Home > Jay Bookman > Archives > 2008 > July
July 2008
It’s time to flee the heat…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Originally posted Wednesday, July 23
I have an announcement I need to make.
No, I won’t be taking the AJC’s buyout offer (cue groans of disappointment from Commie, Management, Corporal and others).
I will, however, be going on two weeks’ vacation, beginning today (cue cries of joy in the Bookman household). As I understand it, the blog will be open for commenting during working hours only until I get back.
If I had thought it through early enough, I might have asked permission to give a couple of you — one on the right, one on the left — posting powers while I was gone, so you could keep things going. Maybe next time.
So I’m out of here, but just temporarily.
World wants America it can look up to again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Note to readers: Jay Bookman wrote this entry before he went on vacation and you are invited to comment on it.
Barack Obama’s nine-day international extravaganza enters its European phase today, with a scheduled speech in Berlin expected to draw thousands of enthusiastic Germans.
In fact, in a recent Gallup Poll, 62 percent of Germans said that if given the chance, they would vote for Obama as president, while only 10 percent would vote for John McCain. Polling in Britain —- 60 percent vs. 15 percent —- and France —- 64 percent vs. 4 percent —- produces similar levels of support for Obama.
That doesn’t mean a lot, of course. The senator from Illinois is running for president of the United States, not president of Europe. Americans will make their own decisions about whether he or McCain belongs in the White House, and they have the votes that count.
Still, it will be interesting to see America’s reaction to Europe’s reaction. For some Americans, Obama’s popularity overseas will only confirm their suspicions of him as somehow less than authentically American. McCain’s campaign has been hinting at that line of attack for weeks, hoping it will blunt the impact of televised scenes of Obamania an ocean away.
On the other hand, electing a U.S. president who was more popular in other countries than their own elected leaders would have some practical advantages. For example, a German chancellor, French president or British prime minister would find it a lot easier to support American policies if they’re championed by a president who happens to be popular with their folks back home. We’ve seen the opposite phenomenon for years, with international antipathy to President Bush costing us support from countries that might otherwise be allies.
However, the most important message sent by the strong support for Obama in Europe and around the world doesn’t really involve Obama himself. It involves how the rest of the world still sees our country and its role in the world.
Obama is not the president of the United States; he is only a candidate for president. And yet thousands of people in other countries are turning out to see him and hear him. It’s safe to say that no leader of another country, no matter how charismatic, would be able to draw crowds like that. If he was Barack Obama, leader of Britain’s Labor Party, thousands of Germans would not be turning out to hear him speak.
That says something very important about the United States of America and its importance in world affairs. Our reputation has suffered a lot, as Americans who have traveled abroad can testify. But the excitement generated by Obama suggests that the damage to our reputation and moral authority does not need to be permanent, no matter who we decide to elect as president.
People around the world still place a lot of hope in the United States, but they want us to live up to the standards we preach. They want us to be who we claim to be —- our better selves. They want to be our partners and allies; they want to respect and even admire our country.
Part of the recent anger, even hatred, directed at America can be explained by the fact that too often we have betrayed those expectations. If Saudi Arabia, Syria or China tortures prisoners, few people are surprised or even outraged. But when a nation that has traditionally stressed the centrality of human rights and that led the world in negotiating the Geneva Accords decides to violate its own principles by indulging in torture, the sense of betrayal is very real.
So when we see the rest of the world excited by Obama’s candidacy, it’s less about Obama as an individual than Obama as a symbol of an America whose leadership and friendship they might once again trust. The less charismatic, less youthful McCain might have to work harder to restore that faith in America, but it would certainly not be beyond his capacity.
Our friends are hungry for an America worthy of global leadership; our enemies are fearful of that America. Regardless of who becomes president, we ought to try to be that America once again.
Time to flee the heat….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I have an announcement I need to make.
No, I won’t be taking the AJC’s buyout offer (cue groans of disappointment from Commie, Management, Corporal and others).
I will, however, be going on two weeks’ vacation, beginning today (cue cries of joy in the Bookman household). As I understand it, the blog will be open for commenting during working hours only until I get back.
If I had thought it through early enough, I might have asked permission to give a couple of you — one on the right, one on the left — posting powers while I was gone, so you could keep things going. Maybe next time.
So I’m out of here, but just temporarily.
Readers may comment at a re-posting of this entry by clicking on this link
No, it’s not oil speculation either
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Oil speculation offers Democrats what off-shore drilling offers Republicans: An easy explanation to a complex, difficult problem.
In both cases, it doesn’t seem to matter that the explanation doesn’t fit the facts, that neither oil speculation nor the drilling ban have caused this runup in oil prices. What matters is that the explanation plays well politically before an electorate demanding action.
And in both cases, the two parties have defaulted to their instinctive narratives, the prefabricated explanations that they tend to apply to almost any economic challenge.
The Democratic narrative, for example, prefers Wall Street manipulation and corporate malfeasance as an explanation for whatever might ail us; thus, their focus on speculators and oil company profits.
The Republican narrative prefers environmentalist excess and government regulation as the default explanation. Hence, the focus on the offshore oil drilling ban and ANWR.
Again, neither is valid. Even under optimistic assumptions, oil drilling off the U.S. coast will not produce nearly enough additional supply to move the world oil price. And as a special task force created by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission reported yesterday, speculation has played no discernible role in driving the price of oil artificially high.
“Current oil prices and the increase in oil prices between January 2003 and June 2008 are largely due to fundamental supply and demand factors,” the task force concluded in its preliminary report.
Looking back over the way the futures market has operated, the task force found that speculators have responded to economic signals just “as one would expect in an efficiently operating market,” with no evidence of manipulation.
The real explanation is a lot simpler: “As it is very difficult to rely on substitutes for oil in the short term, very large price increases have occurred as the market balances supply and demand,” it said.
That kind of truth doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions, so Congress — and the American people — have preferred to ignore it. As a result … well, look at the mess we’re in.
Boo hoo hoo for ‘The Savage Nation’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Poor little Michael Weiner.
You may not know him as that, of course. A while back he changed his name to Michael Savage - oooh, scary!! - when he decided to go into attack radio. Now he makes his living telling listeners why he hates all the people he claims to hate, making like a real tough guy by attacking people without the power to strike back.
He also likes to call himself a conservative, but I don’t buy it. Conservatives have enough problems of their own making without getting stuck with “Savage” as their champion. He’s a professional jerk, and it doesn’t say much for modern America that a professional jerk is such a high-paying profession.
But last week, “Savage” went on his radio show and made fun of autistic children, calling autism “”a fraud, a racket.”
“In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ ” ..
Now the parents of autistic children are striking back. At least one major advertiser, AFLAC, is pulling out and radio stations are canceling the show, which is silly. They knew the kind of garbage “Savage” spews, and they put him on the air anyway because they thought he could make them a buck. Pulling out now and claiming to be shocked, shocked!! is hypocrisy.
Oh, and “Savage” now claims he was taken out of context. Poor little misunderstood Mikey.
Cry me a river. Or as someone once said: “‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ ” ..
Bush administration thinks ‘horizontal’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“It is precisely because we are succeeding in Iraq that we are able to have these conversations today to set aspirational goals for time horizons when we can transition our mission to overwatch, counter-terrorism and training, which is the goal that we share.”
— White House Press Secretary Dana Perino
At first, I wondered why the Bush administration was pushing this “time horizon” concept so hard. It’s not a timetable, it’s always a “time horizon.” But if you think about it, “time horizon” is so much more than a euphemism. It is the perfect, absolutely accurate, even downright poetic way to describe the Bush approach to getting out of Iraq.
Because here’s the thing about the horizon: You can never ever get there.
You can travel all day long, at any speed you want, trying to reach the horizon, and at the end of the day you will be no closer to reaching it than you were when you started out.
The horizon is out there, seemingly just out of reach, yet never to be attained.
