Legion of Angels News Archive

FROM CNN’s Jack Cafferty:

Senator John McCain says when it comes to foreign policy he’s light years ahead of Barack Obama. Over and over again, McCain has insisted Obama lacks the necessary experience to conduct business with foreign countries on behalf of the United States.

So how do you explain this?

Citizens of dozens of foreign countries prefer Barack Obama over John McCain as our next president by a margin of almost 4 to 1, according to a massive poll conducted by the Gallup Organization. About 30 percent of those surveyed prefer Obama, while just 8 percent favor McCain.

This was no daily tracking poll either. Gallup polled people in 70 countries in Africa, Europe, Asia and North and South America, representing nearly half the world’s population, between May and September of this year.

Citizens of the Philippines and Georgia were the only ones who preferred McCain to Obama. Not exactly the super-powers we’re looking to mend fences with.

Here’s my question to you: Why do citizens in 70 foreign countries prefer Barack Obama to John McCain by a margin of nearly 4-1?

Interested to know which ones made it on air?

Justin from North Carolina writes:
Barack Obama is the candidate of reason. Only a fool would think of supporting the ticket with the oldest presidential nominee and a woefully inept vice presidential candidate are in the best interest of America or the world especially when the current disaster of a president proves to be more coherent than the both of them.

Kevin writes:
They prefer him because he’s a patsy and they know he’s going to pander to them. Kennedy was on medication during meetings with Khrushchev and Khrushchev called him a pygmy. No fear whatsoever. Good thing Kennedy did stand up to him during the Cuban missile crisis. Obama needs some testosterone shots. Putin, Chavez, the Castro’s, the Girl Scouts of China…anybody could chew him up, push him around, and spit him out.

F.S. from Rollinsford, N.H. writes:
Jack, just to let you know that from my wife’s and my visit to Europe for 3 weeks just recently, we couldn’t find anyone in 4 countries that wanted McCain for President. They all think he is warmonger and that Palin is a joke. Do they know something we don’t?

Jackie writes:
To be fair, I think McCain’s negativity rests with the “R” after his name. He is a decent man who, because of his age and knowing this is his last chance, sold his soul to the Republican National Committee.

Mike writes:
It’s simple. It may sound racist, but it’s really not. Foreign countries are tired of old white men bossing them around and looking down on them. They finally see someone who will respect & approach them as equals.

Zach writes:
Let’s see, Jack…where to begin…They don’t want to get bombed? They want to work with a well-spoken, even-keel U.S. President for a change? They’re smarter than almost half of the people in our own country?

Source — CNN

PIKESVILLE, Md. — If Senator John McCain’s radical plan for remaking American health care is to work, he will have to find a way to cover people like Chaim Benamor, 52, a self-employed renovator in this Baltimore suburb. Mr. Benamor never found it necessary to buy insurance before having a mild heart attack last year and now, 13 years shy of Medicare, has little hope of doing so.

The heart attack left Mr. Benamor with a $17,000 hospital bill, $400 in monthly prescription costs and a desperate need for insurance. After being rejected by a number of commercial carriers, he turned to the Maryland Health Insurance Plan, one of 35 state programs for high-risk applicants whom no private company is willing to insure.

He decided that the annual premium — $4,572 for a plan with heavy deductibles — was more than he could handle on an income of about $35,000. Yet his earnings were too high for him to qualify for state subsidies.

“I’d like to get it, but what do you pay first?” Mr. Benamor asked at his dining room table. “Do you pay the mortgage? Do you pay your child support? Do you pay your car insurance? Do you pay for your medicine?”

In late April, Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, announced that if elected president he would seek to insure people like Mr. Benamor by vastly expanding federal support for state high-risk pools like Maryland’s, or by creating a structure modeled after them. But as Mr. Benamor’s case demonstrates, even well-regarded pools have served more as a stopgap than a solution.

