The head of the Alaska Family Council -- a Christian pro-family, anti-abortion group -- on Wednesday sent an e-mail to thousands of people asking them to urge Palin to pick Smith, not Christen. [....]
The family council plea, from group president Jim Minnery, said Smith was "more conservative" and that Christen would be "another activist on the Court."
"it is likely that Obama will nominate someone else for a second post Daschle had created for himself: director of a new White House Office of Health Reform. One name mentioned for the job is former Clinton administration adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle, who would take over the effort to conceive, sell and implement a wide-ranging health-care overhaul."
Clinton herself saw all this coming. Two years ago, in the early stages of her presidential campaign, she warned we were undergoing "a slow erosion of our own economic sovereignty" because of our growing indebtedness to foreigners, who, according to some estimates, hold about half of our government-issued securities.
The day she made that warning, a selloff in the Chinese stock markets led to a plunge on Wall Street. In a letter to then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson andFederal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, then-Sen. Clinton said the dynamic "underscores the exposure of our economy to economic developments in countries like China."
