The same anesthetic that caused the overdose death of pop star Michael Jackson is now the drug of choice for executions in Missouri, causing a stir among critics who question how the state can guarantee a drug untested for lethal injection won’t cause pain and suffering for the condemned.
Last week the Missouri Department of Corrections announced it was switching from its longstanding three-drug method to use of a single drug, propofol. Missouri would be the first state ever to use propofol as an execution drug.
“This is very, very concerning with a drug that we don’t know, and seeing the problems of the one-drug method,” said Kathleen Holmes of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.Read more…
This week, the White House has noticeably spent time this week pushing claims that the huge increases in federal spending President Obama has presided over are actually much smaller than those of other recent presidents, pointing to a commentary from Rex Nutting at MarketWatch. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney even told reporters that “this President has demonstrated significant fiscal restraint and acted with great fiscal responsibility.”
All this was too much for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog, which assigns the claims in the column (and the White House touting of it) “Three Pinocchios.”
The Fact Checker piece explains, “First of all, there are a few methodological problems with Nutting’s analysis — especially the beginning and the end point. Nutting basically takes much of 2009 out of Obama’s column, saying it was the ‘the last [year] of George W. Bush’s presidency.’ . . . The federal fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, so the 2009 fiscal year accounts for about four months of Bush’s presidency and eight of Obama’s. In theory, one could claim that the budget was already locked in when Obama took office, but that’s not really the case. Most of the appropriations bills had not been passed, and certainly the stimulus bill was only signed into law after Obama took office. . . . Nutting acknowledges that Obama is responsible for some 2009 spending but only assigns $140 billion for reasons he does not fully explain. On the other end of his calculations, Nutting says that Obama plans to spend $3.58 trillion in 2013, citing the Congressional Budget Office budget outlook. But this figure is CBO’s baseline budget, which assumes no laws are changed, so this figure gives Obama credit for automatic spending cuts that he wants to halt. The correct figure to use is the CBO’s analysis of the president’s 2013 budget, which clocks in at $3.72 trillion.”
Further, The Post analysis points out, “Obama’s numbers get even higher if you look at what he proposed to spend, using CBO’s estimates of his budgets . . . . So in every case, the president wanted to spend more money than he ended up getting. Nutting suggests that federal spending flattened under Obama, but another way to look at it is that it flattened at a much higher, post-emergency level — thanks in part to the efforts of lawmakers, not Obama.” It’s worth noting that during this time, Democrats controlled Congress entirely until 2011, and Democrats still control the Senate.
Importantly, the Fact Checker article shows how federal spending under Obama has been much larger as a percentage of the economy: “One common way to measure federal spending is to compare it to the size of the overall U.S. economy. That at least puts the level into context, helping account for population growth, inflation and other factors that affect spending. Here’s what the White House’s own budget documents show about spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy (gross domestic product):
2008: 20.8 percent
2009: 25.2 percent
2010: 24.1 percent
2011: 24.1 percent
2012: 24.3 percent
2013: 23.3 percent
“In the post-war era, federal spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy has hovered around 20 percent, give or take a couple of percentage points. Under Obama, it has hit highs not seen since the end of World War II — completely the opposite of the point asserted by Carney. Part of this, of course, is a consequence of the recession, but it is also the result of a sustained higher level of spending.”
The article concludes, “The data in the article are flawed, and the analysis lacks context — context that could easily could be found in the budget documents released by the White House. . . . The picture is not as rosy as [Carney] portrayed it when accurate numbers, taken in context, are used. Three Pinocchios.”
Can we really be surprised by this development after this administration mailed real estate tax notices – a day after the 2010 election? St. Louis County government needs an enema. Check out the related story and make yourself more nauseated!
The Call:
Sixth District Councilman Steve Stenger, D-Affton, is outraged St. Louis County ended fiscal 2011 with a $2.4 million operating surplus after County Executive Charlie Dooley contended the county faced a financial crisis during 2011 and 2012.
