We will leave it up to the reader to determine whether Governor Mitch Daniels has made serious errors in in judgment.  He has supported a Conservative Far Right Christian position especially when it comes to Church and State issues and tt is apparent from the data collected, that the first amendment may be in danger from his past and future actions as well as other constitutional sections.  He has supported deregulation of banks and the SEC causing the current economic Depression.

Governor Daniels office stated that his position is that Certain Religions aren't   "Real" religions.  What is a real religion, Governor Daniels?  What you have been practicing?  He says on the one hand that only certain Christian denominations are valid.  Read the following and remember: "By their Works may they be known."  This is a summary of information collected from several sources about Governor Daniels.

(Remember it is best to investigate on your own when looking at allegations about anyone.     Don't believe us, think for yourself and investigate for yourself!  And remember, the First Amendment Coalition and Religious Freedom Coalition of the South East do not represent any political party nor do we recommend any political candidate, nor are we involving ourselves in the political process.)

This document contains excerpts from articles posted on huffingtonpost.com by Sam Stein, 05/19/11; also from  previous articles in the washingtonpost.com, and salon.com    

Mitch Daniels Not Only Took ObamaCare Funds, He Pushed Similar Reforms

A race to pre-define the prospective presidential candidacy of Republican Mitch Daniels took off in haste on Thursday, as Democrats heaped praise on the Indiana governor for his implementation of the president's health care law.

It's low-hanging fruit, as far as political attacks go. The Affordable Care Act is toxic among Republican voters -- something that those attacking Daniels are implicitly acknowledging. While the Indiana governor has called for ObamaCare's repeal, his acceptance of the ACA money does set him apart from some of his GOP colleagues.

It also underscores that extent to which Daniel is vulnerable on the health care front. Like nearly every other candidate in the GOP field, his record contains several potential points of friction among conservative voters. The most obvious one would be his previous support for the notion that the government could mandate individuals to purchase insurance. Below, for instance, is an October 23, 2003, South Bend Tribune article about Daniels on the gubernatorial campaign trail.

The candidate said he favors a universal health care system that would move away from employee-based health policies and make it mandatory for all Americans to have health insurance.

Daniels envisioned one scenario in which residents could certify their coverage when paying income taxes and receive a tax exemption that would cover the cost.

"We really have to have universal coverage," Daniels said.

Culled from a lengthy search of the governor's various statements on health care policy, that article was the one prominent instance in which Daniels appeared to endorse the type of mandate that Republicans now claim is unconstitutional.

Half-a-dozen attempts to follow up with someone from the governor's press office were not returned. Sellers Feinberg, a health care consulting firm that Daniels hired, said it could not discuss the work it had done with a current client.

Back in 2003, mandates were very much a conservative idea, making support for them by Daniels -- let alone fellow 2012 Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich -- either mundane or expected.

But there are other similarities between the health care policies Daniel's passed as governor and those that constitute President Obama's signature legislation. Both, for instance, require insurance companies to allow children to remain on their parents' accounts past traditional ages for college graduation -- Daniels allows dependent coverage up to age 24, Obama up to 26. Both required Medicaid programs to expand eligibility to individuals and families above the poverty level.

Like Obama, Daniels also put a premium on updating hospital records and information sharing. According to a February 21, 2005, Indianapolis Business Journal article, he "ordered the state Department of Health to come up with a regulation that requires every hospital to implement an error reporting system and provide data to the department, which will post it on the Internet." Separately, both Daniels and Obama increased taxes on cigarettes as a means of generating revenue for health care coverage elsewhere (and discouraging smoking).

"Of all the candidates on the Republican side of the aisle, who has the most interesting ideas in health care, I would put Romney number one, but Daniels number two," said Len Nichols an expert on health care economics at George Mason University.

Many conservatives would disagree. For these policy prescriptions and for his decision to accept the money offered under the ACA, Daniels has been accused of putting taxpayers on the hook for the health care of others, and crowding out private business from the health care marketplace.

Of course, not all of the health care reforms Daniels made so closely mirrored those in the ACA. Indiana was far from a canvass for Obama-like reform. There were plenty of policy proposals the governor backed that left Democrats enraged.

In the winter of 2005, Daniels pushed a bill that eliminating the requirements that insurance companies cover some pre-existing conditions for consumers purchasing individual policies. His logic was that pared down plans would be cheaper plans. And being able to purchase even modest insurance would be better then being unable to afford any insurance.

"The goal is to insure as many individuals as possible and to give as much choice as possible," Daniels said at the time. "It is far better to have some coverage than no coverage, which is the position of far too many Hoosiers today."

