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December 2008
‘The Forever War’: Highly recommended for those who care to know
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just finished reading Dexter Filkins’ “The Forever War,” a Christmas present. I recommend it highly.
Filkins is the New York Times war correspondent who has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq and now Afghanistan again. He puts himself at the front lines, often in ways that seem foolhardy, but he comes away with remarkable stuff. I hate to use cliches such as “gripping,” but his book is … gripping. You start reading it and it’s hard to stop.
It also gives you a real ground-level view of the difficulty of what we’re trying to accomplish by force of arms, and what our men and women in uniform face overseas. In my conversations with military people, the constant refrain is that they feel they have gone to war while the American people have gone to the shopping mall. They feel ignored by a population that just doesn’t seem to care much anymore, and it’s hard to argue with that perception. They come home on leave or on rotation, and it shocks them to see that the war that had occupied their every waking and sleeping moment gets almost no attention here at home.
The number of U.S. media outlets with reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan is down to barely a handful. Part of that’s a consequence of economics — keeping journalists in a war setting is expensive, and the media industry is suffering. That reality aside, it’s certainly fair to criticize decisions by media executives to focus on celebrity coverage while ignoring the efforts of our military.
But if you look a little deeper, those media executives are merely responding to the market. The American people just aren’t interested in war coverage. It doesn’t do anyone any good to file news stories that few people read or watch, and the lack of media coverage is a reaction to that reality.
However, for those who do want to know, “The Forever War” will tell you a lot.
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At this rate, they’ll be giving houses away in a box of Cracker Jacks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Let’s put 2008 behind us, shall we? Let’s officially declare this last day of the year as the bottom and then move on.
If only it were that easy….
from the New York Times:
“… home prices in 20 metropolitan areas across the country dropped at a record rate of 18 percent in October from a year earlier as the fallout from the financial collapse reverberated through the housing market.
According to the measure, the Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller Home Price Index, all 20 cities surveyed reported one-year price declines in October. Prices in 14 of the 20 metropolitan areas fell at a record rate.
“October was clearly the free-fall month,” said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s. “Everything was going against us in October, without exception.”
After increasing steadily through the first part of the decade, home prices have fallen every month since January 2007, their slide accelerating as troubles in the housing market infected the broader economy and brought down financial firms. Now, as buyers sit on the sideline and a glut of unsold homes clogs the market, economists say that home prices might continue to slide throughout 2009.”
“Metro Atlanta home prices took a record double-digit tumble in the year ending in October, according to a closely watched 20-city index released Tuesday.
With an average price drop of 10.5 percent for existing single-family houses, Atlanta joined 13 other cities experiencing double-digit declines. It was the metro area’s first annual double-digit drop since the index started reporting Atlanta data in 1991.
The metro area also posted a record month-to-month decline of 2.4 percent.
“The only thing selling is foreclosures if you’re on the south side of town,” said Rita Hutson, an associate broker at Metrobrokers/GMAC Real Estate. “It has absolutely gotten worse.”
Shea Zimmerman, senior vice president and managing broker at the Harry Norman Realtors office in East Cobb, said her region has faced a slightly better situation with price drops of about 7 or 8 percent, thanks to a strong school system that has kept home values from falling too far.”
And here’s the city by city list:
City, monthly price change, annual price change
• Atlanta, -2.4%, -10.5%
• Boston, -1.1%, -6.0%
• Charlotte, -1.8%, -4.4%
• Chicago, -1.6%, -10.8%
• Cleveland, -1.0%, -6.2%
• Dallas, -1.1%, -3.0%
• Denver, -1.5%, -5.2%
• Detroit, -4.5%, -20.4%
• Las Vegas, -2.7%, -31.7%
• Los Angeles, -2.6%, -27.9%
• Miami, -3.0%, -29.0%
• Minneapolis, -3.4%, -16.3%
• New York, -0.9%, -7.5%
• Phoenix, -3.3%, -32.7%
• Portland, -1.9%, -10.1%
• San Diego, -3.0%, -26.7%
• San Francisco, -4.2%,-31.0%
• Seattle, -1.4%, -10.2%
• Tampa, -3.4%, -19.8%
• Washington, -2.7%, -18.7%
Source: Standard and Poor’s
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Blagojevich a one-man carnival
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, never a shy one, has gone ahead and appointed former state Attorney General Roland Burris to replace Barack Obama in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had already promised to bar any Blagojevich appointee from taking a seat in the Senate, using the Senate’s rarely used power to control its own membership. But there are questions as to how and whether that power can be put into play.
“Don’t allow allegations against me to taint this good and honest man,” said Blagojevich, who’s not exactly a compelling character witness. (If you notice, he also sounds an awful lot like Regis Philbin, which is another strike against him.) And while Burris apparently does have a decent reputation in Illinois, his willingness to accept the appointment from Blagojevich calls his judgment and integrity into serious question.
Oh, and then there’s the race card thing. Burris is black, and supporters such as U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush are suggesting that barring Burris from joining the Senate as its only black member would be like lynching him.
Now THAT’S old school.
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Time for a Cuba Libre!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Berlin Wall came down almost 20 years ago. The Cold War is long over, and the Soviet Union sits on history’s ashpile. Yet U.S. policy toward Cuba has remained frozen in time, a fact that has made it easier for Fidel Castro and his followers to maintain their tight grip on the island and its people.
Can we finally change that policy? Why yes we can.
WASHINGTON - Five decades after Fidel Castro toppled a U.S.-backed dictator to take power in Cuba, the Cold War rivalry with Washington could be thawing as President-elect Barack Obama looks to ease sanctions against the communist-run island.
Obama has made clear he favors relaxing restrictions on family travel and cash remittances by Cuban Americans to Cuba, which this week marks the 50th anniversary of Castro’s revolution.
Obama could also reverse other steps taken by outgoing President George W. Bush to tighten sanctions on Cuba, such as the prepayment of food imports from the United States, and he is expected to restore migration talks broken off by Bush.
Experts on Cuba believe modest changes in policy will come quickly, but stop short of lifting the trade embargo first imposed in 1962 or allowing all Americans to travel to the island 90 miles off the coast of Florida…..
“The potential for change is more real than ever,” said Katrin Hansing, associate director at the Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute.
An FIU poll conducted in November showed that 55 percent of Cuban Americans in Miami, an anti-Castro bastion that has long backed a hard-line U.S. stance on Cuba, now favor lifting the 46-year-old trade embargo.
Cuba watchers agree the embargo has failed to bring about political change in Cuba, like earlier CIA efforts to assassinate or overthrow Fidel Castro, who retired in February due to illness but still wields power behind the scenes.
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‘Abstinence only’ is a total crock
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The right has long pushed abstinence-only programs as an alternative to sex education, and the Bush administration has funded those programs to the tune of roughly a billion dollars. Yet repeated studies have found the programs just don’t work.
How has the administration responded to that data? With one federally funded study, it simply refused to release the report.
They would rather push what ought to work rather than what does work. They would rather design a program that makes themselves feel better than a data-driven program that actually cuts down on teen pregnancy and teen abortion. There’s something amoral about preserving programs that you know don’t work just to satisfy a political constituency, especially when the failure is measured in damaged teenaged lives.
Here’s the latest study to confirm what previous studies found, reported in the Washington Post:
“Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.
The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.
“Taking a pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. “But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking.”
The study is the latest in a series that have raised questions about programs that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that specifically ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins. The new analysis, however, goes beyond earlier analyses by focusing on teens who had similar values about sex and other issues before they took a virginity pledge.”
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What are Israel’s goals?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Israeli response to aggression by Hamas appears to have been a success, with large numbers of Hamas members and top officials killed or driven underground. Again, Israel had every right and indeed an obligation to respond to attacks on its people, and it has done so effectively.
However, success could turn into failure with an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza or even an expansion of the bombing campaign that begins to inflict more civilian casualties. And unfortunately, that seems to be where Israel is heading, with tanks and troops massing at the border and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak telling the Knesset that the military was fighting a “war to the bitter end against Hamas.”
Israel should not allow its overwhelming military dominance to seduce it into believing in a military solution to Hamas. No such solution exists, and trying to impose one can only make matters worse, as Israel should have learned from its repeated experiences in Lebanon.
So the question is one of goals: If Israel seeks a renewed ceasefire with Hamas, it may have created the circumstances in which that goal can be negotiated. No one can quibble with a goal of stopping missiles from landing in its territory.
However, if Israel’s goal is really to solve its Hamas problem once and for all, it will fail. There is no conceivable mechanism by which that can be achieved at gunpoint.
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Your chance to play Roger Ebert…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s kind of slow out there in the news department. So … anybody out there gone to the movies this holiday season?
Seen anything good that was supposed to be bad?
Anything bad that was supposed to be good?
What’s the best movie you’ve seen this year?
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The GOP’s minority ‘outreach’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The GOP is apparently intent on continuing its minority outreach program — if by outreach you mean a running back’s stiff-arm to any minority voter who might come close.
The latest event was the decision by one of the top candidates for the post of Republican National Committee chairman to send out a CD to RNC members containing a song about “Barack the Magic Negro,” sung to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon” by someone impersonating Al Sharpton.
The lovely tune was originally broadcast on Rush Limbaugh’s show. But Chip Saltsman of Tennessee apparently doesn’t understand that it’s one thing to play the segment on a controversial talk radio show, and another to have it sent out by someone wanting to be elected to head the national party and serve as party spokesman.
It brings to mind the local Republican official here in Georgia who sent out an email to her fellow Republicans not so long ago with a doctored photo of Obama as a black lawn jockey, among others. She wasn’t a racist, she insisted, and neither were the 20 or so Georgia conservatives who had sent the photo to her.
One of the more curious responses came from Erick Erickson over at redstate.com. “”In any event, that Chip Saltsman did this shows poor judgment on his part,” Erickson writes. “He should have known this would happen. This is a distraction from the RNC Chairman’s race coming on the heels of revelations that South Carolina GOP Chairman, and fellow contender, Katon Dawson belonged to an all white country club shortly before he decided to run for RNC Chairman.”
So far, so good. However, Erickson also believe that “There is absolutely nothing racist about the song, but the race baiters of the world love to think there is. The added humor is that the song accurately captures the problems of the race baiters in American with Obama as President.”
Erickson goes on to chide the current RNC chair, Mike Duncan for saying he was “shocked and appalled that anyone would think this is appropriate, as it clearly does not move us in the right direction.” To Erickson, “This suggests he doesn’t keep up with Rush Limbaugh, which suggests he’s a bit disconnected from the roots of the party.”
So Limbaugh now apparently sets the standard for what’s appropriate in the Republican Party? Is he, in effect, the unofficial RNC chairman, with the official titleholder bound to follow Limbaugh’s lead?
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Israel responding as it must
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve never been a fan of Israel’s policy of responding to extremist attacks by punishing civilian populations. Among other problems, it hasn’t seemed to work. However, Israel’s decision to strike back decisively against Hamas in Gaza over the weekend was necessary and appropriate. It is ludicrous to argue that a country under regular rocket attack from a neighbor does not have the right to defend itself. The Bush administration is correct to put responsibility for the attacks on Hamas.
The attacks have the added benefit of striking mainly at military/governmental targets, with the Israelis apparently taking out large numbers of Hamas officials and party infrastructure. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports how that was achieved:
“Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. According to the sources, Barak maintained that although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare, as well.
Barak gave orders to carry out a comprehensive intelligence-gathering drive which sought to map out Hamas’ security infrastructure, along with that of other militant organizations operating in the Strip.