“I think that elected officials are taxed with the responsibility of being honest to the taxpayers, and here we had a situation where the county was claiming a crisis, the county executive was claiming a crisis, claiming that we were going to have a $26 million deficit …,” Stenger said. “It turns out he was $28 million wrong. We had a $2 million surplus.” Dooley last November projected a budget deficit of $26 million for 2012, the same amount he had projected for fiscal 2011, according to Stenger. Read more…
This afternoon, the Senate will again be voting on proposals to prevent interest rates on federal student loans from going up. Speaking on the Senate floor this morning, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, “This problem could have been solved weeks ago. Democrats weren’t interested. They wanted a scapegoat more than a solution. . . . The Democrat plan is designed to fail. . . . [T]hey propose to divert $6 billion from Medicare and to raise taxes on small businesses — hurting the very companies we’re counting to hire today’s college graduates. They’ve known for months we won’t support this tax hike and that it couldn’t pass either chamber. It has already failed. But they’re proposing it anyway, for a second time.”
He explained, “[S]ince passage isn’t their goal, our friends on the other side huddled behind closed doors, out of sight of the public and the press, and produced the tax hike instead of letting the committee do its work. We already know how this story ends. So why are Democrats forcing us to vote on their failed proposal yet again? Because, as I’ve said, they’re more interested in drawing our opposition — of creating a bad guy — than in actually solving the problem.”
“When it comes to college graduates today,” Leader McConnell pointed out, “the bigger issue is the President’s economic agenda, which has created an environment in which most of them can’t find a decent job.”
Indeed, recent news reports have described “a grueling job hunt” for young graduates, a jobs “crisis” for young adults, and as Gallup described it, “a disaster for those unemployed and underemployed as they look for jobs when so few new jobs are being created. For younger Americans as a group, this is a particularly acute issue.”
In the last six months, the AP reported, “A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed” and a Pew study found “the lowest employment-to-population ratio for young adults since 1948.” Time reported that “[n]early 25 million adults live at home with their parents because they’re unemployed or underemployed” and according to The Wall Street Journal, “Only 49% of graduates from the classes of 2009 to 2011 had found a full-time job within a year of finishing school . . . .” And Gallup wrote earlier this month, “April has also brought gloomy job news for young Americans and underscores that this group has been struggling disproportionately for some time.
The Hill reports today, “The Health and Human Services Department has signed a $20 million contract with a public-relations firm to highlight part of the Affordable Care Act.” According to PR Week, which first reported on the contract, “‘The campaign will inform the American people about the many preventive benefits now available to those with Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurance as a result of the Affordable Care Act,’ a representative from the Department of Health & Human Services said.” So once again, the Obama administration will be spending millions of taxpayer dollars to sell the public on Democrats’ still unpopular (and unconstitutional) health care law.
Writing about today’s news, Lachlan Markey of The Heritage Foundation points out, “Last year, HHS asked Congress to quadruple the budget for its public affairs office – to nearly $20 million – and nearly double the size of the office’s staff. The department insisted the changes were necessary to ‘help Americans understand and access their benefits and information under the law.’”
The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis noticed something else interesting about the HHS announcement. “The story [in The Hill] notes that the public relations firm Porter Novelli ‘won the contract after a competitive bidding process.’ Interestingly,” Lewis writes “the managing director of Porter Novellis’ Washington D.C. office is Catherine “Kiki” McLean — a true ‘D.C. insider,’ according to her bio. Indeed she is. Among her other accomplishments, McLean’s bio also notes she was ‘an on-air surrogate for the Obama for America campaign.’ This, of course, raises a few questions, including: Just how competitive was the competitive bid process that went to a senior Democrat? And isn’t this the kind of insider access Obama decried in 2008?
Related:
Cong. Carnahan: “Protesting ObamaCare is An Attack On Our Representative System of Govt.”
While Claire tries to burnish her moderate, middle class, “I’m one of you” credentials to save her Senate seat, word over the weekend is that the good senator was late paying the taxes on her Washington condo:
Only seven months after critical news stories about unpaid taxes on a private airplane, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill was late paying property taxes on her Washington, D.C., condominium.
