Category: Politics 2007

*Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg on the complete and total vindication of President Bush and other opponents of public funding for embryonic stem cell research.
*Spitzer’s DMV strikes again:

Arno Herwerth, a 21-year veteran of the New York Police Department, said he requested the “GETOSAMA” plates earlier this month to send a political message. He said he was surprised to hear, after receiving the plates, that the DMV wanted them back.
In a Nov. 15 letter to Herwerth, the agency cited a regulation prohibiting plates that could be considered “obscene, lewd, lascivious, derogatory to a particular ethnic group or patently offensive.”

Oh, really – offensive to whom?
*Of all the planted-question issues with the debates (see here, here and here), this video of Obama unwittingly giving away that he knew a questioner is perhaps the funniest.
It’s like something out of Matlock.
*Hillary throws stones from a glass house:

Clinton closed out her Sunday with an appeal to voters in Bettendorf to caucus for her, but earlier in Cedar Rapids, she took Obama to task over his health care plan and disputed his claim he doesn’t take lobbyist money.
When a reporter asked whether she is suggesting Obama has “issues of character, the New York senator said, “I’m going to let voters make that decision but it’s beginning to look a lot like that. It really is.”

For those of us old enough to remember the Clintons and their surrogates arguing incessantly that character is wholly irrelevant to the presidency and that campaigning on such issues is a sign of being defeated on the issues – heck, go back and watch “The American President,” their propaganda movie devoted to this theme, albeit while re-casting the facts in the most favorable possible light – this is hilarious, as is this:

Clinton said she wanted to win the caucuses — and, next year, push the state into the Democratic column in the general election.
“I want a long term relationship,” she said. “I don’t want to just have a one night stand with all of you.”

*And, for a little humor, this, via Ace. We’ve all been on the other end of conversations like this, though perhaps rarely quite so graphically.

When I looked at the long list of tax hiking Democratic Governors back in the spring, I gave an incomplete grade to Maryland’s new Democratic Governor, Martin O’Malley, not out of any illusions about whether he was anything but a standard-issue tax-and-spend liberal but simply because he hadn’t done anything yet.
Well, no need to wait longer for the verdict. E.J. Dionne, predictably, hails O’Malley’s billion-and-a-half dollar tax hike, passed earlier this week:

Facing a $1.7 billion budget deficit, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley — who offered the above observations in an interview — led the legislature this week to approve $1.4 billion in taxes and $550 million in spending cuts. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen that kind of balance from the federal government.
At the same time, the legislature extended health coverage to 100,000 residents and approved new money for transportation, education and cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay. . . .
The final budget package contains its share of questionable concessions to this group or that. The middle class bears more of the burden of the tax increases than O’Malley had hoped. The income tax hike for those earning over $500,000 a year — the rate goes from 4.75 percent to 5.5 percent — is a modest step in the right direction.

Continue reading Billion-Dollar Marty

As if he hasn’t had enough stumbles, NY Governor Eliot Spitzer is now considering breaking outright his campaign promise not to raise taxes, which he previously bent rather severely with proposed business tax hikes and aggressive sales tax enforcement against Native Americans. He’s apparently pondering an income tax hike:

Governor Spitzer is considering a proposal to raise income taxes on wealthier New Yorkers, according to a labor-backed political party that is pushing for the increase….
Support for a tax increase is coming from one of Mr. Spitzer’s firmest backers, the Working Families Party, a grassroots operation financed by a coalition of labor unions and community groups….
Party leaders have not finalized details of the plan, but they are expected to call for raising the income tax rates of New Yorkers earning at least $200,000 to $500,000 a year.

This is on top of Spitzer’s new plan to tax Internet sales and new MTA fare hikes. Because really, the first thing people think of in New York is that taxes are so low and the business climate is so friendly…

Mark Cuban challenges Bill O’Reilly to debate him with Keith Olbermann as the moderator. Via Hot Air.

Apparently Gov. Corzine intends to go forward with his stem cell plan even after the voters rejected it.

Democrats nationwide have been operating on the assumption that taxpayer funding for stem cell research is endlessly popular with the voters (for all the talk of “banning” research on embryonic stem cells, remember that nobody has advanced a serious proposal to make such research illegal; the issue is whether to spend taxpayer money on it despite the substantial moral/ethical objections of a significant number of taxpayers).
Yesterday in New Jersey, that theory was put to the test, and appears to have gone down in defeat before what is usually accounted as a liberal Northeastern electorate:

Continue reading NJ Voters Reject Corzine’s Half-Billion Dollar Stem Cell Boondoggle

Devastating anti-Hillary ad put out by John Edwards:

Via Stop Her Now.

Matt Labash’s Weekly Standard profile of GOP political operative Roger Stone is one of the funniest, most fascinating things you are likely to read about a practitioner of politics at its most bare-knuckeled (the man has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back). I’d be here all day if I started to excerpt it, so I’ll just say: read the whole thing.

*As the comments to this post noted, the Bush Administration is obviously producing good economic news to distract the media from the progress being made in Iraq.
*I find your lack of conservatism disturbing.
*I’m no Obama fan but this T-Shirt sold to benefit his campaign is pretty clever.
*Definitely not safe for work.

