If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti

Politics

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Sometime tonight, I’ll be over the pacific ocean on my way to Australia.  So I’ll be off the grid for a few days.  Assuming I survive being trapped in a small cylindrical tube with a hyperactive toddler, I’ll be back making snarky remarks by the weekend, although I’ll be posting them on the other side of the blog.

In the meantime, I’m putting up some preemptive comments on what I assume will happen in politics over the next few days.

Anticipated Story One: Another dispatch from Camp Clinton (insert link to story of Hillary claiming she’s the real candidate).  Yes, I appreciate that she’s won the most votes since the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica started.  But I really think she’s stretching when she claims this indicates the cylons want her to win and they will nuke the planet if we don’t vote for her.

Anticipated Story Two: What, the New York Times is running the “is John McCain a real American” story again?  I guess this indicates they’ve run out of McCain criticism, so they’re just going to loop their previous stories until November.

Anticipated Story Three: So I’ll throw a question to you guys.  Is the third party Clinton-Hannity ticket going to hurt Obama more or McCain more?

Anticipated Story Four: While I thought Obama’s speech about the incident with the Jaegermeister, the siberian tiger and the Girl Scout troop was good, I wasn’t quite as impressed as Sullivan (insert link to Sullivan post where he describes Obama’s speech as “scorching” and “transcendental” before Obama causes him to ascend to a higher level of consciousness).

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Scott McClellan cuts loose on Team Turd Blossom:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

What makes this significant is that McClellan isn’t just another disgruntled former flunky:

McClellan was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal political aides, and most of his friends had expected him to take a few swipes at his former colleague in order to sell books but also to paint a largely affectionate portrait.

Instead, McClellan’s tone is often harsh. He writes, for example, that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House “spent most of the first week in a state of denial,” and he blames Rove for suggesting the photo of the president comfortably observing the disaster during an Air Force One flyover. McClellan says he and counselor to the president Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea and thought it had been scrapped.

But he writes that he later was told that “Karl was convinced we needed to do it — and the president agreed.”

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

McClellan, who turned 40 in February, was press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006. An Austin native from a political family, he began working as a gubernatorial spokesman for then-Gov. Bush in early 1999, was traveling press secretary for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and was chief deputy to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer at the beginning of Bush’s first term.

“I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

What Happened, indeed.

George Will—what a relief he is in the cesspool of conservative “thought” these days—has a must read on the Cult of the Presidency book:

An occupational hazard of the inflated presidency is a hazard to the nation. It is what Healy (borrowing a term from psychiatry) calls Acquired Situational Narcissism. As repositories of absurd expectations, and surrounded by sycophants, presidents become deranged. Inevitably, the inflation of expectations causes what Healy calls an “arc of disillusionment” that diminishes one president after another.

Michelle Obama says, “Barack will never let you go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” Leaving aside the insult—her opinion that we are uninvolved and uninformed—do we really elect politicians to yank us out of our usual lives? Americans are said to be cynical about politics. Actually, they are presidential romantics. Which is why they suffer serial disappointments.

The president has three principle duties—run the machinery of government, conduct foreign relations and act as a goalie on Congress, vetoing their bad legislation back into play. Our current President has been dreadful at all three of these, partly because of his vision of creating a better America.

But it’s not just the presidency that is affected by the worship of executive power.  It’s every branch of government. One of the reason our Congress has become a good-for-nothing bunch of lazy corrupt fucks who can’t even be bothered to pass a God-damned budget—not that I’m angry or anything—is precisely because of this.  They expect the President to pass the budget, cut taxes, fight the War on Terror (they spinelessly punted their war powers back in 2003 rather than declare war), heal the lepers, feed the sick, bring religiosity to the fuzzie-wuzzies, etc., etc. ad infinitum ad nauseum ad divinum.  We have three senators right now running for the Presidency on massive agendas that they have never even tried to enact in Congress.  If they can’t get it down when they have one vote in the legislature, why should we expect them to get it done when they have zero votes?

