Troopergate

The little-known Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin faces accusations of firing public safety commissioner Walt Monegan in a messy Palin family drama dating to her pre-gubernatorial days. Monegan refused to fire a state trooper who had divorced Palin's sister.

The accuser is executive Andrew Halcro, a Republican-turned-Independent who lost to Palin in the 2006 governor's race.

The accused is Palin, the rising Republican star with a dubious reputation who has the most to lose now that she's John McCain's choice as running mate.

The man in the middle is former commissioner Monegan, who says Palin and her administration pressured him to fire the state trooper.

Then there's trooper Mike Wooten, who jokingly used a Taser on his step-son, Palin's nephew Payton. Wooten has been reprimanded for violating nearly a dozen laws and departmental policies since December 2001.

Palin denies the allegations, claiming Monegan wasn't a team player.

Monegan was fired in July, after he declined a transfer to become the director of the state's alcohol control board (an attempt to put him out to pasture). State lawmakers want to know if Palin abused her power and if Monegan was fired for personal rather than work-related reasons.

In late July the state approved $100,000 to hire an outside investigator, and former Anchorage prosecutor Stephen Branchflower, to look into the firing.

Monegan recently told the Anchorage Daily News he was never directly told by Palin or anyone to "fire Wooten", but she and her staff repeatedly harassed him about the issue. But he maintained Palin, members of her administration and her husband, Todd Palin, raised the issue about Wooten's employment many times.

A month after Monegan was sacked, Palin's staff made at least two dozen calls to the Department of Public Safety, questioning Wooten's employment. She denied orchestrating the calls.

OPEC discussing minimum price of oil to be $100

Hurricane Gustav scarcely damaged the oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, causing oil prices today to fall below $108 for the first time in months.

Oil prices have been going down recently due to less demand in the United States as Americans buy more hybrids and/or smaller cars. Oil demand in the United States dropped by 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) in the first half of 2008, the steepest volume drop in 26 years.

Iran has said $100 is the lowest acceptable oil price and called for OPEC to cut output by 1.5 million bpd by early next year. Venezuela and several other countries agreed. Other OPEC sources have suggested a price floor closer to $80 a barrel because of concerns about the effects of high fuel costs on large consumer economies such as the United States, which is currently in a recession.

OPEC has apparently gotten used to the new high prices and wants them to stay above $100. Back in June OPEC was predicting oil prices to reach $170.

Shotgun wedding as Vice-Presidential nominee's daughter announces she's pregnant

John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin announced today that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. There's also an internet rumour that Palin's youngest son, born in April, was actually her daughter's son.

A statement released by the McCain/Palin campaign said that Bristol Palin will keep her baby and marry the child's father in a shotgun wedding. Bristol Palin's baby is due in late December.

The disclosure of the pregnancy came on the opening day of the Republican National Convention, scaled back because of Hurricane Gustav, and three days after McCain named Palin as his running mate. Other news was likely to overshadow the disclosure.

"Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family," they added. The father was identified in the statement as Levi, but the campaign said it was not disclosing his last name or age, sparking concern that the boy might be either quite young or even an incestuous relative.

Sarah Palin's fifth child, a son named Trig, was born in April with Down syndrome (also sparking rumours of incest in the Palin family). Internet bloggers have been suggesting that the child was actually born to Bristol Palin but that her mother, the 44-year-old Alaska governor, claimed to be the mother.

Palin spokesman Bill McAllister emphatically denied rumours of falsifying birth records and incest.

"Senator McCain's view is this is a private family matter. As parents, (the Palins) love their daughter unconditionally and are going to support their daughter," said McCain spokesman Steve Schmidt.

The advisers said Palin told them about the pregnancy during lengthy discussions about her background. At several points during the discussions, McCain's team warned Palin that the scrutiny into her private life would be intense and that there was nothing she could do to prepare for it. If the birth was the result of incest it would be necessary to refute it strongly in the effort to avoid scrutiny.

Prominent religious conservatives, many of whom have been lukewarm toward McCain's candidacy, predicted that Palin's daughter's pregnancy would not diminish conservative Christian enthusiasm over the vice presidential hopeful.

"I think it's a very private matter," said Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition of America. "It's a matter that should stay in the family and they have to work through it together."

NOTE: We have not changed or altered Roberta Combs quote at all. She actually said "It's a matter that should stay in the family"... after all, if you can't keep it in your pants, keep it in the family...

California saves $86 billion in health care costs from anti-smoking campaign

California's large-scale tobacco control campaign has saved $86 billion in health care costs in its first 15 years, U.S. researchers said today. The $86 billion reduction represents about a 50-fold return on the $1.8 billion California spent on the program, they said.

"The benefits of the program accrued very quickly and are very large," Stanton Glantz, director of the University of California San Francisco Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, said in a statement.

Unlike many programs which center on teens, the California program focuses its tobacco-control efforts on adults through an aggressive media campaign and changes in public policy, such as promoting smoke-free environments.

"When adults stop smoking, you see immediate benefits in heart disease, with impacts on cancer and lung diseases starting to appear a year or two later," said Glantz, whose findings appear in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

According to the study, the program prevented the sale of 3.6 billion packs of cigarettes (worth $9.2 billion to the tobacco industry) between 1989 and 2004.

Note: The profits vs. costs of the tobacco industry is a clear indication that economics wise the tobacco industry costs more than its worth.

The report may help persuade other states to step up funding for such large-scale efforts to counteract the tobacco industry's $13 billion annual spending on smoking-related advertising and promotions.

A report by the National Cancer Institute last week found such advertising increases tobacco use. But it also found that large-scale tobacco control campaigns work, and called for more funding of such efforts.

Tobacco accounts for one in 10 adult deaths worldwide and is the leading preventable cause of death in the world, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, smoking kills more than 438,000 people prematurely each year.

To study the effects of California's program, Glantz and colleagues used statistical models that looked at the relationships between per capita spending on cigarettes and health costs between 1980 and 2004.

They compared these with information gathered from 38 states that had no comprehensive tobacco control efforts and that had only increased cigarette taxes by 50 cents per pack within the study period.

The researchers saw a steady rise in cost savings from the start of the program in 1996 until the study ended in 2004, despite major cuts in the program's funding.

If the state had maintained original funding levels at about $80 million per year, total health cost savings would have exceeded $150 billion over the 15-year period, they said.

Glantz said the study shows tobacco control programs not only reduce smoking and prevent disease, but also quickly and significantly reduce health care costs.

Approx. 19% of adults in California smoke actively or socially.

Smokeless Cigarettes

Smoking Bans working in Toronto