Obama Picks Insider, Political Hack Without Any Medical Credentials To Be His Ebola Czar. Can It Get Any More Clear That This Is A Crisis That The Administration Is Milking?

Obama taps Ron Klain as Ebola czar

Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

Share on Google Plus

Share via Email

More Options

Resize Text

 

Print Article

 

Comments 1331

By Juliet Eilperin and David Nakamura October 17 at 12:05 PM   

Ron Klain, shown in 2011, has been tapped by President Obama to become the administration's Ebola response coordinator. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

President Obama has asked Ron Klain, who served as chief of staff to both Vice President Biden and former vice president Al Gore, as his Ebola response coordinator, according to a White House official.

"He will report directly to the president’s homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, and the president's national security adviser, Susan Rice, as he ensures that efforts to protect the American people by detecting, isolating and treating Ebola patients in this country are properly integrated but don’t distract from the aggressive commitment to stopping Ebola at the source in West Africa," a White House official wrote in an e-mail.

Klain, a longtime Democratic operative, served as Biden's chief of staff from 2009 to 2011 and as Gore's from 1995 to 1999. He helped oversee the Democratic side in the 2000 presidential election recount as its lead lawyer, a role that Kevin Spacey portrayed in the HBO film "Recount."

CNN first reported the news Friday morning.

Obama has been under pressure from Republicans for weeks to appoint an "Ebola czar" to oversee the federal government's overall effort to contain the disease. Thursday night, the president told reporters: "It may make sense for us to have one person, in part just so that after this initial surge of activity, we can have a more regular process, just to make sure that we're crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's going forward. "

"Klain’s role is consistent with the view the president articulated in the Oval Office last night that Monaco, Rice and others have done outstanding work in confronting this challenge so far — but given their management of other national and homeland security priorities, additional bandwidth will further enhance the government’s Ebola response," the White House official added in the e-mailed statement.

The move did not satisfy conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who said the staff change fell short of what is needed to contain the spread of the lethal virus on U.S. soil.

“We don't need another so-called 'czar'; we need presidential leadership. This is a public health crisis, and the answer isn't another White House political operative," Cruz said in a statement. "The answer is a commander in chief who stands up and leads, banning flights from Ebola-afflicted nations and acting decisively to secure our southern border."

But Klain's Democratic colleagues said he was well-suited for the assignment. Robert Bauer, who served as White House counsel under Obama and also worked on the 2008 recount, said Klain has developed a reputation of having "taken on highly-charged assignments where there were significant complexities, and managed them very well."

Klain is not known for his health-care expertise, though he would get briefings on those policies in his capacity as a campaign strategist for Gore and the Democrats' 2004 presidential candidate, John Kerry.

"I wouldn't call him a policy wonk by any means, but he was someone who got [that] you couldn’t formulate good strategy without understanding the policy," said Chris Jennings, who served as a top White House health policy adviser under Presidents Clinton and Obama.

Klain navigated the legal and political worlds with ease, Jennings added. "He wasn’t just an analyst. He was a strategist."

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) questioned Klain's lack of medical credentials, saying in a statement, “Given the mounting failings in the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak, it is right that the President has sought to task a single individual to coordinate its response. But I have to ask why the President didn’t pick an individual with a noteworthy infectious disease or public health background?

Known for a mordant sense of humor, Klain is also an enthusiastic Facebook user who frequently posts about his family. He is married toMonica Medina, who served as a top National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official during Obama's first term and is now the National Geographic Society's senior director for international ocean policy.

Klain became close with Biden while serving as a staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee when Biden served as chairman. He helped advise Biden during the 2008 campaign, and his bona fides inside the West Wing date back to shortly after Obama won that historic election.

During the transition, the newly elected president wanted to find a role for Klain in the West Wing, and his name was mentioned as a potential White House communications director, according to a person familiar with the internal deliberations. But Biden also wanted him and convinced Klain to join the vice president’s office as chief of staff, a role he had also served for Vice President Gore in the late 1990s.

