Category: Politics 2005

If you missed it yesterday, the Daily News is floating the rumor – backed, apparently, by a tantalizing quote from State Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno – that Donald Trump is thinking of running for governor as a Republican. The News is pushing this story again today. Random thoughts:
*Is the NY GOP this desperate? Why, yes, in fact, they are. I haven’t followed the travails of Bill Weld lately, but I’m not feeling very optimistic about him at this stage.
*Would I rather have Trump as my governor than Eliot Spitzer? Yes, but that’s hardly saying much.
*Trump does have some obvious selling points. He’d be self-financing. He understands business, which makes an effective contrast to the business-hating Spitzer. He knows how to get things done, and likely would work better and less confrontationally with the Legislature than celebrity governors like Schwarzenegger and Ventura have. He’d finally get the Trade Center site working.
*I have neither the time nor the energy here to recount the downsides of Trump as a public official (or as a campaigner), but let’s just say there’s no shortage of those, either. And he’d be only the most nominal of Republicans, even compared to Weld.
*The NY tabloids could not invent a better candidate for the purpose of selling newspapers.

Dave Barry’s political humor, like the rest of his humor, is always hilarious and often true as well, which is just one of many reasons why news that his weekly columns won’t be returning is too bad. Barry’s a libertarian, which explains why he’s able to consistently target both sides of the partisan aisle. Anyway, there’s one line in the first segment of his 2005 in review column (which has plenty of laughs at Bush’s expense as well) that captures the Democrats in a nutshell:

In a strongly worded rebuttal, angry congressional Democrats state that, because of a scheduling mixup, they missed the President’s speech, but whatever he said, they totally disagree with it, and if they once voted in favor of it, they did so only because the President lied to them.

*Jon Henke calls for Line-Item Budgeting – not just a line-item veto by the president, but forcing Congress to vote on each expenditure. More here. There would obviously be some practical hurdles: how do you decide what is a separate item? For example, can the Army budget include tanks and guns in the same item? One could see how even the hardiest advocate of creating obstacles to government spending might blanch at this if it’s not carefully crafted, even leaving aside the practical poilitical obstacles to either (1) amending the constitution to require this or (2) getting our legislators to agree to it, to the detriment of their own influence.
A similar problem besets two similar ideas I keep coming back to. One is the idea of some sort of prohibition on items of spending and taxation that are, in effect, special-interest legislation. I do think you could, if you were writing this all from scratch, devise a fairly clear test for expenditures and tax breaks that do not benefit the general public, and perhaps even use the courts to enforce that line. But there would still be problems in policing the marginal cases.
Similarly, my other idea, which would require a narrow exception for certain critical national security functions: prohibit the federal government from sending money to state and local governments, or from imposing most mandates on them. Each governmental entity should raise through taxation whatever it needs, and no more than it can justify to the voters in its own jurisdiction.

A new study from the University of Oslo compared women who miscarry and women who have abortions:

The Oslo team found that, after 10 days, 47.5% of women who had miscarried suffered from some degree of mental distress compared with 30% of the abortion group.
The proportion of women who had a miscarriage suffering distress decreased during the study period, to 22.5% at six months and to just 2.6% at two years and five years.
But among the abortion group 25.7% were still experiencing distress after six months, and 20% at five years.
The researchers also said that women who had an abortion had to make an effort to avoid thinking about the event.

Naturally, the article reporting the study, from the BBC, includes quotes from representatives of the British abortion industry denying any ill effects from their product. As you would expect the industry to say. But avoidance of the truth requires a sustained commitment to avoiding empirical study of the facts.

This handy chart from the Treasury Department illustrates the recovery in employment since the 2003 tax cuts – which, unlike the original 2001 cuts, were phased in imemdiately and thus could immediately affect incentives – quite nicely.

This doesn’t sound good for Karl Rove:

Viveca Novak, a reporter in Time’s Washington bureau, is cooperating with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity in 2003, the magazine reported in its Dec. 5 issue.
Novak specifically has been asked to testify under oath about conversations she had with Rove attorney Robert Luskin starting in May 2004, the magazine reported.

It can’t be good news that the special prosecutor is looking at things done and said after the investigation began, although of course there are many explanations for why, any number of which end without anyone else getting indicted.
Is there anybody reporting on this story who isn’t part of the story? Next we’ll hear that Kaus and Maguire have testified.

A rare speech by Karl Rove, to the Federalist Society on the topic of the courts. Rove notes a familiar refrain in recounting the battle over the Alabama state courts:

It began in 1994, when Republican Perry Hooper challenged sitting chief justice and trial lawyer-favorite Sonny Hornsby. Hooper pulled off a stunning upset. Outspent, outworked, he won by 262 votes out of over 1.2 million votes cast. And then, the day after the election, several thousand absentee ballots mysteriously surfaced, none of them witnessed nor notarized, as required by Alabama law, and Sonny Hornsby tried to have them counted. It took a year of court battles before Hooper was finally seated.

