obama over the “public option.”

Liberal Democrats — particularly in the House — have made it clear that they won’t accept any final health-care reform bill that does not contain a “public option” — which is fiercely opposed by Republicans and conservative Senate Democrats. The new poll numbers are likely to harden the liberals’ resolve.

That impatience among liberals is also being reflected in Obama’s job-approval ratings among his fellow Democrats on the health-care reform issue. The Post/ABC News poll found that the president’s rating fell among his fellow Democrats by 15 points from a high of 85 percent last month.

GOP’S RATINGS ON HEALTH CARE REMAIN DISMAL . . .

Evan as the president and Capitol Hill Democrats continue to struggle on a final health-care reform bill, their Republican rivals are faring very poorly on the issue, with a solid 65 percent majority in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll disapproving of the GOP’s handling of the health-care issue.  Only 21 percent approve.

The new numbers show a three-percentage-point worsening of the public’s disapproval of the Republicans’ handling of the health-care reform issue since September, when 62 percent disapproved. The percentage who approved remained unchanged.

More ominous for the GOP, the Journal/NBC News poll found that if Congress fails to pass health-care reform, nearly four times as many Americans would hold congressional Republicans responsible for the reform plan’s failure (37 percent) than they would the president  (10 percent) or congressional Democrats (16 percent).

Twenty-three percent would blame both parties.

The GOP’s poor marks on health care come against the backdrop of even more dismal public confidence in the Republicans’ overall ability to make the right decisions for the future of the country.

Less than a fifth of Americans in the Post/ABC News poll have confidence in the GOP to lead the country, while a overwhelming 79 percent expressed no confidence.

Less than one in five voters (19 percent) expressed confidence in Republicans’ ability to make the right decisions for America’s future while a whopping 79 percent lacked that confidence.

Among the all-important independent voters — who now outnumber both Republicans and Democrats and who voted strongly for the Democrats in the last two election cycles — confidence in the GOP stands at a record-low 17 percent, while a record-high 83 percent of independents voiced no confidence in the Republicans.

By comparison, the president’s own confidence ratings aren’t all that impressive either — Only 49 percent expressed confidence in Obama, while 50 percent voiced a lack of confidence in him. But as weak as public confidence in the president is, it’s still far greater than that of the GOP.

. . . . . . AND ITS VOTER BASE CONTINUES TO SHRINK

As bad at the GOP’s standing is now, the party’s long-term future is looking increasingly bleak, as the percentage of the electorate that identifies with the Republicans continues to erode.  Only 20 percent of Americans in the Post/ABC News poll now identify themselves as Republicans — the lowest GOP party affiliation in a quarter-century.

The new findings continue a trend that was noted more than a year and a half ago by the Pew Center, whose poll in March 2008 found that identification with the GOP had fallen to 27 percent of the electorate, while Democrats and independents increased to a 36 percent tie.

A look at voters’ ideological leanings is telling. Significantly, the bulk of the GOP’s losses is among moderates and traditional conservatives who have become increasingly alarmed by what they see as a dangerous turn by the party to the far-right fringe and have moved into the independents’ column.

Independents now comprise a 42 percent plurality of the electorate, with Democrats making up 33 percent. There are now enough independents to create a third major political party if they so chose.

And a new party is not beyond the realm of possibility. Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot may have been 20 years ahead of his time when he founded his short-lived Reform Party — with its appeal to voters disenchanted by the liberal leanings of the Democrats and the conservative tilt of the Republicans —  in 1997.

It’s happened before at least once in the nation’s history: The Republicans, founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party, itself eventually replaced a moribund political party — the Whigs — in the 1870s after the Civil War.

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Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Production Delays and Public-Relations Problems Plagued the Ford Administration’s 1976 Swine Flu Vaccination Program — and a Media Frenzy Over the Deaths of Three Elderly People Just Hours After They Took the Vaccine Only Made Matters Worse, Triggering a Widespread Fear That the Vaccine Was Unsafe

In this archival photo, a woman receives a swine flu vaccination with the use of a jet injector by a doctor as part of a nationwide, government-sponsored campaign in 1976 to vaccinate all Americans from the threat of a swine flu pandemic. But the program was plagued by delays in producing the vaccine and collapsed into disarray after a media frenzy over the deaths of three elderly people just hours after receiving the vaccine triggered widespread fears that the vaccine was unsafe. The fiasco forced the federal government, under then-President Gerald Ford, to call a halt to the $400 million program.  (Photo courtesy Centers for Disease Control)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, October 19, 2009)

(Updated 2:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 20, 2009)

By SKEETER SANDERS

As a growing number of children, teenagers and college-age young adults have come down with the H1N1 swine flu — and the number of new cases is likely to rise dramatically this winter — fewer than half of Americans say that they’re planning to receive the new H1N1 swine flu vaccine, according to recent polls.