McCain thinks Americans are stupid
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain has a new campaign commercial up, blaming Barack Obama for the runup in gasoline prices. Here’s the script:
Announcer: “Gas prices - $4, $5, no end in sight, because some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America. No to independence from foreign oil. Who can you thank for rising prices at the pump?”
Offscreen chant: “Obama, Obama.”
Announcer: “One man knows we must now drill more in America and rescue our family budgets. Don’t hope for more energy, vote for it. McCain.”
As a policy prescription, that’s about the lamest commercial I’ve seen in a long time. It strongly implies that oil pumped from U.S. territory would be sold to Americans at a lower price than oil from elsewhere, and that is absolutely false and McCain’s people know it even if McCain does not.
This is “Straight Talk?”
No, this is cynical, manipulative nonsense.
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State would be broke if Richardson had his way
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The effects of a struggling economy are beginning to hit state government, with Gov. Sonny Perdue announcing that he will be forced to dip into reserves to offset a $600 million shortfall.
Dire as that sounds, though, things could be worse. Last spring, House Speaker Glenn Richardson tried to raid Georgia’s rainy day fund to finance election-year tax cuts. Had he succeeded, the state’s reserves would have been cut in half, and today we’d be a lot closer to a budgetary crisis.
Richardson pushed that plan even though an economic slowdown already loomed on the horizon. He was more intent on getting his proposal passed — and in claiming credit for the feat — than in the impact his proposal might actually have on the people of Georgia. And when he lost, his petulant and angry reaction — striking out at Perdue and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle — proved an embarrassment to his party if not to himself.
He is, after all, not a man easily embarrassed.
His party, though, may finally have had enough. A small group of GOP legislators has come out to oppose Richardson’s re-election as speaker, rallying behind state Rep. David Ralston of Blue Ridge as a candidate to replace him.
Ralston, an attorney and chair of the House Non-Civil Judiciary Committee, is a respected legislator, and he has taken a courageous and necessary step in agreeing to lead the rebellion against Richardson.
However, Ralston has had some embarrassing personal tax problems, and the small coalition of GOP legislators rallying around him seems motivated more by anger and disgust with Richardson than by fervent support for Ralston as speaker.
Given the way these things work, it’s possible that neither Ralston nor Richardson will be the speaker when the House reconvenes in January. Ralston is taking the early risk, but should the intraparty rebellion against Richardson gather support over the summer, a more prominent member of the House Republican leadership — say, Mark Burkhalter of Alpharetta — could step into the fray, bringing enough votes to put the effort over the top and crown himself speaker.
If that happens, Richardson would have no one to blame but himself. Some speakers see themselves as defenders of the House, wielding immense power behind the scenes but seldom using the post to push major initiatives or give themselves a high profile. That’s the type who tend to last a long time in the job, as the late Tom Murphy did.
Murphy certainly had an ego, and he liked to wield power, but he always treated the House as more important than he was, and his members appreciated it.
Richardson, by contrast, is closer to the Newt Gingrich model. He has treated the House and the Republican caucus as tools to satisfy his own ego and ambitions. He doesn’t see himself serving the needs of the House; he believes the House should serve the needs of Glenn Richardson.
That attitude was on full display last session in the tax-reform fight. Richardson proposed to abolish local property taxes and replace them with revenue from a new state sales tax, a move that would have stripped local officials of control over their own budgets.
By pushing the idea so hard, Richardson forced House members to take a stance against their mayors, county commissioners and school boards back home.
And why? For no apparent reason other than Richardson’s own glory. The idea itself was terrible policy.
At the end of the session, after it had become clear that he had lost, Richardson made a promise that he wouldn’t be giving up.
“I’m going to start again with it next year, the very first thing out of the gate,” he said.
The 2009 General Assembly convenes in less than five months. If I had to bet, I’d bet Richardson will once again be wielding the gavel in the House. But it’s far from guaranteed.
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Nouri al-Maliki pulls a Shecky Greene
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I lost my virginity to Shecky Greene.
Speaking purely journalistically, of course.
Back in the early ’80s, I was working as the entertainment editor of The Las Vegas Review-Journal (my career has been all downhill ever since). Shecky was about to open his comedy act at one of the big Vegas hotels, so I did a cover story on him for our magazine.
In our interview, Shecky ripped the cheap hotels then being built along the Strip, complaining that they were ruining the town. But after that quote appeared in the paper, Shecky issued a statement denying he had ever said such a thing. His remarks had made some important people mad, and he had to throw me under the bus.
I was fresh out of college, and that was the first time in my career that someone had pulled that manuever on me. I knew Shecky had said it; he knew he had said it. And we both knew he was lying when he denied it.
I see that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has now executed a Shecky with a half twist. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Maliki basically endorsed the timeline — excuse me, the “time horizon” — proposed by Barack Obama for withdrawal of U.S. troops
“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,” Maliki said.
Asked if he supported Obama’s approach over that of John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who Americans should vote for.
“Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality,” he said. “Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems.”
Once that statement began to draw attention, the Iraqi government issued a half-hearted denial, claiming Maliki’s remarks had been mistranslated or misunderstood. The denial didn’t say what, if anything, Der Spiegel had gotten wrong, and the statement itself was released through the U.S. military press office, not by the Iraqi government.
Maliki said it. He wants us gone sooner than later, and he’s making that more and more clear all the time.
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Somebody has stolen our president!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Who is this new guy in the White House, the one who looks and talks like George Bush but acts like someone who actually knows how to use the full range of tools available to him as president?
It can’t be George W. Bush. This new guy has agreed to lift trade sanctions against North Korea and to remove North Korea from the list of states sponsoring terrorism. This new “Bush” embraces timelines — excuse me, “time horizons” — for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and he has sent U.S. diplomats to talk directly with Iranian diplomats. He even appears close to opening a U.S. “interest section” in Iran for the first time since the late ’70s.
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton says such moves are “further evidence of the administration’s complete intellectual collapse.” In an interview with Fox News’ Major Garrett, Bolton said “it’s the Bush administration legitimizing the Obama presidency’s policy. It’s like Senator Obama already has a transition office in the West Wing.”
So who is this impersonator? (Anybody seen Frank Caliendo lately?) Do they have the real President Bush squirreled away in some secret, undisclosed location, right next to a straitjacketed Dick Cheney? (And why do we say something is “squirreled away” in the first place?)
Most important, why on earth did they wait seven and a half years to make the switch?
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Free swim!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You guys can handle it from here.
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Fending off big trouble in Afghanistan
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The rising casualty rate among our forces in Afghanistan — in the last two months, U.S. and allied fatalities in Afghanistan have exceeded the death toll in Iraq, with July likely to follow suit — has focused public and political attention on what has long been a secondary front.
This week alone, the Pentagon announced the deaths in Afghanistan of three metro Atlanta residents — Cpl. Jon Ayers of Snellville, Cpl. Matthew Phillips of Cumming and Master Sgt. Mitchell Young of Jonesboro. Ayers and Phillips were among nine U.S. soldiers killed when their isolated outpost was attacked in a coordinated assault by Taliban fighters.
That assault was repelled, but survivors of the attack have since been withdrawn and the outpost abandoned. The move is an acknowledgement by U.S. commanders that they do not have the manpower needed to defend that ground.
The same is true of Afghanistan as a whole. The Pentagon has been forced to fight the Taliban and Afghan warlords with manpower and resources it knows to be insufficient, as an “economy-of-force campaign.”
In military terms, that means Afghanistan has been getting just enough resources from the Pentagon to keep the situation roughly stable, while the bulk of the U.S. military was committed to a more aggressive battle for control of Iraq.
That calculation reflects the reality that Iraq and Afghanistan are not two separate wars but two theaters in the same war, with both theaters drawing from the same limited pool of military and civilian resources. The decision to concentrate our effort in Iraq was made despite the fact that Osama bin Laden had used Afghanistan, not Iraq, as his base and remains at large. (Afghanistan also has a bigger population and roughly 30 percent more land area than Iraq, both suggesting it would take more manpower to pacify.)