At least among the six campaigns I paid any attention to yesterday – the Governor’s races in NJ and Virginia, the Mayor’s races in NY City and Detroit, and the referendum packages in California and Ohio – if there’s any lesson to be drawn from yesterday’s votes, it’s one that conflicts with the apparent public mood: the voters chose the status quo and rejected calls for reform:
1. Incumbents and incumbent parties won. Virginia and NJ stayed in the same party hands. Incumbents were re-elected in NYC and Detroit.
2. Packages of reform-minded referenda, anchored by anti-gerrymandering efforts, were defeated in Ohio and California.
3. Longstanding concerns about corruption in the state-level New Jersey and California Democratic parties, the state-level Ohio GOP and the local government in Detroit were brushed aside by the voters. No wake-up calls were sent, except perhaps to the Virginia GOP to offer a choice, not an echo.

You may recall my effort, in connection with the “porkbusters” campaign, to get my Congressman, Gary Ackerman, to commit to give back local pork-barrel transportation spending (including money for parking lots, sidewalks, bike racks and public parks in Queens) to help offset the cost of Hurricane Katrina. Well, yesterday I received his response, which is set forth in full in the extended entry. As you can see, Ackerman fails to even acknowledge the question; his response includes not a word about transportation funding. Instead, he scrolls through the usual hot buttons – Iraq, tax cuts, no-bid contracts, etc. – and appears to oppose any effort to cut any spending of any kind:

Continue reading Ackerman Ducks The Question

This is a bit too much of a political inside joke to post under a “baseball” heading, but the Weekly Standard sees the hidden influence of Leo Strauss and his secretive cabal in Ozzie Guillen’s White Sox.

Mickey Kaus notes that it is the wrong approach for Democrats, should there be indictments in the Valerie Plame case, to try to use the case to re-argue the entire case for war in Iraq rather than just stick to the basic charge of jeopardizing the CIA:

It’s not just that this would be a mistake, but that it’s the exact same mistake they’ve made before: most notably in 1987 when the Democrats discovered the Reagan Administration doing something politically explosive and contrary to its stated principles – trading arms to Iran for hostages – and frittered away all the political benefits of this revelation by instead staging a huge fight over the Nicaraguan side of the Iran-Contra scandal, which to most of the general public amounted to the allegation that Reagan’s people were going too far in fighting Communism in the Western Hemisphere. This was, of course, an issue on which the Dems had been whupped by Reagan in the past, and they were so eager to settle the score that they wound up getting a lot less mileage out of the scandal than they probably should have.
We may see a related mistake brewing in the Harriet Miers hearings – there have been rumblings that the hearings will turn into a rehash of the Ben Barnes/National Guard story, a mistake the Democrats just can’t stop making.

For the record, I’m, with RedState, DailyKos and the rest in supporting the Coburn Amendment.
If there’s enough of us, Patty Murray can’t threaten us all.

The New York Sun mocks Chuck Schumer for overuse of a metaphor:

No sooner had [former] Senators [Connie] Mack and [John] Breaux unleashed their ideas on making the federal tax code more simple and fair than Senator Schumer unsheathed his rusty old dagger, describing the idea of eliminating the federal deduction for state and local taxes as “a dagger to the heart of the people of New York.” Voters might be inclined to listen — except for the fact that Mr. Schumer sees a dagger virtually everywhere he looks.
A 2003 plan for flexible work schedules instead of overtime? “A dagger to the heart of the middle class,” Mr. Schumer said, according to the Associated Press. A 2002 plan by federal regulators to urge Wall Street firms to establish backup facilities outside New York City? A “dagger pointed at the heart of New York,” Mr. Schumer said, according to the Daily News. High gas prices? “A dagger at the heart of our economy,” Mr. Schumer said in 2000, according to the New York Times. A unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood would be “a dagger through the heart of the peace process,” Mr. Schumer said in 2000, according to the Agence France Presse.
Hate crimes “put a dagger in the heart of what America is all about,” Mr. Schumer said in 1999, according to USA Today. A proposal to change the federal transportation funding formula was “a dagger pointed at” New York and California, Mr. Schumer said in 1999, according to the Washington Post. School vouchers? “Daggers that plunge into the heart of what is the American way,” Mr. Schumer said in May 1999, according to the New York Post. Cuts in federal student aid? “A dagger to New York’s college students,” Mr. Schumer told Newsday in 1995.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Mr. Schumer sees daggers more often than a four-eyed knife thrower looking through a kaleidoscope.

(Emphasis added). Via Taranto.

