Huckabee Says Palin’s Plans Won’t Affect His For 2012 Election
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee says Iowa voters have sent a national message by ousting three state supreme court justices over the gay marriage issue.
Huckabee was in Des Moines on Sunday courting evangelical conservatives.
He spoke from the pulpit as the keynote speaker for the Iowa Family Policy Center.
He is considered to be a top of election candidates in the 2012 election — along with fellow republicans Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney
Huckabee said he’ll have a better idea on his campaign in six months. And his decision won’t be swayed by Sarah Palin.
”If she gets in she may run away with it and that’s something that everybody has to be prepared for. But I won’t make my decision on what she does. If I get in it I prefer that she not and she endorse me (laughs),” says Huckabee.

Hillary Clinton ’Not In Any Way Interested’ In Pursuing Elective Office

Don’t expect to see Hillary Rodham Clinton’s name on an election candidates ballot anytime soon.

The current secretary of state – and former Democratic senator and presidential candidate – says she’s very happy in her job as America’s top diplomat.

She tells ”Fox News Sunday” that she’s ”not in any way interested in or pursuing anything in elective office.”

Clinton says she’s committed to doing what she can to advance the interests and values of the United States.

Thanksgiving 2010: Bless Sarah Palin
Our greatest thanks go to Sen. John McCain for having chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate back in 2008. She truly is a gift that keeps giving. Her latest stunt–confusing North and South Korea–is further testimony to her unique contribution to American politics. Without her, it would all be so much more boring.

Palin keeps everyone on their toes. President Obama has to worry that this volatile politician might actually become the Republican election candidates in 2012. If the economy remains in a tailspin, Palin can continue to argue that the experts lack expertise, and that it’s time for a gal from Alaska to set America aright.

She’s no less of a conundrum for the GOP. The Republican establishment is going into overdrive to stop Palin. For Mitt Romney and others she’s a nightmare. But it may take nothing less than Republican political sorcery to stop her. The truth is that Palin’s very ignorance serves as her vital badge of credibility with the right. The less she knows about foreign countries, the purer she appears. It’s interesting, among other things, that Palin doesn’t appear to have traveled abroad in the past few years. She doesn’t want seasoning. She wants to be unseasoned.

Which is why I don’t think that her latest gaffe will hurt her with conservatives. They’ll blame the liberal media–even though the flub happened while appearing on Glenn Beck’s show–for blowing it out of proportion. Anyway, conservatives, who have long viewed McCain with suspicion, should express their gratitude on Thanksgiving to McCain for impulsively selecting Palin. She is his true bequest, his legacy as a politician.

Finally, the rest of the world should be grateful as well. Foreign newspapers are tut-tutting over Palin’s Korea misstep. That America can produce a character such as Palin allows them to wallow in their superiority to the USA. No one can say that America isn’t a generous country. It showcases leaders such as Palin so that the rest of the world can laugh at it. Even, of all places, North Korea.

Sarah Palin: 2012 Presidential Contender Or Pretender?
DES MOINES, Iowa — Sarah Palin, the telegenic Republican who exasperates and delights voters about equally, is dropping ever more hints of a presidential bid, including a visit Saturday to the key state of Iowa.
The official purpose of her trip to suburban Des Moines is to promote her new book, ”America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag.” But Democratic and Republican insiders will search for every possible hint of whether she will seek the nomination to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012.
Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee, has fed such speculation in recent days. She told ABC’s Barbara Walters she thinks she could beat Obama, adding, ”I’m looking at the lay of the land now.”
In a separate interview, Obama told Walters, ”I don’t think about Sarah Palin.” He added that Palin has ”a strong base of support in the Republican Party, and I respect those skills.”
Palin will attend a second book-signing event next week in Iowa, which holds the nation’s first presidential caucuses in 13 months.

Barbara Bush: Palin Should Just Stay In Alaska
WASHINGTON — Former first lady Barbara Bush doesn’t appear to think much of Sarah Palin’s White House aspirations, saying the former Alaska governor should stick to her home state.
In an interview with CNN’s Larry King scheduled for airing Monday, Mrs. Bush says she sat next to Palin once and ”thought she was beautiful.”
The outspoken wife of former President George H.W. Bush says Palin, who is considering a presidential run in 2012, seems ”very happy in Alaska” but then adds, ”I hope she’ll stay there.”
In an excerpt provided by CNN, both Bushes compliment their son, former President George W. Bush, on the success of his recent memoir, ”Decision Points.”
The former president says his son has ”done a good job selling the darn thing.”

Obama Needs Wake-Up Call on Jobs Before 2012
There are ongoing discussions in Democratic circles since the Republican electoral victories about how the president can get re-elected in 2012. The few I’ve attended ignore the most salient and disturbing fact of them all: the unemployment rate come election day will almost certainly be well above 8 percent, and perhaps hovering near 9 percent. Can a sitting president win with even an 8 percent unemployment rate, the best that can be hoped for? It would be setting a post-World War II precedent, by far.