It’s a trend that is leaving many health professionals worried that the death toll from H1N1 will also rise dramatically.

Even as supplies of the regular seasonal flu vaccine has fallen behind the demand, the public’s skepticism over the H1N1 vaccine has persisted, despite warnings that the number of H1N1 cases already has reached pandemic proportions.

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Unlike the seasonal flu, which strikes indiscriminately and is especially hazardous to the elderly, the H1N1 swine flu is striking mostly young adults, teenagers and pre-teen children.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says a total of 86 children under 18 years of age have died from the 2009 H1N1 virus since it first surfaced last March, the CDC’s Dr. Anne Schuchat told reporters in a briefing on Friday.

Eleven of those deaths were reported just in the past week, Schichat said.

Distribution of the vaccine against the H1N1 virus is now under way, with priority being given to to those considered at high risk, including health care workers, pregnant women and children. But the CDC says some deliveries of vaccine will be delayed because production is lower than expected.

This has caused shortages of both the seasonal flu and H1N1 vaccines, forcing many hospitals, employers, schools and colleges to postpone or cancel scheduled flu-shot workshops.

But officials clearly do not want to trigger a panic.

DESPITE THREAT OF H1N1, A PERSISTENT WORRY ABOUT SAFETY OF VACCINE

Despite the growing threat that H1N1 poses, however, a growing number of Americans are shying away from taking the H1N1 vaccine. Even many health care workers are reluctant to be immunized, with a recent survey by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases finding that only 42 percent of health care workers are getting  themselves immunized.

The reason: Persistent concerns about whether the H1N1 vaccine is safe.

It’s a concern that dates back more than 30 years — ever since a U.S. government-sponsored swine flu vaccination program in 1976 collapsed in disarray amid production delays, public-relations problems and a wave of fear generated by a frenzy of media coverage of three elderly people who died within hours after taking the vaccine.

To make matters worse, it was soon discovered that people who were administered the H1N1 vaccine back then had an increased risk of developing a rare neuromuscular disease. More than 500 people did develop the disease, 25 of whom died from it.

That discovery forced the federal government, under then-President Gerald Ford, to call a halt to the program, which cost taxpayers over $400 million, and to pay out millions more in compensation to the families of those who died after taking the vaccine.

GETTING PUBLIC TO TAKE H1N1 FLU SHOTS A ‘TOUGH SELL’

“I’m genuinely baffled,” Arthur Kellermann, an emergency medicine physician at the Emory University School of Medicine, told National Public Radio. “The public has developed this odd sense of complacency. The only thing that comes to my mind is photos of people standing on the seawall of Galveston hours before [Hurricane Ike] hit.”

For public health officials and the medical community, convincing more people to take the H1N1 vaccine is going to be a tough sell. Part of the problem is the lack of availability — for now — of  both the H1N1 and regular seasonal flu vaccines caused by production delays.

But the greatest obstacle may be the lingering memory of the 1976 swine flu vaccination debacle. A recent survey by the Harvard University School of Public Health found that nearly a third of Americans expressed concerns about the safety of the new H1N1 vaccine.

“If [the] vaccines work, then those who have been vaccinated have nothing to fear,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center, in an interview with the America Online News Service.

But Fisher is not convinced that the H1N1 virus is as serious a threat as federal health officials claim it is.

“Does this particular strain of influenza warrant the amount of money we’re spending and this campaign the government is waging?” she asked rhetorically. “Federal health officials are making a mistake. There’s been an overreach. People don’t appreciate being bullied. A lot of people are starting to stay away from doctors. There’s a paradigm shift occurring.”

That Fisher is skeptical of the federal government’s handling of the H1N1 threat can’t be dismissed as mere partisan sniping, although to be sure, there are some — most notably right-wing radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh — who have used the H1N1 threat to score political points against the Obama administration.

But the 1976 swine flu fiasco hasn’t faded from the public consciousness even after 33 years –and isn’t likely to fade any time soon.

DEATHS AT FORT DIX TRIGGERED FEAR OF SWINE FLU PANDEMIC

During the first two months of 1976, about 500 recruits at the U.S. Army base at Fort Dix, New Jersey fell ill with flu-like symptoms, despite having been vaccinated against several flu viruses that were circulating at the time.