Though high-risk pools have existed for three decades, they cover only 207,000 people in a country with 47 million uninsured, according to the National Association of State Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans. Premiums typically are high, as much as twice the standard rate in some states, but are still not nearly enough to pay claims. That has left states to cover about 40 percent of the cost, usually through assessments on insurance premiums that are often passed on to consumers.

Health economists say it could take untold billions to transform the patchwork of programs into a viable federal safety net. The McCain campaign has made only a rough calculation of how many billions would be needed and has not identified a source for the fi-nancing beyond savings from existing programs. Finding the money will only get more difficult now that Mr. McCain has pledged to balance the federal budget by 2013, which already requires a significant reduction in the growth of spending.

Mr. McCain’s proposal stands in sharp relief to that of his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who wants to require insurers to accept all applicants, regardless of their health. That is now the law in five states, including New York and New Jersey.

For those who can afford the premiums, or who qualify for subsidies in the 13 states that provide them, the high-risk programs can be a godsend.

Richard and Susan Logan, both of whom have battled cancer this decade, said they were grateful to have coverage for themselves and their daughter through the Maryland plan, even though it will cost $22,232 this year. They had been rejected by 25 commercial insurers, said Mrs. Logan, 57, a part-time billing clerk for a physician.

The Logans, who live in Gambrills, near Annapolis, estimate that without the high-risk pool, they would pay $40,000 a year for medication alone.

“The plan’s worth its weight in gold for that,” said Mr. Logan, 62, an aviation accident investigator. “Otherwise, we’d be paying for the medications out of our retirement.”

A fifth of the 14,000 participants in the Maryland plan receive subsidies that drop their premiums below the market rates charged to healthy people, said Richard A. Popper, the plan’s director. But many in the middle find the policies both unaffordable and intolerably restrictive, and Mr. Popper estimates that two-thirds of those eligible have not enrolled.

Almost all of the state pools impose waiting periods of up to a year before covering the health conditions that initially made it impossible to obtain insurance. In some states, fiscal pressures have forced heavy restrictions in coverage and enrollment. Florida, which has 3.8 million uninsured people, closed its pool to new applicants in 1991, and the membership has dwindled to 313.

An informal survey by the American Cancer Society recently found that only 2 percent of nearly 2,700 callers to its insurance hot line enrolled in high-risk pools within two months of being referred to them. “In most cases, we know they probably didn’t apply because they discovered high premiums or pre-existing condition clauses and just didn’t bother,” said Stephen Finan, associate director of policy for the group’s Cancer Action Network.

There is no census of the medically uninsurable. But in 2006, insurers turned down 11 percent of all individual applicants for medical reasons, including 22 percent of those 50 or older, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group.

Finding a way to cover the sickest of the uninsured is critically important because 15 percent of the population is responsible for three-fourths of health care spending. Many wind up in emergency rooms, which cannot legally reject them, leaving hospitals with more than $30 billion in unpaid bills each year.

Mr. McCain’s proposal, which he calls the Guaranteed Access Plan, would be part of a market-based restructuring that is in many ways more fundamental than the universal coverage proposed by Mr. Obama.

With the goal of making the insurance marketplace more equitable and competitive, Mr. McCain would end the longstanding exclusion from income taxes of health benefits paid by employers. The 17 million nonelderly people covered by directly purchased insurance do not enjoy that advantage.

Mr. McCain would replace the exclusion with refundable health care tax credits of $2,500 per person and $5,000 per family in the hope of driving consumers into the individual insurance market. To help push down premiums, he would allow the purchase of policies across state lines.

Currently, those who buy insurance individually often face higher costs because their risks are not spread across broad groups of workers. Though insurers cannot discriminate against participants in group plans, they evaluate consumers seeking individual coverage case by case to determine if they are worth the risk of coverage, and at what price. Insurers contend that if they had to charge the same rates to all comers, many would wait until they were sick to buy policies.