Our whole government needs to get a damned grip on what they are capable of, what their role is and what their limitations are.  The last few years have not made me optimistic on that account.

Is this Joe Lieberman’s idea of “Reaching across the aisle?”

Senator Joseph Lieberman is scheduled to headline Pastor John Hagee’s 2008 Christians United For Israel Washington-Israel Summit this July 22. In accepting Hagee’s invitation, Lieberman became the most senior elected representative confirmed to appear at the annual gala. Last year, when Lieberman spoke at Hagee’s summit, he compared the Texas televangelist to the biblical prophet Moses, dubbing him “an Ish Elochim,” or “a man of God.” Unless he rescinds his pledge to appear at this year’s summit, Lieberman can be expected to deliver another soul-stirring tribute.

Hagee’s vitriolic condemnation of Catholicism, his jeremiad declaring Hurricane Katrina divine punishment for New Orleans’ hosting of a “homosexual rally,” and his generally disturbing apocalyptic theology became national news last February when John McCain accepted his endorsement in a widely publicized ceremony.

While initially resisting pressure to reject Hagee’s endorsement, McCain finally ended his relationship with Hagee when a sermon by the preacher describing the Holocaust as the will of God registered on the mainstream media’s radar (Hear the now-infamous sermon here).

McCain at least came to his senses. What’s Lieberman’s excuse?

Stories like this are why I love the free market:

The FHWA’s “Traffic Volume Trends” report, produced monthly since 1942, shows that estimated vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on all U.S. public roads for March 2008 fell 4.3 percent as compared with March 2007 travel. This is the first time estimated March travel on public roads fell since 1979. At 11 billion miles less in March 2008 than in the previous March, this is the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history.

Though February 2008 showed a modest 1 billion mile increase over February 2007, cumulative VMT has fallen by 17.3 billion miles since November 2006. Total VMT in the United States for 2006, the most recent year for which such data are available, topped 3 trillion miles.

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Transportation estimated that greenhouse gas emissions fell by an estimated 9 million metric tons for the first quarter of 2008.

In addition, SUV sales are way down as people trade in their gas guzzlers for more fuel-efficient cars.

This must be incomprehensible to our politicians.  The price of gas goes up—a signal to the market that gasoline is growing more scarce—and the market ... responds!  People drive less.  They drive more efficient cars.  They cut consumption.

And, the worst part of its, they did without the government telling them to. How awful this must be for the Algores of the world.  The free market is trimming fossil fuel consumption without any federal mileage standards, mandates on car size or incentives to carpool.  Oh, the humanity.  Won’t someone please think of the politicians?

In the typical government way, of course, the DOT is presenting this as a bad thing.  If people are driving less, that means they are playing less in the gas tax.

Monday, May 26, 2008

David Frum responds to Peter Ferarra on the subject of supposed future budget windfalls.

Under President Bush and the Republican congressional majority, the United States bought itself a lot more government. The bill for that extra new government will begin to arrive in the years ahead, but the crucial decisions - the prescription drug benefit for example - have already been made, probably irreversibly so.

How is this to be paid for? Right now, the answer is embedded in law: The Bush tax cuts expire in 2010. Income taxes go up, capital gains taxes go up, dividend taxes go up, the estate tax returns - and the budget balance (now projected at a $450 billion deficit for this current year) supposedly snaps back into surplus.

In that sense, Ferrara is right. Looking for new sources of revenue is not “necessary” - there are soon going to be plenty of old sources of revenue returning to the Treasury.

Trouble is, that those old sources are maximally economic harmful.

If Republicans and conservatives want to finance the government in a less destructive way (as we should!), we are going to have to find substitutes for these harmful, looming, pre-scheduled tax increases.

