All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

The Republican National Committee offers its employees insurance coverage for elective abortions, the Politico reports. That’s a seeming contradiction to the party platform and the GOP’s current position on an abortion amendment added to the House health care bill.

The GOP platform calls elective abortion "a fundamental assault on innocent human life," according to Politico.

Furthermore, almost every single Republican in the House of Representatives voted in favor of an amendment to the Democrats' health care bill, offered by Reps. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Joe Pitts (R-Penn.), that explicitly prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for plans that cover abortion. It also effectively limits private insurers from being able to offer abortion coverage within the proposed national health insurance exchange. The amendment passed with some Democratic support.

The only Republican who bucked the party and voted "present" on the amendment did so in an attempt to foil the overall health care bill's chances of passage.

"We believe in the sanctity of life, and the Stupak-Pitts Amendment addresses a moral issue of the utmost concern," House GOP leaders John Boehner (R-Ohio), Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.) said in a statement after the vote. "It will limit abortion in the United States. Because of this, while we strongly and deeply oppose the underlying bill, we decided to stand with Life and support Stupak-Pitts."

Still, the RNC chose not to opt out of abortion coverage, Cigna representatives told Politico.

RNC spokeswoman Gail Gitcho reportedly said the policy pre-dates the tenure of current RNC Chairman Michael Steele.

"The current policy has been in effect since 1991," she said, "and we are taking steps to address the issue."

As President Obama was leaving the White House for his trip to Japan, he announced he would host a Jobs Summit next month. With unemployment over 10 percent, he said the summit is needed: "Millions of Americans -- our friends, our neighbors, our family members -- are desperately searching for jobs," said the president.

Jobs and the economy are going to be the key issue on his trip to Asia. While other diplomatic issues are on the agenda, specifically nuclear weapons issues with Iran and North Korea as well as global climate change, no issue is as pressing as the economy.

"Asian economies, in particular China, are emerging from the economic crisis stronger and earlier than almost anyone else. So these countries are assuming much greater roles in the global system," said Evan Feigenbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations. "I think the trip to Asia is in part a recognition of that."

Specifically, President Obama will wrestle with the issue of free trade, trying to make sure emerging Asian markets are open to U.S. made goods. He will be attending a major economic summit while here, but the president does not have any new free trade agreements to announce with Asian markets.

Read full post…

Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who was formally censured by members of his own party earlier this week for playing nice with Democrats on climate change and other legislation, has spoken out in his own defense, according to Capitol Hill's newspaper Roll Call.

The Charleston, South Carolina Post and Courier reported that the Charleston County Republican Party voted on Monday to censure Graham for not upholding the Republican platform. The group cited his cooperation with Democratic senator John Kerry on the proposed cap-and-trade bill and his support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Obama's $700 billion bailout plan.

"U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham -- in the name of bipartisanship -- continues to weaken the Republican brand and tarnish the ideals of freedom, rule of law, and fiscal conservatism," the resolution reportedly reads.

"There have been a lot of things over the years that people have been dissatisfied with the senator for doing but I think the cap-and-trade issue is the straw that broke the camel's back," Lin Bennett, the county GOP chairwoman, said according to the South Carolina State. "We have a state platform that if you want to run as a Republican in our state part of that platform includes ideals and goals we would like to see and one of them is smaller, and less government intrusion into people's lives."

Read full post…

At a speech about his presidential center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas this afternoon, George W. Bush told a supportive crowd that he has had time to reflect in office over the past nine months.

Mr. Bush said there were ups and downs, but through it all he "always did what I believed was in the best interests of our country."

And, he told the crowd to raucous applause, "I came home to Texas with my values intact."

Mr. Bush was speaking to launch the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which includes a public policy institute with the mission of promoting the goals and values of his presidency.

There are three components to the center, he said: An archive, museum, and the policy institute.

The archive will include the documents and records of Mr. Bush's time in office, and will house "four million photos; thousands of boxes of documents; and hundreds of millions of e-mails," according to the former president, who said he is using the materials to be housed there for his forthcoming memoir.

The museum, he said, will tell the story of the Bush presidency "through my most consequential decisions." (His memoir, which is planned to come out next fall, will have a similar format.) "Visitors will see the bullhorn I used in my first visit to Ground Zero, a replica of my Oval Office, and our very own 'Texas Rose Garden,'" he said.

The policy institute, which will be called the George W. Bush Institute, will be "a vibrant hub of principled thought and practical action," the former president said.

Read full post…

Ronald Neumann, the former United States Ambassador to Afghanistan from July 2005 to April 2007, did not mince words on "Washington Unplugged" Thursday when he told CBS News' John Dickerson "the whole process" of assessing whether to send more troops to Afghanistan "has sent a message of some weakness."

"It scares people, Afghans, Pakistanis. Is the United States on the way out?" the current director of the American Academy of Diplomacy said.

For this reason, Neumann argued, the president deciding to put off making a decision on troop increases for a few weeks while his joint chiefs assess the situation in the Karzai administration will likely not hurt U.S. standing in the region.

"[W]e have already paid that price, so if one takes another week or two to refine this, and its a process that probably is necessary for our national consensus, I don't think that that has an additional price," he told Dickerson.

Neumann explained that the real question of America's reputation abroad is how close President Obama's final decision is to General Stanley McChrystal's recommendation for an additional 40,000 troops.