Responding to Hugh Hewitt’s taunts about “Evian Flu” among conservative pundits, Ramesh Ponnuru writes:

At least as to the bottled water thing, Ramesh is right on. Most of us have an instinctive belief that paying good money for water in a bottle is ridiculous. And yet, if you live in a city like New York or Washington (or Worcester, Mass., where I went to college and where the tap water was brown), where drinking the tap water is not a sane option, bottled water has become a necessity – and all the moreso after September 11 and especially after Katrina, when bottled water has become an emblem of disaster preparedness.
(As for wine, I believe recent surveys have shown that Americans as a whole now drink more wine than beer.)

I should have linked to this when it ran, but if you are pondering President Bush’s objectives in nominating a Supreme Court Justice, you should definitely read the analysis offered by the always-incisive Jay Cost back in July.

Heh.

Getting back to the original reason I was checking the website for my Congressman, Gary Ackerman (D-Queens), I was looking for examples of pork barrel spending in my district that could be a target for the Instapundit/N/Z. Bear “Porkbusters” campaign to put pressure on Senators and Members of Congress to accept spending cuts on pork projects in their states and districts to help pay for the massive rebuilding efforts needed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (and, perhaps, Hurricane Rita as well).
Now, Ackerman’s not shy about bringing home the bacon. He prominently displays a link to this September 2002 press release:

U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens/L.I.) today announced that his fifth Congressional district is number one in New York State and 37th in the nation for receiving the most in federal dollars – $9.5 billion in 2001 – according to a study conducted by the Associated Press (AP).
The news wire service’s analysis compared total federal government spending among the nation’s 435 congressional districts. The totals include demographic-based funding such as Social Security and Medicare, direct spending on regional projects and government loans and insurance.
Ackerman noted the high ranking despite the fact that he’s a Democrat in a Republican controlled Congress. The Congressman’s district stretches throughout the north shore of Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties.
The only other New York district to make the top 130 on the AP list, was upstate Rep. Mike McNulty, a Democrat from Albany who placed second in the state and 45th in the nation with $8.8 billion.

Well, let’s take a look at where that money goes, from First up is a July 30, 2005 press release on Ackerman’s own websiteannouncing Ackerman’s cut of the transportation bill (more here, here and here). I’m posting this now, but I will try to follow up with Ackerman via email to get a response.

Continue reading Ackerman’s Pork

The LA Times. Via Beldar.

Apparently, the Austin, Texas DA has been letting a film crew record his pursuit of Tom DeLay. And Earle’s methods of pressuring corporations to pay off his favorite causes in exchange for leniency are . . . unorthodox, to say the least. And we remember Earle’s use of the DeLay investigation to raise money for Democrats, which the Houston Chronicle called “a stunning display of prosecutorial impropriety.”
You know, I was appalled by the personal attacks heaped during the Clinton years on Ken Starr, an upstanding public servant and a man whose previous career had been one of unblemished integrity and civility. I felt then – and still do – that the relentless attacks on Starr, as a means of delegitimizing his inquiry and distracting from the merits of the case, were bad for the administration of justice. And so, I have deeply mixed feelings about the “pig pile on Ronnie Earle” playbook. But the more I see of Earle’s record, the more obvious it is that this is a guy with a long track record of troubling behavior with regard both to this investigation and other politically charged investigations. Maybe he has the goods on DeLay; I’m still in the process of absorbing the ins and outs of Texas campaign finance law in the hopes of making sense of this whole thing. But his behavior certainly doesn’t inspire confidence.

Tacitus thinks Rick Santorum is owed an apology.

Media scammed yet again by a Democrat pretending to be a disaffected Republican for purposes of anti-Bush stories.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, stop the presses: three liberal journalists say the media hasn’t been anti-Bush enough! Media Matters, with characteristic lack of perspective, treats this as a confession of press conservatism.

There’s been a lot of talk going around lately about government spending, and I thought I’d add some hard data in here on the percentage of GDP consumed by federal taxes and by federal spending. These are official government historical data and projections based on the Fiscal Year 2005 budget. I’ll hold the analysis for now, but this chart gives something to refer back to in later posts:

Continue reading Tax and Spend

From a July 29 press release by my Congressman, Gary Ackerman:

Ackerman noted that “since last fall, I have tried again and again to work with FEMA on this rule so that 9/11 first responders and their families could start collecting the funds raised by the 9/11 Heroes Stamp. But at every step, FEMA – which does a spectacular job responding to disasters and emergencies throughout the country – refused to accept input or provide any feedback as to the content of the rule or when it would be published. I have enormous respect and admiration for what FEMA does in crises, which is why I’m so disappointed in this rule. Unfortunately, more than 45 months since the stamp was created, 38 months since the stamp went on sale, and more than six months since beginning work on the rule, what’s been produced is, frankly, half-a__ed bureaucratic bulls__t. New York’s best and bravest deserve far, far better than this.”