Unfortunately, that strategy has suited bin Laden and his Taliban supporters quite nicely. He too sees the struggle as a two-theater war, but from his perspective, he has managed to keep the bulk of the U.S. military tied down in far-off Iraq even though he is expending almost no resources there. Meanwhile, he has consolidated his position in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
We are now seeing the consequences of that strategic mistake. Almost seven years after the attacks of Sept. 11, the CIA reports that bin Laden and his allies have built a new stronghold in Pakistan to replace that lost in Afghanistan, and are using that sanctuary to destabilize not only our Afghan allies but parts of Pakistan as well.
There are no easy answers. The United States and its NATO allies have tried to suppress a Taliban and al Qaida offensive by gradually increasing troop strength, but so far the Afghan “surge” has had little effect. Taliban attacks continue to increase. In recent days, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has renewed his longstanding call to draw down our troop commitment in Iraq and use that manpower to further reinforce our effort in Afghanistan.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, takes a similar position, although Mullen also stresses the importance of maintaining recent security improvements in Iraq.
“I’ve made no secret of my desire to flow more forces, U.S. forces, to Afghanistan just as soon as I can,” Mullen said. “Nor have I been shy about saying that those forces will not be available unless or until the situation in Iraq permits us to do so.”
This week, Republican nominee John McCain joined the chorus, noting that “security in Afghanistan has deteriorated, and our enemies are on the offensive.” He called for three additional brigade combat teams in Afghanistan to blunt Taliban gains, but given McCain’s commitment to maintaining troop levels in Iraq, it is uncertain where that additional manpower could be found.
America’s two-theater strategy has been founded on the hope that we would get lucky on the timing. The Bush administration hoped that the battle in Iraq would be concluded fairly quickly, allowing reinforcements to pour into Afghanistan before the Taliban regained their footing. Nobody in the White House or Pentagon anticipated that more than five years after marching into Baghdad, well over 100,000 U.S. troops would still be tied up in combat in Iraq.
Now, time may be running out on that strategy, especially as the Taliban become more aggressive and entrenched. We have taken a gamble in Afghanistan by trying to do too much with too little for too long, and it’s a gamble we could end up losing.
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Turning up the heat on global-warming deniers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President Bush acknowledges that global warming is real and that mankind is a significant contributor. John McCain takes it further, campaigning on the need for “mandatory emission reduction targets and timetables.”
Nonetheless, like Custer at Little Big Horn and the Jewish zealots at Masada, a small if dwindling band of global warming deniers continues to fight on, insisting that as long as they hold out against the hordes of smock-clad scientists, no consensus can be said to exist.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the EPA just released a new report on the likely impact of global warming in the years to come on human health and welfare:
“Cold days and cold nights are very likely to become much less frequent over North America. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity. Hurricane wind speeds, rainfall intensity and storm surge levels are likely to increase. Other changes include measurable sea-level rise and increases in the occurrence of coastal and riverine flooding.”
As The Washington Post reported:
“It’s going to be hotter, it’s going to be hotter sooner in the year than it was in the past,” said Kristie L. Ebi, an adjunct professor at George Washington University and one of the report’s lead authors. She said that young people living in the D.C. area now will notice a difference before they reach middle age.
“They’re going to look back and think about how nice the summers used to be,” Ebi said. “Within 20, 30 years, on average, the [public] should notice that it’s warmer.”
So step on up, deniers. Tell us again about the sunspots, and why Greenland is called Greenland, and the 30,000 signatures on that petition, and how Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone and the spaceships they’ve got stored out in Area 51.
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Gwinnett attitudes change S-L-O-W-L-Y
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a straw poll taken along with Tuesday’s primary, almost 70 percent of Gwinnett County Democrats said they would support paying an extra penny in sales tax to extend MARTA rail service to their county.
Gwinnett Republicans, on the other hand, rendered the opposite verdict, with almost 63 percent saying they would oppose a penny MARTA tax. Personally, that outcome was surprising — I thought the rejection rate among GOP voters would be even higher, given that a state primary election in the middle of July tends to be ignored by all but the hardest core of the party faithful.
The turnout numbers bear that out. Only 36,000 Republicans voted in Gwinnett’s primary Tuesday, compared to more than 81,000 in February’s Republican presidential primary.
However, the best gauge of just how conservative that group of voters really was comes from another straw-poll question on the ballot. Gwinnett Republicans were asked whether “the Republican Party has moved too far to the political left,” and more than 57 percent said yes, the problem with the party is that it has gotten too liberal. That is not a widely shared assessment.
Given that background, it’s a bit of a surprise that 37 percent of Gwinnett Republicans nonetheless said they would support a MARTA tax and rail service. Apparently, some minds are changing.
But others are not. In the AJC’s GwinnettTalk blog, readers were asked whether they supported a MARTA extension and why. The refrain from opponents was distressingly familiar.
“We don’t need Marta out in Gwinnett County!” one commenter wrote. “It will just bring all the criminals, thugs and rif raf from Atlanta out here — we have enough of that already and don’t need more. Let them go to the Perimeter Mall or 5 points! Keep marta out of Gwinnett!!!”
“I voted NO because I don’t want more crime in our area,” another commenter said. “We have enough as it is!”
Logically, that kind of argument is easy to rebut. Criminals don’t ride mass transit on their way to robbing a bank or breaking into a home. They use cars that are driven on highways. Furthermore, as it developed from rural to suburban to increasingly urban, Gwinnett has developed its own home-grown crime problem as well as other problems long associated with urban areas.
The idea that Gwinnett could hold the world at bay by barring MARTA from its doorstep proved wrong long ago.
Unfortunately, however, logic doesn’t help much in dispelling an objection based less in rationality than in fear, much of it race-based. The question for Gwinnett, and for the metro region as a whole, is whether such attitudes can be overcome to allow progress toward a badly needed regional transportation solution.
Gwinnett has long been considered the region’s biggest obstacle to a cooperative approach, in part because it has never developed a leadership group with enough vision to see beyond county boundaries. And the irony is, no county has more to gain from a regional transportation solution than Gwinnett, and more to lose if transit doesn’t become an option.
While traffic is a problem everywhere in metro Atlanta, it may be most acute in Gwinnett, both in terms of commuting to jobs outside the county and in terms of local traffic within Gwinnett itself.
Getting from place to place inside Gwinnett has become a major hassle.
Furthermore, 20 years ago urban areas had more to gain from transit than suburban areas. That has now reversed. Even before gasoline hit $4 a gallon, long-term demographic and business trends had begun to concentrate wealth and population in the urban core, a phenomenon seen not just in Atlanta but in cities around the country. Expensive gasoline can only accelerate that trend.
With travel more expensive, suburban communities such as Gwinnett need affordable, convenient transit options to tie them more closely to the urban core. But a lot of people in Gwinnett still don’t see it that way.
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It’s official: GOP=2Lib4Ga…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last week I mentioned that Gwinnett Republicans had put a straw-poll question on Tuesday’s ballot asking GOP voters whether “the Republican Party has moved too far to the political left.”
Well, the results are in. More than 57 percent of Gwinnett Republicans say that yes, the party has moved too far to the left.
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Socialists in $2,000 tailored suits
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What’s the difference between a capitalist and a socialist?
Apparently, about 3,000 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average . Back when the DJIA was up at 14,000 and climbing — about nine months ago — tough-minded capitalists were explaining that government intervention was always bad for the economy. For example, if homeowners got suckered into bad loans they couldn’t repay and were about to lose their home, that was their own fault — fools have to pay the price for being fools.
Failure, after all, disciplines the system. With reward must come risk, and all that. The attitude was captured all too well in an e-mail from the head of Countrywide Financial, responding to a plea from a Countrywide customer desperate for more time to repay his loan.