The most notably innovative, conservative approach Daniels took to health care reform, however, was the Healthy Indiana Program that he signed into law in 2007. The program, which required a waiver from the federal government and was paid for in part by the cigarette tax, created health savings accounts for low-income individuals. Medicaid funding was put into those accounts, and was supplemented by monthly payments from enrollees. Participants were kept to a $300,000 annual cap and $1 million lifetime limit. But a portion of the funding they didn't use was actually given back to them as a payment -- a financial incentive for individuals to be economical in their health care decisions.

"For folks like me -- I am an economist, but I am a Democrat -- this is like the most creative application of the conservative ideology, frankly, in 15 years," said Nichols.

The problem: It didn't really work. The benefits provided under the Healthy Indiana Plan were particularly skimpy and the costs were more expensive than expected.

"Enrollment was always much smaller" than the plan's supporters had expected, said Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. "150,000 was the estimate, enrollment was a third of that."

Will Eli Lilly Scandals Rub Off On Mitch Daniels?

Excerpt from an article first posted By Ed Silverman in pharmalot.com on May 9th, 2011

As Indiana governor and former Eli Lilly exec Mitch Daniels gears up for a run at the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign staff is working hard to deny he had anything to do with the marketing scandals that enveloped the drugmaker during his tenure, according to iWatch, the blog from the Center for Public Integrity.

In 2005, for instance, Lilly pleaded guilty and paid $36 million for illegally marketing its Evista osteoporosis med (read this). And two years ago, the drugmaker pleaded guilty and paid $1.4 billion for off-label promotion of its Zyprexa antipsychotic. The penalty include a criminal fine of $515 million which, at the time, was the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a US criminal prosecution of any kind (read here).

However, Daniels was risking steadily through Lilly corporate ranks at the time these infractions occurred, notes iWatch. He was vice president of corporate affairs, president of North American pharmaceutical operations and, in 1997, became senior vice president of corporate strategy and policy.

Daniels’ press secretary Jane Jakowski denies the gov was involved - directly or indirectly - with the marketing for either drug. “He had zero to do with marketing plans that were created for Zyprexa and Evista.” Concerning a high-profile battle over a patent for the Prozac antidepressant in which trial data was allegedly hidden, she adds Lilly “was the object of a multimillion-dollar smear campaign by a self-interested organization that was trying to drive vulnerable patients away from medical treatment for depression.”

Nonetheless, his senior roles at the drugmakers suggests, to some, that he may have some explaining to do as he portrays himself to voters as someone with the skills and leadership to run the country and make the best decisions possible. “I would have hoped that he would have known about some of these issues, and if he didn’t, why didn’t he? That needs to be evaluated” Stephen Sheller, an attorney who sued the drugmaker over Zyprexa marketing and was involved in the settlement.

“Bill Clinton had the bimbo factor. Mitch Daniels is going to need a strategy to counteract the assumption that will be made that he was somehow complicit in the misdeeds of Eli Lilly,” Ira Loss, senior health care analyst at Washington Analysis, an investment research firm, tells iWatch. “It’s possible that he wouldn’t have known a thing,” but “Mitch Daniels can’t walk into the presidential race and not expect questions about this issue.”

However, Sid Wolfe, who directs Public Citizen’s Health Research Group and is a frequent industry critics, notes that most decisions are not made by any one exec, so his involvement in the controversies remains unclear. “These things transcend individuals. It’s more difficult to say this is the work of person A, B, or C,” he tells iWatch. “It’s industrywide corporate culture.”

 

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Mitch Daniels's Presidential Prospects Could Be Dimmed by Power Plant Scandal

 

Under construction: Duke Energy's Edwardsport plant. Photo by author.

Anyone who thinks Indiana's Republican Governor Mitch Daniels should run for president hasn't paid much attention to the dark cloud hanging over Duke Energy's new coal gasification plant -- a massive industrial complex rising up at the edge of the tiny town of Edwardsport, Indiana.

Three highly placed men have lost their jobs in recent weeks in a scandal over influence peddling at the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, while a citizens' organization is accusing Duke of misleading the commission and mismanaging the project.

The ethics scandal broke Sept. 21 when the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, a 40,000-member group that has attacked this power project with the fury of a grizzly, put out a press release noting a lawyer's move from a job at the IURC to a job at Duke Energy without waiting the year required by Indiana government's ethics code.