Mark Gitenstein, a former Obama administration ambassador to Romania, said Klain developed a strong relationship with Obama while helping prepare the then-senator from Illinois for the presidential debates against Republican nominee John McCain in 2008. Klain had served in a similar role for John Kerry’s 2004 campaign.

“Debate prep requires getting in someone’s face and saying, ‘No, you're not doing this right,’ ” said Gitenstein, who had personally recommended that Klain replace him as general counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1989, when Klain was 28 and then serving as a clerk on the Supreme Court.

Gitenstein said Klain’s management of the economic stimulus push in the first year of the Obama administration helped him prepare for the challenges that he'll face managing the Ebola response. “It was a very difficult job – a management problem and a problem of getting the money to the right places, which required coordination with other Cabinet secretaries. … Ron really got his arms around the problem as fast as anyone I’ve seen.”

Former senator Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), who was a longtime political adviser to Biden, called Klain well-suited for the role based on his varied experience dealing with Congress, the White House and the media.

“He’s like your renaissance man, the more difficult the problem the better he is,” Kaufman said.

Jon Wolfsthal, who served on Biden’s national security staff, said Klain managed both Biden’s domestic operations and the national security division.

“I would not say he’s a light touch. You know he’s in the room,” Wolfsthal said. “But he’s not trying to push anybody around or boss them around. He’s very serious and he makes sure the work gets done. … Even though he doesn’t have a background in disease, it doesn’t matter – he will master anything.”

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) immediately praised the news.

"I've known Ron Klain for over twenty years," Schumer said in a statement. "He is smart, aggressive, and levelheaded; exactly the qualities we need in a czar to steer our response to Ebola. He is an excellent choice."

Klain left the White House in 2011 to become president of Case Holdings, the holding company for the business and philanthropic interests of former AOL chairman Steve Case.

Ed O'Keefe contributed to this report.

Americans Are Afraid To Call Out Muslims!

Zuhdi Jasser: White House Lacks 'Courage' to Use the Word 'Muslims'

Monday, 21 Apr 2014 06:44 PM

By Wanda Carruthers

Share:

  Get Short Link |

  Email Article |

  Comment  |

   Contact Us  |

  Print  

|  A   A  

• inShare

The White House lacks "courage" to use the word "Muslims" when admonishing communities to look for extremist tendencies among children, said Zuhdi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.

"They are talking about Muslims. They're talking about Islamism. Yet they don't have the courage to name it. You're not going to have a policy that way. You can't have national security by PR," Jasser told "Fox & Friends" Monday.

The issue came up in a recent speech by a White House official at Harvard University on April 15, the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings.



Lisa Monaco, President Barack Obama's assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, delivered an address titled "Countering Violent Extremism and the Power of Community." She urged American parents, religious leaders, and friends to watch children for tendencies toward terrorism.

Monaco's speech did not mention radical Islam, but stressed the agency's efforts in "stemming domestic radicalization to violence." A number of domestic attacks have had ties to radical Islam, including the bombings at the Boston Marathon and the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, Texas.

"Violent extremism is not unique to any one faith. And, as Americans, we reject violence, regardless of our faith," Monaco told the Harvard Kennedy School Forum.

Jasser said it was "obvious and glaring" that Monaco didn't mention the "issue of [the] radicalization of jihadism, the ideology of radical Islam."

The politically correct culture that downplayed the role of Islamic extremists in violent attacks made the cause of moderate Muslims more difficult, Jasser said.

"Those of us who are doing reform work, that realize that it's Muslims that can fix this, are left in the margins, while the apologists who are in denial and want to put obstacles in our counterterrorism work in this country are working with the White House preventing the work that needs to be done," he said.



Related Stories:

• Reporter Howie Carr: Gov. Patrick Was Too PC After Boston Bombings
• American Islamist Coalition Launches With Empty Rhetoric

© 2014 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Obama Wants To Stop All Terror By Having Everyone Report "Abnormal" Behavior.