“It’s unbelievable … disgusting,” wrote Angelo Mozilo, CEO of what was then one of the largest mortgage companies in the country.
But the tune has changed. With the nation’s financial system teetering at the brink — the consequence of mindless risk in search of immense reward — Wall Street’s rugged masters of the universe are running to Uncle Sam in panic, falling to the knees of their $2,000 tailored suits and screeching, “Help us, help us, help us, oh please won’t you help us!!!”
All of a sudden, John McCain says the federal government has to commit billions of dollars to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even if it means nationalizing those privately held companies. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, tells Congress that Wall Street needs tighter regulation and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the Fed will make loans to troubled financial firms and accept questionable investments as collateral, in effect putting the rest of us on the line for their debts.
In other words, after years of privatizing their gains and reaping immense financial rewards through their manipulation of the “free market” system, the leading lights of Wall Street are suddenly turning socialist. Now that it’s time to pay the piper for risk gone bad, they turn to government and ask, “Hey, buddy, will you get that for me?”
And unfortunately, government has no choice but to do so. If it’s not quelled, the panic now rippling through corporate boardrooms and financial houses threatens to do significant long-term damage to the economy not just of the United States but on a global scale as well.
It sure is strange to see, though. Suddenly, government has become the capitalists’ best friend. Suddenly, the idea that government is here to help doesn’t seem quite as funny to Wall Street as it used to be.
There’s no doubt that excessive government regulation can strangle free enterprise. But as we’re witnessing, excessive greed can do the job even more quickly. Managing a modern economy requires that we find a useful balance between greed and government regulation, and over the past decade or longer, we lost that balance.
Had we accepted the necessity of a bit more government regulation and intervention to tamp down the excesses of a market economy, we would need a lot less government intervention today to rescue ourselves from what looks to be a very large mess.
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More tea leaves for your reading pleasure….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue — mentioned in some circles as a longshot vice presidential pick — said he hasn’t been asked for his tax information by the campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
Such scrutiny typically precedes a candidate’s selection as vice president. Perdue was asked about the screening following a Monday rally at the state Capitol for McCain, where several hundred Republicans gathered.
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McCain recruiting blog commenters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Now this is an interesting approach….
John McCain has a page on his website encouraging supporters to become commenters at suggested blogs (this one not among them.)
“Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known. Once you’ve commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below. After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center.”
The site even offers Today’s Talking Points to help the would-be commenter keep in step with the campaign’s message. I’m not sure what you could do with the “points” you rack up by commenting and reporting back on your pro-McCain comments, so if anyone knows, drop a line.
Five liberal sites are listed, along with more than 70 sites listed as conservative, four as moderate and 14 as “other.”
Georgia-based PeachPundit makes the list as “other,” as does Instapundit, which strikes me as odd. If Glenn Reynolds doesn’t make the cut as conservative, what criteria are you using?
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The “fuelishness” of offshore drilling
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Oil is destined to become such a highly prized commodity that in time, we’ll probably end up drilling almost everywhere we can, desperately hoping to tap a final barrel or two. In that sense, today’s fight to open offshore areas to drilling is merely a fight over timing.
But let’s at least be honest and smart about it. Let’s at least have a basic understanding of what we can and cannot achieve by drilling offshore.
We’ve already debated the fact that any oil pumped from U.S. coastal areas would be sold on the world oil market, at world market prices. If oil is selling at $200 a barrel, that’s what U.S. consumers would pay for it. We’d get no price break, no hometown discount. Changing that system would be enormously difficult, because in effect it would require the United States to nationalize its oil industry. Exxon and Chevron aren’t exactly going to sit back and let that happen.
And then there’s nonsense like this:
Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said that if the United States had opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling a decade ago as part of a comprehensive energy plan, “we wouldn’t be in this predicament today.”
“But now the chickens have come home to roost,” he said. “We can afford to wait no longer.”
There is no factual basis to that claim whatsoever. None. If we had drilled in ANWR 10 years ago, we would be in this exact same situation today and no reputable oil expert will tell you otherwise.
Energy experts at the Energy Information Administration, an arm of the U.S. government, made that very point in a report released in May. If we opened ANWR to drilling today, EIA concluded, production would peak 20 years from now and it would have no effect whatsoever on the price of oil in 2028 or our strategic situation.
It’s an issue of scale, with any additional production from offshore drilling doomed to be dwarfed by additional global consumption. Look at the numbers.
The United States already produces 8.3 million barrels a day, the third highest production total in the world, not that far behind #1 Saudi Arabia. So we’re not exactly pikers when it comes to drilling.
However, 8.3 million barrels a day isn’t nearly enough to slake our petro-thirst, because we consume 20.6 million barrels a day. That’s roughly one-fourth of total world oil production (and we’re one-twentieth of the world’s population).
Put another way, every day we Americans consume as much oil as is pumped from the United States, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela and Canada combined.
So the idea that we can alter our strategic or economic situation by producing still more oil domestically is simply nonsense. It is foolishness sold by fools to other fools, and you can’t run your car on foolishness.
But boy if we could…
.
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Metro Atlanta populated by whiners
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Phil Gramm, a close friend of John McCain and an influential voice in drafting McCain’s economic plan, said last week that our economic situation isn’t all that bad, dismissing public sentiment to the contrary by explaining that we have all become a nation of whiners.
The Schapiro Group, a Georgia polling and consulting company, just released a poll on perceptions of the economy here in metro Atlanta. Here’s what they found:
“Metro Atlanta residents hold a pessimistic view of the U.S. economy, with over half (58%) rating current economic conditions nationally as ‘poor’ and another 33% saying ‘fair.’ At the same time, only 33% say that the economy of the greater metro Atlanta area is ‘poor’, with 45% giving it a ‘fair’ rating.
How would you rate the economic conditions in the country today?
Excellent 1%
Good 8%
Fair 33%
Poor 58%
How would you rate the economic conditions in the greater metro Atlanta area today?
Excellent 1%
Good 20%
Fair 45%
Poor 33%
Those who say the economy is struggling have a clear view of who is to blame: ‘the government.’ More metro area residents blame ‘the government’ than oil and gas prices, the collapse of the housing market, the war in Iraq, and corporate greed combined.
Who or what do you think is most responsible for the state of the economy today?
Our government 43%
Oil and gas prices 13%
Collapse of the housing market 8%
War in Iraq 7%
Corporate greed 8%
Individuals making bad choices with their money 12%
Something else 7%”
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President Bush balks on global warming
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In normal times, the fate of Planet Earth would not ride on a decision issued in Fulton County Superior Court in Atlanta. Decisions of such importance are supposed to be made in more lofty arenas, such as the White House or Congress.
However, because the decision-makers in Washington have forfeited their legal and moral responsibilities, a county judge hundreds of miles away has been forced to step into the vacuum to address global warming. And in a recent ruling by Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore, the planet emerged victorious.
At least temporarily.
The case in question involves a large coal-burning power plant proposed for construction in rural Early County, along the Chattahoochee River. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups sued to block the plant, charging among other things that it would emit up to 9 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, a primary culprit in global climate change.
In most circles, there’s no longer any question that the planet is warming and that mankind is driving that change. Both Barack Obama and John McCain acknowledge the challenge and promise to address it. The National Intelligence Council, comprising the CIA and other agencies, reports that climate change could “seriously affect U.S. national security interests” in the next 20 years. “Logic suggests the conditions exacerbated [by climate change] would increase the pool of potential recruits for terrorism,” Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence, warned a House committee studying the issue.
Even President Bush grudgingly admits mankind’s role in climate change — the scientific evidence is too overwhelming to deny. But he nonetheless stubbornly declines to do anything serious to address the problem.
In fact, Bush and his administration continue to thumb their noses at a U.S. Supreme Court decision on global warming issued more than a year ago that required the government to take action or explain why.