One of the main problems with the current Republican Theory of Spending is that it seems to assume that the money will be there one way or another-so just keep cutting taxes and sort of hope that things will work themselves out in the end. But that can’t and won’t go on forever.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Want to be a homeowner? Uncle Sam wants your prints first.

Fingerprints are considered to be among the most personal of information, and fingerprint databases created and proposed in the name of national security have generated much debate. Recently, “Server in the Sky” — a proposed international database of the fingerprints of suspected criminals and terrorists to be shared among the U.S., U.K. and Canada — has ignited a firestorm of controversy. As have cavalier comments by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that fingerprints aren’t “personal data.”

Yet earlier this week, a measure creating a federal fingerprint registry totally unrelated to national security passed a U.S. Senate committee almost without notice. The legislation would require thousands of individuals working even tangentially in the mortgage and real estate industries — and not suspected of anything — to send their prints to the feds. The database and fingerprint mandates were tucked into housing and foreclosure assistance bills that on Tuesday passed the Senate Banking Committee by a vote of 19-2.

The measure the committee passed states that “an indvidual may not engage in the business of a loan originator without first … obtaining a unique identifier.” To obtain this “identifier,” an individual is requiredto “furnish” to the newly created Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System and Registry “information concerning the applicant’s identity, including fingerprints for submission” to the FBI and other government agencies.

The fingerprint provisions are contained in a “manager’s amendment” that was hammered out by committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn, and Ranking Member Richard Shelby, R-Ala., on Monday and attached the next day to a broader housing bailout bill that had been scheduled for a comittee vote. That bill, the “Federal Housing Finance Regulatory Reform Act of 2008,” expands the lending authority of the Federal Housing Administration and the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance the mortgages of troubled borrowers and banks.

Treating homeowners like potential terrorists? Yeah, this will go over really well.

Democrats.  Party of the People, dontchya know.  Making sure that tax cuts are given to people who need and not the evil stinking ... what was that?  They slipped in a $1.6 billion tax cut for lawyers into Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008?

The [tax cut] language is from Sec. 311, Uniform Treatment of Attorney-Advanced Expenses and Court Costs in Contingency Fee Cases. The provisions allow trial attorneys to deduct advanced litigation fees regardless of whether their contingency fee was structured as a “net” or a “gross” fee arrangement. The law does not now allow lawyers to take a current tax deduction under a net fee arrangement.

The lawyers may have a legitimate point here.  May.  But you know damned well that if the Republicans larded an energy bill with $1.6 billion tax cut for a group that donates almost exclusively to their party, the Democrats and the media would be screaming bloody murder.

Friday, May 23, 2008

You know, maybe these hearings on the oil companies are worth the expense after all.  They are the gift that keeps on giving, exposing an ocean of stupidity in Congress.

For today, here’s Paul Kanjorski:

The current high price of gas has led to a lot of crazy proposals from gas tax holidays to creating a tax deduction based upon energy consumption. But Rep. Paul Kanjorski’s (D-PA) may top them all in terms of its stupidity. From the Times Leader, Kanjorski’s plan would do the following:

• H.R. 5800 would tax industries’ windfall profits.

• The bill would set up a Reasonable Profits Board to determine when these companies’ profits are in excess, and then tax them on those windfall profits.

• As oil and gas companies’ windfall profits increase, so would the tax rate for those companies.

• Kanjorski said his legislation will encourage oil companies to lower prices to prevent them from receiving higher tax rates.

While Hillary Clinton may have failed ECON 101 along with John McCain, it appears as if Kanjorski may been enrolled in Marxism 450 at the time. In all honesty, nationalization of the oil industry (i.e. Venezuela) may be better than Kanjorski’s ridiculous proposal.

One can make a case for taxing that portion of the return to capital that comes from economic rents, but Kanjorski has probably never even heard the term. An economist who backed such a tax would understand that such a tax is not going to lead to lower prices at the pump, just as economists are setting the record straight on the current gas tax holiday gimmick. Furthermore, the justification for taxing economic rents would apply to all sectors, not just petroleum.