(Emphasis added). I’ve omitted the language here, which is unfortunately not omitted from Ackerman’s press release. Isn’t this crossing a line that should not be crossed? I mean, it’s one thing when a politician uses foul language in a private conversation and it somehow goes public, most famously in the case of Nixon’s White House tapes but also, more recently memorably, in the case of George Bush in 2000 calling a New York Times reporter an unprintable name while talking to Dick Cheney in front of what turned out to be a live microphone. And it’s another thing when that conversation is had in a setting where the politician should have known his conversation would be overheard and publicized, as with Cheney’s use of an expletive to Patrick Leahy in a meeting on the Senate floor. And it’s another thing still when a politician uses a bad word in a magazine interview that’s expressly intended for publication (even if, as in the case of John Kerry’s Rolling Stone interview, the magazine in question is one that uses such language freely), or in a radio interview (as in Ray Nagin’s outburst during the hurricane).
But this is a new low, putting this sort of language in a press release. Now, while I refrain from using bad language on this blog, I’m certainly not innocent of doing so in my daily life, so I’m not getting squeamish here about the words themselves. My point is, simply, that it is yet another step to the coarsening of our culture to incorporate obscenties into the public vocabulary of our elected officials, one of the few areas of public discourse in which that is still taboo, and in which a measure of formality and civility is still expected to prevail. Recall Lileks’ prediction, in August 2002:

Once vulgar words are commonplace in the papers and the television, there’s no going back – and public life just gets cruder and cruder. I know it’s a losing battle. Fifty years down the road a presidential candidate will say “My opponent says I’m soft on the military, and to him and all his advisors, I can honestly say: f**k you.” He’ll be celebrated in some corners for connecting with the genuine people, with those not bound by musty conventions. The authentic people! The ones who really f**kin’ live!

It turned out to be one year and four months down the road, not 50. And Ackerman’s press release is another step down that road. By 2008, will we have candidates who, like Atrios, call everyone who disagrees with them “f___ers” and leave it at that? Even if we don’t, we are headed in that direction.
UPDATE: Jesse Taylor makes the opposite case, and in the process pretty well plays right into the popular caricature of the Angry Left as over-agitated, immature, reflexively oppositional and utterly lacking in perspective.

We already knew that George W. Bush was a (rhetorically) committed free trader, even if his actions haven’t always lived up to his rhetoric (ahem, steel tariffs). But this call for the total worldwide abolition of trade barriers, as pie-in-the-sky as it may be under present international political conditions, ought to warm the hearts of conservatives, libertarians and Clinton-style liberals everywhere. Nothing wrong with shooting high and setting goals we can work to, even if it takes the next few decades.

If you missed them, two of the most biting denunciations of far-Left bloggers have come recently from their own side of the aisle: Bob Somerby on Atrios (scroll down; lots of adult language involved), and, from a few weeks back, Mark Kleiman on Juan Cole.

I was watching the local NBC affiliate on Monday and you know it’s not good news for the Democrats challenging Mike Bloomberg that a new poll showed Bloomberg leading the field . . . among Democratic primary voters. By a 2-to-1 margin: 43% for Bloomberg to 21% for Fernando Ferrer. And the accompanying report had no trouble finding Bloomberg supporters at the West Indian Day Parade, not normally a hotbed of Republicanism.
Like him or not, Bloomberg is a competent manager and as close to a genuinely bipartisan mayor (by New York City standards) as you can get. He’ll be re-elected.

Via Econopundit, I see that Connecticut is suing the federal government over “unfunded mandates” in the No Child Left Behind Act, arguing that it is impermissible for the federal government to require testing without paying for the tests.
As a matter of constitutional law, this may be a bit of an uphill battle, although there is Supreme Court caselaw supporting the arguement that the federal government can attach conditions to funds it gives the states but can’t outright compel the states to do things, whether it pays for them or not. As Steve Antler notes, though, it is liberals and Democrats who would be the real disappointed parties if unfunded mandates of this sort were declared unconstitutional.
Personally, I’d like to go farther and ban, all but entirely, the practice of the federal government giving money to the states to carry out policy. There may be a narrow class of cases where (1) the national interest is sufficiently imperiled to justify the federal government requiring states to follow a uniform national standard and thus justify out-of-state taxpayers footing the bill, and yet (2) the job is best carried out through the infrastructure of state/local government. Counter-terrorism, border security, and vaccination/response for epidemic infectious diseases are all potential examples of this. But the great bulk of areas in which the feds give money to states and localities are simply for services to benefit the people of that state or locality. And that means one of two things:
A. The federal government is taking taxes from the people of the state and routing it, redundantly, back to the people. In this case, why not have the taxes raised locally? That would improve the transparency and accountability of government by making clear who was responsible for deciding how much to tax and how and where to spend.
One of the worst examples is Medicaid. The Medicaid program, by providing matching funds to the states, effectively takes a big chunk of the federal budget and hands over control of it to elected officials in the states; at the same time, the incentive to use Medicaid funds drives states to spend more, ultimately costing their own budgets as well. If states simply had to choose between spending their own money or not spending it, both state and federal government would be more accountable for their own choices.
B. The federal government is taking taxes from the people of a different state or locality and diverting it. Of course, there are endless controversies over who benefits more from this, but I think most observers of Washington would have to admit that what the federal government does not do is work out a plan based on reasonable policy criteria for deciding which states and localities get a net benefit and which are net losers. Instead, the real division of funds winds up being (1) a patchwork of contradictory programs and (2) heavily influenced by which states and localities have powerful Senators and House Committee Chairs.
Now, a lot of conservatives have championed “block grants” and the like – no-strings-attached funds given to states – as a way of reducing federal influence. Cutting these off, though, would in the long run hand more real authority back to state authorities that are closer to, and thus more directly accountable to, the people. Unfortunately, it would almost certainly require an amendment to the Constitution to do this, and one that would require a sufficient number of exceptions that it would be difficult to police.