On February 5, one recruit died within 24 hours after he fell ill and four of his fellow soldiers were later hospitalized. Two weeks after the soldier’s death, health officials announced that the cause of death was a new strain of the swine influenza A virus — H1N1. The virus was detected only from January 19 to February 9 and never spread beyond Fort Dix.

At the same time, however, a second swine flu strain, H3N2, was discovered and appeared to be related to the virus involved in the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic — the most lethal in the planet’s history — that felled over a billion people worldwide, killing over 22 million.

Although neither virus spread beyond Fort Dix, public-health officials were nonetheless alarmed by what they saw as an imminent threat of another global flu pandemic. Led by then-CDC Director Dr. David Sencer, they strongly urged Ford to launch a program to have every person in the U.S. vaccinated for the disease.

Ford agreed. But the program was doomed from the start.

For one thing, the fear that the world in 1976 was about to experience a repeat of the 1918 pandemic was based on the erroneous assumption that it was caused by H1N1, when in fact, the 1918 pandemic — which killed a half-million Americans — was actually caused by the avian flu virus, H5N1.

Moreover, as noted by The Washington Post, of the 500 soldiers at Fort Dix who had been infected with swine flu, only one of them died — which raised questions about just how lethal the disease really was. And not only did the swine flu viruses not spread beyond Fort Dix, there were no cases of swine flu reported throughout the summer of 1976 in the Southern Hemisphere — where it was winter and where flu outbreaks would have been expected.

THE 1976 SWINE FLU IMMUNIZATION FIASCO: WHAT WENT WRONG

On October 1, 1976, the immunizations against swine flu began. Within ten days, approximately 40 million people had received the vaccine, mostly through newly-designed compressed-air vaccination guns instead of traditional needle injections.

All seemed to go well, until the news broke on October 11 that three senior citizens in Pittsburgh who received the vaccine that day died just a few hours later. That set off a media frenzy, with news outlets speculating, without a shred of evidence, that the deaths were caused by the vaccine.

As it turned out, the three deaths were from other causes that had nothing to do with the H1N1 vaccine. But the damage was done. The public came to believe that the vaccine caused the three elderly people’s deaths. And that belief persists to this day.

That was bad enough. What really killed the vaccination program was the discovery in November 1976 that the H1N1 vaccine increased the risk of developing a paralyzing neuromuscular disease called Guillain-Barré syndrome. More than 500 people who were administered the vaccine developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, of which 25 died.

The federal government was forced to halt the program and paid millions of dollars in compensation to the families of those who died. The fiasco ultimately cost Sencer his job as head of the CDC.

WHAT ABOUT TODAY’S H1N1 FLU THREAT?

Looking back on the 1976 swine flu immunization program, it’s easy to brand it a debacle. And it could happen again.

Last week, a 14-year-old British girl died suddenly, just hours after she received  a vaccination for cervical cancer. Newspapers quickly picked up the story, running headlines implying the vaccine killed her.

But an autopsy revealed two days later that the real cause of the girl’s death wasn’t the cancer vaccine, but rather a previously undiagnosed tumor located in her chest.

The hardest job for the CDC and other health authorities is likely to be convincing the public that the new H1N1 vaccine is safe. CDC spokeswoman Arleen Porcell-Pharr has spent weeks seeking to do just that, emphasizing that the vaccine has been tested and approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

“We expect the 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine to have a similar safety profile as seasonal flu vaccines, which have very good safety track records,” she said.

But skeptics like Eileen Karpfinger, a licensed chiropractor and co-founder of the Upaya Center for Wellbeing in Alameda, California, remain unconvinced. “It’s ludicrous to me that I have to put my child through this,” Karpfinger told  AOL News, referring to vaccines in general. “As a mother I don’t find vaccines to be effective.”

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Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

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On October 17, 1989, the Greater Bay Area Was Slammed By Its Strongest Tremor Since 1906 — a 6.9-Magnitude Shaker That Killed 63 People, Injured Over 3,700 Others and Wreaked Over $6 Billion in Damage; Two Decades Later, Many Public Structures have Been Braced, But Most Homes Remain Vulnerable

Officials of the California Department of Transportation survey the wreckage of the double-decked Cypress Freeway in Oakland on October 20, 1989, three days after a 6.9-magnitude earthquake — the strongest since 1906 — struck the San Francisco Bay Area during the height of the evening commute, causing the upper deck of the freeway — as well as a section of the landmark Bay Bridge — to collapse. Dozens of cars on the lower deck of the freeway were crushed, killing 42 people and injuring scores of others. Twenty years later, a newly-released survey found that while many public structures have bee retrofitted to withstand the next major quake, thousands of private homes remain highly vulnerable. (Archive photo courtesy U.S. Geological Survey)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Thursday, October 15, 2009)

