Napolitano says no to running for Senate seat in Arizona
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has ended the political speculation on whether she will leave President Barack Obama’s Cabinet to run for the U.S. Senate in the 2012 elections.
Napolitano, a former governor from Arizona, told Democratic Party leaders earlier this week that she would not seek the open Senate seat.
“She cares deeply about Arizona, but the secretary intends to continue doing the job that the president asked her to do — protecting the American people from terrorism and other threats to our country,” her spokesman Sean Smith said in a statement on Friday.
Speculation about her possible candidacy emerged after the recent announcement by Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyl, a three-term conservative, that he would not seek re-election.
It was not the first time during the two years that Napolitano has headed the Department of Homeland Security that rumors swirled about her future. Napolitano’s name had cropped up as a possible candidate for a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court early in Obama’s presidency.
One possible Democratic candidate mentioned for the Senate seat is Dennis Burke, the U.S. attorney in Arizona who previously served as Napolitano’s chief of staff when she was governor.
Burke’s office currently is prosecuting Jared Lee Loughner, who has been charged with the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in a deadly shooting rampage last month in Tucson, Arizona.
Valentine’s Day with the GOP
What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than by sending your special someone a pink e-card, covered in hearts, with a message from the president: “Hope you like this Valentine’s card, your grandchildren are paying for it.”
In the GOP version of My Funny Valentine and a way to raise some sweet cash, the Republican National Committee is poking some fun at the White House and its Democratic cohorts with GOPvalentine.com, and more than 30,000 of the snarky messages had been sent as of Friday morning.
The site boasts 18 card options, including “This card entitles you to one free hug full-body pat-down” with a photo of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and “Don’t censure this Valentine” with a photo of Rep. Charles Rangel, who was censured by the House of Representatives for ethics violations.
The media isn’t safe either. A card featuring Keith Olbermann, whose contract with MSNBC was terminated following a suspension for donating to Democratic candidates, reads “MSNBC just wants to be friends this Valentine’s Day.”
The one for incoming White House spokesman Jay Carney, a former Washington bureau chief for Time who left to become Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director, takes an even more pointed swing:
Remember Jimmy McMillan, 2010 New York gubernatorial candidate from the Rent is Too Damn High Party?
Gee, why can’t they be more creative in describing the debt they ran up? Oh, yeah, this is the debt they ran up.
McCain, Napolitano shoot it out, rhetorically speaking, over US-Mexico border
When Arizonans John McCain and Janet Napolitano started arguing over border security in the Senate on Wednesday, it sounded briefly like the pair could be heading for a modern day shootout at the O.K. Corral.
But it ended in a Mexican stand-off instead, with each cow poke flanked by an imaginary posse of sympathetic sheriffs.
The trouble started when McCain, a Republican senator, got his chance to ask questions at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, a former Democratic governor of Arizona, was a testifying witness in discussions that had been all about Islamist militancy up to then.
But McCain turned the conversation sharply toward the southwest to ask about security along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“What in the world is going on here?” an irritated McCain asked after suggesting that Napolitano had lost her sensitivity to the plight of border communities facing cross-border crime and violence since joining the Obama administration.
Washington Extra – cautionary tale
President Barack Obama signed a $600 million bill to strengthen border security, and just to make sure the message got through, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano took the podium at today’s White House media briefing. Immigration has always been a tough political issue, and in an election year no great strides are expected on major reform before the November vote. “It cannot only be done by Democrats. The Republicans need to come to the table,” Napolitano said.
The American consumer is still a cautionary tale. But consumer sentiment appears to have stabilized in August after dropping sharply in July. “Consumers are still cautious, but it is not double-dip material,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group. In a separate report, U.S. retail sales rose in July but showed hints of lingering economic softness.
And finally, I tried to find something positive to say about Friday the 13th and realized there’s no need, because it’s still Friday!
Here are our top stories from today…
Obama signs $600 million border security bill
President Barack Obama signed a $600 million bill to beef up security on the border with Mexico, and his aides pressed lawmakers to set aside election-year politics and work toward broader immigration reform. With illegal immigration seen as a key issue in the November congressional elections, the administration touted the border enforcement plan as laying the groundwork for a revived effort to overhaul the immigration system.
For more by Matt Spetalnick, click here.
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow us to announce a new facet of one stop shopping.
