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Insider Report from Newsmax.com
March 27, 2011
Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Biden: Impeach President for Unauthorized Attack
2. Bush 41 Still ‘Quite Close’ to Bill Clinton
3. Talk Is Cheapest in Oregon, and Spirits Are High
4. Kristol: Palin Shouldn’t Be GOP Nominee
5. U.N.: One Quarter of North Koreans Face Starvation
6. Obesity-Mortality Link Called ‘Significantly Flawed’
1. Biden: Impeach President for
Unauthorized Attack
Vice President Joe Biden has a very clear idea of what should happen to
a president who orders U.S. military forces to launch an attack on a
foreign country without congressional authorization: impeachment.
With some voices saying President Barack Obama should face impeachment
for attacking Moammar Gadhafi’s forces in Libya, a videotape has
surfaced from the 2007 campaign trail showing Biden threatening to
impeach President George W. Bush if he attacked Iran without the
approval of Congress.
“I have written an extensive legal memorandum with the help of a group
of legal scholars who are sort of a stable of people, the best-known
constitutional scholars in America, because for 17 years I was chairman
of the Judiciary Committee,” Biden said in an interview with MSNBC’s
Chris Matthews on “Hardball.”
“I asked them to put together [for] me a draft, which I’m now literally
riding between towns editing, that I want to make clear and submit to
the United States Senate pointing out the president has no authority to
unilaterally attack Iran.
“And I want to make it clear, I want it on the record … if he does, as
chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and former chair of the
Judiciary Committee, I will move to impeach him.”
He went on to say: “I think the best deterrent is for the president to
know, even at the end of his term, we would move and move to follow
through with that so his legacy would be marred for all time if he
acted in what was clearly, clearly an impeachable offense.
“In the absence of that, what happens is, and you’re going to think I’m
joking about this — I’m not. If you’re going to impeach George Bush you
better impeach Cheney first. Not a joke.”
2. Bush 41 Still ‘Quite Close’ to
Bill Clinton
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton worked together on
fundraising efforts after the 2004 Asian tsunami and they have remained
close friends ever since, Bush discloses.
“Just because you run against someone in an election, it doesn’t mean
you hate the guy,” Bush said in an interview with his hometown paper,
the Houston Chronicle, published on Monday.
“Our friendship grew out of a shared belief you have to try to help
whenever and wherever you can. So we have become quite close.”
Bush and Clinton shared a 2 1/2-hour lunch when Clinton visited Houston
earlier this month.
“I do think our friendship has sent a message around the world that
just because you disagree on something doesn’t mean you can’t work
together,” Bush said.
Clinton also worked with Bush’s son, former President George W. Bush,
on fundraising efforts following the earthquake in Haiti. George and
his brother Jeb were later interviewed by CNN and George W. said:
“We’re fond of Bill Clinton. He’s been incredibly gracious to our dad.
And if somebody is gracious to our father, he ingratiates himself to
us. And we are grateful to Bill Clinton.”
3. Talk Is Cheapest in Oregon, and
Spirits Are High
Motorists in New York State can save big time on gasoline taxes by
simply driving to neighboring New Jersey to fill up.
New York has the second highest state gasoline tax rate, charging 47.1
cents per gallon, while New Jersey ranks No. 48 with a tax of just 14.5
cents per gallon, according to a new report from the Tax Foundation.
California has the highest tax, 47.7 cents, while other states with low
gas taxes are Alaska (8 cents) and Wyoming (14 cents).
The Tax Foundation’s report discloses wide differences in the state
taxes imposed on other items including cigarettes, spirits, wine, beer,
and cell phone usage.
In Oregon, the average state and local tax rate for cell phone usage is
just 1.81 percent, in Nevada it is 2.08 percent, and in Idaho, 2.2
percent. Nebraska has the highest rate, 18.64 percent, followed by
Washington (17.95 percent) and New York, 17.78 percent.
State taxes on cigarettes in New York amount to a whopping $4.35 per
pack, followed by Rhode Island at $3.46 and Washington, $3.025. The tax
on smokes is lowest in Missouri, 17 cents, followed by Virginia (30
cents) and Louisiana (36 cents).
While it may be cheap to talk on a cell phone in Oregon, having a
cocktail while chatting can be expensive. The state excise tax on
spirits in Oregon is $22.38 per gallon. Only Washington is higher,
$26.03. New Hampshire and Wyoming have no excise tax on spirits, and in
Vermont the tax is just 67 cents per gallon.
Wine is a different story. Alaska has the highest excise tax on wine,
$2.50 per gallon, followed by Florida at $2.25 and Iowa at $1.75. There
is no statewide tax on wine in Mississippi, New Hampshire,
Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wyoming, according to the Tax Foundation.