Dean Barnett notes a dynamic among left-wing bloggers, especially younger ones, that I addressed recently: “writing like they’re politically obsessed Quentin Tarantino characters.” Link via Instapundit. It may be morally satisfying to spew profanity-laced insults at anyone and everyone who disagrees with you (and not just Republicans; go search lefty blogs like Atrios and Kos for “DLC” and see what you come up with), but it’s no way to expand the tent.

OK, maybe Mark Kleiman has never worked in an office with a busy professional or executive. But for those of you who have: what are the odds that the person who keeps Karl Rove’s phone log is Karl Rove?
(Of course, if Rove instructed someone not to log the call, we’re in Betty Currie territory, and Rove could be in a heap of trouble. But my point here is, it’s much more likely that Rove’s secretary, not Rove, was the person deciding what calls to log, and how).

Ricky West says the Democratic excitement over a close special election (which they lost) in Ohio is deja vu from 2002.

Patrick Ruffini:

In a totally free market for information, politics must have popular entertainment value in order to be viable.

Drezner, as you would expect, has some thoughts on the House’s passage of CAFTA. Among other things, he quotes the Washington Post on Bush’s personal appeal to House Republicans:

Underscoring the importance that Bush attaches to the pact, he put his prestige on the line by making a rare appearance with Vice President Cheney at the weekly closed-door meeting of the House Republican Conference. Bush spoke for an hour, lawmakers said, stressing the national security implications of CAFTA, which are rooted in the concern that growing anti-American sentiment in Latin America would flourish if the United States refused to open its markets wider to the nations that negotiated the pact.
“Mothers and fathers in El Salvador love their children as much as we love our children here,” Bush said, stressing the need to look out for the young democracies in “our neighborhood,” according to lawmakers. He also noted that four of the six countries — the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua — have assisted the U.S. military effort in Iraq.

Jon Henke, on the Plame leak:

If a White House official 1) consciously knew that Valerie Plame was a covert agent 2) whose identity ought to have been protected, and 3) that White House official initiated a leak of her name to the press 4) in order to disclose her identity, then he ought to be removed from his position and prosecuted.

Even leaving aside the issue of prosecution – which I’ve about beaten to death at the moment – I’d pretty much agree with this, and I’d add that the White House should fire anybody who meets (1) and (2) and initiated or participated in a leak, and that (4) is only marginally relevant if people in the White House gave out her name, knowing her status. It’s actually amazing – at least if you’re not familiar with how politics works – how much heat has been expended on the issues of who can be prosecuted and what regulations require and what the president said he should or should not do, as opposed to the central question of what is bad enough conduct to justify firing someone in the first place. And to me, if somebody was just negligent with the identity of a non-covert agent and accidentally revealed that she’d been covert in the past, that’s a blunder, but it’s not something you organize a lynch mob over. Listen to former Director of the National Security Administration and former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Admiral Bobby Inman, who at one time was nominated by Bill Clinton to be Secretary of Defense:

[The leaking of Plame’s identity] is still one I would rather not see, but she was working in an analytical organization, and there’s nothing that precludes anyone from identifying analytical officers. I watch all the hand-wringing over the ruining of careers… there are a lot of operatives whose covers are blown. It doesn’t mean the end of their careers. Many move to the analytical world, which is where she already was. It meant she couldn’t deploy back off to Africa, but nothing I’ve seen indicated that was possible in the first place.

Inman also notes the pervasive leaking from the CIA directed at the Bush Administration during the 2004 election, about which the cheerleaders of the Plame investigation can muster no outrage.

