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Former White House Executive Chef Walter Scheib found dead in New Mexico

Walter Scheib, the former White House executive chef who had been missing for over a week, was found dead Sunday in New Mexico. He was 61.
The Taos News reported that Scheib's body was found in a river approximately 20 to 30 feet off a hiking trail in the mountains above the Taos Ski Valley. The New Mexico State Police said the spot where the body was found was approximately 1.7 miles from the Yerba Canyon trail head where Scheib's car was located.
Authorities said that they did not believe Scheib had not informed anyone of his hiking plans and was not believed to have been prepared for more than a day outdoors. Scheib had recently moved from Florida to New Mexico, and reportedly went for a hike June 13. His girlfriend reported him missing the next day. The 4-mile Yerba Canyon trail follows a canyon bottom before climbing to 3,700 feet in elevation, according to the U.S. Forest Service website.
Search coordinators said cell phone data showed that Scheib was last connected to a cellular signal at around 3 p.m. local time near a peak. They said that suggests that Scheib either reached the summit of the trail or came close to it before encountering trouble on his descent. The National Weather Service reported that storms had pounded the area around the time Scheib's cellular signal was lost.
Scheib, who graduated from New York's Culinary Institute of America in 1979 and later worked at grand hotels in Florida and West Virginia, became White House executive chef in April 1994 when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton hired him.
He was in charge of a full-time staff of five and oversaw a part-time staff of 20. Scheib was known for refocusing the White House kitchen on distinctly American cuisine with seasonal ingredients and contemporary flavors. He was responsible for preparing everything from First Family meals to formal State Dinners.
Last month, Scheib cooked dinner for a cancer charity's fundraiser at a hotel in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He told the Times Leader newspaper that preparing meals at the White House had required him to have a different outlook on food and cooking.
"When you're working at the White House, it's not a hotel or a restaurant, or a private club. It's a personal home," Scheib said. "Our goal wasn't just to cook food at the White House, it was to give the First Family an island of normal in a very, very crazy world."
His creations were served to many world leaders including Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Vicente Fox, Nelson Mandela and Boris Yeltsin.
Scheib left the White House in 2005 when Laura Bush let him go. He became a food consultant and speaker, often entertaining guests with anecdotes from his time at the White House. He also appeared on the Food Network's "Iron Chef America" show in 2006.
Scheib also wrote a book about his experiences entitled "White House Chef: Eleven Years, Two Presidents, One Kitchen." It was published in 2007.

Huckabee won't be 'baited' into Confederate flag debate, says it's not a ‘presidential’ issue

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said on Sunday he wouldn’t be “baited” into the politically charged Confederate flag debate in South Carolina, joining a group of fellow GOP White House contenders that says the state must decide.
“Everyone's being baited with this question as if somehow that has anything to do whatsoever with running for president," Huckabee, a 2008 presidential candidate and former Arkansas governor, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "My position is it most certainly does not."
Fellow GOP candidate and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum took a similar position.
“We should let the people of South Carolina go through the process of making this decision," he said on ABC's "This Week."
Their remarks came a day after GOP presidential hopeful Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also said South Carolina should decide whether to allow the Confederate battle flag to fly above the capital grounds.
Walker also said he would honor a request by Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, to reserve comment on whether the flag is a symbol of racism.
He said he would wait until after the funerals for the nine black people fatally shot Wednesday by a white man in a historic African-American church in Charleston, S.C. -- the incident that re-ignited the flag controversy.
South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott, one of only two black U.S. senators, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he also would wait until after the funerals to comment.
Flag supporters say it is a symbol of Confederate and southern heritage while critics argued it is a relic of white supremacy.
In 2000, civil right activists got the flag removed from inside the South Carolina statehouse and from atop the capitol dome. However, the flag still flies on the capital grounds in Columbia, S.C.
The controversy has since become an issue in presidential campaign politics, in large part because South Carolina is one of three early-voting states in which defeat or even a poor showing can end a White House bid.
“I don't think you could say that the presence of one lunatic racist, who everybody in this country feels contempt for, and no one is defending, is somehow evidence of the people of South Carolina," Huckabee also said Sunday, regarding the church tragedy and alleged shooter Dylann Roof. "I don't personally display it anywhere, that's the issue for the people of South Carolina."
He also said that voters don't want the presidential candidates to "weigh in on every little issue in all 50 states that might be an important issue to the people of those states, but it's not on the desk of the president."
On Saturday, GOP presidential candidate and senior GOP South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said the flag is “part of who we are,” while acknowledging it might be “time to revisit” the decision to allow it to fly over the state capitol grounds.
The same day, another Republican presidential candidate, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, touted what his state did in 2001 about the flag, a year after the South Carolina decision.
“In Florida, we acted, moving the flag from the state grounds to a museum where it belonged,” he said in a statement. “I’m confident [South Carolina] will do the right thing.”
Also this weekend, 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney called for the flag to be removed from the state capitol grounds.

