ThinkFast: June 10, 2009

According to a USA Today/Gallup Poll, most people don’t know who speaks for the Republican Party. A 52% majority of those surveyed couldn’t come up with a name when asked to specify “the main person” who speaks for Republicans today. The top response was radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh (13%).

The remote Pacific island nation of Palau said yesterday that “it has agreed to a U.S. request to temporarily resettle up to 17 Chinese Muslims” now being held at Guantanamo Bay. Palau President Johnson Toribiong said the Obama administration “made the request last week and that his country was ‘honored and proud‘ to resettle the detainees from China’s Uighur minority as a humanitarian gesture.”

State Sen. R. Creigh Deeds won Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial election yesterday, capturing approximately 50 percent of the votes. Terry McAuliffe came in second with 26 percent, followed by Brian Moran with 24 percent. Deeds will now face off against Republican nominee Bob McDonnell in the general election.

“Forty percent of low-income Americans do not have health insurance,” says a report released yesterday by the Department of Health and Human Services. “Approximately one-third of the uninsured have a chronic disease and they are six times less likely to receive health-care services than those with insurance,” the report found. Read the full report here.

The family of the late Dr. George Tiller “announced Tuesday that it will not reopen his Kansas clinic, eliminating one of the few medical practices in the country that performed abortions late in pregnancies.”

Despite claims by critics that the TARP plan would be a money loser, when 10 banks returned $68 billion of the money yesterday, President Obama said the government had realized a small profit. According to McClatchy,”in addition to returning the $68 billion, the 10 banks paid the government $1.8 billion in dividends on the preferred shares of stock the government owned.”

The Obama administration is scrapping its plan to cap salaries at firms receiving government bailout money, “leaving them subject to congressionally imposed limits on bonuses.” Instead, the administration is planning to appoint a “pay czar” to monitor the firms receiving the most government aid.

The Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday that it is “temporarily freezing a policy of deporting widows and widowers of U.S. citizens.” Under the Bush administration’s immigration crackdown, “immigrants who had been married for less than two years or whose green-card process hadn’t been completed when their spouses died” would have faced deportation.

After reviewing Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, the New York Times has found ” two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years.” First, that President Obama “is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying” and second, that Obama “does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit.”

And finally: Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is still making her way around Capitol Hill, despite her fractured ankle. Senators are trying to make her meetings as comfortable as possible though. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) had “a bag of ice and a pillow on hand” when she arrived, and quipped, “I hope you all note that some Republicans are empathetic, too.” Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) both signed her cast, and Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) presented the Yankees fan with a “snapshot…of himself posing outside the old Yankee Stadium.”

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