This intelligence-gathering effort brought back information about permanent bases, weapon silos, training camps, the homes of senior officials and coordinates for other facilities.”
The attacks are also being interpreted by some as dooming any intermediate-term chance of progress in settling the Israeli-Palestinian problem, as the Washington Post reports:
“Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza yesterday, in retaliation for a nonstop barrage of rocket attacks from Hamas fighters, raised the prospect of an escalation of violence that could scuttle any hopes the incoming Obama administration harbored of forging an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
“If the casualty reports are accurate, Hamas is going to respond. And this isn’t a two- or three-day deal in which the genie is put back in the bottle,” said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “The Much Too Promised Land.” “This takes the already slim chance of an early, active and successful Obama engagement on Israel-Palestinian peace and lowers it to about zero.”
I’m not sure I agree with that assessment. A strong Hamas would not tolerate peace. A Hamas chastened enough to cease rocket attacks on Israel would be less capable of interfering. As Miller notes in the Post, the odds of making progress were already slim. But I doubt this does much to make those odds worse.
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A one-word explanation? Greed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The secret to capitalism’s success is its ability to take one of mankind’s most powerful emotions — greed — and harness that emotion to drive economic progress. By greedily pursuing our own individual self-interests, the theory goes, each of us contributes almost accidentally to greater prosperity for everybody.
And for the most part, that’s how it has worked. The innovation and risk-taking encouraged by capitalism have given billions of people a quality of life and security that would otherwise be unimaginable. If there is a better, more productive system for meeting the physical needs of human life, we haven’t found it yet.
But then comes a year like 2008, a year in which capitalism has faltered and the security of millions of Americans is threatened. Trillions of dollars of wealth has disappeared in a remarkably short time, along with millions of jobs. Fear rather than optimism dominates the landscape, and everyone from economists to hairdressers to members of Congress is wondering just what went wrong and how to fix it.
There are technical explanations, political explanations and folk-wisdom explanations. There are explanations that attempt to get down into the nitty-gritty details and those that offer a big-picture analysis.
My own one-sentence assessment? Capitalism works by getting the best out of greed; it fails when we let greed get the best of us.
And that is a constant, never-ending problem. We have always known that greed is dangerous. Going back into time as far as the written word can take us, every major religion, every major culture has warned against the dangers of greed.
In a capitalist system, the knowledge of greed’s dual nature — its power when harnessed, its danger when it is not — sets up a permanent, enduring tension. The trick is to give greed enough play to reap its benefits while minimizing greed’s danger. In that sense, a greed-powered economy is like a nuclear-powered submarine. Both are driven by a potentially boundless but destructive source of energy that must be kept within bounds to operate safely.
But greed by its nature is seductive. Greed always seeks more, a little more, just a bit more, please. And greed can cause us to rationalize things that cannot and should not be rationalized.
(As one measure of its power, for example, greed has helped to transform a religious celebration of the birth of a poor, humble baby in a manger into a festival of consumerism and consumption. But I digress.)
As the economic crisis continues to play out, a lot of attention is being focused on the failure of legal and regulatory controls on greed. How can a $50 billion Ponzi scheme go undetected for years? How can rating agencies give their most-secure rating to high-risk bonds? How can Wall Street financiers collect hundred-million-dollar bonuses on profits that weren’t really profits in the first place?
The short answer is that people who know better begin to not know better. They convince themselves — or allow themselves to be convinced by others — that a little lighter touch on the reins will produce even more riches, that previous controls on greed are really unnecessary or counterproductive.
And in the end, legal and regulatory controls on greed will always be subject to manipulation. That’s because laws and rules are merely formalized expressions of the underlying and unwritten cultural, moral and ethical attitudes toward greed.
And it is those attitudes that have changed so profoundly in the past generation or so.
Left unchecked, greed overwhelms any sense of proportion, fairness or morality. We as a culture and as individuals came to believe that if greed is the engine that drives progress, any attempt to curtail greed thus curtails progress. We thought that since greed is good, unrestrained greed must be an unrestrained good.
What we’ve discovered — yet again — is that when properly harnessed, greed makes an effective, productive servant.
But it makes a terrible master.
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‘Wall Street, police thyself …’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
and we know how that turns out, now don’t we?
“WASHINGTON — Federal officials are bringing far fewer prosecutions as a result of fraudulent stock schemes than they did eight years ago, according to new data, raising further questions about whether the Bush administration has been too lax in policing Wall Street….
At a time when the financial news is being dominated by the $50 billion Ponzi scheme that Bernard L. Madoff is accused of running, federal officials are on pace this year to bring the fewest prosecutions for securities fraud since at least 1991, according to the data, compiled by a Syracuse University research group using Justice Department figures.
There were 133 prosecutions for securities fraud in the first 11 months of this fiscal year. That is down from 437 cases in 2000 and from a high of 513 cases in 2002, when Wall Street scandals from Enron to WorldCom led to a crackdown on corporate crime, the data showed.
At the S.E.C., agency investigations that led to Justice Department prosecutions for securities fraud dropped from 69 in 2000 to just 9 in 2007, a decline of 87 percent, the data showed.”
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How to win friends and influence….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.
Four blue pills. Viagra.
“Take one of these. You’ll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.
The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills.
For U.S. intelligence officials, this is how some crucial battles in Afghanistan are fought and won. While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country’s roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations.”
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Great, just great….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From the Associated Press:
Pakistan began moving thousands of troops away from the Afghan border toward India on Friday amid tensions following the Mumbai attacks, intelligence officials said.
The move represents a sharp escalation in the standoff between the nuclear-armed neighbors and will hurt Pakistan’s U.S.-backed campaign against al-Qaida and Taliban taking place near Afghanistan’s border.
Two intelligence officials said the army’s 14th Division was being redeployed to Kasur and Sialkot, close to the Indian border. They said some 20,000 troops were on the move. Earlier Friday, a security official said that all troop leave had been canceled.
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Eartha Kitt, RIP….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Merry Christmas everybody …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
.
T’is the day we call Christmas yet gloom fills the land, things haven’t been going exactly as planned.
The news pages are full of jobs disappearing, CEO profiteering, Illinois racketeering.
Detroit is collapsing, the Earth overheating, and our 401(k)s are taking a beating.
So I started to wonder what solace to offer to those who are stuck with naught in the coffer,
to those who are threatened with pending foreclosure, to those having trouble just keeping composure.
How might I cheer the sad and the cranky? (I can’t hand out billions; I’m no Ben Bernanke.)
At first I decided that since I’m a writer, trying to make this holiday brighter,
I should write something grand, something stirring and gallant. Well I tried and I tried, but I haven’t the talent
to summon the words that might sound inspired to the worried, the poor and the recently fired.
I’ll defer to Obama, or the Rev. Joe Lowery to encourage with rhetoric lofty and flowery.
Instead, I decided, until the inaugural to try to raise cheer with very bad doggerel.
’Cause the grim have to grin, the glum have to smile, if you rhyme about nonsense but do it in style.
I mean, really, you’d have to be utterly sour, like someone just tortured at the hands of Jack Bauer
not to laugh at this clown who thinks “Sarah Palin” rhymes — in a way — with the phrase “para-sailin’.
Me and my puns — you couldn’t resist us. If you cracked a smile, then … Merry Christmas.
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Thank you Santa
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I must have been a good boy this year.
All my work is done and presents wrapped; Caddyshack is on TV, and at 9 p.m. they’re re-showing that eternal holiday classic, Penn State v. Georgia in the 1983 Sugar Bowl.
And we all remember how that one turned out, right Dawg fans?
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The Christmas truce, 2008
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Christmas Eve in 1914, British and German troops faced each other on the Western front, dug into trenches within earshot of each other. The Germans started singing Christmas carols; the British responded with carols of their own. Soon they started emerging from their trenches, meeting in the “no man’s land” that separated them, exchanging small gifts and starting soccer games.
In that spirit, what’s your favorite Christmas carol, and whose version do you like the best? And just to make things interesting, what Christmas carol makes you cringe every time you hear it, bringing your inner Scrooge to life?
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Conservatives should spare us their pity
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Jacoby, a conservative columnist for the Boston Globe, asks a question that a lot of other folks on the right have asked as well:
“Can you hear the grumbling over in what Howard Dean used to call “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” over Barack Obama’s personnel decisions?
No Jeff, to tell you the truth, I can’t.
In its insistence that the left is angry at Obama, the Republican elephant has become a veritable Horton of Dr. Seuss fame, hearing tiny little sounds from tiny little people that no one else can hear. Yes, there have isolated squawks from isolated people about isolated decisions, but for the most part Obama’s supporters seem to be quite pleased with their man.
Obama ran on competence and moderation. He is now stressing competence and moderation as he puts his administration together. The only people who should be surprised are those who ran around like so many Chicken Littles, warning that Obama was a Muslim/Marxist/Black Panther in disguise.
You know, people like Jeff Jacoby.
During the campaign, he warned that Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright “raises doubts about Obama’s character and judgment, and about his fitness for the role of race-transcending healer.” He questioned whether Obama’s occasional brushes with Bill Ayers demonstrates “Obama’s idea of “respectable” and “mainstream” political thinking?” And if so, “doesn’t that tell us something about his judgment and standards?” He also wrote that Michelle Obama’s patriotism was fair game in the campaign.
Jacoby, in other words, has grounds to be surprised and probably a bit disappointed. But he and his fellow conservatives should stop trying to project their own emotions onto other people. It ain’t working.
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Obama camp claims clean hands
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama’s transition office has released its report documenting its contacts with Illinois Gov. Rodney Blagojevich regarding appointment of a successor to Obama’s Senate seat.
The report in effect states that the Obama camp did nothing wrong and was not aware of wrongdoing by others, including Blagojevich. That’s in part because, according to the report, Obama had decided from the beginning not to support any specific candidate to replace him. And since he wasn’t asking Blagojevich to name anybody in particular, the governor had no leverage to ask for or demand anything in return from Obama.
The report also states explicitly that Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had no improper discussions with Blagojevich or his staff. If the report is in any way misleading, incomplete or wrong, that fact will presumably become known thanks to FBI tapes and other evidence. But as it is, there’s not a hint of scandal in any of the behavior documented in the report.
The entire report is available here.
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Obama to use Lincoln’s Bible
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President-elect Barack Obama will take the presidential oath of office using the same Bible used by President-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861.
There’s a lot of historic resonance to that decision, including the obvious fact that Lincoln, like Obama, was a president from Illinois.
It was Lincoln who led the nation through the Civil War fought over slavery and Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in rebellious states. There is poetry in the fact that our first black president will be sworn into office using the same Bible used by Lincoln, and the pettiness of those who find fault with that decision won’t detract a bit from it.
But go ahead any way.
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The gentry and the Democratic Party
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Joel Kotkin, writing at Forbes.com, has a piece that rings uncomfortably true about the growing role of what he calls the gentry in Democratic politics, led by Barack Obama.
“… the core of the elite liberal constituency — academics, high-tech businesspeople and media figures — has been growing steadily in wealth and influence. By marrying this constituency to poor minority voters, gentry liberals have turned our core urban areas into a collection of electoral “ditto heads,” with so-called “progressives” winning as much as 70 or 80% of the vote in presidential elections.
This year’s thrilling primary battle between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama represented a clash of these two tendencies. Although Clinton herself enjoyed strong ties to some gentry liberals, she campaigned, particularly toward the end of the marathon, as Harry Truman in a bright pantsuit. Obama, for his part, sallied forth from a solid base of academics and well-educated professionals, as well as African Americans.”