The ant-war wackos who tried, and failed, to throw Joe Lieberman out of the Senate now have to live with the fact that Lieberman is free to say what he thinks – and whatever his sorrow-not-anger shtick, I suspect he is relishing being a thorn in the side of his former party’s presidential contenders.
Lieberman is dead right about the irresponsibility of Senators who voted to deny the role of Iranian units in arming terrorists:

“I thought it was so direct, factual, based on evidence the U.S. military has given us of the involvement of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in training and equipping Iraqi extremists who… have been responsible for the killing of hundreds of American soldiers.”
Chuckling a bit, apparently in disbelief, Lieberman asked, “How can you vote against a request that the administration impose economic sanctions on a group that the U.S. military has presented us ample evidence is a terrorist group killing American soldiers?”

Remember the scene in Wedding Crashers where Owen Wilson tells a woman he’s trying to seduce, “You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts”?
Read everything Michael Gerson says to yourself in Wilson’s voice and imagine he’s saying it to get a girl in bed. It makes so much more sense that way.

Congressional Democrats have been discovering, after 12 years out of power, that actually governing is a lot harder and less fun than griping from the cheap seats; but as long as George W. Bush is in the White House, they retain a convenient scapegoat for the gap between their rhetoric and reality.
Democratic governors, the numbers of which have proliferated in recent years, have no such luxury; having sold the pie in the sky, they actually have to bake it. I’ve been warning of this since the spring in regard to tax hikes, and Eliot Spitzer’s disastrous illegal-immigrant-driver’s license plan is only one of many other examples of Democratic governors reminding people why there were so many Republican incumbents in the first place.
Add now the Chicago Tribune to the list of the disenchanted, to the point of arguing that the Rod Blagojevich era demonstrates why Illinois needs a mechanism to recall a governor:

Continue reading The Joys of Democratic Governance

If there is one thing we have definitvely learned from the whole Scott Beauchamp episode, it’s that Franklin Foer is a cretin.
Relatedly, we have also been reminded of one of the central lessons of the Plame affair: nepotism and secret-keeping don’t mix.

I’ve written previously here and here about NY Governor Eliot Spitzer’s foolhardy and politically disastrous plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, and NY Senator Hillary Clinton’s evasive response to questions about the plan that “I know exactly what Governor Spitzer’s trying to do and it makes a lot of sense, because he’s trying to get people out of the shadows” and “it’s unfortunate that too many people are using this to demagogue the issue,” wink, wink, while, as Jim Geraghty notes, sending her chief strategist out to argue that the families of illegal immigrants “may be the most powerful political force in the country,” nudge, nudge.
But just because a Clinton takes a non-position doesn’t mean it can’t change, and the NY Post’s veteran Albany correspondent, Frederic Dicker, reports that a panicked NY Democratic Party is planning to throw Spitzer under the, er, steamroller – and some believe that Sen. Clinton may end up getting on board with that effort:

Top Democrats fear that Gov. Spitzer’s controversial plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal aliens has endangered their party’s candidates across the state — and even threatens the presidential prospects of Hillary Rodham Clinton, The Post has learned.
A half-dozen senior Democrats told The Post that Spitzer’s licensing plan is producing what one called “a mass exodus” away from the party’s candidates that may lead to unexpected losses in November’s local elections.
They are also warning that growing voter unhappiness with Spitzer on the licensing and other issues – illustrated in several recent polls – could carry into next year and end the Democrats’ hope of winning control of the GOP-dominated state Senate.
“The driver’s-license issue is a killer for us in the suburbs,” a senior party strategist said. . . .

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Another senior Democrat predicted that Sen. Clinton, who has repeatedly refused to say whether she backs Spitzer’s plan, would soon be forced to reject it.
“The immigrant license issue is one of the most politically dangerous in the nation, and Hillary will have to come out against it,” the Democrat said.

H/T Geraghty. Stay tuned.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to document the undocumented by giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens has been yet another fiasco for the Empire State’s unpopular new governor, bleeding his support even among Democrats who are in the country legally and leading other Democratic officials to keep their distance. But what does New York’s junior senator, running now for President, think of the state’s unilateral effort to hijack federal immigration policy? Up to now, Hillary Clinton has been quiet on the subject, but in an interview she finally had to answer the question:

I think it’s important to bring everybody out of the shadows. To do the background checks. To deport those who have outstanding warrants or have committed crimes in the United States, and then to say to those who wish to stay here, you have to pay back taxes, you have to pay a fine, you have to learn English, and you have to wait in line. And I hate to see any state being pushed to try to take this into their own hands, because the federal government has failed.
So I know exactly what Governor Spitzer’s trying to do and it makes a lot of sense, because he’s trying to get people out of the shadows. He’s trying to say, “O.K., come forward and we will give you this license.”
But without a federal policy in effect, people will come forward and they could get picked up by I.C.E. tomorrow. I mean, this can’t work state-by-state. It has to be looked at comprehensively. I agreed with President Bush and his efforts to try to approach this. He just didn’t have the political capital left by the time he actually got serious about it.
And it’s unfortunate that too many people are using this to demagogue the issue, instead of trying to solve it: you know, people in politics, people in the press, and there’s a kind of unholy alliance.