NOTE TO READERS: This week marks the 20th anniversary of the San Francisco Bay Area’s worst natural disaster since the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906: The Loma Prieta Earthquake, which killed 69 people and caused over $6 billion in damage. At the time, I was a copy editor for a San Francisco newspaper and lived across the bay in Berkeley. I was working later than usual when the quake struck at 5:04 p.m., right at the height of the evening commute. I consider myself lucky to be alive, for had I not had to work late that day — and had there not been 60,000-plus fans at Candlestick Park for Game 3 of the 1989 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s — the number of fatalities from the collapse of part of the Bay Bridge and of the Cypress Freeway in Oakland would have been much greater. In this special commemorative report, we take a look back at the disaster and look ahead to see what is being done to prepare for the next one.

By SKEETER SANDERS

It was a warm autumn evening  on October 17, 1989, a Tuesday. More than 60,000 die-hard baseball fans packed into Candlestick Park in San Francisco for Game 3 of the “Battle of the Bay” World Series between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants. Hundreds of thousands of commuters were on their way home from work — many with their car radios tuned in to the pre-game show.

Millions more throughout the Bay Area and across the country had turned on their TVs to watch ABC’s coverage of the game. It was just past five o’clock — eight o’clock on the East Coast — as ABC announcers Al Michaels and Tim McCarver were discussing highlights of Games 1 and 2 in Oakland, both of which were won by the A’s.

Suddenly, just after the Candlestick scoreboard clock clicked to 5:04 p.m., the announcers’ booth — along with the entire stadium — began shaking violently. Viewers, who were watching a video of the previous game, saw the picture begin to flicker off and on. Many in the stadium crowd began to scream. Michaels then shouted, “I’ll tell you what, folks, we’re having an earth–”

Phfffft!

“–Quake!” never made it on the air. The power went out, cutting off ABC’s live feed before Michaels could finish his sentence.

FIFTEEN SECONDS OF SHEER TERROR

The greater San Francisco Bay Area had just been hit by a tsunami of roiling soil and rock generated by a gargantuan explosion 11 miles underground — as if seven 100-megaton thermonuclear bombs had gone off simultaneously — some 70 miles to the south at Loma Prieta in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

By the time the shaking stopped some 15 terrifying seconds later, a huge swath of Northern California from the Monterey Bay north to Sacramento and from the Pacific Coast east to Nevada had been turned — both figuratively and literally — upside down.

Sixty-three people were killed and more than 3,700 others were injured in the quake, which measured 6.9 on the Richter scale and was the most powerful temblor to strike the Bay Area since the Great Earthquake of 1906, which reduced all of downtown San Francisco to a pile of burning rubble.

Forty-two of those 63 deaths occurred in Oakland, when the upper deck of the double-decked Cypress Freeway collapsed onto the lower deck, crushing dozens of vehicles at the height of the homebound commute. The quake also caused a section of the inbound upper deck of the famed Bay Bridge to collapse onto the outbound lower deck. Several cars on the upper deck plunged into the gap, killing at least one driver and injuring a dozen others.

Were it not for the World Series game at Candlestick Park, traffic would have been much heavier on both the Bay Bridge and the Cypress Freeway and the death toll would certainly have been much higher.

Television viewers across the country soon got to watch an eerie repeat of history unfold live, as an entire block of the city’s swanky Marina District burned to the ground as a result of ruptured natural-gas mains, but unlike the 1906 disaster, the local utility company, Pacific Gas & Electric, was able to quickly shut off the gas and the water mains stayed intact, enabling a small army of firefighters and volunteers to prevent the blaze from spreading.

Nevertheless, for the next 18 to 24 hours after the quake struck, all of San Francisco and a huge swath of the greater Bay Area had to live without electricity, as the temblor knocked out much of PG&E’s power distribution network, forcing the Bay Area Rapid Transit system to shut down and most of the area’s hospitals, police and fire stations and radio and TV stations to fire up their emergency generators.

Yet throughout the disaster, the Bay Area dis not descend into total chaos. By the millions, residents rallied to rescue the trapped and injured, comfort the bereaved who lost loved ones and bring the region back to its feet.