Gone are the days when a doctor will advise you to make life style changes to improve your health, instead you will be able to order your Lipitor with a side of Burger and Fries!
Talk about a new marketing ploy! Drug reps will now be spending time at your favourite fast food chains and take-away stores, pushing their ‘quick fix’ drugs to medically uneducated burger ‘flippers’ and salt shaker fillers.
http://just-me-in-t-health.blogspot.com/ 2010/08/one-stop-shopping.html
Singing frog chides Arizona immigration law opponents
Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer’s campaign is using a singing frog to chide high-ranking Democratic cabinet officials for criticizing the desert state’s controversial new immigration law without actually reading it.
The campaign to elect Brewer – who stepped up when former Democrat Governor Janet Napolitano became President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary – uses a Muppet-like hand puppet to deliver a crooned reading lesson.
“Reading is really super swell … Reading helps you know what you’re talking about,” the Kermit-like frog raspingly intones, cut in with clips of senior administration officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and Napolitano admitting that they hadn’t read the law they have spoken out about.
The law requires state and local police to determine the immigration status of people they reasonably suspect to be in the country illegally during a stop, detention or arrest.
Polls show it is backed by a majority of Americans, although opponents say it will lead to racial profiling, and have launched law suits and an economic boycott that could cost Phoenix an estimated $90 million in lost hotel and convention business over the next five years.
“Broken borders are not a laughing matter, but the failure by Obama’s trusted officials to read Arizona’s law before commenting and condemning it is laughable,” campaign spokesman Doug Cole said in a message posted on Brewer’s campaign website.
“As a result, SecuretheBorder.org is using a little bit of humor to remind everyone in Washington of the importance of reading,” he added.
“They are fellons!!!”
Some conservatives want voters to pass a literacy test before they can vote. Think about it. The Tea Party would disappear overnight.
U.S. Supreme Court advice for Obama
Someone experienced in making hard decisions with the imagination to understand how rulings affect the lives of Americans.
Those words of advice came from Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer as President Barack Obama searches for a replacement for retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.
Testifying before Congress on the Supreme Court’s budget request, they gave their views about the type of person Obama should select, without getting into judicial philosophy. The U.S. Senate must confirm the nominee.
Congressman Jose Serrano, a Democrat from New York who chaired the House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, asked what legal or other experiences the nominee should have and whether it should be a judge or an elected official.
“I don’t think it matters as much what the experience is as long as it’s experience making decisions and hard decisions,” Thomas said. “It helps us if someone is from a different part of the country.”
On the current court, Thomas grew up in Georgia, Breyer previously lived in Massachusetts, and Stevens came from Chicago. Other justices were from New York, New Jersey and California, among other places.
Although all nine of the current Supreme Court members had previously been U.S. appeals court judges, Thomas said they had different backgrounds and perspectives.
DHS chief tries to allay fears about airport full-body scanners
After the failed attempt to blow up up a U.S. commercial jet with a bomb hidden in a passenger’s underwear on Christmas Day, U.S. authorities have been racing to deploy full-body scanners in airports and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been working in overdrive to allay fliers’ concerns about their privacy.
The Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration plan to have some 450 full-body imaging scanners — known as Advanced Imaging Technology machines — deployed this year and Napolitano has been ramping up her public appearances over the last couple of days offering a defense for the need to beef up aviation security with the devices.
“I went through one in California, in San Francisco and I saw the image and I’m very comfortable with it,” she said in response to a caller to National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm Show on Tuesday. “We always offer passengers the option to go the standard way with the greater likelihood of an actual pat down.”
The advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center said on Monday that a Freedom of Information Act request to the Transportation Security Administration has revealed numerous complaints about the machines over the last couple of years, ranging from invasion of privacy to worries about health risks from the scans. Some passengers also complained that were not told by screeners that they could go through a physical patdown instead.
Napolitano said that the full-body images are reviewed by security personnel who are not at the screening station so the reviewer does not see the actual person’s face and that the image produced is not meant to focus on an individual’s anatomy. Rather, the goal is to detect liquids, gels or powders that would not be picked up by metal detectors, she said.
On Monday, Napolitano told the Veterans of Foreign Wars organization that while no technology is 100 percent effective, “What we’re about is finding gaps, filling them, minimizing risk.”