Remember how 1992 was the Year of the (liberal/Democratic) Woman? Think the media will buy 2006 being the Year of the (conservative/Republican) African-American? Let’s list the races:
*Michael Steele is all-but-openly running for an open Senate seat in Maryland, and the Lt. Gov. is likely to get the GOP nomination.
*Detroit City Councilman Rev. Keith Butler looks like he could be the GOP frontrunner to challenge Debbie Stabenow, a potentially vulnerable Democratic Senator in Michigan.
*Former Steeler Lynn Swann is gearing up to challenge Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, and Swann’s high name recognition could make him the GOP frontrunner.
*Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is expected to be a serious contender for the governor’s mansion in 2006, and is a favorite of conservatives looking to shake up the scandal-ridden establishment in the faltering GOP stronghold.
*NY Secretary of State Randy Daniels appears to be considering entering the wide-open race (assuming George Pataki doesn’t run again) to challenge Eliot Spitzer for Governor of NY.
*To top it off, a conservative African-American Democrat, Harold Ford, will be running for an open Senate seat in Tennessee.
Now, there are few hardier perennials in political commentary than the vain hope that the GOP can break through with black voters. And all six of these guys are varying degrees of long shots, although none of them besides Daniels seems like a certain dead loser. These will mostly be hotly contested races, and black Republicans will be in the thick of several of them. How many of the five Republicans will get the nomination and win more than 10-12% of the African-American vote? It could be a trend to watch, even if the media winds up having to be dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge it.

Well, today’s big story will obviously be the report (see here and here) that Karl Rove testified to the Plame grand jury that he learned Plame’s identity from Bob Novak and not from official channels. Of course, if that’s true it would make it nearly impossible to prosecute Rove, since access to Bob Novak is not classified. It also makes it more likely that Rove neither knew nor had reason to know that Plame was or had been a covert operative; if there’s one thing that’s clear in all this, it’s that you would never successfully prosecute anybody who only knew that Plame worked for the CIA if they didn’t know that she had been a covert operative. The NY Times report says Rove said that he didn’t know:

The person who has been briefed on the matter said Mr. Rove neither knew Ms. Wilson’s name nor that she was a covert officer.

(More challenging is the question of what consequences would ensue if Novak told Rove she was covert; I’m still mulling that one over).
Of course, Rove may not be out of the woods just yet. The news report could be mistaken as to what he told the grand jury; there may be evidence contradicting his testimony; or, like anyone involved in a grand jury investigation, he could still be prosecuted if he committed perjury or obstruction of justice or lied to investigators or destroyed documents, regardless of any underlying crimes (ask Bill Clinton, Martha Stewart or Arthur Andersen).
And it still leads back to the question: who told Bob?
UPDATE: As usual, Tom Maguire has comprehensive thougts on the matter.
SECOND UPDATE: Cliff May points out that if you actually read what Bob Novak wrote, and what followed, Plame’s status as a covert or clandestine agent was never revealed, only her CIA employment; the fact that she’d been undercover was first revealed by David Corn of The Nation, most likely based on information provided by Joe Wilson himself. Needless to say, regardless of whether you think this should be a scandal, this is a point that would be of enormous significance in any criminal prosecution. May also reprints an email exchange with Corn over the subject, in which Corn defends himself by saying that he was speaking of Plame’s undercover status hypothetically.

Is it just me, or has Chuck Schumer given the GOP a golden opportunity? You’ve doubtless seen Schumer’s latest demand, from the floor of the Senate, on the White House:

“For consultation to work, and we all want it to work, the president should suggest some names and get the opinion of those of us in the Senate,” he said. The senator also suggested the president convene a summit at Camp David or “a dinner at the White House” to privately discuss the nomination.

Now, during the Clinton years, Newt Gingrich was ruthlessly lampooned by the NY Daily News as a “Cry Baby” over the charge that the 1995 government shutdown was partly motivated by Newt’s pique over not getting a good seat on Air Force One. That was doubtless an oversimplification, but isn’t Schumer opening himself up to similar charges here when he inevitably leads the charge to filibuster Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court: Schumer wanted Bush to wine and dine him before announcing the nominee, and now he’s pitching a fit and shutting down the Senate because he didn’t get his ego-stroking dinner invitation. Is it really such a good idea to hand your opponents such an obvious talking point?

