http://consumeraffairs.com/news04/mcclellan.htmlMedicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mark B. McClellan
President Bush named Mark McClellan, chief of the Food and Drug Administration, to run Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that oversees Medicare and its new prescription-drug benefits.
A physician and economist, McClellan, 40, is a proponent of relying on the private sector to improve health-care quality and efficiency, a key element of the new Medicare drug-benefit bill that CMS will spend at least the next several years implementing.
Although a staunch Republican, McClellan served for a year in the Clinton administration's Treasury Department and is well liked by top Democrats in Congress.
With the Medicare bill taking heavy fire from Democratic presidential candidates and many members of Congress, the White House is hoping that McClellan can defuse tension and improve public opinion of the changes in store for the federal health program.
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She has dropped a surname or two for the TX gov election and also changed her TV commercials that started out with her saying "I am a Republican" and goes on to say that she is putting politics aside to run as an Independent. She dropped the "I am a Republican" line.
She took it upon her self as state comptroller to diss the UU religion..tried to keep a TX UU church from getting tax exempt status til laywers and the media stepped in. Then she backed down. Her defense was that everyone in the congregation had "different beliefs" instead of only ONE common belief, therefore it was not a religion.
http://www.offthekuff.com/mt/archives/003503.html Unitarian Universalists have for decades presided over births, marriages and memorials. The church operates in every state, with more than 5,000 members in Texas alone.
But according to the office of Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Denison Unitarian church isn't really a religious organization -- at least for tax purposes. Its reasoning: the organization "does not have one system of belief."
Never before -- not in this state or any other -- has a government agency denied Unitarians tax-exempt status because of the group's religious philosophy, church officials say. Strayhorn's ruling clearly infringes upon religious liberties, said Dan Althoff, board president for the Denison congregation that was rejected for tax exemption by the comptroller's office.