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Category: Politics
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Muck Tracker Obama Asks Paterson to Withdraw
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Prosecutor John Durham is No Water Carrier for Obama
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Benjamin vows to be America’s family doctor
If the symbolic power of President Barack Obama’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general is lost on anyone, they’re probably not old enough to remember house calls, personalized medical treatment, and a practitioner who cares more for patients than pelf.
Dr. Regina Benjamin, 52, whose nomination was announced yesterday, is a medical anachronism who rebuilt a microcosmic health care system – a rural clinic devastated by two hurricanes then destroyed in a fire – because she held the needs of patients as her highest priority.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)“When people couldn’t pay, she didn’t charge them,” Obama said of the family practice physician. “When the clinic wasn’t making money, she didn’t take a salary for herself.”
Regina BenjaminAlmost 20 years ago, Benjamin opened her clinic in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a fishing village of 2,500 known to fans of a 1994 hit film as the home of Forrest Gump’s shrimp boats. Four years later, it was ravaged by Hurricane Georges, again by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and burned to the ground soon after it was rebuilt. Benjamin’s determination to rebuild each time won her a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” last fall. She chose to spend it on again reopening the clinic.
In accepting the no-strings award, Benjamin told the story of a poor patient giving her a few dollars toward the rebuilding effort. “If she can find $7,” Benjamin said, “I can figure out the rest.”
During yesterday’s Rose Garden announcement, Benjamin expanded on the theme. “As a physician, my priority has always been the needs of my patients,” she said. “I decided I would treat patients regardless of their ability to pay. However, it has not been an easy road.
“It should not be this hard for doctors and other health care providers to care for their patients. It shouldn’t be this expensive for Americans to get health care in this country.”
Fighting preventable illness and its cost in human suffering is personal for her, Benjamin explained. Her father died of diabetes and hypertension; her brother of HIV. Lung cancer killed her mother, a lifetime smoker, and has left her uncle “struggling for each breath.” While “I cannot change my family’s past,” she said, “I can be a voice to improve our nation’s health for the future.”
After earning her bachelor’s degree from Xavier University of Louisiana in 1979, her medical degree from Morehouse School of Medicine in 1982, and a medical doctorate from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1984, Benjamin finished her residency in family practice at the Medical Center of Central Georgia in 1987. In exchange for promising to practice in a medically underserved community, Benjamin’s training was paid for by the National Health Service Corps.
She was the first black women to serve on the board of the American Medical Association and also earned a master’s in business administration from Tulane University in 1991, which was interpreted by some as a sign of political ambitions.
If confirmed by the Senate, Benjamin said she intends to be “America’s family physician,” and promised “to communicate directly to the American people, to help guide them through whatever changes come with health care reform.
“I want to make sure that no one, no one, falls through the cracks.”
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Union adviser Ronald Bloom heads auto task forceJuly 15, 2009 at 8:03am
Ronald W. Bloom, a Wall Street investment banker who went on to become a labor union adviser, is taking over as head of the auto task force.
Is John Coale handling another high-profile calamity?
When Republican Sarah Palin, the soon-to-be-former governor of Alaska, needs advice, she turns to John P. Coale, a Democratic lawyer with an impressive and varied range of connections.
A Bill and Hillary Clinton confidante, and the husband of Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, Coale has supported numerous Democratic candidates through the years.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)However, he endorsed Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, after Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama.
And during the campaign, Coale met Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, through Van Susteren.
After the election, he became an adviser to Palin (unpaid, Van Susteren stressed on her blog).
According to Todd Purdum, who profiled Palin in the August issue of Vanity Fair, Coale helped Palin create a political action committee, SarahPac, after the election.
He also reportedly assisted Palin in establishing The Alaska Fund Trust, her legal expense fund.
Coale told The Washington Post that Palin’s decision last week to step down as governor was motivated in part by what she saw as attacks upon her family.
“She couldn’t ignore the hits on the kids,” Coale said. “She said, ‘It brought out the mama grizzly in me.’”
Coale and Van Susteren, who is also a lawyer, were married in 1988. For a while, they practiced together, but he is now a partner in the Washington firm of Coale, Cooley, Lietz, McInerny & Broadus.
Both are members of the Church of Scientology, a religion practiced by Tom Cruise and John Travolta.