In Kotkin’s view — and again, it’s hard to disagree — the personification of this gentry is Caroline Kennedy, now seeking appointment to the Senate based almost exclusively on her family name rather than hard work and accomplishment in the political arena.
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For the record, it’s not just Detroit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
TOKYO — Toyota Motor, the Japanese auto giant, said Monday that it expected its first operating loss in 70 years, underscoring how the economic crisis was spreading across the global auto industry.
On Monday, Toyota said it expected an operating loss in its auto operations of 150 billion yen, or $1.7 billion, for the fiscal year ending March 31. That would be the company’s first annual operating loss since 1938, a year after the company was founded, and a huge reversal from the 2.3 trillion yen, or $28 billion, in operating profit earned last year….
Worse, analysts said that they expected next year to be even more painful, amid forecasts that the global economy would continue to slide until at least the summer. This could cause a significant shakeout, driving smaller and weaker companies into the arms of a smaller number of bigger, richer players.
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The shoe-tosser as a gauge of Iraqi progress
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After that Iraqi journalist threw a couple of shoes at President Bush, more than a few commentators cited the protest as an encouraging sign of progress. As they pointed out, if Muntadhar al-Zaidi had tried something like that when Saddam Hussein was in power, the poor guy wouldn’t have survived the day.
That’s no doubt correct. In the bad old days, Zaidi probably would have been tortured, forced to sign a fake confession and then executed and dumped in the desert somewhere.
On the other hand, if Zaidi’s fate is indeed an accurate barometer of how much things have changed in Iraq, perhaps they haven’t changed as much as we might have hoped. Zaidi hasn’t been seen in public since his arrest, and a scheduled court date last week was canceled, raising fear among his family members.
One of his brothers was allowed to visit Zeidi in jail Sunday, and talked later with an AFP reporter.
“I met my brother for around an hour. He has been tortured while in detention for 36 hours continuously. He has been hit with iron rods and cables,” the brother said.
“There is very severe bleeding in his eye, and he has bruises on his feet and nose, and he was also tortured with electric shocks.
“He was forced to sign a statement confessing to receiving money from different groups and saying that he did not throw his shoes for the honour of Iraq. But Muntazer said I will not apologise for what I did — not now, not ever.”
According to AFP, the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki confirms receipt of the alleged confession.
“Muntazer al-Zaidi has expressed regret in a letter I received from him in which he revealed that an individual persuaded him to commit this action and that this person is well-known for beheading people,” it quoted Maliki as saying.
Iraqi officials deny claims of abuse, but his brother’s not buying it
“If I am lying, let the judge show Muntazer on television for everyone to see,” he said.
Frankly, the notion that Zaidi was put up to his act by terrorists who behead people … I ain’t buying it. And the fact that he allegedly “confessed” to such nonsense adds considerable weight to his brother’s allegations. All in all, such incidents don’t bode well for the long-term survival of Iraqi democracy.
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Cheney, Bush try to woo history
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Let history note that Dick Cheney smuggled a bit of truth into a very large package of lies last week.
And believe me, history will indeed take note.
As their second term comes to a close, Cheney and President Bush have been doing a series of interviews and public appearances offering their assessments of the past eight years.
In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, the vice president was asked whether he thought the invasion of Iraq would have been justified even if we had known beforehand that Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.
His answer? Yes, of course. We wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and we did. Whether he actually possessed stockpiles of WMD, as the administration claimed at the time, was pretty much beside the point, Cheney explained.
“He had a long reputation and record of having started two wars. Of having brutalized and killed hundreds of thousands of people, some of them with weapons of mass destruction in his own country. He had violated 16 National Security Council resolutions. He had established a relationship as a terror sponsoring state according to the State Department. He was making $25,000 payments to the families of suicide bombers,” Cheney said. “This was a bad actor and the country’s better off, the world’s better off with Saddam gone.”
Of course, that’s not the story we were hearing back in 2002 and 2003. Back then we heard talk of mushroom clouds rising over U.S. cities and unmanned aerial vehicles attacking our shores and huge stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that had to be eliminated because they posed a direct threat to our security. And the deceptions did not stop there.
The American people were lied to not just about the justification for the war but about its cost, its length and its impact, not just on Iraq but on our standing in the world. Cheney believes those deceptions were justified because in his view, it was all for our own good.
That same chilling arrogance was also apparent in Cheney’s response to a question about torture.
In his trademark deadpan style, the vice president endorsed the use of torture as necessary and productive while dismissing the possibility that any torture had actually occurred.
“On the question of so-called torture, we don’t do torture,” he said. “We never have. It’s not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross.
“The professionals involved in that program were very, very cautious, very careful —- wouldn’t do anything without making certain it was authorized and that it was legal.”
Accepting that explanation requires accepting the notion that words have no fixed meaning. What Bush and Cheney sanctioned wasn’t torture, they claim, because administration lawyers changed the definition of the word, deciding for example that “torture” required inflicting pain equivalent to death or major organ failure. It also wasn’t torture because they had “the requisite opinions in order” and everything was authorized.
In the months and years to come, the American people will learn that torture had been far more widespread than they have been led to believe.
They will also come to understand that the atrocities at Abu Ghraib —- a tragedy that Bush himself acknowledged has been our most serious setback in the war on terror —- was not some low-level aberration but the inevitable consequence of behavior and examples set at the very highest levels of the U.S. government.
I’m not ready to argue that Bush, Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and others ought to be prosecuted for approving torture and thus committing a felony under U.S. law. That’s the kind of decision that can only be made after a full, honest, unbiased airing of the facts. But I do think it’s time those facts were brought to light.
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G’night, y’all
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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A little common sense goes a long way
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Joe Nocera of the New York Times writes a great business column. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see him win the Pulitzer for commentary this year.
His latest piece — comparing India’s banking system to our own — is fascinating and all too telling:
“As the credit crisis has spread these past months, no Indian bank has come close to failing the way so many United States and European financial institutions have. None have required the kind of emergency injections of capital that Western banks have needed. None have had the huge write-downs that were par for the course in the West.”
Why have Indian banks remained immune while the U.S. system requires huge government bailouts? Go read Nocera.
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Here’s fresh thread …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
weave me something nice while I’m away.
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Americans losing that footloose feeling
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As a military brat, I moved a lot growing up — attending 13 different schools, K-12, and living in an even greater number of houses. As a journalist I’ve worked at papers in every corner of the country — the Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, Northwest (with an internship in Nebraska).
Although that’s a bit out of the ordinary, Americans as a whole have always been a footloose people. But apparently that’s changing.
From the New York Times
“Despite the nation’s reputation as a rootless society, only about one in 10 Americans moved in the last year — roughly half the proportion that changed residences as recently as four decades ago, census data show.
The monthly Current Population Survey found that fewer than 12 percent of Americans moved since 2007, a decline of nearly a full percentage point compared with the year before. In the 1950s and ’60s, the number of movers hovered near 20 percent.
The number has been declining steadily, and 12 percent is the lowest rate since the Census Bureau began counting people who move in 1940.
An analysis by the Pew Research Center attributes the decline to a number of factors, including the aging of the population (older people are less likely to change residences) and an increase in two-career couples….
Measuring the percentage of people born in a state who still live there, Texas ranked first, with nearly 76 percent, followed by North Carolina, Georgia, California and Wisconsin.
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The sad, instructive story of Ted Haggard
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It was major national news when evangelical leader Ted Haggard was outed as gay by a prostitute he had hired. It cost Haggard his job as leader of New Life Church in Colorado Springs; it cost him his friends; it cost him his reputation. He became a subject of national mockery.
The good news is that it didn’t cost him his family.
These days, Haggard and wife and children are living in Arizona, trying to make a go of it. His post-outing life is chronicled in a documentary due to air in January on HBO, and according to stories in the Colorado Springs Gazette (here and here), the film depicts Haggard as still struggling, still troubled.
“As cameras follow him on a job interview, golfing, doing his laundry, moving into a house, selling insurance and dining in a restaurant, Haggard is extremely forthcoming.
He rattles on about his same-sex attraction, bitterness toward New Life, revised view of the Bible (he relates more to the stories of strife and sorrow) and difficulty in his new career as an insurance salesman.
Throughout the film, he swings from self-loathing to self-aggrandizement to self-pity, yet only once does he seem to express real emotion. That occurs as he drives down a lonely highway to make stops to sell insurance. Close to tearing up, the 52-year-old former pastor says, ”At this stage of my life, I am a loser.””
The portrait painted of Haggard is not of a man who has “chosen” to be gay, as some still like to describe it. It is not a “lifestyle” for Haggard; it is part of who he is. As a consequence, he has been cast out into the wilderness by those who profess love and community, and he is bitter about it. (It is important to note that in his earlier life, Haggard himself had participated in spreading the homophobia he now finds aimed in his direction.)
“The church has said go to hell,” Haggard says in the documentary. “The church chose not to forgive me.”
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A little Friday evening traveling music….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Dick Cheney thinks he’s a human Guantanamo - U.S. laws don’t apply there
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dick Cheney is one piece of work.
Federal law requires Cheney to turn over all official records to the National Archive as he leaves office.
Cheney says nope, ain’t gonna do it and you can’t make me.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Dick Cheney’s lawyers are asserting that the vice president alone has the authority to determine which records, if any, from his tenure will be handed over to the National Archives when he leaves office in January.
That claim is in federal court documents asking that a lawsuit over the records be dismissed. Cheney leaves office Jan. 20, potentially taking with him millions of records that might otherwise become public record.
“The vice president alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records, how his records will be created, maintained, managed and disposed, and are all actions that are committed to his discretion by law,” according to a court filing by Cheney’s office with the U.S. District Court on Dec. 8.
The 1978 Presidential Records Act requires all presidential and vice presidential records to be transferred to the National Archives immediately upon the end of the president’s last term of office and gives the archivist responsibility to preserve and control access to presidential records. The law ended the tradition of private ownership of presidential papers, opening White House records to the public and historians.
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Bush plays Santa for Detroit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Earlier this month, Senate Republicans summoned enough votes to block emergency loans sought by U.S. automakers. They saw the vote as a chance to take a swing at the UAW and organized labor, and they took it, economic consequences be damned.
But their fellow Republican, George Bush, wasn’t quite so willing to see the auto industry collapse as he left the White House for Texas.
“Under ordinary circumstances, I would say (bankruptcy) is the price failed companies must pay,” Bush said today. “These are not ordinary circumstances… Allowing the U.S. auto industry to collapse is not a responsible course.”
At first blush, the deal looks pretty stringent. In return for emergency loans of up to $17.4 billion, “the companies will have to restructure their wage and benefit agreements so that by the end of 2009 they are competitive with foreign automakers that have plants in the U.S. In addition, by March 31 of this year the companies will have to show they are financially ‘viable’ and able to repay the government,” reports the Washington Post.
Merry Christmas, Detroit.
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‘Zuzu’s petals!’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“It’s a Wonderful Life,” with its Depression-era setting and its tale of greedy, manipulative bankers run amok and people struggling to keep their homes, will take on some added resonance in this 2008 holiday season. Aspects of the movie overlooked in better times come into sharper focus.
For example, Wendell Jamieson of the New York Times has a wonderful essay this morning on the true darkness underlying the Capra masterpiece (and don’t worry, he loves the movie.)