Spitzer’s camp immediately rushed to claim this as support:

“We are gratified that many state leaders understand the security value of bringing people out of the shadows and into the system,” said spokeswoman Christine Anderson.

The NY Times and NY Daily News, however, recognized this for what it is: a typically Clintonian effort to have it both ways without answering the question and taking some responsibility for the answer. What else is new?

Continue reading That Ol’ Clinton Straddle

Whenever you think unhinged political rhetoric has reached its lowest possible point in this country, Fortney “Pete” Stark (D-CA, of course) manages to burrow to a new low, this time in debating the SCHIP bill:

From George Will’s column today:

SCHIP is described as serving “poor children” or children of “the working poor.” Everyone agrees that it is for “low-income” people. Under the bill that Democrats hope to pass over the president’s veto tomorrow, states could extend eligibility to households earning $61,950. But America’s median household income is $48,201. How can people above the median income be eligible for a program serving lower-income people?

Incidentally, though there are some very significant differences, Will also notes that Hillary Clinton’s 401(k) proposal does contain some crucial concessions to the Right’s longstanding arguments for Social Security reform:

Clinton’s idea for helping Americans save for retirement is this: Any family that earns less than $60,000 and puts $1,000 into a new 401(k)-type plan would receive a matching $1,000 tax cut. For those earning between $60,000 and $100,000 the government would match half of the first $1,000. She proposes to pay for this by taxing people who will be stoical about this — dead people — by freezing the estate tax exemption at its 2009 level.
A conservative case can be made for something like Clinton’s proposal. It is a case for reducing the supply of government by reducing demand for it, and doing so by giving people ownership of enlarged private assets as a basis for their security. It is a case for raising the nation’s deplorable saving rate and simultaneously encouraging the nation’s economic literacy and temperance by giving more people a stake in equities markets.
George W. Bush made this case in his advocacy of personal accounts financed by a portion of individuals’ Social Security taxes and invested in funds based on equities and bonds. When he proposed this, Clinton stridently opposed him, and not just because she thought it would undermine Social Security’s solvency and political support. She also said it was a dangerous gamble that would make retirement insecure by linking retirement savings to the stock market. Echoing a trope from Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, she said investing retirement funds in the stock market was a “risky scheme.”
Today her Web site calls her proposal a way to save for “a secure retirement.” After an undisclosed epiphany, she belatedly recognizes that 401(k) funds invested in equities are a foundation for security.

Of course, Clinton – as usual – is proposing this in addition to Social Security (while she has been suggesting that Social Security taxes be raised, as well as estate taxes and all the various other things she proposes to pay for with new taxes), and like many Clinton plans it involves careful slicing and dicing of the economy via “targeted” tax cuts. Still, the movement is in the right direction.
The great strategic error that Bush made in 2005 on the Social Security battle was in many ways a reprise of the WMD fiasco in the run-up to the Iraq War: he banked on the wrong arguments and gave short shrift to the better ones. Bush tried to argue that personal, semi-private* accounts were necessary to fix Social Security’s projected shortfalls. The problem is, we are already in a hole on Social Security benefits that are owed without the ability to pay for them under current tax/benefit policies, and the personal-accounts system would do nothing to make the hole smaller; all it would do is stop digging new holes for the future. That’s a great virtue of the proposal – it would make the system perpetually self-financing, rather than financed on a Ponzi scheme footing of using current receipts to pay current benefits without any necessary connection between the two – but Bush oversold the extent to which it could pay for the massive unfunded debts we already have.
*Semi-private in that the accounts are subject to private control and ultimate ownership; they would still be part of a mandatory government program.

As usual, not a fair fight.

Sometimes it’s just so cute. Apparently, according to Lynne Cheney, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama are eighth cousins. “The common ancestor was Mareen Devall, who the Chicago Sun-Times said was a 17th century immigrant from France.” (Noted in the Diaries here).
The wire story by Reuters explains why this is surprising:

The two men could hardly be more different. Cheney is an advocate for pursuing the war in Iraq to try to stabilize the country, while Obama wants to get U.S. troops out of Iraq.

Yeah, that’s the first thing I would notice to look at them …

Granted, it’s a low hurdle, but Dowd hands over most of her column to Stephen Colbert, with hilarious results:

Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream is driving a bulldozer into The New York Times while drinking crude oil out of Keith Olbermann’s skull…

+++

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.
There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Read the whole thing. What makes Colbert so funny when he’s on is the two-sided nature of the satire (of the type Jon Stewart himself used to do): the ability to satirize right-wing blowhards of the Bill O’Reilly variety while using that persona to throw legitimately funny barbs at the left. It’s harder than it looks.
Also: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Don’t use the men’s room at the Idaho Hall of Fame.