Coale represented another Scientologist, Lisa Marie Presley, in her divorce from Michael Jackson.
As a lawyer, Coale’s “particular specialty is the high-profile calamity,” wrote Peter Boyer in The New Yorker in 1999.
The first of his calamity cases was filed in 1979, when Coale unsuccessfully, but prominently, represented a group of U.S. citizens who had been held hostage for months in Iran, asking $10 million in damages for each of the plaintiffs.
In 1984, Coale heard of a toxic gas leak at a Union Carbide plant that killed thousands in Bhopal, India. He rushed to the scene and signed up more than 60,000 plaintiffs. He didn’t prevail in court as the case was decided in India, rather than in a U.S. court.
In the 1990s, Coale was one of several lawyers who came together as the Castano Group in suing Big Tobacco.
To add clout to their suits, Coale, a regular visitor to the Clinton White House, signed up Hugh Rodham, a lawyer and Hillary Clinton’s brother, to work on the case.
Coale and his colleagues did this, Boyer suggests, to out-brother-in-law Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, the Mississippi lawyer heading up an opposing anti-tobacco lawyers’ group. Scruggs’ wife was the sister of then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.
Scruggs’ group got the better of the settlements, though he is now in federal prison, having been convicted of attempting to bribe a judge in another case.
After the tobacco suits, Coale turned his attention to organizing municipalities to sue gun manufacturers.
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don’t forget his ethics complaint for solicitation and ambulance chasing. run right out of west virginia. he and his wife implicated for hiring people to stalk injured people.
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Benjamin vows to be America’s family doctorJuly 14, 2009 at 9:22am
Dr. Regina Benjamin, nominee for U.S. surgeon general, is a medical anachronism who rebuilt a microcosmic health care system.
Paterson’s choice of lieutenant governor draws opposition in NY
Richard Ravitch once got the subway trains to run on time in New York City.
Now he is taking on the more difficult task of getting the New York Senate to run at all.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)In a move that has already been challenged, New York Gov. David A. Paterson Wednesday named Ravitch, 76, the state’s lieutenant governor.
Ravitch took the oath of office later in the day at the Peter Lugar Steakhouse in Brooklyn, signing the papers a few hours before Republicans got a restraining order blocking the appointment.
Matters were further confused Thursday when State Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. of Queens, who had created a 31-31 deadlock in the Senate by defecting to the Republicans, returned to the Democratic camp, giving it a 32-30 majority. He will serve as Senate majority leader.
Reportedly, Ravitch will not start performing the duties of office until the court issue is resolved. Andrew Cuomo, the state’s attorney general, has ruled that the state’s constitution does not allow the appointment.
As lieutenant governor, Ravitch could break tie votes in the Senate.
He would fill a position that has been vacant since March 2008 when then Lt. Gov. Paterson became governor after the resignation of Eliot Spitzer.
Ravitch is accustomed to straightening out messes, so much so that Clyde Haberman of The New York Times once referred to him as “the designated rescuer.”
A Yale Law School graduate, Ravitch chaired his family’s construction company, a builder of affordable housing, in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1975, New York Gov. Hugh Carey, a Democrat, named Ravitch chairman of the state’s insolvent Urban Development Corporation. Ravitch led a bailout that saved the corporation.
In 1979, Ravitch became the chairman and CEO of New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority at a time when subway service was in disarray.
Ravitch devised ways to raise the money that was needed to overhaul the system.
Paterson turned to Ravitch last year to head a commission charged with coming up with ways to save the MTA once again.
The legislature approved a rescue plan this May, before the current crisis in the Senate began the next month.
Republicans took the Senate when Espada and Hiram Monserrate, of Queens, voted with them to depose the Democratic leadership.
Dean G. Skelos, a Republican, became the new majority leader. Espada was named Senate president, making him first in line to succeed Paterson, should Paterson leave office.
The Republicans control held for a few days. Then Monserrate chose to vote with the Democrats again, creating the 31-31 deadlock.
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Benjamin vows to be America’s family doctorJuly 14, 2009 at 9:22am
Dr. Regina Benjamin, nominee for U.S. surgeon general, is a medical anachronism who rebuilt a microcosmic health care system.
Obama Speechwriter Among Administrations Top Earners
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Muckety This Tupac to Barack Obama Solution
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