Later on Tuesday she will participate in a Q&A session on the White House website to discuss aviation security and on Wednesday she leaves for Japan to discuss global efforts to beef up security after the Christmas Day incident. She has already met with officials in Europe and South America and talks are expected in Africa and the Middle East.
US senator says no way to $200 million for 9/11 trial security
Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins rarely raises her voice to emphasize a point but on Wednesday she spoke forcefully against spending some $200 million on security for the trials of the five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, including the self-professed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
“It’s the safe assumption that Congress is not going to appropriate $200 million for the trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City,” Collins told Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano during a hearing on the department’s fiscal 2011 budget.
“It is not going to happen,” she said, adding that some of the money would be better spent on other things, such as resources for the U.S. Coast Guard.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had decided last November to hold the criminal trials of the five individuals in lower Manhattan but New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg reversed his support of doing so because he feared it would cause a virtual lockdown in that part of town, hurting business and possibly costing $200 million for security.
As a result, the Obama administration has been forced to reconsider where to hold the trials and even weigh whether it would be better to prosecute the five individuals in a special military commission trial rather than in a criminal court.
Napolitano said she had not been a part of those renewed discussions but said President Barack Obama expects trials of terrorism suspects in the United States. (Republicans have pressed to hold the trials at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.)
“If the trials are moved from New York City, nonetheless there will be costs associated with those trials,” she said. Napolitano also said that no matter where the trials are held, a security assessment will be required which would dictate the costs.
The complicated question of Haiti’s orphans
The devastation caused by Haiti’s earthquake has extended to some of its youngest and most powerless victims: orphans awaiting clearance to join adoptive families in the United States.
The U.S. government has already said it will allow orphaned children from Haiti to come to the United States temporarily for needed medical treatment, and on Wednesday expanded its effort.
Now three departments — State, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services — say they’ll join together to deal with what is a complicated question, according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
“It is something that needs to be handled very carefully, because there are many issues involved in terms of making sure that … children that come to us are indeed orphans, until all the search and rescue is done, or other families are located,” Napolitano told a Senate hearing.
She was responding to a direct plea for help from Senator Jon Tester of Montana. Tester said five of his constituents “have completed all the paperwork to get the children from Haiti … and yet, they’re being held up.”
“I need to get a commitment from you that the Citizenship and Immigration Service, an agency within your department, will work with my office to help expedite our ability to get those kids out,” Tester asked Napolitano. She immediately agreed, and then described a complex situation.
She said the problem of Haitian orphans was tragic and was likely to grow as the days pass and the number of casualties rises. But beyond that, she said, there are questions about whether adoptive parents in the United States are legally qualified for adoption. Napolitano added that many children brought to the United States need to be immediately put in the care of the federal health department and checked before they can be moved.
News fora are overflowing with people who are simply giddy at the prospect of snagging the latest cultural fashion accessory.
from Summit Notebook:
Napolitano defends bringing Guantanamo detainees to U.S.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the Obama administration's plans to bring terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States -- countering critics who questioned whether it would create security risks.
"There's no question in my mind that those detainees who would be moved to the United States would be held in such a fashion that they would not be any threat to public safety, and I say that as a former prosecutor," Napolitano said in an interview during the Reuters Washington Summit. She served as a U.S. attorney in Arizona during the Clinton administration.
President Barack Obama has pledged to close the controversial prison by Jan. 22, 2010, including bringing some of the terrorism suspects to U.S. soil for trial in military commissions or U.S. criminal courts. There have been questions and doubts about whether his goal can be achieved because of political, legal and logistical complications.
Napolitano held out hope that the administration could meet the fast-approaching deadline: "I would hope so." She declined to comment on the likely location of where the detainees could be held in the United States.
But Republicans have criticized the idea of bringing the terrorism suspects to U.S. soil, arguing that they are not entitled access to the criminal court system and could pose threats to the communities where they may be imprisoned.
Her remarks came as former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued a stinging condemnation of the Obama administration plan, writing in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that civilian courts were not the right place to try the terrorism suspects and could make communities, jurors and courts targets.
"Based on my experience trying such cases, and what I saw as attorney general, they aren't. That is not to say that civilian courts cannot ever handle terrorist prosecutions, but rather that their role in a war on terror—to use an unfashionably harsh phrase—should be, as the term 'war' would suggest, a supporting and not a principal role," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