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Obama and the Rev. Rick Warren
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So Barack Obama asks the Rev. Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation, and controversy ensues.
On one hand, the outrage is understandable. The gay community has every right to feel offended and to have expected better from Obama, especially given that Warren has spouted some real nonsense about gay marriage and California’s Proposition 8. If you don’t think gay Americans should be able to marry, say so. But don’t fabricate some fantasy about gay marriage being a violation of your free speech or the freedom of religion, as Warren did.
On the other hand, I get the sense that Obama really does intend to try something new. He said as much in his response to the controversy, explaining “that dialogue, I think, is part of what my campaign’s been all about: That we’re not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere when we — where we can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.”
While that sounds all touchy-feely and kumbaya-ish, it may disguise some hard-headed political calculation.
In many ways, the Republican Party of the last 20 years has been a collection of unrelated interest groups joined in an unholy alliance of necessity. In effect, the gay bashers joined forces with the gun advocates and the low-taxers and the neocons and the free traders and the anti-enviros, and they all agreed to support each other’s issues in lockstep. (That’s true of all political parties, by the way — we’re just talking a difference of degree here).
A lot of the GOP success in the past 20 years — and a lot of the Democrats’ frustration — can be explained by how tightly that alliance has held together. Obama may see a shot at breaking it apart. If he disagrees with Warren on gay rights but they share common ground on global warming or health care, he’ll take Warren’s help to accomplish what they can on those issues.
Conversely, when the topic turns to gay rights, Obama can try to recruit allies in the corporate sector who opposed him on money issues. It’s a very old maxim, divide and conquer. It’s coalition-breaking in the guise of coalition-building.
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Why is Bernie Madoff still a free man?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’m sure the lawyers out there can defend the decision in legal terms, but as a layman I’m appalled that Bernie Madoff, the admitted mastermind of a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that bankrupted charities and left old ladies destitute, is still walking around Manhattan as a free man, living in his fine luxury apartment and otherwise enjoying his ill-gotten gains.
Originally, federal prosecutors agreed to let Madoff stay free only if he got four people to co-sign his bond. But after Madoff failed to meet that condition — not surprisingly, he couldn’t find four rich friends to vouch for him — authorities relaxed the conditions to let him go home.
They should have told him “too bad for you” and ushered him to a prison cell.
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Life-and-death questions dog health-care debate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He’s just a dog, you tell yourself. Yet somehow, that utterly rational thought doesn’t fend off the choking sensation in your throat as the vet delivers the news.
Just a dog?
He’s just the dog who was young and playful back when your kids were young and playful, a dog who grew up as the family grew up, and who, in the last few years, began to turn gray just as you have.
He’s just a dog who has always looked more fierce than he really is, which is just what you want in a family pet. He’s just a dog who insists on climbing upstairs every night in pain to sleep at the foot of your bed, loyal even in his arthritic old age.
Just a dog? No, no way.
But in the end, yes.
“We’re pretty sure Jackie has lymphoma —- cancer of the blood,” the vet says. “We’ll run some tests, but that’s how it’s looking.”
A few days later, when the diagnosis is confirmed, you start asking questions: How long does he have, is he in pain, what’s the treatment?
He’s not in pain, the vet says, but left untreated the disease could take him in a matter of weeks. Steroids could improve the situation for a little while, but with “canine chemotherapy” we could probably give Jackie another six to nine months.
So you ask the next question —- “How much would canine chemotherapy cost?” —- even though you know the answer will be “too much.”
And sure enough. It’ll cost up to $2,000, plus another $500 or so for X-rays and more tests. That’s a fraction of what similar treatment would cost for a human being, but for a 12-year-old dog, it’s still too much. So you decline. And right there, with that cold-blooded calculation, is where the free market approach to medical care starts to fall apart.
With a dog’s life at stake, you can think through the problem in terms of cost and benefit. With a human being, it would be inconceivable. And that’s not because an insurance company or other third party would pay most of the bill.
No, you don’t ask the price because with a human life at stake, it wouldn’t matter. You already know that whatever the cost, you’re going to do everything possible to pay it.
And in economic terms, that’s the problem. In theory, a willing seller and willing buyer will work out a fair price, with the potential buyer free to walk away if no deal can be struck. But when you combine a willing seller with a desperate, maybe pain-wracked or hope-starved buyer, the market warps and theory fails. The buyer is in no position to say no, and as a result can’t demand a lower price.
There’s another difference as well. Because of Jackie’s status as “just a dog,” we’ll be able to intervene to make sure he does not suffer needlessly in the days ahead. It’s an assurance that we cannot offer each other as human beings —- the same profound respect for human life that ensures we do not deny medical care to loved ones also makes it taboo to accelerate the process of death.
That taboo is costly. According to studies, an estimated 30 to 50 percent of all health care costs are incurred in a patient’s last six months of life. From a strict cost-benefit analysis, that is often money poorly spent because the odds of success are low. But it’s a price we correctly choose to pay to protect the dignity of human life.
Sometimes, though, the lines between right and wrong aren’t drawn so easily. A few years ago, Congress rushed into emergency session to try to ensure that artificial life supports weren’t removed from Terri Schiavo, a brain-dead Florida woman who had been comatose for years. To those who wanted to keep Schiavo alive, the case was about respect for life, about human dignity. To those who wanted to let her die, the case was about the very same thing.
We’re also still divided about whether health care ought to be a basic human right in this country. Personally, I think the case is settled. Once you accept the innate dignity of human life, then morally you cannot decide to provide basic care to some but deny it to others on grounds of cost.
You can’t, in other words, apply the same value to a human being as to a pet.
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U.S. still avoiding the gas pump
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This is really remarkable. It was a surprise when gasoline consumption began to fall so sharply back when prices were high, but the fact it has continued to plummet with prices so much lower reflects profound changes in the economy and in travel patterns.
“NEW YORK - Retail gasoline demand in the world’s largest consuming nation fell 2.5 percent in the week ended December 12 even as prices at the pumps dropped more than a dime, according to a MasterCard SpendingPulse report released Tuesday.
Gasoline demand averaged 9.098 million barrels per day during the week, down 2.5 percent from the previous week and down 5.4 percent from the same week a year ago, according to the weekly report.
The decline in consumption came even as pump prices fell 11 cents to average $1.67 a gallon, according to the report.
U.S. fuel demand has declined in recent months despite falling energy prices as a financial crisis stemming from the soured housing market squeezed consumer spending and confidence.”
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Smoke rising from New Mexico
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From the Associated Press:
“ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A federal grand jury is investigating how a California firm that contributed to the political activities of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the nominee to head the Commerce Department, won a lucrative government contract.
A person familiar with the proceedings told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the panel is looking into possible “pay-to-play” dealings between CDR Financial Products and someone in a position to push the contract through with the state of New Mexico. The person asked not to be named because the proceedings are secret.
The proceedings follow an FBI probe in which investigators sought documents from the New Mexico Finance Authority. Investigators also interviewed former and current authority officials about New Mexico’s 2004 contract with CDR for the $1.6 billion transportation program.
CDR was paid a total of $1.48 million in 2004 and 2005 for its work, according to documents provided by the state.
Asked whether the probe focused only on CDR’s actions in securing or executing the contract, the person with knowledge of the investigation said, “It is more than that.”
CDR and its CEO, David Rubin, have contributed at least $110,000 to three political committees formed by Richardson, according to an AP review of campaign finance records.
The largest donation, $75,000, was made by CDR in June 2004 - a couple of months after the transportation financing arrangement won state approval - to a political committee that Richardson established before the Democratic National Convention that year.”
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Maybe Franken really IS good enough!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Things were looking a little dire for Al Franken in his race for a Minnesota Senate seat, but now that a string of recent events and decisions have swung his way, his prospects have brightened considerably. Either way, the outcome looks destined to be decided by fewer than 100 votes.
As Minnesota election officials go through more than 1,000 challenged ballots, incumbent Norm Coleman has seen his margin shrink. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports on a rather novel approach, giving its readers access to the ballots and seeking “the wisdom of the crowd” in determining their validity.
According to their story:
“The Star Tribune has performed its own analysis of the challenged ballots by relying on a virtual “canvassing board” of more than 26,000 readers who examined at least some of them. There appeared to be widespread consensus that Franken won slightly more disputes than Coleman, enough to theoretically erase the incumbent’s narrow lead by late Monday.
The Star Tribune analysis relies on readers who chose to respond to its Ballot Challenge on StarTribune.com, and there is no assurance that partisans didn’t distort the results. But large numbers of respondents from around the nation participated, and each of 15 respondents who viewed the largest number of disputed ballots gave Franken the edge by 3 to 5 percentage points. There was a broader consensus as well. Only 200 of the 6,500 ballots failed to draw a consensus from at least 75 percent of reviewers. Among the others, reviewers decided slightly more in favor of Franken.”
Of course, the official vote is all that counts. But the canvassing board seems to be reaching conclusions similar to that of Star Tribune readers.
“U.S. Senator Al Franken” — words to brighten Bill O’Reilly’s day, huh?
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Gingrich blows whistle on partisanship?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When the hyperpartisan Newt Gingrich says you’ve gone too far, you’ve really gone too far.
Gingrich has written a letter to the Republican National Committee condemning an RNC attack ad that tries to link Barack Obama to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Gingrich insists the ad be pulled.
“I was saddened to learn that at a time of national trial, when a president-elect is preparing to take office in the midst of the worst financial crisis in over 70 years, that the Republican National Committee is engaged in the sort of negative attack politics that the voters rejected in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles,” Gingrich writes.
Gingrich calls the ad a “destructive distraction,” advising that “in a time when America is facing real challenges, Republicans should be working to help the incoming president succeed in meeting them, regardless of his party.”
“This ad is a terrible signal to be sending about both the goals of the Republican Party in the midst of the nation’s troubled economic times and about whether we have actually learned anything from the defeats of 2006 and 2008,” the former speaker concludes. “The RNC should pull the ad down immediately.”
I’ve covered Gingrich long enough to know that he is not a statesman, although he does occasionally try to play one on TV. He can, however, be a very astute political analyst, particularly when his own interests are not directly involved. Unlike the tone-deaf RNC, he understands that a campaign-style attack ad, based on flimsy or no evidence, launched against a president-elect with a 76 percent approval rating at a time when the country badly wants and needs that president-elect to succeed … well, it’s political suicide.
Most likely, the attack ad represents an effort by RNC Chairman Mike Duncan to curry favor with the party’s base and thus win re-election to his post. And if by appealing to the base he happens to alienate everybody else in America, well, that’s well within the GOP tradition.
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The future of newspapers ….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Posted without comment, from a piece in The New Yorker by James Surowiecki:
“The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: If newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.
Does that mean newspapers are doomed? Not necessarily. There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby the deep-pocketed patron. It’s even possible that a few papers will be able to earn enough money online to make the traditional ad-supported strategy work.
But it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce. For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime — intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on — and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.”
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Life in Bernie Madoff’s economy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Time magazine has a short first-person account by someone who lost everything to Bernie Madoff and his $50 billion investment scam. Here’s how the story starts:
“The call came at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11. I had been waiting for it for five years. When the call finally arrived, it was my wife Sarah who answered. What the person said on the other end of the phone was both simple and devastating: we were financially wiped out.”
The most interesting thing about the piece, as reflected in the lead paragraph, is the writer’s admission that he had long sensed there was something amiss, that the money was coming too easily to last.
“I think everyone knew the call would come one day,” he writes. “We all hoped, but we knew deep down it was too good to be true, right?”