The McCain campaign recognizes that in an invigorated individual market, even larger numbers of chronically ill people would go without the protection afforded by group coverage. High-risk pools would theoretically serve to fill the gaps.

Critics argue that, to date, insurers have benefited from the state pools as much as the uninsured. As long as premiums remain above market rates, the pools insulate commercial insurers from the greatest risks while giving customers little incentive to abandon their private policies.

“They are run in ways that protect the profitability of commercial insurers,” said Karen Pollitz, a professor at Georgetown University who has studied high-risk pools and who has served on the board of the Maryland plan. “They leave the illusion that there’s a safety net without there really being much of one.”

Mr. Obama’s plan differs from Mr. McCain’s in several ways. In addition to requiring insurers to accept all applicants, he would require that parents obtain insurance for their children. To make premiums affordable, he would create a Medicare-like government plan that would be open to all and pump up to $65 billion a year into subsidies. The money would come from repealing President Bush’s income tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 a year.

When Mr. McCain unveiled his high-risk pool proposal, his chief domestic policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, estimated the federal cost at $7 billion to $10 billion. Mr. Holtz-Eakin said five million to seven million uninsured people would be singled out for coverage.

But in a recent interview, Mr. Holtz-Eakin emphasized that the projections “could change dramatically” depending on how the program was structured.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin and other McCain health advisers, including Thomas P. Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Stephen T. Parente, a health economist at the University of Minnesota, said premiums would probably be capped at twice the standard rates. They said subsidies might be available to those making up to four times the federal poverty level, or $41,600 for a single person.

Financial incentives would probably be provided to those who effectively manage their diseases. No decision has been made about waiting periods for pre-existing conditions, the advisers said.

Mr. McCain’s proposal would represent a huge increase over the $50 million a year that Congress now appropriates in grants to the state pools, in a program that began in 2002. But several analysts questioned whether even $10 billion would be nearly enough, given that the states now spend about $2 billion to insure 207,000 people.

“I do not for a minute think it will cost 7 to 10 billion dollars a year,” Ms. Pollitz said. “It may cost 7 to 10 billion dollars a week.”

In an admonition for Mr. McCain, Maryland’s five-year-old plan, like others before it, has quickly become a victim of its growth. As enrollment expanded by 30 percent in each of the last two years, actuaries forecast insolvency as soon as 2010 and compelled the plan’s board to apply the brakes.

Over the last two years, it has raised premiums, deductibles and co-payments, increased out-of-pocket maximums, lowered the lifetime cap on payments and added a waiting period for pre-existing conditions, which rose to six months from two months on July 1. It also increased the amount applicants must pay to buy their way out of the waiting period.

At the same time, the plan is making more people eligible for subsidies. To keep it afloat, the state is raising the assessment on hospital bills that provides two-thirds of its financing.

“It’s not easy when you see there is strong demand for something and you need to temper that demand,” Mr. Popper, the plan’s director, said. “But you either find a way to slow enrollment through economic forces or you close the plan and no one gets in, which is a solution that no one wants.”

Source — The New York Times

HUDSON, Wis. - Senator John McCain in a wide-ranging interview called for a government that is frugal but more active than many conservatives might prefer. He said government should play an important role in areas like addressing climate change, regulating campaign finance and taking care of “those in America who cannot take care of themselves.”

“I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold,” Mr. McCain said, referring to Roosevelt’s reputation for reform, environmentalism and tough foreign policy.

The views expressed by Mr. McCain in the 45-minute interview here Friday illustrated the challenge the probable Republican presidential nominee faces as he tries to navigate the sensibilities of his party’s conservative base and those of the moderate and independent voters he needs to defeat Senator Barack Obama, his Democratic rival.

His responses suggested that he was basically in sync with his party’s conservative core but was not always willing to use the power of the federal government to impose those values. He also expressed a willingness to deploy government power and influence where free-market purists might hesitate to do so and to consider unleashing military force for moral reasons.