The graphic comes from this Brian Maloney story, which goes through how Franken has outraised Norm Coleman in the race for Coleman’s Senate seat but has been burning through cash (in part because Franken still has a serious primary opponent, wealthy trial lawyer Mike Ciresi) to the point where Coleman has twice as much cash on hand, $5 million to $2.45 million.
The result:

Republicans gloated that while Franken burned more than $1 million in the second quarter, a recent Minnesota Poll gave him only a 27 percent favorable rating, compared with 52 percent for Coleman, who faces his first reelection test next year.

H/T HotAir. Coleman’s is one of the Senate seats we need to hold in 2008; hopefully, he will get some help from this sort of bumbling by one of his potential opponents.

NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer has kicked up yet another firestorm with his latest genius idea, to issue drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens:

All New Yorkers are now entitled to earn a driver’s license, regardless of immigration status, under an administrative policy change Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced Friday.
The controversial change was hailed by supporters as a necessary measure to make roads safer, increase the number of insured drivers and protect immigrants’ rights. Opponents said it will threaten homeland security and could put driver’s licenses in the hands of terrorists.
Reversing a post-9/11 state policy that made it impossible for undocumented workers to obtain licenses, Spitzer and Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner David Swarts said Social Security numbers no longer will be required to obtain a license. A passport or other valid identification can be used instead. The initiative is aimed at identifying unlicensed drivers on the roads. The DMV estimates that could include 10,000 people.
“I applaud the DMV and Commissioner Swarts for making this common-sense change that deals practically with the reality that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants live among us and that allowing them the opportunity to obtain driver licenses in a responsible and secure manner will help increase public safety,” Spitzer said in a statement.

+++

New anti-fraud measures will be implemented to increase the security of licensing, officials said. The DMV will use new document verification technology, photo-comparison tools, and staff specially trained in foreign-source identifications. People need to prove New York residency to obtain a license.

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The Social Security number requirement was implemented in 1995 as part of an effort to punish parents for not paying child support. In 2002, the state began allowing people ineligible for Social Security numbers to apply for licenses. A subsequent administrative policy change required proof of ineligibility from the Social Security Administration, a document only available to legal immigrants, thus making it impossible for illegal immigrants to get licenses.

Unsurprisingly, this issue has unified New York’s Republicans and Conservatives, ranging from Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani to State Senate President Joe Bruno to erstwhile Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg to the state’s bumptious Conservative Party:

“Today’s directive to the Department of Motor Vehicles to no longer require provide Social Security numbers, or proof that they are eligible for Social Security cards, will certainly make it easier for illegal immigrants to obtain valid identification to blend into society,” said Michael Long, state chairman of the Conservative Party.

The State Senate isn’t just talking, either, and it looks as if it may have the votes to force a showdown with the ham-handed Spitzer:

In an effort to stop what they deem an ill-advised order from Governor Spitzer that could jeopardize the safety and security of New Yorkers, the New York State Senate will act on legislation next month to prohibit the state from issuing drivers licenses to illegal aliens. The legislation would require a social security number or proof of authorized presence in the United States to obtain a New York State drivers license.
“The Senate has made its’ opposition to the Governor’s plan very clear,” Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno said. “The Senate passed a bill earlier this year that would have prevented illegal aliens from obtaining drivers licenses and we will act on a new bill when we return for a special session next month to stop the Governor’s plan. We need the Assembly to join us. We need the Speaker to bring the Assembly back into session, pass our bill, and deliver a strong message to the Governor that the people of this state oppose his plan and it must be stopped.”

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The legislation the Senate will take up next month is similar to bills proposed by Senator Frank Padavan (Queens) that would require applicants for a drivers license or non-driver identification card, to submit satisfactory proof to the Department of Motor Vehicles that the applicant’s presence in the United States is authorized under federal law (S.74); and legislation (S.6250), passed by the Senate in June, sponsored by Senator John Flanagan (R-C, East Northport), that would require the Commissioner of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to obtain proof from any applicant for a drivers license or nondriver identification card who cannot provide a social security number, that they are ineligible for a social security number. The Assembly did not act on this bill.

More here from a Staten Island Republican, and here for more from Rensselaer County Clerk Frank Merola, who insists he will not follow the new policy:

“I’ve been with the DMV 20 years, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things. This is the worst,” Merola said of the governor’s plan. “My stomach is in knots. I just don’t understand how I can issue a driver’s license to a person who can’t prove they’re here legally. If they want to put ‘undocumented’ across the top of it, that would be just fine, but they went just the opposite.
“Osama bin Laden could be standing in my lobby and I’d have to give him a driver’s license.”
He said licenses issued by his office after Monday no longer have a temporary stamp that show license holders are not permanent, legal residents meaning the licenses are good for eight years though the driver may no longer be legally in the U.S. by then.
After Pataki’s 2002 order, Merola said, county clerks collected Social Security numbers from drivers’ license applicants and checked the numbers against Social Security records. They found 120,000 cases of bogus Social Security numbers that were used to apply for driving privileges.

