Free Republic

Ron Klain is a sharp-elbowed Democratic political operative with no medical expertise. Tapping him as “Ebola czar” may not be the president’s best move when, as it is, no one can believe a word the Obama administration says. And that’s not just because Mr. Klain is yet another lobbyist recruited despite Mr. Obama’s vow that his administration would shun lobbyists. Klain was also a central player in the president’s Solyndra fraud, which soaked taxpayers for over half a billion dollars for the benefit of Obama cronies. In Faithless Execution, I recount the Solyndra fraud. It never got the attention...

A couple long-time friends and readers brought this to my attention from 1994:In a city where name recognition is synonymous with success, Ron Klain has made a virtue of being unknown. As Attorney General Janet Reno’s chief of staff, he is all but invisible to the public but recognized in Democratic circles as the man to have on your side in a political or legal fight. A rare mix of top-flight lawyer and savvy politician, Klain shepherded the nominations of Reno and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg through the Senate and steered the omnibus crime bill through the...

Ron Klain and Solyndra The administration’s point man on a solar fraud is now in charge of Ebola. By Andrew C. McCarthy NRO October 20,2014 Ron Klain is a sharp-elbowed Democratic political operative with no medical expertise. Tapping him as “Ebola czar” may not be the president’s best move when, as it is, no one can believe a word the Obama administration says. And that’s not just because Mr. Klain is yet another lobbyist recruited despite Mr. Obama’s vow that his administration would shun lobbyists. Klain was also a central player in the president’s Solyndra fraud, which soaked taxpayers for...

Most of the so called “conservative media” and many Republican politicians have been trashing the Obama regime for the appointment of new “Ebola Czar” Ron Klain. Most of the trashing has been based on the fact that Klain is not a medical doctor by trade, and that all he has ever done was be in charge of Al Gore’s staff. The fact that the Ebola Czar won’t report directly to our Glorious President Obama, but instead to Susan Rice – well how can you argue with that logic (please note the sarcasm). Republicans and the conservative media are missing the...

On Friday, addressing mounting concerns about a medical crisis in the U.S., President Obama named the noted epidemiologist Dr. Ronald Klain as the country’s “Ebola czar.” Dr. Klain…. Oh, sorry, that didn’t happen. The new Ebola czar is not an expert in infectious diseases, or in public health, or even a doctor. To Washington insiders, Ron Klain, a high-stakes Democratic Party operative, is most famous for his role in Florida legal challenges surrounding the 2000 presidential election. Those with longer memories remember Klain’s work as the Al Gore aide who labored to raise more than $100 million for the Democratic...

“What we were looking for was not an Ebola expert,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, “but rather an implementation expert.” But what exactly was Klain hired to implement — a public health campaign or a political one? The New York Times let slip the Ebola Czar’s true purpose through an anonymous Democrat operative: “He’ll control the message better than most people would, which is really important from an economic standpoint, from a health standpoint, but it’s also important from a political perspective. If anybody can get the way this is being reported and discussed under control in a...

Roberta Rampton, Reuters October 29, 2014 It's not often that a White House official gets mocked on both Saturday Night Live and a major daily newspaper before he makes his first public appearance. But Ron Klain's low-profile first week as President Barack Obama's behind-the-scenes Ebola "czar" has become another attack point for a White House struggling to show it's on top of the crisis. Since starting last Wednesday, Klain has been seen only once, in a photo op on his first day, leaving health officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health - and...

President Barack Obama's commander in the fight against Ebola was expected to operate below the public radar. But did that mean invisible? Ron Klain has barely been seen, and a week before midterm elections, Obama is pressing to dispel criticism that the government can't manage the Ebola crisis. The White House's behind-the-scenes coordination of the Ebola response is being severely tested, while the Pentagon and states like New York and New Jersey take public steps that are far firmer than federal guidelines. That's creating the appearance of a crazy quilt of Ebola measures. "The CDC is behind on this," New...

White House Ebola response coordinator Ron Klain may have become an accidental folk hero to fans of crushing bureaucracy everywhere on Wednesday, when a U.S. senator asked high-ranking Obama administration officials to describe his work. The vague answers sounded like something plucked out of a Dilbert cartoon. 'Even though the President has named a so-called Ebola “czar” to coordinate our response,' Senate Appropriations Committee ranking Republican Richard Shelby complained, 'all reports indicate that he has no actual authority to direct government agencies here.' He asked two cabinet secretaries and two other experts what Klain has 'brought to the table' in...

The height of the Ebola outbreak in Africa, Europe, and the United States also coincided with a period in which the Obama administration came under the heaviest scrutiny over its response to that health crisis. Amid criticism, President Barack Obama rejected calls from lawmakers to impose some travel restrictions on the areas affected by Ebola, but he did say his administration was open to appointing one figure to oversee his government’s response to the crisis. Days later, Obama appointed Ron Klain, a long-time Democratic political operative and veteran of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, to serve as...