In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has left many Republicans unsettled about his ideological bearings by toggling between reliably conservative issues like support for gun owners’ rights and an emphasis on centrist messages like his willingness to tackle global warming and provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Those tensions were apparent in the interview as well, as Mr. McCain offered a variety of answers — sometimes nuanced in their phrasing, sometimes not — about his views on social issues.

Mr. McCain, who with his wife, Cindy, has an adopted daughter, said flatly that he opposed allowing gay couples to adopt. “I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption,” he said.

But he declined to take a specific position when asked whether only evolution should be taught in public schools. “It’s up to the school boards,” he said. “That’s why we have local control over education.” Mr. McCain has said he believes in evolution.

Many social conservatives strenuously oppose California’s decision to allow same-sex marriage. But Mr. McCain, who also opposes same-sex marriage, has always said that the issue is up to the states, and in the interview he said he would stick to that position as president even if California chose to continue allowing gay marriage after putting the matter to a statewide vote in November. “I respect the right of the states to make those decisions,” he said.

Asked if he considered himself an evangelical Christian, Mr. McCain responded, “I consider myself a Christian.”

“I attend church,” he said. “My faith has sustained me in very difficult times.” Asked how often he attended, he responded: “Not as often as I should.” He has recently been photographed going to church as his campaign has begun to make public the times he attends services.

Mr. McCain sat down for the interview, conducted after he held a town-hall-style meeting on economic issues, at the end of a week that his campaign had hoped would mark a turning point in a candidacy that has been plagued with missteps and often seemed unsure of its message.

After a period in which his campaign again endured internal battling and staff upheaval, Mr. McCain argued that competing tensions in an organization — be it a presidential campaign or a White House — can be good thing, up to a point.

“Because of the bubble that a president is in, and the bubble that a candidate is in, sometimes you find out afterwards something that, ‘Oh boy, I wish I had heard thus and such and so and so,’ ” he said. “So I appreciate and want some of the tension. I don’t want too much of it.”

When asked if he felt that it was more difficult to run against Mr. Obama because of the sensitivities of race, Mr. McCain responded wryly: “I’d like to make a joke, but I can’t.”

“We are in a situation today where all words are parsed, all comments are diagnosed and looked at for whatever effect they might have,” he said. “We have to feed the beast, the hourly cable shows, the instant news in the blogs and all that. That is just the situation that we’re in, and I’m not complaining about it, because that would be both foolish and a waste of time.”

Mr. McCain went on to say that he did not consider running against Mr. Obama any more complicated than running against, say, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. “No, I have to base my approach to Senator Obama as one of respect,” he said. “As long as I do that, then I don’t have to worry about any language I might use.”

He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.

“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

Asked which blogs he read, he said: “Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously. Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics.”

At that point, Mrs. McCain, who had been intensely engaged with her BlackBerry, looked up and chastised her husband. “Meghan’s blog!” she said, reminding him of their daughter’s blog on his campaign Web site. “Meghan’s blog,” he said sheepishly.

As he answered questions, sipping a cup of coffee with his tie tight around his neck, his aides stared down at their BlackBerries.

As they tapped, Mr. McCain said he did not use a BlackBerry, though he regularly reads messages on those of his aides. “I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail,” Mr. McCain said.

The interview underscored the extent to which Mr. McCain defies easy ideological characterization, a fact that might help him in a general election but has been a persistent cause of concern among some conservatives. Mr. McCain has long argued that his stances are evidence of his political independence; many of his critics say it is more an example of a politician deftly trying to shade positions to win an election in complicated electoral terrain.

Mr. McCain said he believed that the United States government had an obligation to intervene to stop genocide, though only if it was clear that a solution was possible. Mr. McCain also said that the Federal Reserve was right to step in during the collapse of the investment firm Bear Stearns, and that he would similarly support some sort of aggressive action to avert a meltdown of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, should that prove necessary.