Giuliani, who has been under fire from Mitt Romney for policies tolerant of illegal aliens while Mayor but who has been running on a platform of requiring better identification of those who enter the country legally, ripped the plan:

“I think it would just create an even further level of fraud and confusion in what is already a very confusing picture,” said Mr. Giuliani . . .
“The reality is there is so much traffic in false documents that creates part of this problem,” he said. “It is the reason I am so much in favor of a tamper-proof ID card for people who come in from foreign countries and want to work here.”

Like Mayor Giuliani, I’m sympathetic to the problem of how you deal with a large illegal alien population without exacerbating the problem by having – in this case – scores of uninsured drivers on the roads. But so long as the drivers’ license is used as a proxy identification card for broader purposes (which it will be in practice for some time despite federal efforts to improve on the situation), licenses that do not in any way reflect on their face that they were issued without proof of legal residency will only make the situation worse. Spitzer seems to have forgotten yet again that New York is particularly vulnerable to terrorism:

Certain facts about terrorist operations are beyond dispute, and as the 9/11 Commission noted, one is that terrorists cannot function without I.D. The sixty-three authentic U.S. driver’s licenses the 9/11 terrorists held (from Virginia, Florida, Maryland and other states) permitted them to blend in as ordinary U.S. citizens; permitted them to rent cars, open bank accounts, rent hotel rooms, obtain credit cards, etc. They used them when purchasing flying lessons. And on the morning of 9/11, their U.S. licenses were the “valid ID” that got them on board the planes they used as missiles.
Those authentic, U.S. issued drivers licenses were the tools that allowed the terrorists to hide in plain sight among millions of other illegal aliens and to obtain all the goods and services they needed to plan, rehearse, finance and carry out their attacks.

Naturally, Spitzer’s allies on the Left are lining up behind him – the AFL-CIO, the NY Civil Liberties Union, and of course, the NY Times. These are, of course, the same folks who invariably line up to protest requirements that even the most basic forms of identification – such as, yes, the drivers’ license – be presented before you can vote (an issue now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court). All of which suggests the real priority here, which is to find new and different ways to enlarge the Left’s political base outside of the pool of U.S. citizens.

When you adjust for inflation and remove defense spending and entitlements, which recent presidential terms had the highest and lowest rates of discretionary government spending growth?

Neil Stevens has the full story. Remember to consider changes in control of Congress during terms, notably Reagan’s second (the Senate went Democrat) and Clinton’s first (the 1994 elections); it takes three parties (the White House, the House and the Senate) to spend, and credit and blame alike need to be shared.

Paul Krugman apparently has a blog at the NY Times site (now that they are giving it away for more than it is worth), and Tom Maguire actually read an entire post there, on how Krugman’s utopia – reduced income inequality – requires a revival of the FDR years. Maguire:

Of course, as a policy prescription, urging Dems to inflict a depression and world war on the rest of us in order to achieve Krugman’s vision of greater income [equality] may seem a bit harsh, so I can see why he shies away from that.

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Krugman wants to return us to a happy place we reached by way of war and depression, a place where minorities and women could not work, and where illegal immigrants toiled in the fields but nowhere else. And he wants to pretend that is not how we got there, and not where we were. Good luck. Let’s hope his subsequent blog offerings show a bit more of a basis in reality.

Good luck with that.

Emily Bazelon pens a perfectly good two-paragraph column about why it’s more dangerous to ride in a car with your seat reclined…but somehow just can’t resist turning it into a two-page screed on why government regulation is needed to protect ignorant consumers from avaricious automakers who don’t want to warn you not to use one of the features in your car.

One of the basic rules of political power is never to stake everything you have on a fight you are not sure of winning. But with rumors swirling that former Solicitor General and Reagan Justice Department official Ted Olson might be tabbed as the next Attorney General, the Senate Majority Leader yesterday laid down an ultimatum on which he was willing to stake the full prestige of his office:

“Ted Olson will not be be confirmed by the Senate,” Reid said after a Capitol news conference. “I intend to do everything I can to prevent him from being confirmed as the next attorney general.”

Reid may well be betting on a sure thing, as the rumor of the day is that Olson is no longer the frontrunner for the job, perhaps due to White House concerns over a messy and difficult confirmation process for Olson in spite of his stellar resume, unquestionable qualifications for the job, past confirmations by the Senate and undoubted ability to best any Judiciary Committee Senator in verbal combat. But for a Senate leader who has accomplished little and failed at many of his goals since gaining the majority, betting it all that Ted Olson will never be confirmed is a risky gamble.

Yuval Levin had an interesting article in the most recent National Review (subscription only) explaining, against the backdrop of recent charges by Congressional Democrats of undue politicization of the Surgeon General’s office, that the Surgeon General job really has nothing else to do but make politically provocative pronouncements, given that the real responsibilities of the office have long since been given away to the Department of Health and Human Services and subsidiary agencies like the CDC and NIH:

When the post was created in 1871, the surgeon general was head of the Marine Hospital Service, which cared for American merchant sailors. Under the first surgeon general, John Maynard Woodworth, the MHS took the form of a uniformed pseudo-military service, and was assigned some crucial public-health responsibilities, most notably the maintenance of quarantines. In 1889, the larger U.S. Public Health Service was created, and the surgeon general was made its head. The MHS, meanwhile, was folded into the PHS and became its Commissioned Corps, a uniformed service assigned to help prevent the spread of disease and bring medical care to areas in need. Today, it continues to perform these functions through its roughly 6,000 doctors, nurses, pharmacists, engineers, and other uniformed officers.
The surgeon general’s duties, in short, fit the grandeur of his title. But since 1953, when another reorganization created the cabinet-level office now known as the Department of Health and Human Services, the surgeon general’s duties have gradually contracted. In 1968, the responsibility for running the PHS was moved to the assistant secretary for health, to whom the surgeon general now reports.

