Obama criticizes rival on Medicare
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Wooing Florida voters, President Barack Obama warned Thursday that Republican challenger Mitt Romney would gut his health care reform law and turn Medicare into a voucher program, driving up costs for the elderly on fixed incomes. Romney, firing away near his Boston home base, accused Obama of caring only about saving his own job — not the jobs of Americans.
In the daily war of words in an up-for-grabs presidential contest, health care politics took top billing as Obama opened two days of campaigning in Florida, the largest and most coveted of the nation’s Election Day toss-up states. Obama could see his chances for another term seriously damaged if Romney prevails here.
For his part, Romney, in hastily arranged remarks to reporters near Boston, kept the focus on the sluggish economic recovery under Obama’s watch. He cited new government figures showing that the number of American seeking unemployment benefits rose by 34,000 last week, a figure that may have been skewed higher by seasonal factors.
Both candidates were pouring most of their money and attention into the collection of fewer than 10 states expected to decide the election. First lady Michelle Obama launched a new effort to rally supporters behind her husband, trying to light a fire by saying the whole race could “come down to just a few votes per precinct in key states.”
Pa. monsignor seeks probation
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The first U.S. church official convicted of endangering children in the priest-abuse scandal asked Thursday for probation instead of prison, saying he had already experienced months of scrutiny, vilification and shame.
Monsignor William Lynn, 61, of Philadelphia awaits sentencing on Tuesday. Lynn, the former secretary for clergy at the city’s Roman Catholic archdiocese, handled priest assignments and child sexual-assault complaints from 1992 to 2004.
He faces up to seven years in prison after a jury convicted him last month of felony child endangerment for his oversight of now-defrocked priest Edward Avery. Avery is serving a 2 1/2 to five-year term after pleading guilty before trial to sexually assaulting an altar boy in church.
Lynn’s lawyers argue that few Pennsylvanians serve long prison terms for child endangerment and say he should not serve more time than abusers.
“Monsignor Lynn has never harbored any intent to harm a child,” lawyers Thomas Bergstrom and Jeffrey Lindy wrote.
Gobbledygook
persists by feds
WASHINGTON (AP) — An effort to make the government write so people can understand what they’re reading is off to a spotty start.
A year after an anti-gobbledygook law took effect, federal agencies are still churning out plenty of incomprehensible English, according to the Center for Plain Language, which released a “report card” Thursday grading agencies on their progress — or lack of it.
The Agriculture Department got top marks among the dozen agencies checked: an A for meeting the law’s basic requirements and a B for taking supporting actions such as training staff to write clearly. Faring the worst, Veterans Affairs flunked on both counts.
The Plain Writing Act required agencies to start using clear language in October in documents that provide information to the public. But there’s no penalty for noncompliance. By now, all agencies are supposed to have a senior officer responsible for plain language, a section of their websites devoted to the subject and a broader process in motion to ensure they begin communicating more clearly with citizens and businesses.
Scalia: No ‘falling out’ with Roberts
WASHINGTON (AP) — Justice Antonin Scalia said he hasn’t had a “falling out” with Chief Justice John Roberts over the Supreme Court’s landmark 5-4 decision validating much of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
In an interview that aired Wednesday on CNN, the justice said that, despite reports that he and Roberts had clashed, there is not a personal feud going on between the court’s two leading conservatives.
“There are clashes on legal questions but not personally,” Scalia said of the court.
The Supreme Court late last month upheld much of Obama’s signature health care law, with Roberts siding with the court’s liberals to uphold the hotly debated core requirement that nearly every American have health insurance. The decision allowed the law to go forward with its aim of covering more than 30 million uninsured Americans.
Since then, Roberts has been the focus of derision from some of the nation’s leading conservatives, and there have been reports of fractures in the relationships on the court’s conservative wing, of which Roberts and Scalia are members.
“No, I haven’t had a falling out with Justice Roberts,” Scalia said, when asked about a purported clash between him and Roberts.
“Loud words exchanged, slamming of doors?” prompted Morgan.
“No, no, nothing like that,” said Scalia, who noted that he was out of the country for most of the criticism of Roberts.
Scalia also emphasized “the court is not at all a political institution” and said he believed “not a single one” of his Supreme Court colleagues considers politics when making decisions at the court.
“I don’t think any of my colleagues on any cases vote the way they do for political reasons,” he said. “They vote the way they do because they have their own judicial philosophy.”
Scalia also defended the court’s 2-year-old decision in Citizens United to give corporate and labor union interests the right to spend freely to advocate for or against candidates for state and local offices.
“I think Thomas Jefferson would have said the more speech, the better,” said Scalia, when asked about so-called super PAC spending on national elections. “That’s what the First Amendment is all about. So long as the people know where the speech is coming from.”
Scalia also said in the interview that the case that brings about the “most waves of disagreement” is still the ruling that decided the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. But the justice said his normal answer to people who ask about Bush v. Gore is to “get over it.”
Scalia said it was Gore who decided to bring the courts into the battle. “The only question in Bush v. Gore was whether the presidency would be decided by the Florida Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court,” Scalia said. “It was the only question and it’s not a hard one.”
In fact, Bush’s legal team was the first to go to court, asking a federal judge to block hand recounts in several Florida counties. Several days later, Gore’s lawyers were in a state court seeking to force Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to accept updated county vote totals.
Scalia said he had no regrets about the court’s decision.
“No regrets at all,” the justice said. “Especially because it’s clear that the thing would have ended up the same way anyway. The press did extensive research into what would have happened if (what) Al Gore wanted done had been done, county by county, and he would have lost anyway.”
The justice’s recollection of the outcome of the vote-by-vote review sponsored by eight news organizations, including The Associated Press, was more definitive than the AP reported when the review was released in November 2001.
“Completing two partial recounts that Gore unsuccessfully pursued in court showed Bush maintaining a lead ranging between 225 and 493 votes.
“Under any standard that tabulated all disputed votes statewide, however, Gore erased Bush’s advantage and emerged with a tiny lead that ranged from 42 to 171 votes.
“Strikingly, all these outcomes were closer than even the narrow 537 votes of Bush’s official victory. With numbers that tiny, experts said it would be impossible to interpret the survey results as definitive,” the AP reported.
Scalia is beginning a book tour promoting his new book, “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts” with co-author Bryan A. Garner.