“I don’t know if a government, quote, bailout is necessary now,” he said. “Because there are other courses of action that are being explored in order to ensure their survival. But I don’t believe we can afford to have them fail, because of their impact on the overall economy.”

Asked to name a conservative model, he skipped over the suggestions of three names typically associated with the conservative movement — Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barry Goldwater, the founder of the modern-day conservative movement who occupied the Senate seat Mr. McCain holds today — to settle on Theodore Roosevelt.

Mr. McCain has long admired Roosevelt, and in the interview he identified with him as a fellow reformer and environmentalist and also touched on his assertive foreign policy. The choice might to some extent be an indication of how Mr. McCain would like to position himself now that he has moved from the primary to the general election.

“I believe less governance is the best governance, and that government should not do what the free enterprise and private enterprise and individual entrepreneurship and the states can do, but I also believe there is a role for government,” Mr. McCain said. He added: “Government should take care of those in America who can not take care of themselves.”

Source — MSNBC

WASHINGTON - Senator John McCain ’s presidential campaign has gone through its second shake-up in a year. Responding to Republican concerns that his candidacy was faltering, Mr. McCain put a veteran of President Bush’s 2004 campaign in charge of day-to-day operations, and stepped away from a plan to have the campaign run by 11 regional managers, Mr. McCain’s aides said Wednesday.

The elevation of Steve Schmidt — who worked closely with Karl Rove — at Mr. McCain’s headquarters represented a sharp diminishment of the responsibilities of Rick Davis, who has been Mr. McCain’s campaign manager since the last shake-up nearly a year ago.

The shift was approved by Mr. McCain after several of his aides, including Mr. Schmidt, went to him about 10 days ago and warned him that he was in danger of losing the presidential election unless he revamped his campaign operation, two officials close to the campaign said.

The move of Mr. Schmidt is the latest sign of increasing influence of veterans of Mr. Rove’s shop in the McCain operation. Nicolle Wallace, communications director for Mr. Bush in the 2004 campaign (and in his White House), has joined the campaign as a senior adviser, and will travel with Mr. McCain every other week.

Greg Jenkins, another veteran of Mr. Rove’s operation who is a former Fox News producer and director of presidential advance in the Bush White House, was hired by Mr. Schmidt last week after a series of what Mr. McCain’s advisers acknowledged were poorly executed campaign events.

Mr. Rove, who was Mr. Bush’s senior political adviser until he left the White House last year, was said by Mr. McCain’s advisers to have offered advice in recent days to Mr. Schmidt and others on how to get Mr. McCain’s campaign on track, but has stayed mostly on the periphery. Mr. Rove is aware, his associates said, that his own legacy could be helped should Mr. McCain win the presidency.

Mr. McCain’s advisers said that Mr. Davis would continue to hold the position of campaign manager, but that Mr. Schmidt had taken over every major operation where Mr. McCain has shown signs of struggling: communications, scheduling and basic political strategy. Mr. McCain’s aides said that Mr. Davis would now focus more on longer-term campaign efforts, including helping with the selection of a running mate and planning for the Republican National Convention , which is now just two months away.

Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Davis declined a request for comment. The McCain campaign played down the significance of this latest personnel shift.

“Voters don’t care about the organizational chart of our campaign,” said Jill Hazelbaker, the campaign spokesman, adding: “Today’s move is simply an expression of our understanding of the need to scale up for a general election campaign against Barack Obama .”

Republican circles have been awash with rumors for weeks now that Mr. McCain would seek to bring Mike Murphy, a longtime friend and adviser who helped direct his 2000 campaign for the White House, back into the fold. Mr. McCain’s advisers, noting the deep tensions between Mr. Murphy and many of the people in Mr. McCain’s inner circle — including Mr. Davis and Mr. Schmidt — said such a development was highly unlikely.

Similarly, Mr. McCain’s aides said it was unlikely that John Weaver, another longtime McCain friend who left in the midst of the last shake-up, would return. “Not enough bayonets to make me do this,” Mr. Weaver said in an e-mail response to a question.