And then there’s Maxine Waters, who can’t seem to remember what “nationalize” means.  Maybe it’s time for her to retire to Venezuela.  And is it just me, or are the two Congressmen behind her in the video trying not to laugh?

I do fear that some really dumbass legislation will emerge and be signed into law by President Obama.  But the oil hearing are proving a wonderful litmus test of which members of Congress we should never listen to.  About anything.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Oh, good grief:

On Tuesday, the Democratic-led House easily passed the Gas Price Relief for Consumers Act, a largely symbolic measure aimed at the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

The measure, approved 324-84, would declare as illegal any effort by the cartel to set world oil prices.

The bill would authorize the Justice Department to bring suit against OPEC member countries in U.S. federal courts.

The House approved identical language a year ago, and Bush has threatened repeatedly to veto a bill that contains this provision.

House Democrats noted, however, that the bill passed by a veto-proof margin.

The new bill also would create a special antitrust task force within the Justice Department to look for evidence of price gouging, anticompetitive price discrimination by refiners, and unilateral actions to withhold supply or manipulate markets.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed the vote “to hold foreign oil cartels and Big Oil accountable.”

“Instead of using a veto threat to shield cartels and Big Oil companies from accountability, the Bush administration should work work with the Congress to protect American consumers,” Pelosi said.

Republican leaders ridiculed the measure. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, who voted against it, called the bill “another silly, ludicrous, cosmetic bill that does nothing to increase energy in America or lower the price at the pump.”

So we’re going to sue OPEC to pump more oil.  I’m wondering if OPEC is going to sue us back.  After all, it’s not OPEC that has cow-towed to greens by declaring massive reserves of oil to be off-limits for drilling.

Are the environmentalists to blame for the food crisis? Well, I like kicking the greens anyway, so let’s tally it up:

Farmers and consumers in poor countries are now paying the price now for decisions made by well-fed Westerners, as reported by my colleagues Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin in their front-page article on cutbacks in financing for agricultural research. They explain how the Green Revolution faltered after Western governments and agencies slashed funds for agricultural research, partly to shift money to other areas, like environmental projects, and partly because of opposition to high-yield agriculture from advocacy groups.

...

This issue is timely today not just because of the current food shortages but because greens are calling for vast sums of money to be spent off future climate change. And just as money was diverted from agricultural research for environmental projects in the 1980s, there’s a danger that immediate problems in poor countries will be shortchanged by pursuing the long-term agenda of wealthy Westerners, as Bjorn Lomborg has been arguing. When I wrote about Dr. Lomborg’s proposal to focus less on climate change and more on problems like malnutrition and disease, he told me: “I don’t think our descendants will thank us for leaving them poorer and less healthy just so we could do a little bit to slow global warming. I’d rather we were remembered for solving the other problems first.”

The article talks a bit about Norman Borlaug, my personal choice for Greatest Living American.

The dirty little secret of the Zero Population Growth types is that they think starvation and disaster are good things—they relieve population pressure, especially pressure created by people who aren’t quite white.  They’ve been having their way with agricultural policy for the last twenty years.  LIke all dumb ideas, we could put up with it until their was a crisis.  Hopefully, now, people are seeing their short-sighted misguided policies for what they are.

What did President Bush and the Republicans squander away? The ability to stop stuff like this.

The Senate joined the House Thursday in overriding President Bush’s Farm Bill veto, all but assuring that most of the initial $307 billion five-year measure is on its way to the statute books.

Left out in the cold still is the missing Title III, which was inadvertently dropped out of the Farm Bill text that was sent to the White House Tuesday and therefore never technically recognized by Bush’s veto — nor by the override votes this week.

Covering trade and some international nutrition programs, the title is a small part of the spending picture, about $1.62 billion from 2008 to 2012. But the whole episode has been a huge embarrassment for the Democratic leadership, which had labored hard to get a Farm Bill and hoped to be celebrating an unblemished victory over Bush before Memorial Day.