This is much the same problem that besets the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. All government agencies are inherently political to one extent or another, but agencies that have no real executive responsibilities have no check on becoming simply mills for churning out propaganda.
Levin’s argument, which is worth reading at length, is that the Surgeon General has basically come to be an oracle of public health, one of the last bastions accepted by the Left – along with environmentalism – for the role of public moralizer (albeit the kinds of morals promoted on the Left). But really, the article can just as easily be read as a brief for abolishing the office entirely. There are more than enough agencies already charged with actually carrying out the job of improving public health. We shouldn’t have to pay another one to preach the government’s gospel to us.

Rod Dreher offers some pointed exemplars of why it’s preferable to raise teenagers in a culture, or subculture, that is supportive of avoiding unmarried teen sex than, well, the culture in which so many teens in this country are saturated. It’s another example of why we can’t let the periodic failings of individual political or religious leaders convince us to abandon the goal of defending virtue.

The Attorney General steps down, joining Karl Rove and Tony Snow as August departures from the Bush Administration. Whatever his other merits or faults, Gonzales had to be one of the most politically incompetent people ever to hold such a high position in Washington. It’s hard to think of anything he touched in six and a half years in Washington that didn’t end up getting President Bush the worst possible press (with the arguable exception of when he advised Bush not to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court).
I have to assume that Larry Thompson and/or Michael Chertoff will be the replacement. Both are quality guys, although not without their faults – Chertoff alienated a lot of conservatives during the immigration battle and took some heat for Hurricane Katrina.
UPDATE: Chertoff seems to be the rumored candidate…his record at Homeland Security has been checkered, and I always thought he was more suited for the AG job anyway. But like Gonzales he has a serious political tin ear. Of course, a Chertoff nomination means having to get a new Homeland Security head as well. Apparently Paul Clement will run DOJ for now, although I’m sure he will be more than happpy to get back to his day job as Solicitor General as fast as he can.

Posted by Dr. Manhattan
Ross Douthat is exactly right. I have seen variations of Brad DeLong’s complaint over the years, and every time it only makes me wonder whether the complainer has ever read the sports pages.
I wrote about some related topics on my own blog a long time ago (a piece much of which, ahem, has been massively overtaken by events). One item that still holds up is the common creation myth of the Bill James revolution and the blogosphere generally – the outsiders rising up against the hidebound (baseball/political/media) establishment and changing the game. This paradigm applies equally to the liberal blogosphere that arose after I wrote my piece and the conservative blogosphere from the heady days of early 2003. There is a reason that Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in profiling Markos Moulitsas for the Washington Monthly, compared Moulitsas to Bill James.

*Minnesota Democrats acting like jerks, again.
*Gonzales vindicated. Well, on one count, anyway. He has a gift for trouble, though; I don’t know anybody who still has faith in his competence. And anyway, an investigation of top-secret programs involves, you know, top secret information. Unless smoking out that information is the entire point.

I’ll have more on the David Vitter saga later, but in the meantime, I just had to laugh at this angle to LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s affair with a newscaster:

The new mayor was actually born Antonio Villar. In 1988, he and his new wife, Connie Raigosa, combined their surnames into the more colorful, but less pronounceable, Villaraigosa.

So, what’s his name now?