Ten days after the quake, the World Series resumed at Candlestick Park, with the 62,000 fans paying tribute to the region’s police officers, firefighters, paramedics and other first-responders with a five-minute standing ovation in an emotional pregame ceremony that included a moment of silence for the 63 people who lost their lives in the temblor, followed by the singing en masse of “San Francisco,” the song immortalized in the 1936 film about the 1906 disaster.

And by the way, the A’s beat the Giants to complete a four-game sweep of the Series.

MUCH HAS CHANGED AFTER 20 YEARS — AND MUCH HASN’T

Two decades later, a lot has changed in and around San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. Many schools, highways and other public buildings have been retrofitted to withstand another major quake of up to 8 on the Richter scale.

Other structures — including the Embarcadero Freeway along the San Francisco waterfront and the Central Freeway which cut into the city’s Hayes Valley neighborhood — were torn down after structural engineers found they were unsafe. The destroyed Cypress Freeway in Oakland is now a broad, tree-lined boulevard renamed in honor of former South African President Nelson Mandela.

But thousands of private homes and apartment buildings — particularly those built of unreinforced brick and masonry — remain vulnerable. Scientists warn that there is a more than 60 percent probability of a major earthquake of magnitude 7 or greater striking the region in the next 30 years.

Some of the most vulnerable buildings — built decades before state building codes were upgraded for greater seismic safety in the 1970s — are located in San Francisco’s densely populated Chinatown and Tenderloin neighborhoods. Others, located in the affluent Marina District and the bohemian South of Market area, are built on landfill reclaimed from the bay that can liquefy during a major quake, causing buildings to collapse.

If those buildings are not retrofitted, hundreds of residents in those areas could be killed and thousands more displaced if the long-dreaded “big one” hits — a quake equal to or greater than the 1906 shaker, geologists warn.

HOSPITALS STILL AT RISK

Hospitals in the region remain at high risk, having fallen behind state-imposed deadlines to retrofit their buildings because of the high cost. In San Francisco proper, only now are hospitals undergoing seismic upgrades, with most of the work not expected to be completed until 2015, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The 1906 earthquake struck before the Richter scale was invented, but is estimated to have been a magnitude 7.9 (For decades, it was believed that the monster temblor was an 8.3, but in a report released on the 100th anniversary of the disaster in 2006, the U.S. Geological Survey re-examined the amount of slippage on the San Andreas Fault and recalculated the earthquake at 7.9).

“We have been retrofitting public infrastructure, but in the Bay Area and California, we have done a miserable job of retrofitting where we live,” Peter Yanev, a seismic engineer and author who sits on engineering advisory councils at the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Chronicle. “In San Francisco, there are hundreds and hundreds of buildings that are not retrofitted, and they are a risk to people’s lives.”

A SHARP REMINDER OF AN UNSTABLE EARTH

The region is streaked by at least four major earthquake faults: The 1,700-mile San Andreas — the most famous and feared fault in California — on which the Loma Prieta quake was centered; the Hayward Fault, on the east shore of San Francisco Bay, along which lie the densely populated cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and Hayward; the Calaveras Fault, which runs through the hills between the Bay Area and the Central Valley; and the Rogers Creek Fault, which is really a northern extension of the Hayward, located north of San Pablo Bay.

There are at least a half-dozen smaller faults that bisect the Bay Area as well. Next to the San Andreas, the Hayward Fault poses the greatest risk of generating a major quake — and causing the greatest amount of death and destruction. Not only does the fault run through Oakland and Berkeley, but the University of California’s 60,000-seat football stadium in Berkeley lies directly on the fault and the BART system’s Concord Tunnel cuts directly through it.

As the Bay Area prepared to mark Saturday’s anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake, its residents received a another reminder of just how unstable the ground beneath them is: a 3.7-magnitude earthquake struck just south of the San Francisco suburb of Pleasanton shortly before 8:30 p.m. Tuesday night, followed by two smaller temblors in the same area.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported that the first quake was centered three miles south of Pleasanton. It was reported as having a relatively shallow depth of five miles.

About two hours later, two smaller earthquakes struck, each a magnitude 2.1 on the Richter scale. The first, at 11:18 p.m., had a depth of about 5.2 miles and was centered about five miles north-northeast of the town of Sunol. The second, at 11:27 p.m., had a depth of about 4.3 miles and was centered about eight miles south-southeast of Sunol.

There were no reports of injuries or damage.