Perry: 'American people are going to see a very different candidate'

Presidential candidate and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry acknowledged on Sunday that he was ill-prepared for his previous White House bid, but said he’s back in 2016 to win the election, not to make a symbolic redemption effort.
“I didn't prepare properly,” the Republican candidate told “Fox News Sunday.”  “I thought being governor of the state of Texas for 12 years was enough preparation … . Until you've done it, you don't even realize what a challenge it is, these broad array of issues that you have to have more than passing knowledge of.”
Perry said having back surgery a month before officially starting his 2012 campaign in August 2011 also was a major factor.
The recovery extended for several months, not a few weeks as expected. And Perry ended his campaign in January 2012 after having lackluster debate performances.
 “We weren’t healthy,” the 65-year old Perry said Sunday.
He also said he has learned that “it takes years” to prepare to become a serious presidential candidate and that he has sought the wisdom of such economic and foreign policy experts as former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, whose political career included time as the secretaries of state, labor and treasury and director of the Office of Management and Budget.

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“I feel very confident now sitting on the stage,” Perry said. “The American people are going to see a very different candidate than they did four years ago. … We’re going to talk about a vision for this country that is very forward leaning.”
Perry disagreed with suggestions that he’s running on a populist message similar to that of Democratic presidential candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders that could alienate an array of potential backers and primary voters.
“I sound like a young man who grew up on a dryland cotton farm that understands what it's like to have to really work hard,” Perry said. “In today's world, a lot of Americans are out there and they're going, ‘Hey, wait a minute. What are these people on Wall Street getting rich for? I mean, who's going to bail me out?’ ”
Perry also dismissed the idea that his campaign could be doomed by the kind of verbal gaffes that hurt his 2012 campaign, particularly after he mistakenly called the fatal shootings last week of nine black people in a South Carolina church an “accident,” instead of “incident.”
He said voters will ultimately judge candidates on the issues.  

Controversial MIT economist Jonathan Gruber reportedly played key role in ObamaCare law

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who claimed the authors of ObamaCare took advantage of what he called the "stupidity of the American voter," played a much bigger role in the law's drafting than previously acknowledged, according to a published report.
The Wall Street Journal, citing 20,000 pages of emails sent by Gruber between January 2009 and March 2010, reported Sunday that Gruber was frequently consulted by staffers and advisers for both the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about the Affordable Care Act. Among the topics that Gruber discusses in the emails are media interviews, consultations with lawmakers, and even how to publicly describe his role.
The emails were released as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of federal health insurance exchange subsidies.
The Journal reports that the officials Gruber contacted by e-mail included Peter Orszag, then the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); Jason Furman, an economic adviser to the president; and Ezekiel Emanuel, then a special adviser for health policy at OMB.
"His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted," Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R- Utah, chairman of the House oversight committee, told the Journal. "There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said. He put up this facade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce."
"As has been previously reported, Mr. Gruber was a widely used economic modeler for administrations and state governments run by both parties—both before and after the Affordable Care Act was passed," HHS spokeswoman Meaghan Smith told the Journal in a statement. "These emails only echo old news."
Gruber became the center of a political storm in November 2014, when a video surfaced of him taking part in a 2013 panel discussion about ObamaCare. At one point, Gruber said the Obama administration wrote the bill "in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies ... Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass."
At the time of the controversy, President Obama referred to Gruber as "some adviser who never worked on our staff." However, the Journal reports that Gruber's emails appear to reference at least one meeting with Obama. Furthermore, one email from Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama health adviser, thanks Gruber for "being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment", while another message from Lambrew refers to Gruber as "our hero."
Fox News previously reported that HHS retained Gruber in March 2009 on a $95,000 contract to produce "a series of technical memoranda on the estimated changes in health insurance coverage and associated costs and impacts to the government under alternative specifications of health system reform." A second contract with HHS three months later saw Gruber receive an additional $297,600.
Gruber later apologized for his comments in a December 2014 hearing before the House Oversight Committee, calling the remarks "mean and insulting."