Records show that the Missouri Democrat missed the fall 2011 deadline by about three weeks. McCaskill paid $197 in penalties and interest on top of the $1,514 in taxes owed for half the year. Read more…
In the early 1990s, delinquent taxes at a McCaskill-owned property at the Lake of the Ozarks were such a problem that the county published a notice that it would be auctioning off the property to pay taxes. McCaskill blamed her brother (KC Star, Aug 14, 2004).
On another campaign note. With the president’s increasing unpopularity in Missouri, we know that Claire will not have Obama within three states of Missouri during this election cycle. To counter this and to shore up the Black vote for the fall, the campaign has hired an African American, STL County patronage employee, Chalana Oliver.
Another embattled Obama administration official is stepping down this morning. The New York Times reports, “Gregory B. Jaczko, whose three-year tenure as chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been marked by bitter battles with colleagues and with Congress, announced Monday that he would step down as soon as a successor was confirmed.” The AP adds, “His resignation comes after fellow NRC commissioners criticized Jaczko, revealing dissension among the top leaders of the safety agency. Those commissioners – two Democrats and two Republicans – said Jaczko, a Democrat, was responsible for a tense and unsettled work environment at the NRC. The four commissioners sent a letter to the White House in October expressing ‘grave concern’ about Jaczko’ s actions.” Roll Call notes, “Jaczko, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and opponent of using the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, announced he would resign Monday morning but made his resignation effective once the Senate confirms a successor. . . . Reid pulled out all the stops to get Jaczko appointed to the NRC during the Bush administration, applying blanket holds to the administration’s nominees until they agreed to appoint him. The other four members of the NRC — two Republicans and two Democrats — complained last year that Jaczko has an abusive and bullying management style.”
Back in December, though, when the concerns about Jaczko were aired in congressional hearing, he’d said he wouldn’t resign. At the time, The Hill wrote, “Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko told a House committee Wednesday that he has no plans to resign amid allegations from his colleagues that his leadership style could prevent the agency from protecting public health and safety. ‘I have no plans to resign because I continue to believe that under my leadership the agency has performed very well,’ Jaczko, a Democrat, said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. . . . The four NRC commissioners — two Democrats and two Republicans — delivered a unified rebuke of Jaczko’s leadership at the hearing, accusing him of ‘continued outbursts of abusive rage’ toward staff and withholding key information from his colleagues.”
According to Reuters, “Jaczko bullied employees, humiliated female workers and blocked information from being shared, the other commissioners told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee [in December]. Commissioners William Ostendorff and Kristine Svinicki said they have lost confidence in Jaczko’s leadership. . . . Jaczko’s ‘extreme behavior’ toward three women in separate instances caused one of the employees to cry in front of male co-workers, Commissioner William Magwood told the committee. Other commissioners told lawmakers that Jaczko had intimated NRC staff.”
And a December AP report added, “The commissioners told Congress the women at the NRC felt particularly intimidated by Jaczko. Commissioner William Magwood told the oversight panel that Jaczko had bullied and belittled at least three female staff members, one of whom told Magwood she was ‘humiliated’ by what Magwood called a ‘raging verbal assault.’ Kristine Svinicki, the commission’s only woman, told committee investigators that she was so uncomfortable around Jaczko that she asked her chief of staff to ‘keep watch’ over a private meeting with the chairman in Svinicki’s office.”
Last month, news reports noted that a new report from the NRC Inspector General is forthcoming. Reuters pointed out, “The NRC’s inspector general is expected soon to issue a report that is likely to focus on the tensions on the commission.” And according to National Journal, “[T]he NRC’s inspector general is still conducting an investigation of last year’s allegations and whenever a report is released, it is sure to reopen some of these wounds. An IG report last June already criticized the chairman for not being ‘forthcoming’ with his fellow commissioners leading up to the shutdown of the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada.”
* Reports were that the Spence campaign bus left last weekend’s “Rally for Common Sense” just as Spence communications director Stacy E. Washington took the podium for her remarks