Patterico offers up criticisms of the Libby commutation. Now, I should start by saying that I’m not necessarily a huge fan of the decision; I still think there was an arguable case for prosecuting Libby and that he was probably guilty, but the decision to commute his prison sentence nonetheless strikes me as a reasonable call, and maybe the right one. I mostly enjoyed the spectacle of the brain-bending hypocrisy of the people who think anything less than years in prison is too small a price for perjury…but also that being guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice should be no obstacle to staying president and even being returned to the White House in 2008; people who think that this pardon is some horrible abuse of power, yet pardoning fugitive traitors for cash and terrorists for votes is no reason not to vote Clinton again in 2008.
Anyway, for background I’ll repeat here what I said in the comments of the last thread:
My two cents, since I was too busy to comment when the verdict came down? First, I think Libby’s conviction will be overturned on appeal due to the limitations on his ability to impeach the star witness against him, Tim Russert. Second, I do think Libby was trying to hide the truth, but I also think he suffered from a lousy memory and that Russert was untruthful – I doubt very strongly that he intended to tell a story that much at odds with the chronology, I think he misremembered what happened and tried to shade it further. That’s not a defense of Libby, it’s just what I think happened. Also, I have never ripped Fitzgerald, and I’m not joining the caucus that says he was horribly abusive, but I do think all things considered he should probably have pulled the plug on his investigation once he knew who the leak had come from. He didn’t prosecute Armitage, which strongly suggests that he knew that there was no legal basis for a prosecution based on the leak. Instead, he called Libby and Rove and others repeatedly to the grand jury for no other reason than to investigate their statements to the FBI. Under the circumstances, that strikes me as a waste of resources and poor prosecutorial judgment. And I do think the people in the media he chose not to question strongly suggests there were answers he wasn’t interested in hearing.
That said, Patterico – who was in favor of the prosecution – offers three main criticisms of the commutation. One is that Bush didn’t work through the usual pardon process (in fact, he seems to have reached the decision while fishing with Vladimir Putin). This strikes me as a minor quibble in this case; the main purpose of the process is to vet the submission that goes to the president to make sure that he gets a fair presentation of the facts rather than the slanted perspectives of one side in a criminal case. Here, Bush was already familiar with the players and the facts (we all are, by now, but Bush knows them personally). Granted, the process also provides another benefit (the professional staff can provide perspective on how similarly situated defendants are sentenced), but fundamentally, this was a judgment call Bush was well-entitled to make himself.
The second criticism, from Orin Kerr, is a little more substantial: that Bush has scarcely used the pardon power at all (no doubt in large part due to the bad odor from the previous Administration), and thus this is more in the nature of special treatment than is usually the case for presidential pardons of associates of the President.
That’s a fair argument, but at bottom I think the motive here is Bush’s belief – as has been the belief of past presidents, fairly or otherwise – that Libby would never have been prosecuted in the first place were it not for his political position (it was only the political firestorm over the Plame leak that forced the appointment of a Special Prosecutor in the first place). High executive branch appointees do get special treatment the rest of us don’t, but they also face a risk of criminalization of their daily activities that ordinary people don’t. It cuts both ways. On some level, letting Libby go to jail would have been a legitimazation of the kind of criminalization of foreign policy that the Democrats specialized in during the 1980s, and that is a kind of calculus that makes this decision wholly unlike the situation of ordinary criminal defendants.
Third, Patterico argues that the GOP will pay a terrible political price. Maybe I’ve grown more cynical after the 1990s, but I doubt it. Bush is unpopular, to be sure, and the Democrats have had great success with the “culture of corruption” mantra in convincing the public that the Republicans are up to their eyeballs in shady land deals and defense contracts and freezers full of cash, plus Democratic candidates are busy working to mislead the public about what Libby was actually prosecuted for. But first of all, this is an instrumental argument – that Bush should have let the electoral impact of the decision govern his judgment. Second, I think political people consistently underestimate the built-in cynicism of the average voter with regard to politicians. Third, this story hasn’t had nearly the cache with voters that it has with bloggers, who have obsessed about it endlessly since July 2003 (I’ve certainly posted about it enough, and I’m far from one of the most obsessed bloggers), and there will be a lot of other water under the bridge by November 2008. Fourth, the Democrats remain highly likely to nominate Hillary.
Bush had a tough decision to make. I think he made a reasonable call, given the nature of the underlying prosecution and the political origins of the entire investigation.
UPDATE: WSJ Law Blog says that some criminal defendants will be asking judges for the same treatment Libby got. But judges are not the president; the pardon power has always been the exception to the rule of law.

Was it the pork? The filibusters against civil rights? The white sheet?
Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid calls Robert Byrd “this unusually brilliant man.”
Well, that’s a change of tune. Consider what Harry the Insult Comic Senator has had to say about a number of other distinguished public servants:
Reid on Justice Clarence Thomas:

I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I just don’t think that he’s done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.

Reid on General Peter Pace:

Pace is also a yes-man for the President. I told him to his face, I laid it out last time he came in to see me. I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was.

Reid on General David Petraeus (here and here):

I don’t believe him. . . isn’t in touch with what’s going on in Baghdad.

Reid on President Bush: “a loser” and “a liar”
Reid on Alan Greenspan: “one of the biggest political hacks we have here in Washington.”
Reid on Bill Frist: “no institutional integrity”
Given the company, I’m quite certain I’d rather be criticized by Senator Reid.