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Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Even the President — Caught Completely By Surprise — Admits That He Doesn’t Feel That He Deserves to Receive the Peace Prize After Less Than Ten Months in Office, But Nobel Committee’s Decision Shows How Deeply the World Holds Obama’s Predecessor in Contempt

President Obama passes by a battered United Nations flag on his way to addressing the General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York on September 23. The flag had flown  over the UN’s bombed-out Iraq headquarters in Baghdad. On Friday, the nation, the world — and even the president himself — were stunned by the news that he won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, even though Obama has been in office for barely ten months.  The five-member Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo, Norway cited Obama for “giving the world hope for a better future” with his work for peace and calls to reduce the global stockpile of nuclear weapons. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, October 12, 2009)

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A ‘SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL

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“What do we do now?”

That was the question that Bill McKay, the Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in California, asked his campaign manager on election night in the closing scene of the 1972 motion picture “The Candidate.”

The Bobby Kennedy-like McKay (played by Robert Redford) had just been projected the winner of a hard-fought campaign against an entrenched, Barry Goldwater-like Republican incumbent Senator Crocker Jarmon (Played by Don Porter), a campaign that McKay had not expected to win. His victory thus caught him by surprise.

I thought a lot about that final scene from the film, and particularly Redford’s closing line, as the news had sunk in on Friday that President Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Like most of the world — and even the president himself — my immediate reaction was one of disbelief.

AWARDING PEACE PRIZE TO A PRESIDENT WHO MIGHT ESCALATE A WAR IS AWKWARD

How could the Oslo, Norway-based Nobel Peace Prize Committee award the world’s most prestigious honor to a man who had been in office as president of the United States for just under ten months — and facing a rapidly deteriorating military situation in Afghanistan?

It is difficult to imagine Obama not experiencing his own “What do we do now?” moment upon receiving the news. He, after all, is facing the  most difficult foreign-policy decision that any president can face — one that, indeed, could make or break his presidency. On top of that, Obama is also confronted with seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At a time when the Obama administration is conducting a review of U.s. strategy in the eight-year-old conflict against al-Qaida and its Taliban allies — and coming under under pressure from military leaders — as well as from his Republican critics — to send as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan — winning the peace prize now certainly appears awkward.

What impact will it have on Obama’s ability to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan and the Mideast? We don’t know. Only time holds the answer to that question. But why now?

EVEN OBAMA HIMSELF CAUGHT OFF-GUARD

Even the president himself, caught off-guard by the news, was initially in disbelief. As he told reporters at a hastily-called news briefing at the White House Rose Garden on Friday, Obama acknowledged that “this is not how I expected to wake up this morning.”

Admitting that he was “surprised” that he had been chosen to receive the prize, the president said that “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.”

But Obama also acknowledged “this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build — a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.”

To that end, the president said that he would accept the award in Oslo on December 10  “as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.” He said later that he will donate to charity the $1.4 million that accompanies the prize.

NOBEL COMMITTEE STICKS IT TO BUSH — FOR THE FOURTH TIME

Anyone who has read The ‘Skeeter Bites Report over the past 18 months knows that its editor and publisher is a staunch supporter of Obama. I endorsed him for the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton in February of last year. I voted for him in November.

I have relentlessly gone after the more outrageous of his critics, most notably the whacked-out “birthers,” whose relentless, yet futile campaign to remove Obama from office with false, unprovable claims that he is a foreigner constitutionally ineligible to be president was  — and is — clearly motivated by racist and misplaced Islamophobic animus against him.

But for once, I find myself in agreement with the president’s critics on this one. I do believe that the Nobel Prize Committee was premature to award the Peace Prize to Obama now, in the face of what is very likely to be an escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

Not that I oppose the conflict against al-Qaida and the Taliban; quite the contrary, Obana was right all along when he said on the campaign trail that the war in Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein was a massive distraction by the Bush administration away from the real war on terror in Afghanistan. George W. Bush squandered a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to truly unite the nation and the world against the threat of global terrorism waged by al-Qaida.

Indeed, it has to be said that by awarding the Peace Prize to Obama, the Nobel Committee has, for the fourth time since 2002, heaped a pile of cow manure on Bush. Its decision was only the latest expression of the world’s deep-seated contempt for the former president.

BUSH DESERVES TO GET THE SMACKDOWN FOR DISGRACING AMERICA TO THE WORLD

And who can blame them?  Bush turned up his nose at the world by deciding to go to war against Saddam Hussein based on flimsy claims that Iraq was building up a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that he will probably never live down the day he presented to the UN Security Council what turned out to be phony evidence of Iraqi WMDs.

Result: the Nobel Committee awarded the 2002 peace prize to former President Jimmy Carter, a sharp critic of Bush’s propaganda campaign leading to the Iraq War, and the 2005 Peace Prize to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei, that rejected Bush’s claims that Iraq possessed a WMD stockpile.