The House voted 316-108 late Wednesday to override the president, even as the clerical glitch was becoming public. The Senate went ahead Thursday on an 82-13 roll call, and lawmakers said the two votes mean that 14 of the bill’s 15 titles will become law.

You can bet they won’t ignore glitches in the future. Have fun in minority purgatory, Republicans.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Score another win for gay rights.

SEATTLE — The military cannot automatically discharge people because they’re gay, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday in the case of a decorated flight nurse who sued the Air Force over her dismissal.

The three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not strike down the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But they reinstated Maj. Margaret Witt’s lawsuit, saying the Air Force must prove that her dismissal furthered the military’s goals of troop readiness and unit cohesion.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue, don’t harass” policy prohibits the military from asking about the sexual orientation of service members but requires discharge of those who acknowledge being gay or engaging in homosexual activity.

Wednesday’s ruling led opponents of the policy to declare its days numbered. It is also the first appeals court ruling in the country that evaluated the policy through the lens of a 2003 Supreme Court decision that struck down a Texas ban on sodomy as an unconstitutional intrusion on privacy.

When gay service members have sued over their dismissals, courts historically have accepted the military’s argument that having gays in the service is generally bad for morale and can lead to sexual tension.

But the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Texas case changed the legal landscape, the judges said, and requires more scrutiny over whether “don’t ask, don’t tell” is constitutional as applied in individual cases.

Under Wednesday’s ruling, military officials “need to prove that having this particular gay person in the unit really hurts morale, and the only way to improve morale is to discharge this person,” said Aaron Caplan, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state who worked on the case.

In other words, they can no longer kick somebody out just because they don’t like the lifestyle. Welcome to the 21st century, guys.

Government incompetence may actually be a motivator.

In one crucial way, New Orleans’s modern history of weak, ineffectual government helped it recover after Katrina. Though the BNOB luminaries drew up their plan swiftly, nobody had the political will, knowledge, or resources to enforce it. Property owners could show what they thought of the plan—and of various other utopian schemes bandied about by the nation’s architectural giants—by ignoring them.

This approach—or better, lack of one—differs markedly from the reaction to the nation’s other recent large-scale disaster, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In New York, the state government, which had a long history of centrally planning huge projects, quickly monopolized control over rebuilding. Ground Zero, unfortunately, seemed the perfect opportunity for such a project. After all, the World Trade Center had been built as a government scheme 30 years before the attacks, and the towers’ single leaseholder, real-estate investor Larry Silverstein, sweated under immense political pressure to cooperate with the government in its ambitious reconstruction plans. Six and a half years later, Ground Zero is still an early-stage construction site. Worse, what’s eventually built there could be a white elephant.

In New Orleans, by contrast, though the city and feds can still screw up the sites that they control, including now-vacant housing projects, they can’t define the whole reconstruction process. Enterprising homeowners can experiment with what works, rather than being stuck with some starchitect’s vision for the next century. And it will be fascinating, in a decade or so, to see if one or another approach has fared better than the others: Mouton’s enticing new homeowners to bad neighborhoods on higher ground and hoping that others follow; Habitat’s adding entire blocks to a working-class neighborhood; or Pitt’s luring evacuated low-income homeowners back to one of the hardest-hit and least-rebuilt parts of the Lower Ninth Ward.

Disasters, natural and otherwise, can be great teachers. They can show how unecessary government bureaucracy can be.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

For some reason, I can’t bring myself to have any schadenfreude over the news that Senator Kennedy has a brain tumor.  I hope he makes it.

I will note, however, that if we lived in the socialized medical system that Kennedy has long supported, he would have little chance at survival.  Those systems tend to avoid spending tons of money on high tech procedures for men in their 70’s with his kind of lifestyle.

Well, at least for the common masses.