So Mike Bloomberg’s brief membership in the Republican party has ended, now that he made the cover of Time Magazine. (H/T)
Bloomberg and the GOP were always a marriage of convenience; a lifelong Democrat until he ran for Mayor, Bloomberg is your basic Northeastern centrist, liberal on social issues, fiscally moderate, but disdainful of the interest-group pathologies of the Democratic Party. The marriage made sense for both sides: Bloomberg needed a party and found an easier path in the GOP, which lacked longtime officeholders to get in his way; the GOP needed a successor who wouldn’t dismantle the progress – especially on law enforcement – made by Rudy Giuliani, and wouldn’t be beholden to the Al Sharptons of the world. By running as a Republican, Bloomberg made both sides happy, without ever really governing as a genuine Republican as opposed to a neoliberal. Now that he is term-limited from running again, the reason for the marriage has evaporated.
That said, the biggest winner from this announcement is Eliot Spitzer. Bloomberg would have been a formidable challenger for the governor’s mansion, running as a self-financed, widely-known, moderate Republican with executive experience but no ties to Albany. I can’t see him taking out an entrenched incumbent as an independent, and his decision to leave the party suggests a disinterest in going in that direction.
Speculation is rife, of course, that Bloomberg has his eye on national office. Think he will run even a semi-serious third party campaign for president? Think again. Remember the first, and perhaps only, rule of even modestly noteworthy third parties in our system: they must be organized around some issue on which the two major parties agree. The gravitational pull of the major parties is too strong to overcome simply by fielding a candidate who is charismatic (as the bloodless Bloomberg most assuredly is not – it’s not that he lacks the warmth and empathy of Bill Clinton, it’s that he lacks the warmth and empathy of Mike Dukakis) or who picks a different set of positions from the menu than either major party candidate. I’ve argued for some time that the sweet spot for an impact third party in 2008 would be anti-abortion, anti-war, anti-immigrant, anti-spending, anti-trade and perhaps anti-racial preferences – in short, a candidate with populist appeal to isolationist, socially conservative blue-collar voters – and almost none of that describes Bloomberg. I can’t think of any issue on which he is likely to dissent alone from a consensus shared by the two major parties’ nominees, and without that he would lack a rationale other than “let’s elect a really, really rich guy.”
Despite his various forays into nanny-state-ism, Bloomberg is, by New York City standards, not a bad mayor; like I said, he’s a technocratic caretaker who has done a lot to consolidate Mayor Giuliani’s gains. But he will not get 10% of the vote in any state in November 2008 if he runs.

No, I can’t really top Ace on the Thomas Ravenel story.
Tough week for Rudy Giuliani – Ravenel was the top elected official in his South Carolina campaign, while tops in Iowa was Jim Nussle, who is now headed to DC to be the Budget Director.

Dignity. Integrity. Duty.
Aw, heck, why not just blow it all on fancy airplanes?

Sen. John Kerry broke spending limits by nearly $1.4 million during his 2004 presidential bid, including some funds spent on customizing his campaign jets, a Federal Election Commission draft audit concludes.
The FEC could rule that Kerry’s campaign must reimburse the government. Because his general election campaign was taxpayer funded, Kerry would have to pay back the U.S. Treasury.
Much of the disputed money was spent on customizing jets used by Democratic presidential nominee Kerry and his running mate John Edwards, according to auditors.

Continue reading Kerry Campaign Busted Spending Limit – On Customized Jets

As I have explained at great length before, there are two types of amnesty for violations of the law: complete amnesty, meaning no penalties whatsoever, and partial amnesty, by which people are absolved from consequences for lawbreaking for some penalty less than the full force of the law. It’s been obvious for some time that the current immigration bill would provide a partial amnesty for people currently in the U.S. illegally. For people who oppose any type of amnesty, that’s reason enough to oppose the bill. For people like me, who are willing to support a ‘legalization’ process under the right circumstances, the question is the details. But one thing should be absolutely non-negotiable: anybody who wants to stay in the U.S. legally has to pay their taxes.
The bill currently under discussion appears to fail that test. The immigration bill would bestow a massive tax amnesty on illegal immigrants. The supporters of this bill think that you, as an American citizen, should pay taxes – but illegal immigrants can become legal residents without paying their own share. This is scandalous. The bill should be rejected for that reason alone, and its supporters should be made to explain why they didn’t want illegal immigrants to pay the taxes they already owe.

Continue reading Tax Amnesty For Illegal Immigrants: Paying Taxes is For Suckers

John Hawkins, who I usually respect, is joining the caucus that is ready to blow up the Senate GOP over immigration. As I have said, I’m not thrilled with where we seem to be headed on this issue, and I understand the concern of people who think that more immigration will damage the GOP electorally (and help offset the Democrats’ natural demographic disadvantage that flows from being the party of people who don’t bear or beget children).
But I can’t sign on to going bonkers over this issue. There’s a war on. There are still fundamental differences between the parties on scores of core issues – taxes and economic liberties, life, the courts, the rule of law. Face it, we have lived with bad immigration policy for decades. We should fix that – but it’s not the end of the world if we don’t, and electing Democrats, of all people, won’t help.

Regular readers will know that immigration isn’t exactly my top issue. The system is broken in many ways, unfair to legal immigrants, impotent in the face of mass illegal immigration and unlawful entry by criminals and terrorists, and lethargic and undermanned even when it takes action, but I remain skeptical that our political system is even capable of dealing seriously with these issues. I’m in favor of comprehensive reform, but only if it contains real enforcement teeth; I’m OK with more legal immigration and fine with allowing present illegals to become citizens, but only if there is a substantial price of entry paid for the privilege of citizenship (I discussed the “amnesty” issue at much greater length here).
All that said, there is no reason whatsoever for the Senate to be rushing a vote on the massively complex immigration bill when there will barely be time for Senators to read the thing and no ability for the public to examine its provisions and peaceably assemble to petition for redress of grievances with the bill.