The current unemployment rate is 9.6 percent. In February 2010, the president’s annual budget forecast that the average unemployment rate in 2012 would fall to 8.2 percent. But it almost certainly won’t drop that far, because the rate of real GDP growth is already slower than the president’s budget staff forecast for the remainder of 2010. And they were counting on GDP growth rising to an annual rate of well above 4 percent in both 2011 and 2012. Highly improbable.

This will be quite a mountain to climb. The unemployment rate has never been above 8 percent in November of a presidential election year. It has been above 7 percent only four times. In three such cases, the incumbents lost — Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. Ronald Reagan won reelection with an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent, but it had fallen more than three and a half percentage points from its high two years earlier at the worst moment of the steep Reagan recession.

Looking back farther, when unemployment rates were tamer, the well-known vice president Richard Nixon lost to the upstart Catholic John Kennedy in 1960 when the unemployment rate rose to 6.1 percent from 5.1 percent half a year earlier. Nixon was famously furious that his boss, President Dwight Eisenhower, wouldn’t step on the fiscal gas to help him win after he had asked him to.

Obama has to step on the gas again. But he won’t. He has bought into the budget deficit alarms.

And the Republicans won’t let him step on the gas, anyway. They showed themselves to be deficit enthusiasts a few years ago as President Bush piled them up. But now they are born again — or born again and again — and decry deficits. They say they are fiscal moralists, but they also know that raising the alarms will stymie any quick return to growth and more jobs. They seem to have all the cards.

Obama had better wake up to this reality. The Republicans are bad enough, but he has been his own worst enemy. He appointed the fiscal commission to cut the deficit, playing into short-term fears, and now they will report on December 1. Will he accept proposals to cut spending too soon? It is his commission, after all. The president of course has to fight for major stimulus programs and fight even harder to stop any spending reductions now. Even in 2012, spending cuts would dangerously damage the economy.

The Perfect Storm That Could Elect Sarah Palin
The 2000 election was enough precedent for this to be a valid concern. Speaking for myself, I was of the tragically misguided opinion that both major party election candidates were more or less the same. If, as my idiotic reasoning dictated, both election candidates were the same, why not vote my conscience? Yeah, it sounds crazy in hindsight, but I certainly wasn’t alone. It was a dominant view among many liberals at that time. And so I stood in the voting booth and, at the last minute, decided to vote for Ralph Nader instead of the obviously better and more practical candidate: Vice President Gore. A lot of liberal voters joined me in that decision, unfortunately.

There’s no reason to believe this can’t happen again and with enough impact to swing a close election to the Republican nominee, in spite of what sorts of awfulness will inevitably follow. We’re already beginning to hear about a third party challenge from Michael Bloomberg. And even though third party candidates have virtually no chance of winning, they can still successfully swing an election.

Perhaps I’m being overly cautious and pessimistic. Perhaps common sense will win the day and Sarah Palin will be laughed off the stage and chased back to her compound in Wasilla where she can instigate liberals for her own personal shits, giggles and growing fortune. I hope that’s the case. But if we turn our backs on the possibility of this perfect storm, we could be unleashing a presidency that would make the Bush years seem comparatively painless.

If Palin is going to win, her grotesquely obvious negatives will have to be spun as ”presidential.” That’s a long road to travel, but it’s entirely possible. Just look at the ever-lengthening roster of zombie opposite-day lies floating around.

Death panels are still a thing, even though lingering Republican experiments in healthcare are killing people (sorry, ”both sides are insane” hipsters, but this is absolutely true and Alan Grayson was right). Or how basic high school level economics and math indicating that an extension of the Bush tax rates won’t stimulate economic growth is attacked as ”liberal math.” Or how the public option was unpopular even though it was wildly popular. Or how President Obama’s has a terrible record on jobs even though more jobs have been created during his term than were created during all eight years of the Bush administration. Or how President Obama is ballooning the deficit even though he’s responsible for the single largest one-year reduction in the deficit — ever ($122 billion!). The list goes on and on. And instead of exposing the FNC-GOP-Industrial Complex’s lies, the rest of cable news takes these views as valid points of debate, allowing hired goons to repeat them over and over until the lies become just another angle on the truth.

So Palin can slot nicely into this process. Her ridiculous, misspelled and otherwise disqualifying social network outbursts and Fox News appearances can and have easily become reality. Again, ”death panels” was a Palin thing and it helped to turn public opinion against universal health care even though, to that point, the public had resoundingly supported it.

Post-Election Attacks on Financial Regulation Ignore the Lessons of the Recent Past
If doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, then post-election pronouncements from Republican leaders regarding financial regulatory reform are nothing short of insane.

In the wake of this month’s elections, newly empowered Republican election candidates in Congress have raced to declare their intent to roll back financial regulations and rein in the agencies responsible for implementing them. This is particularly ironic since many of these same members campaigned on a pledge of ”No More Bailouts.” But experience has shown that even the most committed free marketeers will blink when faced with the prospect of a global economic meltdown.