Adam Hamilton has once more entered into the fray of making pronouncements about what the Bible does and does not advocate when it comes to same sex sexual activity and same sex marriage, and you can read his post here, http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/6876/the-bible-homosexuality-and-the-umc-part-one only the first of four such posts leading up to the General Conference in a couple of weeks. My concern is with the misinterpretation of the Bible in this post as well as the misrepresentation of Methodist cultural trends at various points and so once you’ve read what Adam says, then consider the following response. In the first place,...

The Clinton Foundation will get new leadership in the form of longtime Clinton ally and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala as it continues to face ongoing questions about its foreign fundraising practices, former President Bill Clinton announced in Coral Gables, Florida on Friday. The news of Shalala’s new role comes as the foundation has caused all-but-certain 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton some political trouble in the final weeks before her expected campaign roll-out. Republicans have latched onto reports that the foundation resumed accepting money from foreign governments after Clinton left the State Department in 2013 — a...

Europe as an entity and as an ideal is more needed than ever. The individual countries of Europe need the collective power of Europe to assert their interests, influence and values. Yet, as the impasse over Greece confirms, the continent is in crisis. Many assume that some form of compromise is in the offing. Debt can somehow be kicked down the road. The Greek government will bend; the troika of creditors — the EU, ECB and International Monetary Fund — will bend and somewhere in the middle the two will come together. I do not see it. Greece is part...

Third Way, a progressive think tank with ties to the Democracy Alliance, has removed newly appointed Ebola czar Ron Klain from its website, following a Washington Free Beacon report. The Free Beacon reported Friday on Klain’s status as a trustee for Third Way, and his past experience lobbying on behalf of a drug company that was accused of denying life-saving drugs to dying cancer patients. The choice of Klain to head the administration’s emergency response to Ebola was criticized as a political move. Klain is a political operative with no medical experience and a former advisor to former Vice President...

In the Hobby Lobby decision handed down last month, the Supreme Court was asked to strike a balance between women’s rights and religious freedom. But the major conflict that has erupted in the wake of that decision has been between religious freedom and gay rights. The resulting controversy has split gay-rights and faith groups on the left, with wide-ranging political fallout that some now fear could hurt both causes. One chapter of the controversy is set to close on Monday, when President Obama plans to sign a long-awaited executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against gays and lesbians, according...

President Obama’s populist economic pitch is fizzling. The White House hoped to hammer Republicans this year on an array of pocketbook issues centered on hiking the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, an effort meant to appeal to independents and rally Democrats to the polls. Three months in, Obama’s approval ratings are flailing in the low 40s, and Senate Democrats haven’t even been able to unify their 55 members on a minimum wage bill. That’s made it tougher to contrast the positions of Democrats with Republicans in an election year that is shaping up to be about the healthcare law...

The Republican Party is currently trying to sort out an internal battle between its dwindling stock of moderates who are occasionally willing to work with Democrats, and its hard-right base, which views compromise with Democrats in general, and President Obama in particular, as heresy. But in a speech Monday, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the second-ranking Democrat in the House showed that there are significant fissures in the Democratic Party as well. Hoyer, though nominally Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s second-in-command, is starkly different from Pelosi and many others on the party’s left wing when it comes to economic and fiscal issues....

The French government is to take steps to break up a far-right group allegedly linked to the death of a left-wing activist. Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has asked the interior minister to take steps "immediately" to dissolve the Revolutionary Nationalist Youth (JNR). Five people are under investigation over the death of Clement Meric, 18. He was badly beaten in a clash between far-right and anti-fascist activists in Paris on Wednesday, and later died. The Paris Prosecutor, Francois Molins said according to witnesses the two groups had run into each other by chance in a busy shopping district near St Lazare...

When confronted with the Republican Party’s poor standing among minority communities, GOP politicians have usually taken one of two approaches: claim these communities constitute “natural conservative constituencies” or advocate a broad change in policy or ideology to attract minority voters. Neither one of these tactics has been effective, for various reasons–chief among those reasons is that the communities under consideration are usually not “natural conservative constituencies.” Take Hispanics, for example. It is often noted by GOP politicians that Hispanic immigrants are hard-working, family-oriented strivers who tend to be religious. That may be true, but polls showed that while Mitt Romney...

Look, I don’t even know anymore. I’m just gonna put these out there for you as yet another indication of how tough getting anywhere close to solving our deficit and debt problems is. It’s a nice complement to the latest in the fiscal cliff saga, in which allegedly intractable, unreasonable Republicans offer a Simpson-Bowles-like compromise that might actually come within a couple ballparks of acknowledging our debt problems while Democrats seem rather enthusiastic about cliff-diving and yet the press and public are determined to blame Republicans for going over. Let’s see if that can change in the near future. Presumably...