I think a lot of Americans have had that nagging thought in recent years, not about Madoff but about the economy in general. On the surface you saw the excesses, the easy money and financial froth, and beneath it you saw the negative savings rates, the flow of wealth and jobs outside the country, and you wondered how long the disconnect could last.
But as the guy says, “We all hoped, but we knew deep down it was too good to be true, right?”
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Caroline Kennedy wants to be a senator
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“ALBANY — Caroline Kennedy, the deeply private daughter of America’s most storied political dynasty, will seek the United States Senate seat in New York being vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Ms. Kennedy ended weeks of silence with a series of rapid-fire phone calls to the state’s leading political figures, including Gov. David A. Paterson, in which she emphatically and enthusiastically declared herself interested in the seat, according to several people who received the calls.
The governor, who has sole authority to fill the Senate vacancy, insisted that he had not yet chosen a successor to Mrs. Clinton and said that Monday’s conversation with Ms. Kennedy was the first he had had with her since an initial discussion almost two weeks ago.
But several people who have counseled the governor on the pending vacancy said that Ms. Kennedy has emerged as a clear front-runner, if she proves able to withstand the intense scrutiny and criticism that her decision to seek the seat is likely to provoke.
Still, some have questioned whether Ms. Kennedy is qualified for the job.”
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Brian Nichols and the death penalty
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Fulton County DA Paul Howard knew years ago that insisting on the death penalty in the Brian Nichols case would be risky given the historic reluctance of Fulton jurors to impose death. He chose to go ahead anyway, investing millions of taxpaying dollars in effort to put Nichols on Death Row.
Now that the gamble has failed, with three of 12 jurors refusing to vote for death, Howard is complaining that he didn’t get a fair trial. That’s baloney. As an officer of the court, Howard has a duty to accept and respect the jury’s verdict, even if he disagrees with it. He knew, or should have known, that the odds were against him to begin with.
The Nichols sentence is also inspiring some in the state Legislature to try to lower the death standard from a unanimous jury vote to a 10-2 vote. That’s a very bad idea. According to the Innocence Project, more than 200 people have been exonerated after their conviction by DNA evidence in the last 20 years; 17 of those freed had served time on Death Row.
How many more innocent people are still on Death Row today who, because of the nature of the case against them, can’t be freed by DNA? Statistically speaking, they are almost certain to exist. And it is just as certain that innocent people have been wrongly executed.
Nichols’ guilt was never in question. But lowering the threshhold to execution from unanimous vote to super-majority vote raises the odds that society will kill innocent people. Is the greater risk of taking innocent life justified by a greater chance that killers such as Nichols will die?
I don’t see how you can make that rational argument.
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Shoe-tosser hailed as Arab hero
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
BAGHDAD — Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets Monday to demand the release of a reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush, as Arabs across many parts of the Middle East hailed the journalist as a hero and praised his insult as a proper send-off to the unpopular U.S. president….
Journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi, who was kidnapped by militants last year, was being held by Iraqi security Monday and interrogated about whether anybody paid him to throw his shoes at Bush during a press conference the previous day in Baghdad, said an Iraqi official.
He was also being tested for alcohol and drugs, and his shoes were being held as evidence, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
“Al-Zeidi is the man,” said 42-year-old Jordanian businessman Samer Tabalat. “He did what Arab leaders failed to do.”
Hoping to capitalize on this sentiment, al-Zeidi’s TV station, Al-Baghdadia, repeatedly aired pleas to release the reporter Monday, while showing footage of explosions and playing background music that denounced the U.S. in Iraq.
Al-Jazeera television interviewed Saddam’s former chief lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi, who offered to defend al-Zeidi, calling him a “hero.”
In Baghdad’s Shiite slum of Sadr City, thousands of supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr burned American flags to protest against Bush and called for the release of al-Zeidi.
“Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head,” the protesters chanted in unison.
In Najaf, a Shiite holy city, some protesters threw their shoes at an American patrol as it passed by. Witnesses said the American troops did not respond and continued on their patrol.
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Transportation debate not just about Detroit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As part of the price for a bailout of Detroit, Barack Obama has insisted that automakers commit to producing fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel vehicles.
Such change has long been resisted by U.S. automakers, but it is an absolute necessity. It would not only make the automakers more competitive in the long run, it would in time make our nation less vulnerable to foreign oil suppliers, reduce the wealth we ship overseas to buy oil and also cut emissions of greenhouse gases.
But such changes by Detroit, important as they are, would be marginal compared to the transformation that government itself is now in a position to inspire.
As part of his economic recovery plan, Obama has promised a massive re-investment in our nation’s basic infrastructure. The goal is twofold: to put people back to work in the short term; and in the long-term build a foundation for a new prosperity once the economy rebounds, as it will.
In a speech earlier this month, Obama called his plan “the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s.”
“We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule —- use it or lose it,” he said. “If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges … they’ll lose the money.”
Note the model cited by Obama: the massive investment in the interstate highway system back in the Eisenhower era. In ways that could not have been imagined at the time, that decision helped to mold the way the country grew and Americans lived. It even influenced the product line of the U.S. auto industry, as Detroit designed its cars for an era of limitless asphalt and limitless gasoline.
That arrangement served the nation well for almost two generations, but with asphalt and gasoline now at a premium, that era, that America, is now passing. And for some, that change has been hard to accept.
Detroit, for example, could not bring itself to acknowledge that changing demographics, energy prices and lifestyles had changed the auto market. And because of that refusal to adapt, its market share began to decline. As recently as 2000, General Motors still sold 30 percent of vehicles sold in the United States; this year, that number fell to 22 percent and is certain to decline further.
The lure of the open highway also drove housing patterns, encouraging the spread of suburbs far from the jobs that sustained them and increasing our addiction to oil. But that too is now changing.
Metro Atlanta offers a great example. In the current housing crisis, the impact here is felt most severely in the low-income areas where people were already living close to the edge, and in the exurban areas that require long, congested commutes.
Today, land in many outer suburbs sits empty, stripped of trees and waiting for subdivisions that may not be built for decades, if ever. A lot of that property is being reclaimed by banks as collateral for failed development loans, but in time it may be reclaimed by nature as well.
Housing has been to metro Atlanta what automaking has been to Detroit, the prime industry driving the regional economy. And like Detroit, the product we’ve been putting out for the past two or three decades may no longer be responsive to market demand. A 5,000-square-foot home on a two-acre lot has become the lumber-and-stucco version of an SUV, popular with some but a niche product.
The Obama transition team has not put a dollar figure on its proposed infrastructure package, but estimates suggest it could be as high as $1 trillion. The infrastructure built with that enormous sum of money will set development and lifestyle patterns for two generations, just as the interstates did.
Inevitably, roads and bridges must be part of that investment.
But if Obama and Congress are serious about reducing our dependence on foreign oil and making this country more fuel efficient, a significant portion of that investment must also be put into projects such as transit and rail lines.
Otherwise, any reform they squeeze out of Detroit will be almost meaningless.
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No sweet-tea drinkers in Obama Cabinet
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Politico takes note of the fact that the diverse Cabinet that Barack Obama is putting together has no representative from the land where sweet magnolias blossom around everybody’s door. (LINK HAS BEEN FIXED)
And note who they turn to as quotable expert:
“Barack Obama is 15 picks into his Cabinet — he announced New Yorker Shaun Donovan as his Housing and Urban Development head on Saturday—but has yet to name one who hails from the South….”
Others acknowledge, however, that the paucity of Democrats in Obama’s cabinet reflects the declining political power of the red-leaning Southern states and the weakening bench of the blue team there.
“Who comes to mind immediately?” asked Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia. “No one, really.”
“The leading politicians in the South at least for the last generation have been active as Republicans,” Bullock added. “You just don’t have Democrats that come to mind as the go-to person or the expert. It highlights the thinness of the Democratic bench in the South… The skill set is so depleted.”
COMMENTING CLOSED ON THIS ITEM
Bush assaulted by shoes in Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’ll be interesting to see what if anything happens to the Iraqi who threw two shoes at President Bush — apparently the Arabic equivalent of giving him the finger, plus some — during the president’s “surprise” visit to Iraq.
On one hand, that’s got to be a concern and embarrassment for Bush’s security people — you don’t want the president to have to be ducking shoe leather. But what would you do to prevent it? Make every Iraqi go barefoot in his presence?
And while you have to expect that the shoe-tosser will become a hero in many eyes in the Arab world, I doubt Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki was exactly happy about it. At last report the shoe-tosser was being dragged off screaming by security.
So what do you think? Will he be seen again anytime soon?
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Palin’s home church torched
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I don’t know what to make of this, other than to say that if it had anything to do with the campaign, the person who did it is one sick dude.
Of course, if it had nothing to do with the campaign, the person who did it is still one sick dude.
from the AP:
“ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Gov. Sarah Palin’s home church was badly damaged by arson, leading the governor to apologize if the fire was connected to “undeserved negative attention” from her failed campaign as the Republican vice presidential nominee.
Damage to the Wasilla Bible Church was estimated at $1 million, authorities said Saturday. No one was injured in the fire, which was set Friday night while a handful of people, including two children, were inside, according to Central Mat-Su Fire Chief James Steele.
He said the blaze was being investigated as an arson but didn’t know of any recent threats to the church. Authorities didn’t know whether Palin’s connection to the church was relevant to the fire, Steele said.
Palin, who was not at the church at the time of the fire, stopped by Saturday. Her spokesman, Bill McAllister, said in a statement that Palin told an assistant pastor she was sorry if the fire was connected to the “undeserved negative attention” the church has received since she became the vice presidential candidate Aug. 29.
“Whatever the motives of the arsonist, the governor has faith in the scriptural passage that what was intended for evil will in some way be used for good,” McAllister said.”
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When greed overcomes any sense of shame, Part MCMXVII….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
… you get something like this:
There’s a delicious and telling morsel buried in the New York Times’ account of the settlement reached at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago. That’s the place where workers occupied the shutdown plant until they were paid the severance and vacation pay to which they were legally entitled.
It is an act so brazen as to almost defy belief, and yet it epitomizes a mindset that has become all too familiar:
“At the last minute of negotiations, according to Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois, who helped moderate talks to resolve the standoff, and union officials, Republic’s chief executive, Richard Gillman, demanded that any new bank loan to help the employees also cover the lease of several of his cars — a 2007 BMW 350xi and a 2002 Mercedes S500 are among those registered to company addresses — as well as eight weeks of his salary, at $225,000 a year.
The demand held up the settlement, which was reached only after Mr. Gillman agreed to back down. (Mr. Gillman said Friday that he had sought the money to offset a large bonus in 2007 that he had chosen not to accept.)
….Mr. Gillman’s demands, however, became a major sticking point. “I’m not going to describe to you the words that were used when those issues were brought up,” Mr. Gutierrez said.
Eventually, the parties agreed that the workers would be the only ones to benefit. They would be paid severance and for vacation, and receive two months’ health coverage. The company owners also agreed to come up with $114,000 to cover the payroll for their last week of work.”
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$50,000,000,000 — poof, it’s gone
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A lot of the numbers being thrown about in this financial crisis are just mind-boggling. For example, $700 billion. Where exactly did all that money come from? And where exactly is it going? It’s hard to wrap your head around it.
Even that gargantuan sum is dwarfed by the $2 trillion that the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Again, where does that kind of money come from? Apparently it’s just invented out of thin air. It exists because the Fed says it exists.