Erick at Red State asked the question whether Republicans have a better chance of confirming conservative Justices if two are nominated at once, rather than one at a time. Let me explain in a little detail here why I think we do.
Let’s start with a trenchant analysis (as always) by Patrick Ruffini, which I’m quoting here at some length to make a point. Ruffini argues that Republicans need to come out swinging, as Ted Kennedy did with Robert Bork in 1987, on precisely how the two parties’ different views of judging will lead to different outcomes:

*Complaining about ideological opposition to a nominee is about as effective as whining about your opponent running a negative campaign.
*Lauding a judge’s qualifications is a soporific exercise. On paper, John Kerry was “qualified” to be President. But he was dead wrong on everything that mattered, and he was hammered relentlessly for it.
*The Supreme Court fight is best framed as any campaign would be, as a clash of two different philosophies, where both sides are equally accountable for defending their platforms and ideas.
*And most importantly, in judicial philosophy, as in legislating, outcomes matter inordinately more than process.

Ruffini then offers an example of what a bare-knuckled, Kennedy-style argument would look like:

What kind of America do Democrats want by opposing President Bush’s judicial nominee? The kind that the judges they prefer are trying to make for us:
*An America where your children can’t pledge allegiance to the United States of America, Under God (Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow)
*An America where gay marriage is imposed by judicial fiat (Goodridge v. Department of Public Health), and if the people of your state say no, they are silenced (Citizens for Equal Protection v. Bruning)
*An America where wealthy developers can take away your home (Kelo v. City of New London)
*A Banana Republic where elections can be manipulated after the fact to produce the desired outcome (Bush v. Gore; the Dino Rossi litigation)
*An America where the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are more likely to be set free, possibly to conduct further attacks.

In contrast to this, Ruffini offers the positive vision of conservative judging:

How do we “strict constructionists” frame our “agenda?” As an anti-agenda. As one that opposes the imposition of any particular worldview through the Courts. As a simple sentiment, animated by faith in the body politic, and borne of 229 years of democracy in America:
Let the people decide.
Conservatives would never aspire to use the courts to ban abortion, or to end gay marriage. To state otherwise is patently false. Only through a Constitutional Amendment requiring overwhelming popular approval could these objectives be achieved nationally. We are committed to a healthy and vigorous debate at the state level in which the people decide, not judges.
. . . It is often noted that the decisions of the Supreme Court reach into the daily lives of average Americans. We don’t believe it should be that way — the Supreme Court is empowered deal only with matters contained in the Constitution, and last we checked, the words “abortion” and “homosexuality” weren’t mentioned in the text. These are matters for the people and their elected representatives, not for the courts.

I agree with most of this, particularly the juxtaposition of bad results flowing from liberal judging with a more general discussion of the positive philosophy of conservatism of ensuring that all judicial decisions are rooted in the legitimacy of popular sovereignty, whether through the current democratic process or the prior approval of express provisions in the Constitution.+ Conservatives generally do well when arguing about ideas and badly when we argue inside-baseball “fair play” type issues, on which it’s too easy for the media to play referee and side with the Democrats. On the other hand, I do think that some of the procedural points will at least be worth making: an ideological long-term filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee would be wholly unprecedented, and Republicans will need to make the case that the nominee, whoever it may be, is well-qualified to the job.
But here’s the thing Ruffini overlooks in his view of an effective communications strategy: while the GOP is making general arguments about judicial philosophy, the Democrats will be busy trying to pin down the nominee to commit to specific answers on specific issues, e.g., “do you believe in the right to privacy found in Roe v. Wade?” The nominee, for many good reasons, will want to avoid answering these questions and avoid pre-judging specific issues that will come before the Court. Unfortunately, there’s no way to avoid doing so – whether by having the nominee be evasive, refuse to answer, or by having the committee chair rule such questions out of order – without creating some bad visuals implying that the nominee is hiding something.
The challenge, then, is finding a way to simultaneously have the White House arguing about judicial philosophy and the specific bad results of a liberal judicial philosophy, without getting the nominee tangled up in having to implicitly adopt all of the arguments made on his/her behalf and defend them in hearings.
This is where it becomes highly advantageous to have more than one nominee at once. With two nominees, after all, the White House can talk effectively about its own judicial philosophy, and argue that President Bush has chosen these two judges out of a belief that they will generally uphold this philosophy, but at the same time acknowledge that there is no guarantee that either nominee will always rule in a predictable fashion (you need only look at the numerous recent examples of cases on which Justices Scalia and Thomas wound up on opposite sides of various decisions to see that this is inevitable even among judges who have fairly clear and rigid judicial disciplines). And with two nominees, it becomes harder for the Democrats to focus on specific objections to each judge, since some things that appear objectionable about one will not be true of the other.
This is all an extrapolation from the basic rule of politics that it is often easier to beat a candidate in the polls with “opponent” than with a single, flesh-and-blood opponent with specific flaws that can be the subject of a negative campaign. Opening a second front, if Chief Justice Rehnquist announces his retirement before a nominee to replace Justice O’Connor is confirmed or perhaps even nominated, would thus work to the benefit of conservatives in crafting a strategy to win public support for two conservative nominees rather than one at a time.