Read full post…

Texas governor Rick Perry declared that the Obama administration was "hell-bent" on socialism during a speech to the Republican Women's Club in Midland, Texas yesterday, according to Texas local newspapers. He also called for more tea party protests against health care reform efforts.

Perry accused the administration of "punishing" Texas through what he calls the Alien Transfer and Exit Program. He complained to the crowd about what he said is the administration’s system of dumping illegal immigrants captured in other areas of the country into rural Texas, where the state must deal with them. Perry went on to describe a recent conversation he had with officials from the small border town of Presidio.

"They said, ‘do you all know what’s fixin’ to happen?’ I said, ‘well, no. What’s going on?’ They said, ‘the government has just called us and said for us to get ready for an influx of illegal aliens who were captured illegally crossing the border from San Diego to Nogales, Arizona," Perry recalled. "Way on the western side of this country. It's called the Alien Transfer and Exit Program."

Read full post…

It's one of those terms that might seem to belong to an earlier era: political correctness. But in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, critics are seeing exactly that in both the treatment of alleged gunman Nidal Malik Hasan by the military before the shootings and in the comments of politicians and members of the media afterward.

"Who’d think the U.S. Army could be seized with a sudden case of political correctness?" columnist Margaret Carlson wrote Thursday, dubbing the army "oversensitive."

"If they hadn’t been so cautious, authorities could have pieced together the links between Hasan and radical Islam and possibly prevented Fort Hood," she argued. Authorities, Carlson notes, knew Hassan had visited radical jihadist Web sites; some officials at Walter Reed, where he had worked, thought he might have been psychotic. "It wouldn’t have been an act of bigotry, just an act of sanity."

"Jihadist rhetoric espoused by Hasan was categorically dismissed out of submissiveness to the concepts of tolerance and diversity," complained Major Shawn Keller. "The Army as an institution has been neutered by decades of political correctness and the leaders in Hasan's chain-of-command failed to act accordingly out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim and receiving a negative evaluation report."

Read full post…

Sarah Palin did not believe her 2008 interview with CBS News Anchor Katie Couric would be a defining moment in the presidential election, she tells Oprah Winfrey in an upcoming interview -- but she knew it was bad.

The McCain campaign, however, thought the interview went well, Palin tells Winfrey in an interview that will broadcast Monday.

"The campaign said, right on. Good. You're showing your independence," Palin said, according to an excerpt from the interview. "And of course I'm thinking, if you thought that was a good interview, I don't know what a bad interview is because I knew it was a bad interview."

Palin was lampooned by Saturday Night Live for the interview, which some called a "turning point" in the campaign.

Palin Says Oprah "Gracious"; Book Details Leak

The former Alaska governor also told Winfrey she'd like to tamp down the feud she has with Levi Johnston, the father of her grandson. Winfrey asked if Johnston would be attending Thanksgiving dinner with the Palins.

Read full post…

On her Facebook page last night, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin said that Oprah Winfrey had been "very hospitable and gracious" during Winfrey's interview of Palin, which is scheduled to air on Monday.

"Willow, Piper, and I are in Chicago and just wanted to let you know that I had a great conversation with Oprah today," Palin wrote. We taped the show for Monday, November 16th, and enjoyed it so much that we went way over on time. The rest will air on Oprah.com. Oprah was very hospitable and gracious, and her audience was full of warm, energized and (no doubt) curious viewers."

Audience members told NBC Los Angeles that Palin's response to a question from Winfrey about whether she would be interested in a talk show "suggested she was considering the move," though Palin did not offer a yes or no.

One member of the audience suggested there was tension between the two women, though Palin's Facebook comments suggest otherwise. Winfrey supported Barack Obama during the presidential campaign.

"We talked about inside the campaign, about what it felt like when she was first asked to be Vice-President, the candidate," Winfrey said in a video posted after the interview, which you can see at left. "We talked about Bristol, the pregnancy. We talked about Trig, her baby. We talked about Levi Johnston. We talked about her marriage. We talked about everything. There's nothing that we didn't talk about."

Palin sat down with Winfrey to promote her book "Going Rogue," which comes out the day after the interview airs. Time Magazine's Mark Halperin spoke to associates of Palin's who have read the book in advance, and he says the book includes "a hearty bashing of the national media" as well as "some score settling with McCain aides she believes ill-served her (names will be named)."

Read full post…

Calling the nation's high jobless rates "a challenge my administration is absolutely determined to meet," President Obama announced Thursday he will hold a jobs summit at the White House in December.

"We all know that there are limits to what government can and should do," Mr. Obama said. "But we have an obligation to consider every additional responsible step that we can to encourage and accelerate job creation in this country."

The president announced the summit, to be called the Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth, moments before departing for a trip to Asia. Mr. Obama said he will work on a global economic strategy while abroad and will continue to make the nation's economic recovery the focus of his administration.

The U.S. unemployment rate for October surpassed 10 percent, hitting the double digits for the first time since 1983. Claims for unemployment benefits fell more than expected last week, but economists still predict a "jobless recovery" from the recession.

Acknowledging the hardship Americans are undergoing, the president said "even though we've slowed the loss of jobs... the economic growth that we've seen has not yet led to the job growth that we desperately need."

To address that, Mr. Obama said, the December forum will bring together CEOs, small business owners, economists, labor unions and nonprofit organizations to discuss job creation.

"It's important we don't make any ill-considered decisions... particularly at a time when our resources are so limited," he said. "But it's just as important that we are open to any demonstrably good idea to supplement the steps we've already taken to put America back to work."

Read full post…