Nah-nah! Obama gives California more flu-fighting bucks than anyone

Kathleen Sebelius -- the Obama administration's secretary of Health and Human Services nominee who did not have big back-tax problems -- announced this afternoon that she's sending $30,516,050 to California immediately to fight flu.

That's nothing to sneeze at. In fact, it's nearly 10% of all the flu money that HHS is distributing nationwide to those other puny states. See, there is a reason for having Nancy Pelosi. And Oprah, though she's only a California part-timer. Payback for those 55 juicy electoral votes last Nov. 4? And keep those Golden Staters healthy and alive.

(Or as loyal Ticket reader Kenneth tweets: "That leaves only 90% for the other 56 states.")

We weren't going to bother writing about such piddling chump change as millions, given the trillions we've moved up to discussing since January.

But that extra 50 bucks at the end pushed it over the top and clearly showed the transparent commitment to public health of both the Democratic president and Sebelius (shown above demonstrating how to spread a flu virus as quickly as possible).

In an additional multimedia sign of Obama's commitment to public health, Sebelius notes she's launched a contest for ordinary germy citizens to make their own anti-flu public service videos. After all these public health grants, however, there's only $2,500 left for a prize; talk about chump change. (And no prize for pro-flu videos.)

We were just enjoying the middle of summer when Sebelius warns, "With flu season around the corner, we must remain vigilant and do all we can to prepare our nation and protect public health. These grants will give states valuable resources to step up their flu-preparedness efforts.”

All right, it is chump change for the most populous state, given California's gabillions of dollars in red budget ink. But you'd think 30 mil would pretty much guarantee good health around California for everyone as long as we seal the border with Oregon. And maybe Arizona.

Perhaps some other less-important states would be willing to forfeit some or all of their federal flu-fighting funds so that Californians could avoid sneezing and continue to enjoy the sunshine that makes its way through the smog.

There's way too many numbers in the announcement to really bother with. Suffice to say, there are grants for public health -- L.A. alone is getting $8,510,041.

But, disturbingly, there are also immense grants for hospital preparedness. This would seem to indicate that the feds are not really counting on total prevention of the various flus that, according to media reports only a couple of months ago, threatened the human race with extinction.

Never mind washing your hands frequently. The only answer is obviously more money.

-- Andrew Malcolm

No money necessary to click here for Twitter alerts on each new Ticket item. Or follow us @latimestot

Photo: Associated Press

Guys! Quick! Hubby Obama needs some help 'splaining that photo

(UPDATE: Oops. Now another peekaboo pic has shown up. Different woman. Same angle. Same two guys. Over here.)

OK, let's help the poor guy out here. It's a bipartisan gender solidarity thing.

Yes, yes, he's president of the United States of America. The most powerful male in the free world, perhaps le monde entier. Pretty wife. Great abs. Loving father. And a real good talker.

He better be 'cause, as they fly down to Africa right now, Mrs. Obama with the buff bare arms may be asking her hubby one or two questions about this photo that's been flying all over the world ahead of them for a day now. Just as Desi Arnaz would ask his wife in the old "Lucy" show.

On the surface it might possibly appear to some jealous people that the 47-year-old ex-senator from Illinois is eyeing the working backside of Mayara Rodriguez Tavares, a 17-year-old youth delegate from Buenos Aires, no, wait, Brazil at the G-8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy. (And President Nicolas Sarkozy is checking it out too. But he's French.)

Such a suspicion about the nation's male chief executive is absolutely ridiculous, of course, and relies on the tired, old -- and patently erroneous -- sexist cliche about men having a roving eye for the opposite sex, even when they may already be in the company of a member of same said opposite gender.

There have, over the eons, been billions of misunderstandings like this between women and their men when the female followed the man's eyes and perceived them to be glued on some portion of another female's anatomy, back or front. It even happened in cave days when folks wore skimpy animal pelts. That's an Internet fact.

Those patently mistaken female impressions of visual infidelity have led to some verbal outbursts, punched arms, swung purses and long silences in the car followed by a night on the living room couch.

If the offended women would only wait one sec, they could learn the real honest-to-God object of their male's admiration. Most often, the male doesn't even know what other woman his lady is talking about. He was simply admiring a really attractive red sports car that was passing in the same spot but is now unfortunately out of sight.

The car one won't work this time. But there are other obfuscating explanations. Maybe the president had a speck in his eye -- it can happen to presidents anytime even with the Secret Service around -- and was looking down to try and get it out. Could be.

Also, as Ticket reader Tom points out, she does have great shoes.

The most innocent excuse or explanation is that the president was in the process of turning his head to thoughtfully take the hand of his life partner and help her safely down the last large step there so she wouldn't trip and embarrass herself with all the cameras around. What a guy! Chivalry lives!

And those European cameramen -- you know them -- cleverly snapped the photo to make it appear like he was looking at the long curly, brown hair and the female derriere in shiny red material that he hadn't even actually noticed was there. In fact, was there a woman there?

It's all perfectly innocent. So help him out, guys -- or gals. What other explanation can we helpfully offer the first man?

-- Andrew Malcolm

Photos of other male presidential encounters with derrieres below.

Click here for Twitter alerts on each new Ticket item. Or follow us  @latimestot

From Italy, Obama tries to feel the love (transcript here)

Public opinion polls are showing a dip in the president's approval. Critics in Congress are piling on his healthcare plan. And lots of Americans are questioning why the mega-billion stimulus plan has not sparked a new era of job creation.