The CAC was right to be concerned. The lawyer, Scott Storms, had had a hand in decisions involving the Duke plant at the very time he was negotiating for a job at Duke Energy. Duke Energy subsequently fired him, as well as the man who hired him, Mike Reed, who had himself held an executive director position at the IURC while decisions on Duke were being made. Acting to contain the damage, Gov. Daniels removed David Lott Hardy from his position as chair of the IURC.

Hardy, Storms, and Reed were all employed at the IURC when it first approved a sweetheart deal with Duke in 2007. That deal has awarded Duke steadily increasing amounts of ratepayer money as plant construction costs have spiraled upward from the original estimate approved by the IURC -- $1.985 billion -- to a current predicted cap of nearly $3 billion.

The CAC's Kerwin Olson has pointed out to the IURC that if these rate increases were property tax increases, voters would have a chance to vote in a public referendum. If they were general tax increases, they would have to be approved by the General Assembly and the Governor.

"Yet with respect to this decision to pass on a total of nearly $3 billion to the ratepayers, only one opportunity has been afforded the public to be heard"--and that was before the IURC first approved the plant in 2007. In testimony Olson recently submitted to the IURC, he asked the IURC to hold two public hearings in Duke's Indiana territory.

In addition, given five ongoing investigations into the ethics scandal, Olson said that the IURC should suspend "all orders and hearings" on additional relief for Duke until the results of the investigations by the state, Duke Energy, and the U.S. Department of Justice are known.

Olson submitted this testimony during an IURC move toward what could be a definitive IURC go-ahead for Duke Energy to finish the plant at ratepayers' expense. The agreement under IURC consideration would cap the project's costs to be covered by ratepayers at $2.975 billion.

The CAC of Indiana -- an advocate for ratepayers, environmental sanity, and health rights -- has argued that if more electricity is needed (and CAC questions that), ratepayer money ought to be spent instead on increasing efficiency and developing wind and solar power. To the CAC, this 618-megawatt integrated gasification combined cycle plant, nearly four times as big as the old coal plant it replaces, is a greenwashed boondoggle of massive proportions -- not needed by the Hoosiers who are paying for it, not economically justifiable, and unlikely to fulfill the "clean coal" promises made on its behalf.

Anyone who doubts the force of this argument should read the testimony that consultant David A. Schlissel submitted to the IURC on behalf of the CAC, the Sierra Club, and two smaller environmental groups who oppose the tentative agreement that would cap the project at a sum about a billion dollars higher than the estimate three years ago.

According to Schlissel, Duke "has grossly mismanaged its resource planning for the Edwardsport project and has failed to fully disclose to the IURC the risks and the significance of higher construction costs." He recommended an IURC investigation to determine whether Duke had misled the commission. Olson, for his part, told me, "Duke has concealed evidence, grossly mismanaged the project, possibly committed fraud, misled the public and been less than forthcoming before the commission."

In a talk to a couple dozen citizens gathered at the library in Bloomington, about an hour up the road from Edwardsport, Olson also laid out the argument that a selling point which Duke used to get the plant approved in the first place was always just that -- a selling point.

Before the plant was approved, Duke held out the promise of using underground storage to sequester the carbon dioxide the plant produces. It turns out that the terrain at Edwardsport is the wrong terrain for carbon sequestration, even if carbon sequestration were a good idea -- and there are reasons to doubt that. The company might pipe some of the CO2 to another site, but Olson says the plant as it is being built now could not capture more than 18 percent of the carbon dioxide it produces in any case. "We believe they never had any intent to capture any of the CO2," he says.

Supporters of Mitch Daniels for president would do well to be worried by the storm swirling around the centerpiece of his drive to expand the coal-based sector of Indiana's economy. While he might hope to contain the damage with investigations he has ordered the Indiana inspector general and the IURC to carry out, the federal investigation requested by the CAC would bring a more rigorous outside perspective to bear.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that plant is already half built, the CAC is saying that the best thing for Indiana ratepayers would be for the IURC to stop construction altogether. I'd like that fine, not only because I'm a ratepayer but also because I've watched the destruction coal mining does, in the Appalachian mountains where I have family roots and also in southwest Indiana. Half an hour's drive north of the Edwardsport plant, Peabody Energy has ripped up the land in what is touted to become the biggest surface mine east of the Mississippi -- Bear Run. I drove around it one day and thought I'd wandered into a mine-ravaged stretch of Wyoming.

There's a precedent in Indiana for stopping a power plant in mid-construction: Marble Hill Nuclear Power Station was abandoned in 1984 because of cost overruns when it was even closer to completion than the Edwardsport plant is. The Citizens Action Coalition played a role in bringing that plant down. Indiana environmentalists and ratepayers have good reason to hope that, in this case, history will repeat itself.