The court noted that under the Clean Air Act, the federal government is required to regulate any pollutant that endangers the public’s health and welfare. It also noted the overwhelming evidence that CO2 endangers national security, the integrity of our coastlines and human health, among other things. Under the law, the administration had two choices: Explain why CO2 is not a danger, or start reducing CO2 emissions.
The administration has done neither. In fact, when the EPA sent the president its official report in December citing “compelling and robust” evidence that CO2 endangers human welfare, the White House refused to even open the e-mail.
In effect, that dereliction of duty dumped the problem into the lap of Judge Moore, who had to decide whether the coal-burning plant proposed by Longleaf Energy in Early County could be permitted without addressing the issue of CO2 emissions.
It couldn’t have been easy. On the one hand, it’s clear that CO2 contributes to global warming, and the Supreme Court had left little doubt that if CO2 hadn’t yet been officially designated a dangerous pollutant, it would be soon. Roughly a third of the nation’s current CO2 emissions come from existing coal-burning plants, and adding to that number would be irresponsible.
On the other hand, how could Georgia try to limit emissions of CO2 when no rules, regulations or emission limits had been set for the pollutant nationally or in other states? How could Longleaf be required to install hugely expensive technology that no other plant was required to use?
In the end, Moore courageously and perhaps a bit foolishly revoked the Longleaf permit, citing not just the CO2 issue but other problems as well. That ruling will be appealed, and it will be surprising if the CO2 portion of the ruling is upheld. At the moment it’s still a little bit ahead of the law.
In moral and practical terms, however, Moore’s ruling points in the direction we must inevitably head, and it’s time Congress and the next president follow her lead.
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Democrats coming out of the woodwork
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While most of the polls show a fairly tight presidential race, it doesn’t feel that way. As I mentioned in comments a while back, the body language and attitude of the Obama campaign indicate they believe Obama’s going to win, while the language and attitude of the McCain camp also indicate they believe Obama will win.
And maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t remember polls showing such widely divergent results, with some showing an Obama lead of 3 or 4 points and others claiming an Obama lead of 15 or so. Here’s a news story from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that suggests one reason why this race has been difficult to pin down.
“An escalating number of voters registering as Democrats is providing evidence that the 2008 election could produce a wave of support for Barack Obama — and trigger a decades-long shift of party allegiance that could affect elections for a generation.
The numbers are ominous for Republicans: Through May, Democratic voter registration in Broward County was up 6.7 percent. Republican registrations grew just 3 percent while independents rose 2.8 percent.
Democrats have posted even greater gains statewide, up 106,508 voters from January through May, compared with 16,686 for the Republicans.
“It’s a huge swing,” says Marian Johnson, political director for the Florida Chamber of Commerce. “I looked at that and said, ‘Wow.” “
A gain of 90,000 voters for Democrats is a large number in Florida, where elections have been excruciatingly close. It also reflects a difference in passion among the two parties that could have repercussions all the way down the ticket to dogcatcher.
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How to cut the price of gasoline by $1.15 a gallon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just filled up the family car again - ouch. At $4.16 a gallon, it adds up much too quickly.
We’re all now fixated on that $4-a-gallon figure — reportedly approach $5 in parts of California — and for good reason. When we’re standing at the pump, that’s the number that gets our attention.
But in many ways, it’s not the number that matters. The number we should really care about is how much we spend each week, a month, a year on gasoline. Not how much per gallon, but how much in total.
We can figure that out using a multivariable equation: M/mpg x P = C; where M is the number of miles you drive, mpg is your car’s fuel efficiency rating and P is the price of gasoline.
C, of course, is how much cash you end up spending on gasoline.
So, if you put 20,000 miles on your cars in a year, that means you drive about 385 miles a week. The average mpg rating for an American vehicle is 25 mpg.
Plug those numbers into the equation — 385/25 x $4 — and you get a figure of $61.60 a week on gasoline. That’s about what the average household spends on gasoline these days.
But what if you want to lower that number? You can’t change the price of gasoline. That’s a variable out of our control. We could cut back the number of miles we drivie, and many of us have. If you cut your driving by 20 percent, you cut your weekly gasoline bill to $49.28, saving about $11.
But let’s change another number. Let’s boost that 25-mpg figure to 35 mpg. Plug in the numbers, even at $4 a gallon, and all of a sudden your weekly gasoline cost is $44. You save $17.60 a week.
In effect, increasing your MPG to 35 produces the same impact on your family budget as cutting the price of gas by $1.15 a gallon, bringing it down to $2.85 a gallon.
Where am I heading with all this?
For decades, environmentalists have been pushing to raise the MPG requirements for US automobiles, and for decades conservatives — with a lot of support from Detroit labor unions and Democrats like John Dingell — have refused to accept that change.
We were told to let the market work. Government regulation was always bad; the free enterprise system would always solve everything.
Well, look what that got us: Because we didn’t raise the fuel efficiency of the US vehicle fleet, we’re sending billions overseas for foreign oil, the automakers are going broke and the union jobs are disappearing. Oh, and the price of gasoline is killing our economy.
It’s stupidity. With more fuel-efficient cars, the impact of $4 gasoline would be a lot easier to take, both in the household budget and on the national economy. We blew it, and the question is whether we’ve learned our lesson yet.
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Obama woos NASCAR voters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Obama campaign has talked a lot about “expanding the playing field,” seeking votes in places that Democrats had previously written off, such as here in Georgia. Well, the folks over at SI.com report that the effort has taken an interesting turn.
“SI.com has learned that for the first time in history, a major presidential candidate may sponsor a race car in NASCAR’s premier series. According to sources, Barack Obama’s campaign is in talks to become the primary sponsor of BAM Racing’s No. 49 Sprint Cup car for the Pocono race on August 3. Details of the agreement are expected to be worked out over the coming days.”
I follow NASCAR — one of the highlights of my sporting life was renting an RV a few years ago with some friends and spending the weekend in the infield at Talladega. Boy Howdy. But hearing Darrell Waltrip talking about “the No. 49 Barack Obama Toyota” … well, this world sure is a funny place.
UPDATE: Well, not so funny after all. Looks like the deal’s off….
“The Obama campaign will not be sponsoring a car in the Sprint Cup series, though we will continue to look for ways to reach out to voters,” said Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman.
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Oh my, has it come to this?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Matt Towery over at Insider Advantage claims that, well, I’ll let him say it:
“(Sonny) Perdue, according to strong national sources, has risen to the top four in the veepstakes” to run with John McCain.
Why? First, Perdue has strong approval ratings in his home state. Second, his home state is now in play and could, in a perfect storm, become the decision-maker of 2008. Third, former Sen. Sam Nunn, according to both Time and Newsweek, is an eye-blink away from being the Democratic nominee for VP. But Perdue’s name identification and popularity as a current Governor would easily eclipse that of Nunn.”
I’ll leave any comments to the rest of you. There’s not much sport in this one. It’s like hunting over a baited field, fishing in chummed waters, trolling for senators in airport men’s rooms…. not much challenge to it, in other words.
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Iran, bombs, Bush and Obama…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Imagine that you’re a member of Iran’s leadership, and that you and your colleagues have come to understand that pursuing a nuclear weapon is a bad idea. The economic and political sanctions engineered by the United States and Europe have taken a harsh toll, and you’re willing to cut a deal, just as North Korea and Libya did, to achieve a more normal international standing.
But you have a big problem. You simply can’t be seen by your fellow Iranians and the rest of the Middle East as backing down to the bullying of George Bush. So what do you do?
Maybe, just maybe, you take a page from your own country’s history. Back in the hostage crisis of the late ’70s, Iran refused to bow to immense pressure from President Jimmy Carter to release the 52 American hostages it had taken from the U.S embassy in Tehran. The confrontation with Carter apparently became personal with the Iranians.
But on the day a new president, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated, Tehran relented. Six minutes after Reagan became president, the hostages were freed, denying Carter credit for their release.