Two years later, the Nobel Committee stuck it to Bush again when it awarded the 2007 Peace Prize to former Vice President Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  for spreading the word about global warming. Bush defied the world on the growing threat of climate change when he refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — making the U.S. the lone holdout against the agreement.

Now comes the 2009 Peace Prize to Obama. I’m a strong supporter of this president, but I’m not so naive to believe that the Nobel Committee wasn’t motivated by a desire to snap the cat-o’-nine-tails across Bush’s backside one last time; it’s hardly a secret that Obama’s number-one foreign policy priority in the nine months he’s been in office has been to repair much of the damage to America’s relations with the rest of the world that Bush wreaked during his eight years in the White House.

Nevertheless, Afghanistan has a very real potential to destroy Obama’s presidency just as Vietnam destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s. So far, the president has acted very deliberately, determined not to repeat the mistakes of past presidents.

Congratulations, Mr. President, and Good Luck — You’re going to really need it.

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor& Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

As the President Fights Off Conservatives on Health-Care Reform and the Economy, Liberals Complaining More and More Loudly About His Lack of Action on Ending the War in Afghanistan, Closing Guantanamo Bay and Expanding Gay Rights — But the Slow Pace of Change Is Also Frustrating Right-Wing Critics Who Claim That Obama Is ‘Taking the Country Down the Path Toward Socialism’

A lot on his plate: President Obama, who will hold a third meeting on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan with principal advisers next week, is on the spot after General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, presented a grim public assessment of the war. The president’s dilemma over Afghanistan, combined with the rough going that he and his Democratic allies in Congress are experiencing in getting a comprehensive health-care reform bill passed is becoming a cause of growing concern among the liberals who enthusiastically supported his run for the White House. (Photo: Reuters)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Thursday, October 8, 2009)

By ELI CLIFTON

Inter-Press Service

Since before taking office, President Obama has been no stranger to being in the cross-hairs of conservative pundits who have accused him of everything from bring a “secret communist” to a “tax-and-spend liberal” who would oversee huge expansions in the federal government.

But a growing chorus of criticism here in Washington is coming from liberals who feel the president has failed to deliver on a large number of the campaign promises he made during the run-up to the November election.

This sentiment of disappointment and frustration with Obama’s lack of progress on his agenda — topped by his seeming inability to build a consensus in his own party on health-care reform, concern that he may be in the process of committing the U.S. to an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, inaction on closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and repealing the ban on gays in the military — was put on striking display on Saturday night when NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” led off with a satirical skit portraying Obama listing his two major accomplishments since taking office as “Jack and Squat”.

The SNL skit came on the heels of last week’s announcement that the president’s adopted hometown of Chicago had lost its bid for the 2016 Olympics for which the president and first lady had made a last-minute trip to Copenhagen to personally lobby the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The IOC’s decision to award the Games to Rio de Janeiro — the first South American city ever to host the quadrennial sports spectacular and the first city ever to host both the World Cup soccer tournament (in 2014) and the Olympics back to back — left the Obama administration with the political equivalent of egg on their faces.

SLOW GOING IS ALSO FRUSTRATING OBAMA’S RIGHT-WING CRITICS

Indeed the White House’s seeming inability to accomplish its major public initiatives (with the notable exception of the $700-billion-plus economic-stimulus package) comes as a surprise to members of both parties as the Democrats have a majority in both the House and Senate and — at least in theory — should be in an ideal position to push an agenda of their choosing.

Obama’s difficulties with building a coalition within his own party have come largely as a result of conservative Democrats, known as “Blue Dogs,” whose election played a large part in building a Democratic majority in the House.

However, the lack of progress from a president who ran with a campaign slogan of “Yes We Can” also casts serious doubts about the credibility of his right-wing critics who claim he is a radical reformer with a secret left-wing agenda.

“There are those on the right who are angry. They think that I’m turning this great country into something that resembles the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but that’s just not the case,” said SNL actor Fred Armisen, as Obama. “When you look at my record it’s very clear what I’ve done so far and that is — nothing. Nada. Almost one year and nothing to show for it.”

While the list of accomplishments which “SNL” claims the president has failed to make progress on is — as has been pointed out by a number of fact-checking journalists — overstated, the number of initiatives on the administration’s agenda which are “in progress” but haven’t yielded discernible results is growing.