Obama Administration Asks Parents, Schools To Watch For ‘Warning Signs’ Of Kids Training For Terror

April 22, 2014 by Ben Bullard 

 7 2

 

 2 37

THINKSTOCK

President Barack Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser suggested to a Harvard audience last week that parents and teachers across the country can get involved in rooting out homegrown terror by turning a more suspicious eye toward the children they raise and educate.

“[W]e recognize that there are limits to what the federal government can do,” Lisa O. Monaco, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security, said in a prepared speech before the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. “So we must rely on the partnership of those who are most familiar with the local risks, those who are in the best position to take action–local communities.”

How do you do that? By scanning kids for indicative behavioral changes while viewing the little strangers’ growing-up phases through a lens that filters for the “warning signs” of terror:

In the more than 80 percent of cases involving homegrown violent extremists, people in the community — whether peers or family members or authority figures or even strangers — had observed warning signs a person was becoming radicalized to violence. But more than half of those community members downplayed or dismissed their observations without intervening. So it’s not that the clues weren’t there, it’s that they weren’t understood well enough to be seen as the indicators of a serious problem.

What kinds of behaviors are we talking about? For the most part, they’re not related directly to plotting attacks. They’re more subtle. For instance, parents might see sudden personality changes in their children at home — becoming confrontational. Religious leaders might notice unexpected clashes over ideological differences. Teachers might hear a student expressing an interest in traveling to a conflict zone overseas. Or friends might notice a new interest in watching or sharing violent material.

In a world in which the government holds the keys to solving all ills, this advice veers toward the dystopian. Parents whose lives enmesh fully with their offspring through direct, intimate and constant involvement in the raising of their children are not as valuable to the police state as parents who at least know what to watch out for in their kids, aloof as so many parent-child relationships may be.

The same can be said of teachers, whose skills in monitoring children as potential wards of the state — either through removal from the home or incarceration — prove at least as useful to a watchful government as is their ability to transmit knowledge and cultivate close ties with parents (aloof, of course, as many parent-teacher relationships may be).

Monaco’s introduction made note of several recent terror attacks and isolated, tragic freak-outs — but she managed to place them all on the same top shelf of anti-terror priorities, while simultaneously observing the alleged motives only of the crazy far right.

Here’s what she said about last year’s Boston Marathon bombing:

Of course, we’re here today because of a tragedy. This morning I joined Vice President Biden at the memorial service marking the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings — marking one year since we were shocked by those awful images at the finish line; one year since we lost Krystle Campbell, Lingzi Lu, eight-year-old Martin Richard and Officer Sean Collier — all innocent lives and all lost far too soon.  It’s been one year since we saw how Boston responds in the face of terrorism–with resilience and resolve and unbending strength.

When the bombs went off, I had been President Obama’s chief advisor on homeland security and counterterrorism for just a few weeks. It was a deeply personal introduction to the demands of this job. I was raised a few miles from here — in Newton. I went to high school in the shadow of Fenway Park and then made the long trek down Storrow Drive to come here for college. Growing up, I spent every Patriot’s Day lining that marathon route — usually at the crest of Heartbreak Hill — cheering on the runners and taking part in a great Boston tradition. And last year, my twin brother was there in the crowd, alongside thousands of other Bostonians. It was not only an attack on the homeland; it was an attack on my hometown.

By whom? For what reasons? She didn’t attempt to speculate.

Here’s what she said about the crazy guy who killed three people earlier this month at a Jewish community center in Kansas:

We’ve faced violent expressions of extremism throughout our history, including 19 years ago this week in Oklahoma City. And, sadly, we continue to face it, as we saw just two days ago in Overland Park, Kansas, when a gunman — allegedly a white supremacist with a long history of racist and anti-Semitic behavior — opened fire at a Jewish community center and retirement home, killing three. And, while the American people continue to stand united against hatred and violence, the unfortunate truth is that extremist groups will continue targeting vulnerable populations in an effort to promote their murderous ideology.

That’s why stemming domestic radicalization to violence has been a key element of our counterterrorism strategy from day one. President Obama has been laser-focused on making sure we use all the elements of our national power to protect Americans, including developing the  first government-wide strategy to prevent violent extremism in the United States.