And the Fed refuses to reveal where it’s gone. Somebody’s got it, but they won’t say who.
Now there’s Bernie Madoff, the New York financier and former NASDAQ chairman who has confessed to what is allegedly a one-man, $50 billion investment fraud.
$50 billion? Excuse me, let me rephrase that:
$50 BILLION?
As in a five followed by 10 — count ‘em, 10 — zeros? I mean, your telephone number has fewer digits than that. It’s longer than your Social Security number.
“While Mr. Madoff is facing federal criminal charges, accused by federal prosecutors of operating a vast $50 billion Ponzi scheme, many of his clients are facing an abrupt reversal of fortune that is the stuff of nightmares.
“There are people who were very, very well off a few days ago who are now virtually destitute,” said Brad Friedman, a lawyer with the Milberg firm in Manhattan. “They have nothing left but their apartments or homes — which they are going to have to sell to get money to live on.”
Madoff has been running the scheme for years, probably for decades. And I suspect he’d still be running it successfully today if this economic collapse hadn’t happened along to expose him.
But $50 billion, all gone? Where does that kind of money go?
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Bush kneecaps GOP senators
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So Republican senators buck up enough courage to filibuster the Detroit bailout package, refusing to let it come up for a vote and thus killing it. In the process, they pretty much alienate a good chunk of the industrial Midwest, further damaging the party’s standing in that region.
After which, the Republican White House says too bad, we’re going to give Detroit the money anyway by dipping into the $700 billion TARP fund.
As White House press secretary Dana Perino put it, “a precipitous collapse of this industry would have a severe impact on our economy, and it would be irresponsible to further weaken and destabilize our economy at this time.”
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that two things have happened here:
— The Bush White House just royally *&8793ed the Senate Republicans.
— And just to make sure the message got through, it basically called the GOP senators irresponsible.
Have I got that right?
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This doesn’t look so good for Candidate #5
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“As Gov. Rod Blagojevich was trying to pick Illinois’ next U.S. senator, businessmen with ties to both the governor and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. discussed raising at least $1 million for Blagojevich’s campaign as a way to encourage him to pick Jackson for the job, the Tribune has learned.
Blagojevich made an appearance at an Oct. 31 luncheon meeting at the India House restaurant in Schaumburg sponsored by Oak Brook businessman Raghuveer Nayak, a major Blagojevich supporter who also has fundraising and business ties to the Jackson family, according to several attendees and public records.
Two businessmen who attended the meeting and spoke to the Tribune on the condition of anonymity said that Nayak and Blagojevich aide Rajinder Bedi privately told many of the more than two dozen attendees the fundraising effort was aimed at supporting Jackson’s bid for the Senate.
Among the attendees was a Blagojevich fundraiser already under scrutiny by federal investigators, Joliet pharmacist Harish Bhatt.”
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Bob Gates vs. Donald Rumsfeld? No contest
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When Robert Gates was named to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense right after the ‘06 elections, the officer corps quietly but sincerely celebrated.
If you want to know why, and if you want to know why Barack Obama has decided to keep Gates at the Pentagon, read the secretary’s essay in the current edition of Foreign Affairs. The contrast with Rumsfeld could not be more stark.
Among the highlights:
“I have learned many things in my 42 years of service in the national security area. Two of the most important are an appreciation of limits and a sense of humility…. We should be modest about what military force can accomplish and what technology can accomplish.”
“We should look askance at idealistic, triumphalist or ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to transcend the immutable priniciples and ugly realities of war, that imagine it is possible to cow, shock or awe an enemy into submission instead of tracking enemies down hilltop to hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.”
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Obama the transformer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charles Krauthammer sees what I’ve been seeing too — Barack Obama does not intend to be a caretaker president. No, quite the contrary:
“With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president — who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in — to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.
….He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.”
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Health care as an economic issue
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Another half million Americans are freshly out of work, joining the roughly 10 million that had already been pushed into unemployment. A lot of them are freshly out of health insurance as well.
Health-care costs for employees and retirees are also part of the reason that U.S. industry in general and automakers in particular have a hard time competing with overseas industry.
Given all that, President-elect Obama is apparently intent on pushing major health-care reform, in part as an economic issue. It makes a lot of sense. But you also get the sense that Obama is trying to do an awful lot of very big things in a very short timespan.
WASHINGTON — Calling an overhaul of the health care system a basic element of his administration’s economic recovery programs, President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday presented former Senator Tom Daschle as his choice to become secretary of health and human services and to lead efforts to secure “affordable, accessible health care for every single American.”
Mr. Obama, noting that more than 45 million people have no health insurance, said, “The runaway cost of health care is punishing families and businesses across the country.”
A major health care initiative “has to be intimately woven into our overall economic recovery plan,” Mr. Obama said, adding: “It’s not something that we can put off because we are in an emergency. This is part of the emergency.”
Mr. Daschle echoed that sense of urgency. “Our growing costs are unsustainable,” he said, “and the plight of the uninsured is unconscionable.”
Mr. Daschle brings a kind of moral passion to the campaign for universal coverage. Health care, he says, is rationed on “the worst possible criteria: one’s ability to pay or one’s health condition.”
At the heart of the health care system, Mr. Daschle wants to establish a Federal Health Board, an independent entity like the Federal Reserve. The board would make coverage decisions for federal health programs. It would, he says, “reduce or deny payment for new drugs and procedures that aren’t as effective as current ones.”
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Birthers, speak up now or forever hold your piece
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Patrick Ruffini, a Republican media and Internet strategist (and parttime blogger) has this to say to the birthers:
“The Obama citizenship smear hasn’t gained traction in mainstream conservative circles, but this is exactly the kind of stunt the left will use to tar all conservatives and silence legitimate criticism of Obama and his policies. We need to be vociferously calling out people who traffic in this nonsense.
Scandal stories didn’t get much traction during the campaign, so if we are smart, I am hopeful we won’t see a repeat of the ’90s opposition to Clinton, which was primarily scandal driven, and tarnished the Republican brand so that only Bush’s big-spending conservatism could save it. Which is got us in the pickle we are in today.”
Anybody know anybody who needs to get that message?
This will be the last thread on which birther nonsense can be posted. From here on out, it will be deleted.
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Obama pledges complete account of Blagojevich contacts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The president-elect’s statement this morning on the Blagojevich indictment:
“Let me say that I was as appalled as anyone by the revelations earlier this week. I have never spoken with the governor on this subject. And I am quite confident that no representatives of mine would have had any part in any deals related to this seat. I think the materials released by the U.S. attorney reflect that. I have asked my team to gather the facts of any contacts with the governor’s staff about this vacancy so we can share them with you. And we will do that in the next few days.”
That’s exactly what he ought to do. Document every contact, every conversation and email, and ensure that the account is totally complete.
A lot of folks on the right are raising questions, which is fine. Those questions are legitimate and deserve answers, which Obama has now pledged to provide. However, it is not legitimate to portray the existence of questions as some kind of evidence of corruption. That is a foolish leap of logic.
There is no evidence of scandal or corruption regarding Obama in this case; to the contrary, as Obama points out in his statement, all evidence so far points the other way. I’d be very surprised if that changes.
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Privatizing government can backfire
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For reasons that aren’t quite clear, Georgia may soon try to completely privatize its troubled mental-health system. According to Commissioner B.J. Walker of the Department of Human Resources, privatization offers “another way of looking at things” that could stimulate “real, positive change in mental health.”
There’s no doubt change is needed. Investigations by the Journal-Constitution have concluded that abuse, neglect and shoddy medical care contributed to the deaths of 136 patients within the state system from 2002 through 2007, and the U.S. Justice Department has warned Georgia officials that conditions are so bad that they violate patients’ civil and constitutional rights.
According to documents prepared by Walker’s staff, the state is proposing to hire private contractors to build and operate new hospitals to replace dilapidated state-owned facilities, some of which are more than a century old. The documents claim the step is justified because Georgia lacks the money to build new state hospitals on its own.
But think through the logic, or rather illogic, of that: If a private company builds new facilities on the state’s behalf, where exactly would the company get that money? Inevitably, the cost of those new facilities would still be borne by taxpayers, even if the money is hidden in private contracts.
In theory, of course, the profit motive will drive contractors to cut costs as much as possible, making operations more efficient. But that isn’t the problem here in Georgia. As AJC stories have documented, the deaths of so many patients in the state system can be attributed to insufficient and poorly trained staff, and to the fact that Georgia ranks near the bottom in per-capita spending on mental-health care.
Cost-cutting driven by privatization —- with no increase planned in funding —- is certain to compound rather than cure the problem.
A similar blind faith in the power of privatization is now driving transportation policy as well. With gasoline tax revenues falling well short of what is needed to reinvest in infrastructure, the latest fad is to raise revenue by allowing private companies to build toll roads or convert existing lanes to toll lanes.
In effect, that creates the same kind of shell game driving privatization of mental-health care. The public would still foot the bill, but it would do so through tolls paid to private companies instead of through taxes.
That way, politicians get to claim they’re holding the line on taxes and private companies get lucrative contracts. The only people who lose are the public.
And while tolls do have their place, in many cases the loss to the public is significant. In a survey of toll projects around the country, the Washington State Department of Transportation found that operators spend an average of 22 cents in overhead —- toll collectors, equipment, etc. —- just to collect a dollar in revenue. Raising revenue through the gas tax, by comparison, costs less than a penny on the dollar in overhead, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration.
Privatization also creates a whole new means for politicians to trade contracts for campaign contributions and other favors, as the latest “pay to play” scandal in Illinois demonstrates. Among his many other alleged sins, Gov. Rod Blagojevich is on tape demanding that highway contractors deliver campaign contributions of at least $500,000 in return for his approval of a $1.8 billion private tollway project.
In the popular image of privatization, of course, contracts are awarded only through a tough competitive bidding process. In real life, that’s not how things work.
According to a recent investigation by National Public Radio, the federal government has greatly expanded the number of private contractors it has hired, paying them more than $400 billion last year to do work once done more cheaply in many cases by government employees. “The administration has given the majority of that contract money to companies that didn’t have to compete to get it —- or faced only limited competition,” NPR found.
Katherine Schinasi, a high-ranking official with the Government Accountability Office, told NPR that in many cases, federal officials pay little or no attention to contractors under their supervision.
As a result, they can’t answer even the most basic questions from the GAO, such as whether contractors have done a good job or whether they’re saving taxpayers money.
In certain well-defined tasks, privatization undoubtedly offers significant benefits. But because it has been embraced as a panacea, and because so many have found it a lucrative means of milking the taxpayer, too often it creates far more problems than it solves.
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Tell the truth and no crossies, Mr. President
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post, noting the round of “exit interviews” being conducted by President Bush, came up with a great idea:
“I was going to ask you what questions you think reporters should be asking Bush,” he tells readers, “but since he’s so adept at ducking, I’ve decided to ask something a little bit more fun: What questions would you most want to ask the president if he were under Pentathol?”
Froomkin’s own first choice: “When exactly did you decide to go to war in Iraq?” But some of his readers got a little more inventive.
SaveTheCountry, for example, wants to know if Bush wore “a concealed radio receiver in any of the 2004 debates with John Kerry? If so, who was transmitting?”
And GavinM would ask: “Do you believe in the literal truth of the Bible and what is your opinion on the end of days passages in Revelation?”
What about you guys? One question, and he has to answer truthfully.
