Posted on 06/03/2009 10:41:16 AM PDT by STARWISE
BREAKING -- And another one: the Obama administration will name a Republican as the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a White House official tells POLITICO.
The announcement that former Republican Congressman Jim Leach of Iowa will be nominated this afternoon. -- Carol E. Lee (1:17 p.m.)
another useless position... should be his job to dismantle and get rid of his department.
It’s probably about the pension.
Obama is just vacating seats so there is no possible way there can be any Republican opposition to the avalanche of bills coming down the pike.
And of course those greedy RINO’S just leap at the chance to further line their pockets with unrestricted access to the public purse.
>>>Beltway Bill Bennet once headed this agency (IIRC) and still speaks well of it.
Lynne Cheney served as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993.
From the Common Cause Web site:
James A. LeachOne could say Jim Leach is the mirror image of a consitutional conservative like, say, Ron Paul. I.e., left is right, right is left.Chairman, National Governing Board of Common Cause*
James A. Leach is the interim Director of the Institute of Politics of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is on leave from Princeton University, where he is the John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School.
Before joining the Princeton faculty, Leach served in the U.S. House from 1976 to 2007. He chaired the Banking and Financial Services Committee, the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. He was a leading advocate of legislation expanding support for AIDS treatment and prevention, international debt relief, banning Internet gambling and reforming the financial services industry. He is perhaps best known as the principal author of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law, which is considered one of the seminal pieces of banking legislation of the 20th century, second in import only to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
Leach attended Princeton, the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics. A former U.S Foreign Service officer, he served as a delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the U.N. General Assembly. In 1973, Leach resigned his commission in protest of the Saturday Night Massacre when Richard Nixon fired his Attorney General, Eliot Richardson, and the independent counsel investigating the Watergate break-in, Archibald Cox.
Leach serves on the board of several public companies and three non-profit organizations – the Century Foundation, the Kettering Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and formerly served as a trustee of Princeton University.
Leach holds eight honorary degrees and has received decorations from two foreign governments. He is the recipient of the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award, the Woodrow Wilson Award from Johns Hopkins, the Adlai Stevenson Award from the United Nations Association, and the Edgar Wayburn Award from the Sierra Club.
*Note: Jim Leach is on voluntary leave from the Common Cause Board through the November 2008 election. Martha Tierney currently serves as the interim chair of the board.
That's true. At least that is one good thing coming out from all of this.
Yeah, it sorta reminds me of Mouch, as in Wesley.
Leach hasn't been in Congress since 2006.
It’s an easy bone to throw to make it appear as though Obama & his adminstration are really non-partisan.
Barf
Let’s see how many news outlets include Leach’s support for Obama when they report this.
Why should it matter?
I stand corrected and still call the agency useless.
“Why should it matter?”
Because if they report to public that Leach was already an Obama supporter, it makes Leach look more just another dem and less as though the Obama admin. is trying to hire real republicans.
From the Wikipedia article on Beltway Bill:
In 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed him to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he served until Reagan appointed him Secretary of Education in 1985. It was in 1986 that Bennett switched from the Democratic to the Republican party. Bennett resigned from this post in 1988, and later that year was appointed to the post of Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy by President George H. W. Bush. He was confirmed by the Senate in a 97-2 vote.
Party switchers come in all varieties.
Leach isn’t a Republican.
I always thought must’ve got hold of his FBI file
The average government-school educated American cares only if the guy has an R or a D after his name, not whether he eats tofu. For news stories relating to nominees for sub-cabinet posts, that's all they are likely to learn.
Let the columnists fill in the details. And they will, you can be sure.
It isn’t a “nuance” if you come right out and report that Leach supported Obama.
But if they report is that Obama is giving the job to a republican, it sounds a lot different even to the uneducated or naive. Even they can understand that he gave the job to a supporter.
Jim Leach. Finally, we see his true colors. I will never forget the night before the NAFTA vote with him on Larry King. Another congresswoman was reading to him some of the terrible parts of NAFTA...he asked, “What is that you are reading?”
And admitted he had not read one bit of the bill he would vote for the next day.
It's also an attempt to look even more “bipartisan”.
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