Continue reading The Two-Nominee Strategy

MoveOn.org has taken some of the most extreme positions on the left in recent years, most notoriously by opposing the war in Afghanistan. Now, Republicans are planning to make the group’s support an issue for Democrats like Bob Casey who accept MoveOn.org money while campaigning as moderates.

In case you missed it, the NY Times ran the most ridiculous op-ed piece I think I have ever seen last week; a woman named Fatina Abdrabboh (apparently a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, naturally) wrote, from Cambridge, Mass., about how

[T]he Muslim headscarf, or hijab, that I wear makes me feel as if I am under a microscope. I try to go to the gym just about every morning. Because I work out with my scarf on, people stare – just as they do on the streets of Cambridge.

Then she described how upset she got watching the news in the gym:

Every television in the gym highlighted some aspect of America’s conflict with the Muslim world: the war in Iraq, allegations that American soldiers had desecrated the Koran, prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay, President Bush urging support of the Patriot Act. The stares just intensified my alienation as an Arab Muslim in what is supposed to be my country. I was not sure if the blood rushing to my head was caused by the elliptical trainer or by the news coverage.
Frustrated and angry, I moved to another part of the gym. I got on a treadmill and started running as hard as I could. As sweat dripped down my face, I reached for my towel, accidentally dropping my keys in the process. It was a small thing, I know, but as they slid down the rolling belt and fell to the carpet, my faith in the United States seemed to fall with them. I did not care to pick them up. I wanted to keep running.

But wait! Her faith in the nation was restored by an act of staggering heroism:

Suddenly a man, out of breath, but still smiling and friendly, tapped me on my shoulder and said, “Ma’am, here are your keys.” It was Al Gore, former vice president of the United States. Mr. Gore had gotten off his machine behind me, picked up my keys, handed them to me and then resumed his workout.
It was nothing more than a kind gesture, but at that moment Mr. Gore’s act represented all that I yearned for – acceptance and acknowledgment.
There in front of me, he stood for a part of America that has not made itself well known to 10 million Arab and Muslim-Americans, many of whom are becoming increasingly withdrawn and reclusive because of the everyday hostility they feel.
It is up to us as Americans to change how the rest of the world views us by changing how we view some of our own citizens. Mr. Gore’s act reminded me that rather than running away on my treadmill, I needed to keep my feet on the soil in this country. I left the gym with a renewed sense of spirit, reassured that I belong to America and that America belongs to me.

You should read the whole thing, although I’ve excerpted almost all of it as is; there’s so little there it’s amazing that a reputable college newspaper would find room for this piffle, let alone the New York Times (one staggers to think of all the worthwhile things written in the blogosphere last week that NYT readers would never learn about while they publish the likes of this). Chris Lynch and Jonah Goldberg make appropriate mockery of various aspects of the column (links via Lyford). Ankle Biting Pundits had some more serious background on the numerous times that Fatina Abdrabboh – presumably the same one – had been quoted in the media complaining about perceived ill-treatment in the U.S., particularly on account of her headscarf; it’s a must-read.
I had a few thoughts of my own:
1. Isn’t it, um, kind of dangerous to bend down on a treadmill while wearing a headscarf? Am I the only one who thought this was a tort case waiting to happen? (A scene at the end of “The Incredibles” comes to mind, if you’ve seen it).
2. In most Muslim countries, wouldn’t a woman working out on a treadmill in gym full of men (well, one man, at least) attract quite a lot more than some unusual stares? Like, say, rocks?
3. On the other hand, back in Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee, most women would not consider a man performing a simple act of courtesy like picking up a set of keys to be sufficiently newsworthy to justify writing to the New York Times about it. Whether that’s a comment on men in Cambridge or the men Ms. Abdrabboh grew up around, I leave to you.
4. As my wife pointed out, if people in Cambridge stare at her, it’s probably just because she doesn’t have green hair and a pin through her nose.

I think my favorite detail from this story is the fact that the NY Times has a “Credibility Committee.” When you need to appoint a committee to figure out why you have credibility problems . . .
Tom Maguire has more.

Mark Steyn echoes the arguments I made here and here for keeping flag-burning legal.

I had meant to link to Don Luskin’s brutal takedown of Paul Krugman’s article on scandals with the pension funds in Ohio; Krugman’s mendacity in spinning the news to create falsely negative impressions about Republicans is pretty boundless. (Via Maguire). Of course, the real scandal here isn’t the perfidy of Republican politicians and businessmen or the perfidy of Democratic politicians and businessmen or even (as Luskin suggests) the distorting effects of racial preferences; the real issue is that big giant honey pots of other people’s money are being invested by politicians and people appointed by politicians. That’s a dangerous trend and one that GOP reformers should crusade against at the state and federal levels. I hope Arnold succeeds in changing that in California.