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Are Senate Republicans willing to play Scrooge?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’m still very much torn about the auto industry bailout, and I haven’t had time to delve into the details of the latest proposal, although recent changes do address some of my biggest concerns. For example, the new plan no longer requires government approval before companies spend more than $25 million of bailout money; the new level is $100 million, which is at least somewhat reasonable. You want government oversight, but not government micromanagement.
However, as a matter of politics rather than policy, I really wonder at the apparent willingness of Senate Republicans to filibuster the proposal worked out between the Bush administration and the Democrats. Polls suggest that the country as a whole is divided on the bailout, but a pre-Christmas GOP filibuster of a bill designed to keep millions of blue-collar Americans working and collecting paychecks…. it’s hard to imagine a better way to cement the Republican image as an enemy of the working man, particularly if they succeed in killing the bill and force GM into bankruptcy.
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What’s the story with Rod and Barack?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The allegations in the Blagojevich case out of Illinois would be fascinating in their own right, if nothing else as a case study in self delusion. That guy thought he would get away with all this? But it’s also important to remember that he’s in his second term of governor and spent most of his life in Illinois politics — his assumptions and understandings of how the world worked that the rest of us find so astounding did not rise out of nowhere. They reflect what he saw around him.
You occasionally get whiffs of a similar world here in Georgia — stories about politicians shaking down contributors in return for, say, a zoning necessary for an apartment project, or a politician slyly reminding a business person that he has regulatory oversight over that person’s industry. And sure enough, when you look later at the campaign disclosures, there’s a substantial contribution from that business person to that politician. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to go to press with.
The larger story, however, is what impact this will have on President-elect Barack Obama, who as a Democratic senator from Illinois inevitably had dealings with Illinois’ Democratic governor. The only thing on the record is in Obama’s favor — Blagojevich’s anger and frustration at Obama’s refusal to “pay to play” in naming his replacement to the Senate.
Reuters describes Obama as essentially untouched by the scandal:
CHICAGO - President-elect Barack Obama’s decision to keep a distance from his state’s governor, who was arrested on corruption charges on Tuesday, should enable him to escape becoming tainted by the scandal, analysts said.
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich stands accused of trying to sell the president-elect’s vacant U.S. Senate seat for financial and other personal benefits for himself and his wife, among other charges.
“Obama is not related to the corruption pattern in Chicago,” said political scientist Dick Simpson of the University of Illinois in Chicago. “He has not been pressing for any person to replace him in his Senate seat.”
However, Michael Scherer at Time’s Swampland blog is not quite so sure:
At a news conference just now, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald made very clear that he had uncovered no evidence of misbehavior on the part of Barack Obama. “I should be clear that the complaint makes no allegations whatsoever about the president-elect or his conduct,” he said. But he also made clear that his investigation was hardly complete. He still needed “to find out what happened.” And he said, as a policy, that the U.S. Attorney office is not in the business of “giving clean bills of health.”
That’s the reason that the fall of Gov. Rod Blagojevich is going to continue to haunt Obama, not to mention Chicago’s Democratic establishment where he built his roots. The President of the United States has a higher burden than just about any elected official anywhere. His staff will be called on by the press to account for all their conversations with Blagojevich and his aides. Obama will have to explain what he knew about these discussions. The bit players in the complaint, like the unnamed Senate Candidate 1 and Senate Candidate 5, will have to come forward and explain their involvement.
If the investigation continues into next year, which seems likely, there may even be calls for the appointment of something like an independent counsel at the Justice Department to avoid any hint of political interference. Obama’s staff and political allies may be forced to get attorneys of their own.
And ABC News describes some heated, and quite obscene, language from Blagojevich toward Obama in FBI wiretaps, particularly considering Obama’s refusal to pay to play:
“Told by two other advisers he has to “suck it up” for two years, the FBI says it heard Blagojevich complain he has to give this “motherfer [the president-elect] his senator. F him. For nothing? F* him.”
The governor is heard saying he will pick another candidate “before I just give fing [Senate Candidate l] a fing Senate seat and I don’t get anything.”
All in all, there seems no sign of any direct problem for Obama. But the case will be a distraction at a time he really didn’t need any.
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The other 20 percent post on this blog
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’m sure numbers like these won’t last once Obama takes office and has to actually start implementing decisions and making people angry. However, they do represent an awful lot of political capital that if used wisely can help him accomplish a lot, and quickly.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — With six weeks before taking office, President-elect Barack Obama is having one heck of a honeymoon, a new national poll suggests. A new CNN poll gives Barack Obama a 79 percent approval rating in the way he’s handling the transition.
Nearly eight in 10 Americans questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey out Tuesday morning are giving the president-elect the thumbs up when it comes to his handling of the transition.
Obama’s approval rating is 14 points higher than the approval rating for President-elect George Bush in 2001 and 17 points higher than President-elect Clinton’s rating in 1992, CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.
“An Obama job approval rating of 79 percent — that’s the sort of rating you see when the public rallies around a leader after a national disaster,” said Bill Schneider, CNN’s senior political analyst. “To many Americans, the Bush administration was a national disaster.”
The Democratic Party continues to be much more popular than the GOP. Six in 10 have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, while a majority have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party.
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‘Sen. Craig Loses Appeal in Bathroom Sting Case’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
That’s the headline on the Washington Post site, on a story reporting that a Minnesota appeals court has rejected Larry Craig’s effort to withdraw his guilty plea.
However, I bet you could write that same headline for a story about his poll standings back in Idaho….
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SunTrust gets more ‘investment’ from feds
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
from the AJC’s Paul Donsky:
SunTrust Banks is going back to Uncle Sam and seeking an even larger investment of federal funds.
The company, which has already received a $3.5 billion investment under the U.S. Treasury Department’s Capital Purchase Program, said Tuesday it had received preliminary approval to sell an additional $1.4 billion in preferred stock to the government.
That would bring the total government investment in SunTrust to $4.9 billion, the maximum amount the bank is eligible for under the program.
SunTrust’s CEO James M. Wells III said the deteriorating economy and overall gloomy outlook pressed the bank to look for a greater cushion.
“As we now know from the most recent data, the economic situation is decidedly bleaker than was the case when we announced our initial, partial regulatory capital transaction under the Treasury program,” Wells said in a news release.
“Given the increasingly uncertain economic outlook, we have concluded that further augmenting our capital at this point is a prudent step, especially if the current recession proves to be longer and more severe than previously expected,” Wells said.
However, as the folks over at Calculated Risk point out:
“SunTrust applied for the previous $3.5 billion on Oct 27th, and received the funds on Nov 17th - less than a month ago!
Here was the CEO comment then:
‘Our participation in the Capital Purchase Program enhances SunTrust’s already solid capital position and will permit us to further expand our business and take advantage of growth opportunities. In addition, we are pleased to support the Treasury in its ongoing effort to address dislocations in financial markets and spur the market stabilization that is in the public interest.’
At the end of October, SunTrust was “supporting the Treasury” and “expanding” their business.
Now the situation is “decidedly bleaker”.
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But first, kill all the editorial writers….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested by federal authorities this morning and charged with an incredibly wide-ranging and utterly shameless degree of corruption. As U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald described it, “the breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering,” and that’s no exaggeration.
The most important allegation involves a claim that Blagojevich, a Democrat, had been peddling Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder (as governor, Blagojevich has the power to appoint Obama’s replacement). The fact that Blagojevich was apparently conducting such negotiations even though he knew he was under federal investigation is astonishing.
But personally, I confess to being fascinated by a lesser allegation that Blagojevich tried to get Chicago Tribune editorial writers fired in return for a favorable financial deal for the Tribune company.
Here’s how federal documents describe the alleged deal, based on tape-recorded conversations:
“According to the affidavit, intercepted phone calls revealed that the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs, has explored the possibility of obtaining assistance from the Illinois Finance Authority (IFA) relating to the Tribune Company’s efforts to sell the Cubs and the financing or sale of Wrigley Field. In a November 6 phone call, Harris (Blagojevich’s top aide, who was also indicted) explained to Blagojevich that the deal the Tribune Company was trying to get through the IFA was basically a tax mitigation scheme in which the IFA would own title to Wrigley Field and the Tribune would not have to pay capital gains tax, which Harris estimated would save the company approximately $100 million.
Intercepted calls allegedly show that Blagojevich directed Harris to inform Tribune Owner and an associate, identified as Tribune Financial Advisor, that state financial assistance would be withheld unless members of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board were fired, primarily because Blagojevich viewed them as driving discussion of his possible impeachment. In a November 4 phone call, Blagojevich allegedly told Harris that he should say to Tribune Financial Advisor, Cubs Chairman and Tribune Owner, “our recommendation is fire all those [expletive] people, get ‘em the [expletive] out of there and get us some editorial support.”
On November 6, the day of a Tribune editorial critical of Blagojevich, Harris told Blagojevich that he told Tribune Financial Advisor the previous day that things “look like they could move ahead fine but, you know, there is a risk that all of this is going to get derailed by your own editorial page.” Harris also told Blagojevich that he was meeting with Tribune Financial Advisor on November 10.
In a November 11 intercepted call, Harris allegedly told Blagojevich that Tribune Financial Advisor talked to Tribune Owner and Tribune Owner “got the message and is very sensitive to the issue.” Harris told Blagojevich that according to Tribune Financial Advisor, there would be “certain corporate reorganizations and budget cuts coming and, reading between the lines, he’s going after that section.” Blagojevich allegedly responded. “Oh. That’s fantastic.” After further discussion, Blagojevich said, “Wow. Okay, keep our fingers crossed. You’re the man. Good job, John.”
In a further conversation on November 21, Harris told Blagojevich that he had singled out to Tribune Financial Advisor the Tribune’s deputy editorial page editor, John McCormick, “as somebody who was the most biased and unfair.” After hearing that Tribune Financial Advisor had assured Harris that the Tribune would be making changes affecting the editorial board, Blagojevich allegedly had a series of conversations with Chicago Cubs representatives regarding efforts to provide state financing for Wrigley Field. On November 30, Blagojevich spoke with the president of a Chicago-area sports consulting firm, who indicated that he was working with the Cubs on matters involving Wrigley Field. Blagojevich and Sports Consultant discussed the importance of getting the IFA transaction approved at the agency’s December or January meeting because Blagojevich was contemplating leaving office in early January and his IFA appointees would still be in place to approve the deal, the charges allege.”
Occasionally, I’ve had angry politicians and business people imply that they could threaten my job, but I’ve never had any indication that they had attempted to actually carry through on it.
Blagojevich, on the other hand, seems to have made a very real effort, and if the account above is accurate, he even received some assurances the deed would be done. I bet that for John McCormick, this is better than winning a Pulitzer.
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Populist tide seems to be rising
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The zeitgeist appears to have taken a very notable shift.
John Thain, CEO of Merrill Lynch, has been denied in his request for a $10 million bonus in a year in which the company lost $11 billion and as many as 30,000 employees will end up being fired. (Officially, the story is that Thain himself decided not to request the bonus). The net result is that Thain gets nothing in his Christmas stocking.
The fact that such a step is deemed remarkable on Wall Street is itself remarkable.
In another sign of the times, Kris Broughton of Alpharetta, writing at the conservative group blog Culture 11, sounds downright populist in addressing Mr. Thain’s terrible plight:
“Mr. Thain might have to sell his home or investment property at a steep discount because nobody is paying full price right now for real estate. His kids may have to go to public schools. He might not be able to meet the margin calls on his portfolio. He might find himself looking at a severely decimated retirement account.