As for beer, the tax is highest in Alaska ($1.07 per gallon), Alabama
($1.05), and Georgia ($1.01), and lowest in Wyoming (2 cents), Missouri
(6 cents), and Wisconsin (6 cents).
4. Kristol: Palin Shouldn’t Be GOP
Nominee
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol was an early admirer of Sarah Palin
when she stepped onto the national stage, but he now believes she
shouldn’t be the Republican nominee for president in 2012.
During a panel discussion at Vanderbilt University on Monday, Kristol
said the choice of Palin as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2008
was “a reasonable gamble to take.”
He also said Palin “did fine” in her debate with Joe Biden, and “held
her own against the 30-year senator.”
But he added that she is “unlikely to run” in 2012 and went on to say
in comments reported by Politico: “She has a very shrewd judgment about
politics and policy and very good instincts, but she hasn’t done what
Reagan did, which is really educate himself over a number of years.
“I think she’s unlikely to be the Republican nominee, and to be honest
I think she probably shouldn’t be the Republican nominee for president.
5. U.N.: One Quarter of North Koreans
Face Starvation
North Korea’s government food distribution system will run out of
supplies in May and place a quarter of the nation’s citizens at risk of
starvation, according to the U.N. World Food Program.
Dire reports about food shortages in the communist country are not
uncommon, but the current situation is worse than in recent years, the
agency warns.
Floods and extreme cold this winter have devastated crops and an
outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease has ravaged North Korea’s livestock,
the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Vulnerable members of society are currently facing increasing shocks
to their daily coping strategies, leaving them on a knife edge,” the
WFP said in a statement.
Daily rations in the country have reportedly been reduced to 360 grams
a day. At one hospital visited by WFP staffers, 136 children were being
treated for malnutrition and 11 were in such poor condition that they
were able to take only intravenous fluids and high-nutrition biscuits,
none of which were available.
The United States and other nations are wary about rushing to North
Korea’s aid because previous food donations have been re-directed by
dictator Kim Jong Il’s regime away from ordinary citizens to the
nation’s military and elite, the Journal noted.
The WFP has proposed sending 297,000 tons of cereal products to North
Korea. But that assistance would amount to only about 5 percent of the
5.5 million tons of rice and cereal grains North Korea needs to produce
to feed its 24 million residents each year.
Newsmax reported in February that North Korea had ordered its embassies
and diplomatic offices around the world to issue new appeals for food
aid.
An estimated 1 million North Koreans died in a famine in the early and
mid-1990s.
6. Obesity-Mortality Link Called
‘Significantly Flawed’
Amid anti-obesity campaigns — including first lady Michelle Obama’s
crusade against childhood obesity — comes a new report skeptical of
assertions that weight problems are closely linked to early death.
The report states that there is little credible scientific evidence to
support claims that being overweight or obese leads to an early death,
and the science behind such claims is “frequently nonexistent or
distorted,” according to report authors Patrick Basham and John Luik.
Several studies support the authors’ view, according to Basham,
director of the Democracy Institute and a Cato Institute adjunct
scholar, and Luik, a Democracy Institute senior fellow. Their report
appears on the Spiked website.
For example, Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention found that there were more premature deaths among Americans
of normal weight than among the overweight, and in fact those who were
overweight were most likely to live the longest.
An analysis by Jerome Gronniger in the American Journal of Public
Health noted that men in the “normal” weight category had a mortality
rate as high as men in the “moderately obese” category, and men in the
“overweight” category had the lowest mortality risk.
A recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
looked at various measures of obesity, such as percentage of body fat
and waist circumference, and found that those high in body fat
percentage and waist circumference had lower mortality rates than
others.
And a study published this month in the prestigious medical journal The
Lancet “has driven an empirical stake through the heart of the
conventional wisdom that being ‘apple shaped’ [with fat concentrated
around the waist] increased one’s risk of a heart attack,” Basham and
Luik observed.
The 10-year study involving 220,000 people found that waist
circumference is not a reliable predictor of cardiovascular disease.
Basham and Luik, authors of “Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity
Crusade,” state: “We continue to find that the case against obesity is
significantly flawed.
“All of which should serve to remind us that the success of the obesity
crusade rests not on the truth of its science, but on the way in which
the obesity entrepreneurs use that science to change policy. Going
forward, better policymaking will require, at a minimum, a far greater
appreciation of the way in which science and its findings are both
misrepresented and used by the obesity crusaders to distort the
regulatory process.”
Read this with links at Newsmax
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