We could see something similar happen on the nuclear issue, particularly if Barack Obama becomes the next president. With Bush, the invader of Iraq, gone from office, Iran’s leadership could suddenly find a nuclear deal more palatable.
I’m not saying it’s gonna happen like that —for one thing, I’m not at all convinced that Iran is ready to cut such a deal. Nor am I in any way suggesting this scenario as a reason to vote for Obama. You can’t make such important decisions on mere speculation.
I’m just saying that if it happens, you read it here first.
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The facts about offshore drilling
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Personally, I’m not sternly opposed to the idea of dropping the federal ban against offshore oil drilling and letting individual states make that decision for themselves, weighing the revenue from drilling against the impact on tourism, the environment and coastal beauty.
However, it’s also important to get some things straight about the cost-benefit analysis behind that decision.
For example, it’s become a right-wing talking point that drilling is now so safe that there were no oil spills in the wake of the 2005 Gulf hurricanes. That is just plain wrong.
A report commissioned by the U.S. Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore oil leases, found that after Katrina and Rita, “124 spills were reported with a total volume of roughly 17,700 barrels of total petroleum products, of which about 13,200 barrels were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 4,500 barrels were refined products from platforms and rigs. Pipelines were accountable for 72 spills totaling about 7,300 barrels of crude oil and condensate spilled into the (Gulf of Mexico).”
In that case, “response and recovery efforts kept the impacts to a minimum with no onshore impacts from these spill events.” But the risk of serious problems is still there.
More important, offshore drilling is being sold by many as a way to lower gasoline prices or alter our strategic dependency on foreign energy sources. It will not do that. The international thirst for oil is so vast that it wouldn’t be sated a bit by the quantities of oil we are likely to find off our coasts.
At peak production, it would ease energy prices only at the margins, with an impact measured in pennies at the gallon. You may hear politicians and talk show hosts claim otherwise, but you will not hear that claim from reputable oil experts. As oilman extraordinaire T. Boone Pickens is now acknowledging, “This Is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.”
Those are the facts: The dangers of drilling offshore have eased, but remain real. And the benefits of drilling offshore, while tangible, aren’t very big.
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Oh look, is that an exit sign?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The elected leader of Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, is demanding a timetable for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops from his country.
In the holy city of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the religious leader of Iraq’s Shiia majority, signaled to his followers this week that it was time to negotiate an end to the “illegal” U.S. occupation.
“We will not accept any memorandum of understanding that doesn’t have specific dates to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq,” Iraqi national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie said after meeting with Sistani.
Such statements ought to be embraced as good news. They suggest an Iraqi government increasingly confident in its authority and ability, ready to stand up so we Americans can stand down. They represent a flashing neon sign, written in English, reading “This way to the exit.”
But the Bush administration refuses to read the lighting on the wall. It doesn’t want to leave Iraq. Not now, not tomorrow, and not ever. And its response to the Iraqi demands has made that clear.
The White House is refusing to consider any sort of timetable, insisting that we will withdraw our troops as conditions allow, not as a schedule dictates.
In the past, that position has made military sense, but no longer. At some point in the process, things improve enough that setting a schedule for withdrawal becomes the next logical step. The Iraqis apparently believe that point has come. They believe that the conditions in their country have now improved enough to start talking in real terms of just when the Americans are going to leave.
They aren’t talking about an immediate withdrawal, but they do seem to want a guaranteed withdrawal. And as a sovereign country, that is their decision, not ours. So why is the White House balking at a chance to leave Iraq and claim victory?
Well, one of the administration’s primary goals in invading Iraq — in fact, probably its single most important objective — was to establish Iraq as a friendly, long-term host of American military bases. From those bases in the heart of the Arab world, they hoped to dominate the oil-rich Middle East for decades to come.
And if that was your goal from the beginning, the calculus of victory gets pretty simple:
Winning means staying; leaving means losing.
A timetable for withdrawal is a timetable for defeat, at least as the Bush administration has defined defeat and victory in its heart of hearts.
The belief that the Iraqis would tolerate or even welcome a long-term U.S. presence was never realistic; it was just another of our many prewar miscalculations. From the beginning, the Iraqis have had other ideas.
Some Iraqis did welcome our invasion as a way to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein. Others fought us from the beginning and continue to fight us. But Iraqis of every political leaning and religious sect were in agreement that we would not be allowed to stay. The experience of occupation has only hardened that sentiment.
We have been in Iraq for more than five years now, and unfortunately, it’s still too early to leave. Despite the growing confidence of Maliki and others, neither the Iraqi military nor its government is anywhere near ready to operate on its own. However, the time is right, for both Iraq and the United States, to start talking seriously about the timing of our exit.
When we do finally leave Iraq, perhaps in two or three years, we will have no guarantee that Iraq will remain peaceful or that it will preserve the bare structure of democracy. Such a guarantee is simply not attainable. We can’t be there to baby-sit, and the sad truth is that affairs in Iraq may very well default back to ugly, where they’d been for a very long time before we got there.
But that is not our responsibility. It is the responsibility of Iraqis. That’s the message they’re trying to send, a message we have no choice but to heed.
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“Have you no sense of decency?”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In his column today, Leonard Pitts bemoans the shamelessness of those who accuse John McCain of betraying our country because, under extreme torture 40 years ago, he read a North Vietnamese propaganda statement in front of television cameras:
“Maybe I am hypersensitive, maybe just old-fashioned by the standards of an era that regards earnestness as a character flaw. Still, it strikes me as viscerally wrong, offensive at the mitochondrial level, to trivialize, demean or diminish, particularly for political gain, a man’s service and sacrifice on behalf of his country.”
Some of you may have seen posters on this blog launch attacks on McCain just like those described in the column. Well, I’m wholeheartedly with Pitts on this one. It’s vile, it’s wrong and it ought to be stopped.
Would conservatives be doing the same thing, even more so, if the Democratic candidate had a similar history. Absolutely. The shameful and well-organized attacks on John Kerry — the fake Purple Hearts at the GOP convention, for example — make that perfectly clear. I was at that convention, and it disgusted me.
But that doesn’t make it right. Not in any sense of the word. As Pitts put it:
“… it seems to me that something has gone haywire in a nation that forgets how to revere the service of military men and women, political expediencies and affiliations be damned, a nation where a Max Cleland can leave three limbs in Vietnam, yet have his patriotism questioned or a John Murtha can serve as a Marine for 37 years, yet be called a coward.”
Amen. Grow a sense of decency, people.
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Yet another Grady Hospital scam…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Two points to make on the story about the secret “contract” promising Pam Stephenson a two-year gig as Grady Hospital CEO at $600,000 a year. If Stephenson leaves as expected come September, she could walk off with a $750,000 golden parachute for doing nothing:
1.) No way. That is an outrageous and probably illegal arrangement, and demonstrates once again how critical it is that the public’s business be done in public. The contract between Stephenson and the previous Grady board was cut in secret at a time when Stephenson served as the board’s chair, and was apparently done without knowledge or consent of at least some of her fellow board members. Grady’s new governing board — which includes Stephenson as its vice chair — ought to use every tool at its disposal to ensure that she sees as little of that money as possible, and to seek her ouster from the board itself. To use a position of supposed public service as a means of self-enrichment is shameful.
2.) Some people are now going to cite this case as once again demonstrating the corruption that’s inherent in government and public service. Yeah right. Grady has had serious problems and a housecleaning was long overdue. But if Grady was a private corporation, the same people condemning the institution today would be defending Stephenson’s salary as evidence of the free market at work and praising her for getting what she could.
Oh, and her golden parachute wouldn’t be $750,000, it would be more like $7.5 or $75 million.
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Obama not happy with Vernon Jones
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama distanced himself from DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones Tuesday, and by “distanced himself” I mean he gave Jones a straight-arm shove that would make an NFL running back proud.