AFGHANISTAN: ‘DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T’

Frustration in Washington foreign policy circles has centered on the willingness with which the administration seems to be committing the U.S. to a long-term involvement in Afghanistan — a country with a long history of repelling outside powers — and a failure to make measurable headway in bringing about a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Foreign-policy realists have largely agreed that an outright withdrawal from Afghanistan could be catastrophic and potentially destabilize an already chaotic region, but concern has been growing about the administration’s “mission creep” in Afghanistan away from the original objectives of combating terrorism and denying al-Qaida a safe haven.

Obama will be making a difficult decision — probably next week — about how to respond to General Stanley McChrystal’s request for 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops to support U.S. operations in Afghanistan.

The decision facing the president is politically loaded:

A decision to deploy the number of troops requested by McChrystal will garner attacks from liberals within his own party and longtime anti-war activists that he is committing U.S. soldiers to an unwinnable war.

A decision to deploy a fewer number of troops than requested will undoubtedly bring cries from Republicans and Democratic hawks accusing the president of not listening to his generals and denying the military the manpower and resources required to be victorious in Afghanistan.

Foreign policy heavyweight Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, generally praised Obama’s foreign policy moves overall, but he sharply criticized the administration’s strategy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict in a newspaper interview published Tuesday.

“I think it’s time for different role; the focus on settlements on the Israeli side and improving contacts on the Arab side, over-flight rights and so on, is going for the capillaries at a time when that cannot produce good results,” he told The Washington Times. “I have felt for some time that the two sides are unlikely in the foreseeable future to be able on their own to make the compromises necessary.”

Scowcroft advocates an alternative strategy in which the United States, Europe and Russia would table a plan to create a Palestinian state.

NINE MONTHS AFTER INAUGURATION, A GROWING IMPATIENCE ON THE LEFT WITH OBAMA

Part of the increasing frustration from the left seems to be with the lack of dramatic progress on policy initiatives from an administration that is nine months into a four-year term.

The important initiatives promised by Obama have included health-care reform, closure of the Guantanamo bay prison, introduction of a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions, and a repeal of the ban on gays in the military — but it is too early to say that the president has outright failed to deliver on these promises just yet.

Health-care reform has been held up by both intra-party and partisan wrangling, the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison still seems likely but not on the time frame originally promised; cap-and-trade legislation has been introduced in the Senate and there is hope that serious progress will be made on the bill — although a vote this year is doubtful before the December Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark ; and a repeal of the ban on gays in the military is being “pushed down the road a little bit,” according to Defense Secretary of Robert Gates.

REAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS BEING OVERLOOKED

Real accomplishments have been made with the removal of $1.75 billion in funding to order seven more F-22 “Raptor” jet fighters — a follow through on Obama’s commitment to end pork-barrel government contracts — and the administration appears to be making progress in changing the nature of the debate on environmental legislation.

The past two weeks have seen a wave of large public utilities and well known U.S. companies resign from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in opposition to the Chamber’s determined efforts to block cap-and-trade legislation.

While progress may still be coming in a wide range of the president’s policy initiatives, the slowness of serious movement on health-care reform and difficulties in defining the U.S. mission in Afghanistan have become the chief domestic and foreign policy tests in which the president’s supporters would like to see real progress.

The first year of the Obama presidency is far from over and the president’s poll numbers remain high — an Associated Press/GfK Poll released Tuesday found his job-approval numbers rose slightly to 56 percent — but a growing sense of unease has started to spread amongst his supporters that his persuasive and moving speeches might not be followed by successful policy initiatives.

OBAMA WHITE HOUSE LESS DISCIPLINED THAN CAMPAIGN

Obama and his campaign managers were seen as running one of the most well-disciplined and carefully planned presidential campaigns in modern U.S. political history.

Unfortunately, the discipline and coordination displayed by his near-flawless campaign seem to have gone missing in recent months as supporters are left concerned that the candidate they supported — and who in many ways proved his capability as a bipartisan, “big tent” builder — seems increasingly unwilling or unable to overcome conflicts within his own party or push back against a disorganized and increasingly marginalized Republican opposition.

Armisen’s satirical portrayal of Obama may have been over-the-top in its depiction of him as a president who has accomplished nothing, but the skit spoke to the fears of Obama supporters that the charismatic candidate they helped elect might not be a cure-all for the increasingly difficult and intertwined domestic and foreign policy challenges facing the U.S.

“So all of you frothing Glenn Beck supporters, put away those tricorner hats and those Photoshop pictures of me as the Joker,” said Armisen as Obama, “because if I see any more of this hateful rhetoric, I’m going to have to take drastic action… no, not really.”

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Special Report Copyright 2009, Inter-Press Service. Re-posted by permission.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.