The only way to credibly pledge to prevent bailouts then is to eliminate the conditions that make them inevitable. There are several ways to do that: 1) break up the large financial institutions so that they can be allowed to fail without taking the rest of the financial system with them; 2) disentangle the complex web of connections that creates a domino effect when one institution fails; 3) raise capital standards so that financial institutions have a bigger cushion when times get tough; 4) rein in the reckless and abusive conduct that lands financial institutions in hot water in the first place; and 5) create a mechanism to allow for the orderly dissolution of large institutions when all the other strategies come up short.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act enacted earlier this year does not attempt to break up the largest financial institutions, and many question whether its new resolution authority can handle the failure of a large multi-national financial institution, but the Act includes a variety of measures aimed at the other goals. All of them, however, rely on regulators to do well precisely those things that regulators did poorly in the run up to the financial crisis. And all of them are now, to one degree or another, in the cross-hairs of Republican congressional leaders.

One attack comes from those who are looking to cut the budgets of federal financial regulatory agencies, claiming such cuts are a necessary part of their pledge to eliminate the deficit without raising taxes. This threat to de-fund financial regulation is particularly troubling given Congress’s failure as part of the Dodd-Frank Act to provide two agencies with key roles in its implementation — the SEC and CFTC — with the same type of secure funding other financial regulators enjoy. If Congress fails to come through with a funding increase for SEC and CFTC that matches the dramatic expansion in their responsibilities, these agencies’ ability to provide effective oversight and implementation of the new law will be hamstrung. Thankfully, threats to defund the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are just hollow bullying. The CFPB’s funds come directly from the Federal Reserve’s budget, and the Act specifically forbids the House and Senate Appropriations Committees from reviewing the CFBP’s budget.

What’s Next for Clean Energy and Climate Policies
There is no doubt that we have our work cut out for us. The current Senate has failed to act on comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation and we now know that the 112th Congress will be a very different landscape with an incoming class of members that is among the most anti-science to date. Yet the outcome of the elections does not change the facts: the U.S. is dangerously dependent on oil, China and other countries are making huge gains in clean energy technologies, and we continue to spew dangerous carbon pollution into the atmosphere.

The fight to create new clean energy jobs and solve the climate crisis must continue – in the states, at the Environmental Protection Agency and with other administrative opportunities and, to the extent possible, in Congress. While we do not expect the new Congress to act on a comprehensive energy and climate bill, we will continue to push for progress and encourage Congress and the Obama administration to use every tool available to grow America’s clean energy economy and curb harmful carbon pollution.

Most importantly, we must now focus on protecting and preserving the EPA’s authority to crack down on polluters and regulate global warming pollution under the Clean Air Act, with a particular emphasis on beating back any congressional attempts to block or delay the EPA from moving forward. Additionally, we will also urge the administration – via the Departments of Energy, Interior, Transportation and EPA – to take aggressive action on other clean energy, environmental and public health issues. (As we’ve previously noted, our election eve poll of 83 battleground districts found that voters — including independent voters — overwhelmingly support the EPA regulating carbon pollution.)

Where possible, we will work to pass complementary clean energy measures in Congress – like a renewable electricity standard, building efficiency standards, cutting fossil fuel subsidies and reducing the transportation sector’s oil use — many of which have had bipartisan support in the past.

We were reminded of this recently as we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which were signed into law after passing through Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. Newt Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Barton, Henry Waxman, Jim Inhofe, Ed Markey, Jim Sensebrenner, Chuck Schumer and Fred Upton all voted for final passage of the amendments — shepherded by the administration of George H.W. Bush — that updated the Clean Air Act to address a wide range of modern day air pollution problems including acid rain, automobile tailpipe emissions, air toxins and ozone depletion.

We need that same bipartisan support to protect EPA’s ability to hold polluters accountable and put in place clean energy solutions that help rebuild America’s struggling economy. But we should be clear that much of our effort in the 112th Congress may be focused on defense. It’s worth remembering what incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner said last year when asked about climate change: ”…the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”

As Congress acts on these election candidates issues, LCV will aggressively hold accountable those lawmakers who stand in the way of progress by siding with Big Oil, Dirty Coal and other corporate polluters.

Building off the overwhelming rejection of California’s dirty energy ballot measure — Proposition 23 — we will also work to defend other states’ clean energy laws that are under assault from polluting special interests. And we will continue to make progress on clean energy and climate policies in key places across the country. Successful clean energy economies are already emerging in cities and states where innovation is supported by smart, sustainable policies, and this progress must be encouraged. The states have always been the laboratories of democracy, and clean energy is no exception.

It is deeply disturbing that the U.S. has not yet enacted comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation and that as a result of the midterm elections we will have to say goodbye to many good friends. But there are paths forward. We can still make progress. We must keep working at every level to transition our nation to a cleaner, safer, more secure energy future.