So the White House must have been less than thrilled at the timing of the Group of 8 meetings in Rome this week. Just at a time when he might have been needed politically on the home front, President Obama found himself in meetings with Russian officials in gilded halls in the Kremlin -- where those officials made sure the streets were empty of the usual Obamamania -- talking about climate control to a few European nations but without China, a critical player on the issue, and getting a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI in the august halls of the Vatican.

Even Obama, at a press conference from Rome, wondered about the wisdom of so many G-whatever meetings in so many forums to so little effect.

The one thing I will be looking forward to is fewer summit meetings, because, as you said, I've only been in office six months now and there have been a lot of these.  And I think that there's a possibility of streamlining them and making them more effective.  The United States obviously is a absolutely committed partner to concerted international action, but we need to, I think, make sure that they're as productive as possible.

The president also had a lot to say about healthcare, Iranian nuclear weapons and food security. You can read the full transcript below.

Then it was off with First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, to meet with the Pope, followed by a trip to Ghana, a country Obama praised as "a functioning democracy [with] a president who's serious about reducing corruption, and ... significant economic growth."

-- Johanna Neuman

The Ticket goes inside politics several times a day. Click here for Twitter alerts of each new item. Or follow us @latimestot

Photo: Activists perform in masks of President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Rome this week where the G-8 failed to get developing nations on board for climate control. Credit: Reuters

What did the CIA lie to Congress about, and where was Cheney?

Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee set off a political bombshell this week. In a leaked letter, they disclosed that CIA Director Leon Panetta -- four months after taking office -- learned that his agency had misled Congress about a special project. He canceled the program and scheduled closed-door meetings with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees the next day to brief them.

Ever since, observers of the national security scene have been puzzling over the story. Aside from the disturbing -- but not particularly surprising news -- that someone at the CIA sat on this news for four months after getting a new boss, the question is: what classified program did Panetta close down?

Early speculation rested on waterboarding, a technique the Bush administration used in interrogating terrorists. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had earlier accused the CIA of misleading her on use of the controversial practice. But President Obama has already banned waterboarding, so it's not something Panetta would need to shut down.

Now, some are quoting the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, who in March alleged that a secret army of CIA operatives reported to former Vice President Dick Cheney. In remarks he has not substantiated in print, Hersh talked about "a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office.... It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on."

Cheney makes a convenient target. He's already enraged Democrats for suggesting that Obama's policies are making the United States more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. In fact, Panetta accused Cheney of hoping America would be attacked again, just to prove his point. As a result, some Republicans argue that the Democrats are just floating the Cheney rumor to deflect attention away from Pelosi's credibility on the issue.

Others argue that there is less there than meets the eye. As one unnamed former intelligence official told the Washington Post, "This characterization of something that began in 2001 and continued uninterrupted for eight years is just wrong. Honest men would question that characterization. It was more off and on." If the nature of the program could be revealed, said the source, it would be seen as "no big deal."

Either way, look for the guessing game to continue.

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo Credit: Getty Images

The Ticket goes inside politics several times a day. Click here for Twitter alerts of each new item. Or follow us @latimestot

Joe Biden update: No 'private meetings,' just meetings closed to the press

Possibly a very important policy change quietly emerged in the daily schedule of Vice President Joe Biden today.

Loyal Ticket readers know that, as a patriotic duty, we monitor the longtime senator's schedule with a close eye for detail because, after all, this man is only a heartbeat away from having to give a toast at a G-8 summit. We've especially noted Biden's innumerable  "private meetings" that are closed to the press because, well, they're private.

And we've wondered aloud how this Democratic VP's private meetings with unnamed people on unnamed subjects differs from the private meetings with unnamed people that his evil predecessor had that got so many Democratic senators and representatives worried about nefarious secrets.

On one recent long weekend, the man who became a Delaware senator when his future boss, Barack Obama, was an inexperienced fundraiser of only 11, devoted an entire Monday to "private meetings" that are closed press in his Delaware home.

If that isn't dedication for the $208,000 salary.

Well, today's schedule, unlike many at the end of Biden's work weeks, contains no "private meetings." Not one.

Having spent Thursday traveling and successfully selling the nation on the so far hard-to-detect effects of the $787-billion Obama administration economic stimulus spending plan that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave them, Biden will show up for work around 11 today.

He'll join Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a roundtable to discuss only the rising costs of healthcare for people who own or work for small businesses. One suspects the absent president's ambitious plan to spend billions more to impose his healthcare reforms might also be mentioned.

OK, so figure an hour for the roundtable, maybe 75 minutes max. You can only talk about that stuff so long before requiring healthcare yourself. Fifteen minutes for handshaking, cellphone photos and congratulations on the excellent roundtable. The VP should be outta there by 12:30.

That leaves -- what? -- five, maybe six hours to make it a seven-hour workday.

According to the White House schedule, Biden will not spend the remainder of the workday in private meetings that are closed press.

Instead: "The Vice President will spend the remainder of the day in meetings that are closed press."

You get the difference, right?

(Friday UPDATE 7 p.m.: According to the VP's weekend schedule, if you need to reach him about the stimulus plan or something, both days he will be in Delaware where "There are no public events scheduled." No public mention of private meetings.)

-- Andrew Malcolm

Twitter alerts on each new Ticket item are open to the press or anyone simply by clicking here. Or follow us   @latimestot

Photo: Getty Images