“I do not endorse him; I have not endorsed him,” Obama said Tuesday in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He put my picture on his literature, without asking me.
“Now I will tell you in the southside of Chicago, and I’m assuming here in Georgia, those kinds of things aren’t uncommon. It’s a little less common to do when you’re a U.S. Senate candidate when presumably the scrutiny is a little higher.”
Obama, who was in metro Atlanta for two fund-raisers and a town hall meeting in Powder Springs said he thinks he met Jones at a previous campaign event.
“I think he may have come to an event of ours a while back,” Obama said. “The reason I think I may have met him is I know somebody told me as I was shaking his hand that he had taken pride in voting for George Bush twice.”
So I think that clears up any questions about that.
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Sam, Obama and the gay question
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I haven’t put much credence in talk of Sam Nunn becoming Obama’s running mate, largely because Nunn has been out of politics and the public eye for so long. But the rumors keep popping up in interesting places.
For example, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter argues in his current column that picking Nunn as vice president makes practical sense:
“First, you have to win. General elections are fought in the middle, which is exactly where Sam Nunn sits. They are fought over independents and moderate swing voters, who would like Nunn. Above all, he would help lift his party’s presidential nominee over the threshold of credibility that, for all the positive polls for Democrats, still stands between Barack Hussein Obama and the presidency.”
Alter also notes that a Nunn candidacy will be opposed by many in the gay community because of his advocacy of the “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” policy for gays in the military:
“Nunn’s position now is a mixture of new rhetoric (‘I’m grateful to the thousands of gays and lesbians serving today’) and a willingness to ‘review the policy’ with an eye toward ‘eventually’ changing it.
I too have been struck at the depth of the anger at Nunn in the gay community, and I think it’s mistaken. In the past 15 years, a lot of Americans both in public and private life have gotten more comfortable than they used to be about gay rights, including a lot of people who learned in those years that their son, daughter, father, mother, sister or brother is gay.
Holding a grudge against people for opinions they no longer hold doesn’t make much sense, especially on an issue in which public sentiment has swung so far so quickly. The winners can afford to be magnanimous.
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“The devil went down to Georgia, he was lookin’ for a soul to steal”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I still haven’t seen convincing evidence that Georgia could be in play for Barack Obama; two consecutive polls by Insider Advantage claim the race is tight, but no other pollster has come close to producing similar results. Until that happens, it’s all just bluster.
That said, the GOP explanation for Obama’s interest in Georgia is downright ludicrous. He’s spending time and money here because he’s in trouble in Pennsylvania and Ohio? Oh come on, at least give us something plausible.
First off, that’s factually incorrect. Obama’s up by about 8 points in Pennsylvania, about 4 points in Ohio, according to pollster.com. McCain would love to be in that kind of trouble.
Second, if Obama really were in trouble up north, wouldn’t he stay in that region to try to fix the problem? Campaigning in Georgia to fix your problems in the Rust Belt would be like responding to 9/11 by attacking a country that had nothing to do with it. Only fools would do something like that.
The best explanation is psychological. There’s a sense of panic in GOP circles that a blowout may be coming this fall, and Obama’s folks want to feed that panic. If that fear grows, McCain will have problems raising money, enthusiasm for his candidacy will decline, GOP turnout will fall and intra-party squabbling will increase. So the Democrats want to feed that fear — they want to make it grow big and fat until it consumes the soul of the McCain campaign.
“One of the premises of our campaign is we don’t just intend to win, we want a mandate,” Obama says, and you don’t hear talk like that from McCain.
It’s still a long way to November, and a lot can change. The race is far from over. But Obama coming to Georgia is like a football team walking onto the opponent’s home field and dancing on its emblem. It’s about intimidation.
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GOP = 2lib4Ga.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the July 15 primary, Gwinnett County Republicans will be asked their responses to nine questions posed by party leaders. Among them:
Do you believe that the Republican Party has moved too far to the political left?
Yeah, that’s the ticket. The Republicans = Too liberal for Georgia.
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That doesn’t sound like any fun at all
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Publishers Weekly just came out with its listing of books scheduled to be released this fall and early winter by major publishing houses. Among the looming titles in its business section are:
“Game Over: How the Collapse in the Economy Will Sink Your Wealth by 50% or More Unless You Know What to Do” by Stephen Leeb, a market analyst who was one of the few back in 2006 who was predicting $4 gasoline.
“The Great Crash of 2010: How to Survive and Thrive in the Coming Hard Times,” by market analyst Harry S. Dent.
“Panic: The Study of Modern Financial Insecurity,” by Michael Lewis, author of “Moneyball” and “Liar’s Poker.”
“The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do About It,” by Yale economics professor Robert J. Shiller.
“The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy,” by David Smick.
Anybody detect a theme in those titles?
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Biting off more than we can chew…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear installations would create trouble that we aren’t equipped to handle easily, not with ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drove that point home in a press conference last week at the Pentagon.
“I’ve been pretty clear before that from the United States’ perspective, the United States’ military perspective in particular, that opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful on us,” Mullen said. “That doesn’t mean that we don’t have capacity or reserve, but that would really be very challenging.”
Mullen was more diplomatic about the consequences if the Israeli government were to launch such an attack, saying he would leave that decision to the Israelis. But his message was the same: “Don’t do it.”
Or as Mullen put it, “this is a very unstable part of the world, and I don’t need it to be more unstable.”
Strategically, it almost doesn’t matter whether an attack is launched by Israel or by the United States. The two are viewed as one entity by many in the Middle East. And either way, an attack would create the same backlash from the same parties, leaving the U.S. military to clean up the mess.
Mullen, who had just returned from a visit to the Middle East, no doubt communicated that message bluntly in private discussions with his Israeli counterparts. And as Israeli military analysts have noted, Israeli jets would need U.S. permission to fly over Iraqi airspace to get to their targets in Iran.
Mullen’s words of caution no doubt grated on the ears of those elements in the Bush White House still hankering for military action against Iran. But the admiral made clear his preference for negotiation over war.
“I’m convinced a solution still lies in using other elements of national power to change Iranian behavior,” Mullen said, “including using diplomatic, financial and international pressure. There is a need for better clarity, even dialogue at some level.”
It’s interesting to compare Mullen’s strategic assessment against those of presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. McCain and his top foreign policy advisors, including Sen. Joseph Lieberman, have stressed the military approach to Iran and condemned attempts at dialogue advocated by Obama. Mullen, the nation’s highest ranking military officer, takes a position that aligns more closely with that of Obama.
Mullen also echoes Obama in discussing the interplay between our situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mullen candidly acknowledged last week that because of a shortage in U.S. and NATO manpower in Afghanistan, the Taliban “have, without question, grown more effective and more aggressive in recent weeks, and as the casualty figures clearly demonstrate.”
To alleviate that problem, Obama has advocated drawing down troops in Iraq and using some of those units to bolster our commitment to Afghanistan. Mullen also sees that as a necessity.
“I’ve made no secret of my desire to flow more forces, U.S. forces, to Afghanistan just as soon as I can,” he said. “Nor have I been shy about saying that those forces will not be available until the situation in Iraq permits us to do so.”
As that last sentence suggests, Mullen’s assessment does differ from that of Obama in one critical aspect. The admiral is not ready to advocate a drawdown in Iraq, saying only that he is hopeful of doing so by the end of the year if conditions in Iraq continue to improve. Obama, on the other hand, is ready to make that call now, insisting that fewer U.S. troops in Iraq and more in Afghanistan would improve the situation in both theaters.
If elected president, Obama will likely find it impossible to draw down in Iraq as quickly as he advocated as a candidate. But he may also find top military officers relieved to have civilian leaders with a more realistic concept of how our men and women in uniform should be deployed.
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That just isn’t how it’s done, Max
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Max Sanders, a 19-year-old from Minnesota, faces felony charges for going on eBay and offering to sell his vote for president to the highest bidder.