The last shake-up occurred at the beginning of last July as Mr. McCain’s campaign was bleeding money, riven by infighting, and the candidate was trailing in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. For all the negative commentary that shake-up drew to Mr. McCain, it had its desired result, a reminder that campaign upheavals are not necessarily a bad thing.

In an early insight into the impact of Mr. Schmidt’s new role, the campaign is planning what will amount to a restarting of Mr. McCain’s candidacy after Independence Day, in which he will tour the country talking about a jobs program and visiting battleground states intended to illustrate the economic woes he will be talking about: Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan.

By contrast, in appearances that drew widespread derision by Republicans — and whoops of delight from Democrats — Mr. McCain delivered a speech in which he came out in favor of off-shore drilling first before an audience of oil executives in Houston, and repeated it in a speech in Santa Barbara, Calif., a locale long identified with opposition to off-shore drilling.

In abandoning Mr. Davis’s idea to have the campaign largely run by 11 regional campaign managers, Mr. Schmidt told associates that he feared that system was unworkable and would lead to gridlock in the campaign. He is also about to hire a political director, a post that had gone unfilled under Mr. Davis.

There were other signs that Republicans were trying to get back on track in the fight with Senator Obama. The Republican National Committee this week formed an independent expenditure committee to run advertisements on behalf of Mr. McCain. The committee bought time for advertisements this weekend in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, said Democrats who monitor the purchases.

Charlie Black , one of Mr. McCain’s senior advisers and an ally of Mr. Davis, described the changes as a retooling before the general election. Mr. Black said that Mr. Schmidt would be the chief operating officer of the campaign, serving under Mr. Davis, in charge mostly of helping Mr. McCain settle on a message and get it out with speeches, advertisements and surrogate events.

“He is going to be the chief choreographer,” Mr. Black said of Mr. Schmidt.

Yet by every appearance — including the broad portfolio Mr. McCain has handed Mr. Schmidt — it is clear that he is running the operation, Republicans involved in the campaign said.

Mr. Schmidt, 37, is one of the most intense, hard-driving figures in his party today: when he worked for Mr. Bush, his nickname in the campaign was “The Bullet,” a reference to the shape of his shaved head.

He has been at the center of some of the most politically significant Republican operations of the last 10 years. In working with Mr. Rove and Ken Mehlman , the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Schmidt has become immersed in the use of data-driven methods to find and turn out Republican voters.

He also ran the Bush campaign’s war room, which was responsible for capitalizing on mistakes of opponents. Mr. McCain’s advisers said that one sign of Mr. Schmidt’s increasing influence in the campaign’s rapid response operation was the quickness with which it seized on a remark by Gen. Wesley K. Clark questioning whether Mr. McCain’s experience as a naval aviator shot down over Vietnam had qualified him to be president.

Mr. Schmidt ran the successful re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger , the California Republican who won in a Democratic state by embracing moderate positions on issues like the environment and gay rights.

Mr. Schmidt also served as communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, a job that presumably offered him the kind of district-by-district political education that could prove helpful in making decisions about where to send Mr. McCain and what he should talk about.

The shift comes after what even Mr. McCain’s aides acknowledged has been a squandered period of time since he claimed the nomination in February. Mr. McCain spent Wednesday in Colombia, his second overseas trip in a week, and one that he took despite the urging of Republicans who said he needed to convey his concerns about domestic problems to voters at home.

“Somebody asked, ‘What’s the strategy behind this?’ ” Mr. Black said of the foreign travel. “It’s simple. McCain says he wants to go to these places, and we say, of course.”

But, Mr. Black added, the trip should help to underline “one of the big contrasts in this race: Obama wants to become the first protectionist president in our history since Herbert Hoover.”

This story, McCain orders shake-up of his campaign, originally appeared in The New York Times.

Source — MSNBC