According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press:
Minnesota law bars a voter from soliciting, receiving or accepting any “money, property, or other thing of monetary value” in return for a vote. Anyone who had bid on the vote could’ve been in trouble, too, because the law also prohibits paying for someone’s vote with money, “food, liquor, clothing, entertainment, or other thing of monetary value.”
Young Max just needs a little advice from politicians. You don’t offer to sell anybody your vote; you set up a fund to which your new “friends” can contribute if they wish. If people ply you with liquor or expensive meals and gifts, they aren’t bribing you, they’re “creating a relationship” with you. And if you happen to end up voting the way your “friends” would wish, that’s only because they presented such a convincing case. That way there’s no quid pro quo, and thus no crime.
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Some people are runnin’ scared
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From the comments below:
“I love that despite Democrats like Jay Bookman who exist, those of us who are productive and recognize the rights of INDIVIDUALS can still prosper and make money in this country.
Of course, once Democrats like Jay have their way, we wont have freedom at all anymore.”
Really folks, it won’t be so bad. Don’t be scared. I mean, if we survived the last eight years, don’t you think we can survive almost anything?
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A birthday testimonial for the U S of A….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In honor of Independence Day, let’s set aside a holiday thread to talk about all the things we love about this country.
What’s the best thing we got going for us?
Our music — jazz, blues, country, gospel, bluegrass and rock ‘n’ roll? Good stuff. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights? Wouldn’t be America without them.
Barbecue and corn bread? Spacious skies, amber waves of grain and purple mountains’ majesty? Our wise, courageous leaders?
Seriously. Consider it a birthday testimonial — what do you love most about the United States of America?
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Rumsfeld’s torturous defense
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday’s column….
In May of 2004, a grave Donald Rumsfeld stood before the TV cameras and condemned the pictures of abuse emerging from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
“The images that we’ve seen that include U.S. forces are deeply disturbing, both because of the fundamental unacceptability of what they depicted and because the actions by U.S. military personnel in those photos do not in any way represent the values of our country or of the armed forces,” Rumsfeld told the world.
Over the next few days, Rumsfeld would further condemn the abuse as “totally unacceptable and unAmerican,” then as “blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman.” He also made a promise that the guilty would be punished, a promise seemingly kept when seven enlisted personnel were later sentenced to prison.
Today, though, it is hard to fully describe the hypocrisy and cynicism of Rumsfeld’s performance. As he stood there telling the world he was shocked, shocked at what transpired at Abu Ghraib, he did so knowing that he himself had authorized more serious acts of torture on a much larger scale.
He himself had approved acts that he called unacceptable and unAmerican. He himself had ordered treatment that was, in his words, sadistic, cruel and inhuman.
In fact, Major Gen. Anthony Taguba, the Army officer appointed by Rumsfeld to investigate the scandal at Abu Ghraib, now believes that in light of ongoing disclosures, “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
That is not a charge to be made lightly, but as the facts become clear, it becomes harder and harder to reach a contrary conclusion.
For example, it is telling that the initiative for torture does not seem to have come from interrogators frustrated at not getting information through legal means. To the contrary, the idea seems to have initiated very early in the top levels of government, from men such as Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, who then drove sometimes reluctant subordinates to accept the practice.
In the process, they ignored protests from interrogation experts at the FBI and elsewhere who insisted that less extreme approaches would be more fruitful and extract more accurate information. They also squelched objections that the practice was immoral and counter to American values and law.
The narrative that is emerging suggests that to Rumsfeld and others, torture was not something they felt forced to do, but rather something they wanted to do against those they blamed for Sept. 11. And while an instinct for such vengeance may be natural, it is an instinct that civilized nations refuse to sanction, as Rumsfeld acknowledged by condemning the abuse exposed at Abu Ghraib.
According to reports in The New York Times, the torture techniques implemented with high-level approval at Guantanamo and elsewhere had been borrowed from techniques used by communist China against captured Americans during the Korean War. Back then, we accurately condemned those techniques as torture and stressed that they produced false confessions. And when we used the same techniques, they produced the same results.
Back in the summer of 2002, you may recall, the federal government issued a series of odd security alerts, warning that terrorists were first going to target malls, then banks, then apartment buildings. Each warning produced a flurry of panic, but none ever panned out. That’s because they were products of the ongoing torture of an al Qaida member of already questionable sanity who was telling interrogators whatever they wanted to hear, just as our captured servicemen had.
Four years ago, Rumsfeld advised the country to be patient, assuring them that justice would be done to those who had broken our laws regarding torture.
“These things are complicated; they take some time,” he said. “The system works.”
Well, he better hope not.
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On handguns and airports…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Second Amendment, you could sense that gun advocates had become so giddy with success that they might get carried away and try to press their new advantage in ways that would provoke a public backlash.
The showdown at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport may very well prove the point. Holders of concealed-weapons permits claim that they have a right under state law to carry handguns inside airports but outside the security zone. Airport officials and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin insist they do not, and have promised to arrest any civilian with a weapon at the airport. City officials are also using the case to press for federal laws or rules to support their position and override state law.
Like so much about the gun issue, this is more about symbolism than practical effect. But the symbolism in this case works against the gun lobby, which may find it has significantly overreached and chosen poor ground on which to fight.
In the wake of Sept. 11, the public has come to accept airports as a no-rights zone, a place where their expectations of privacy and legal bans on warrantless search have been magically suspended. The Constitution just doesn’t apply there.
I’ve never been comfortable with that concept — I think there are probably less intrusive ways to ensure airport security — but the idea of airports as a special, almost sacred place is nonetheless real and widely accepted. So when gun advocates insist that they have the right to carry concealed weapons on airport property — I just don’t think the public is going to have much patience with that argument.
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Dr. Newt’s patent medicine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just got a Fourth of July email from Newt Gingrich, in which he claims that if Americans act now, we can immediately and dramatically lower gasoline and diesel prices just by taking “three simple steps.”
If you click through to a Youtube video, you learn that those things are 1.) Open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; 2.) exploit “America’s vast reserves of shale oil” and 3.) open off-shore areas to drilling.
No mention of conservation or fuel efficiency, etc. All gain, no pain, with a dramatic drop in fuel prices almost guaranteed. It all sounds so easy.
The funny thing is, tagged onto the end of the Gingrich email is a paid commercial advertisement touting a “Breakthrough Announcement from Dr. Al Sears:”
“The Secret is out! Burn fat and drop pounds in as little as 10 minutes a day - without going to the gym!
At last! Dr. Sears’ patented PACE® program is available to you right now! … PACE© proves once-and-for-all that a great body and vibrant health does NOT have to be difficult, time consuming or boring. …..”
Exact same pitch, just a different product.
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Oil and the invasion of Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From the beginning, oil played a critical role in drawing us to invade Iraq. As former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan says in his memoirs, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Iraq boasts the world’s second or third biggest oil reserves, depending on who you believe. Without that oil, Iraq would have been Sudan or Rwanda or Zimbabwe or Myanmar, another sad place where brutality and repression rule and the United States has no strategic interest.
However, I think it’s an exaggeration to claim that we invaded to simply seize Iraq’s oil and make it our own, although the U.S. military as far back as the ’70s has had plans to seize Arab oil fields and turn them over to some sort of international management. Our goal was a little less blatant, and a little more grand.
We went into Iraq in part to ensure that its oil kept flowing and to boost that flow if possible, and also to ensure the continued flow of oil from neighboring Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. We went into Iraq to establish permanent bases in that country, bases we could use to intimidate Iran into obedience and to turn the Gulf region into an American protectorate that looks to the U.S. for its security.
In such a situation, we would not own the oil in question nor claim the profits from its sale, but we would have a lot of strategic influence over how and to whom that oil was sold. And anybody who thinks that wasn’t the case is more than a little naive — maybe willfully naive — about how the world works.
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