My mother will tell you, “I really can’t have a whole lot of sympathy for you if you’re down to your last million.”
It is unconscionable for me to worry about the problems of this rich man or his buddies. If he doesn’t work another day in his life, enough money has gone through his hands to assure him of a lifetime of decent food, shelter, and clothing. If his entire existence has been predicated on never hitting a bump in the road, well, then maybe he shouldn’t have been a CEO in the first place.”
And out in Chicagoland, laid-off workers at Republic Windows and Doors continue to occupy their closed-down factory, refusing to leave until the company pays them the vacation and severance money they’re legally entitled to receive. Workers are reporting to the factory in shifts, people are donating meals to the cause, the governor has come by to express support and has threatened to stop doing business with Bank of America, the company’s lender, and President-elect Obama has also expressed sympathy for the workers’ stance.
“I’m not scared because I’m not alone on this,” said Raul Flores, 25, who had worked at Republic for eight years. “We’re strong and we’re going to stay. This gives us the strength to keep going. This is going to be for everyone.”
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Just a wee bit more on President Alien
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I hate to beat a horse that has been so thoroughly and hilariously beaten and left for dead overnight (and I’ll have an unrelated thread up soon) but just for the record, Dana Milbank at the Washington Post has a very funny takedown of the birthers that you shouldn’t miss.
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‘Shut up about the birth certificate’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Conservative writer David Horowitz, writing in the conservative National Review, advises his fellow conservatives to “shut up about the birth certificate,” as the headline on his article puts it.
“The continuing efforts of a fringe group of conservatives to deny Obama his victory and to lay the basis for the claim that he is not a legitimate president is embarrassing and destructive,” Horowitz writes. “The fact that these efforts are being led by Alan Keyes, a demagogue who lost a Senate election to the then-unknown Obama by 42 points, should be a warning in itself….
“It is not conservatism; it is sore loserism and quite radical in its intent,” concludes Horowitz. “Respect for election results is one of the most durable bulwarks of our unity as a nation. Conservatives need to accept the fact that we lost the election, and get over it; and get on with the important business of reviving our country’s economy and defending its citizens, and — by the way — its Constitution.”
I confess I do have some sympathy for the “birthers,” though. As an outsider, it’s hard to distinguish between the zany arguments that get official approval by the conservative establishment — things like Bill Ayers, Michelle Obama’s infamous “whitey” tape, the claim that Obama is a closet Marxist — and those arguments that are considered beyond the pale. I mean, where does one draw the line between acceptable lunacy and unacceptable lunacy?
Apparently those within the movement have a hard time figuring it out as well, which is why Horowitz had to send out a memo explaining the official ruling.
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Merrill Lynch exec wants $10 million for job ‘well done’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Merrill Lynch stock drops 80 percent, the company loses $11 billion in the last year, it is forced to sell itself to be acquired by Bank of America, with as many as 30,000 people losing their jobs as a result, and now Merrill’s CEO demands a bonus of $10 million?
What planet is this again?
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo called “shocking” reports that Merrill Lynch & Co.’s board is considering giving Chief Executive Officer John Thain a $10 million bonus.
Cuomo said in a letter today to Merrill’s board that a bonus that large “appears unjustified.” The company told Cuomo Nov. 5 that any bonuses would be based on performance and retention needs. New York-based Merrill is being bought by Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp.
“The performance of Merrill’s top executives throughout Merrill’s abysmal year in no way justifies significant bonuses for its top executives, including the CEO,” Cuomo wrote. “Merrill’s decision to be taken over by Bank of America seems to have been the only thing that saved Merrill from collapse.”
Merrill’s board planned to discuss executive bonuses for 2008 at regular meeting scheduled for today in New York, a person familiar with the matter said.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that Thain proposed to directors that he be paid a bonus of $5 million to $10 million for 2008. The board’s compensation committee was resisting as much as $10 million, the newspaper said.
Thain, who received $15 million when he joined the brokerage in December 2007, already is set to get a change-of-control bonus of as much as $5.22 million if the Bank of America takeover is completed by Dec. 31, according to regulatory filings.
Merrill was forced into the takeover after its share price tumbled 80 percent and it lost $24 billion over five quarters.
Merrill and Bank of America Corp. were among the banks that received money in the initial $125 billion bailout. The others were Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., State Street Corp. and Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
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Georgia’s red paint job may be fading
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia Republicans breathed a sigh of relief last week, reassured that order had been restored to their universe with Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ decisive victory.
“The basic principles that Ronald Reagan talked about in the ’80s are just as important today,” Chambliss said afterward. “If we return to those basic core values we can continue to be successful in future elections.”
Forgotten, at least for the moment, was the fact that John McCain had carried Georgia by only five percentage points, compared to George Bush’s margin of 17 points in 2004, and that in the general election Chambliss had led Jim Martin by only three points.
Those tight margins can perhaps be dismissed as a one-time phenomenon attributable largely to Barack Obama. But there’s good reason to think otherwise.
According to exit polls, for example, Georgians age 44 and under voted for Obama by a healthy margin; McCain built his victory among older Georgians. Those same polls also report that self-described conservatives (39 percent of Georgia voters) outnumber liberals (13 percent) by a 3-to-1 margin, which is good news for Republicans. However, among the 48 percent who describe themselves as moderate, Obama beat McCain by 17 points.
Political change can happen in a hurry —- a switch of just three votes out of a hundred, for example, would have put Georgia in Obama’s column. And other states have recently gone from red to blue in a flash.
A few years ago, Colorado was one of the reddest of the red states and seemed destined to remain that way for a generation. But this year it favored Obama by eight points and elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate by 10 points.
Virginia and North Carolina —- both Southern states with rapidly growing suburban areas like Georgia —- have gone through similarly quick transitions. Bush carried Virginia by eight points in 2000 and 2004, and even Robert Dole carried it in 1996. Today Virginia has two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor, and it gave Obama a six-point victory in November.
Obama also won North Carolina, a state Bush carried by more than 12 points four years ago, and a Democrat beat the incumbent Republican senator, Elizabeth Dole, by 12 points.
Such examples worried David Hill, a Texas pollster with long professional, personal and emotional ties to the Texas Republican Party. So after the election, he polled more than 600 Texas voters to try to gauge their sentiments about the GOP.
On its Web site, the Texas Republican Party brags that “without a doubt, Texas is the strongest Republican state in the nation,” and it went for John McCain by 10 percentage points. But that may be changing. Six years ago, for example, the GOP dominated the Texas House of Representatives, holding 88 seats compared to just 62 for the Democrats. That margin has been shrinking ever since, and is now down to a razor-thin 76-74.
And when Hill conducted his poll, results shocked him.
“On most every measure tested,” he found, “the generic Republican ‘brand’ is significantly less appealing than the Democratic one” among Texans.
Overall, Lone Star voters used terms such as arrogant, racist, corrupt and angry to describe Republicans, and as Hill puts it, “that’s untenable for the party’s long-term health.”
“Grassroot Texas Republicans are firm in their convictions and confident they are right,” Hill concluded, warning that “these admirable attributes cannot be allowed to desensitize us to the fact that even in Texas, committed, principled conservative voters are a minority.”
According to Hill, moderate Texans still lean to the conservative side, but they don’t care much about illegal immigration or traditional values, the issues that fascinate the GOP base. Moderates are more interested in issues such as education and health care for children.
“There is a natural human tendency to resist change until the necessity of having to do so can no longer be avoided,” Hill warned, noting that in politics, “a realization that the political landscape is shifting and you must adjust often only comes once it’s too late.”
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Putting politicians in charge of Detroit?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There’s no question that the bailout billions flowing to Wall Street firms have been granted too freely, with few if any conditions on their use. So as Congress considers bailing out Detroit as well, there’s a real desire not to repeat the mistake. But at first glance you have to wonder whether a board of Cabinet secretaries is the right kind of oversight for such an effort.
Among other things, would its decision-making be more political than business-oriented?
But then again, what would be the model for such a board? We’ve never done this kind of thing before on this kind of scale, so if this mode of oversight is too intrusive and political, what would the right kind of oversight look like?
We are straying into dangerous and unknown waters, and the bad part is, we probably have no choice but to do so.
WASHINGTON - A bailout plan for the failing U.S. auto industry could include a Cabinet-level oversight board and a provision to withdraw the money if the overseers decide the companies are failing to take steps to overhaul themselves.
The plan would draw the emergency aid from an existing loan program meant to help the automakers build fuel-efficient vehicles. The size of the package hasn’t been finalized, but it is expected to be about $15 billion, several congressional aides said.
It would create a board composed of Cabinet secretaries from the departments of Treasury, Energy, Labor, Commerce and Transportation plus the Environmental Protection Agency administrator to oversee a broad auto industry restructuring. A congressional aide outlined the emerging measure on condition of anonymity because it is not yet completed.
In return for the money, the carmakers would have to agree to terms similar to those placed on banks that receive funds under the $700 billion Wall Street bailout: to limit their top executives’ pay packages, cease paying dividends, give the government a chunk of future gains and guarantee that taxpayers would be reimbursed before any other shareholders, the aide said.
The bill under discussion would place the special investigator overseeing the bank rescue in charge of keeping tabs on the auto bailout.
The White House and Democratic congressional leaders are narrowing their differences over the auto bailout, but had yet to agree on specific legislative details, officials said.
Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Banking Committee, said Sunday that General Motors Corp.’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, “has to move on” as part of a government-run restructuring.
“I think you have got to consider new leadership,” Dodd said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Criticized for staying on the sidelines until now, President-elect Barack Obama voiced support Sunday for the bailout legislation being drafted in Congress. He accused car industry executives of a persistent “head-in-the sand approach” to long-festering problems.
In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Obama said Congress was doing “the exact right thing” in drafting legislation that “holds the auto industry’s feet to the fire” at the same time it tries to prevent its demise.
UPDATE: I hadn’t seen numbers like this before. To borrow Gen. Petraeus’ famous line about the invasion of Iraq, “so tell me how this ends.”
From the NY Times:
“A comprehensive bailout for Gerneral Motors, the Ford Motor Company and Chrysler could cost as much as $125 billion, and even the companies themselves are hard-pressed to dispute that figure.
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, testified before Congress last week that the Big Three’s request for $34 billion in loans “will not be sufficient for them to avoid bankruptcy a some point in the next two years.” He said from $75 billion to $125 billion would be needed to pay for a full-scale reorganization of the automakers.”
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He had it coming, that’s for sure
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
And it’s about time he got it. From the Associated Press:
Voters in Louisiana ousted indicted Democratic Rep. William J. Jefferson on Saturday, electing instead a Republican attorney who will be the first Vietnamese American in Congress.
Unofficial results showed Anh “Joseph” Cao denying Jefferson a 10th term. Republicans made an aggressive push to take the seat from Jefferson, 61, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of bribery, money laundering and misusing his congressional office.
Cao, 41, won Louisiana’s majority-black 2nd Congressional District, which covers much of New Orleans. Just 11 percent of registered voters in the district are Republicans. Turnout appeared to be light.
Voters reelected Jefferson in 2006 even after news of the bribery scandal broke. Late-night TV comics made him the butt of jokes after federal agents said they had found $90,000 in alleged bribe money hidden in his freezer.
Cao came to the United States as a child after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and went on to earn degrees in philosophy, physics and law.
The election was one of two in Louisiana postponed because of Hurricane Gustav. In the other, Republican physician John Fleming defeated Democratic Dist. Atty. Paul Carmouche, 48 percent to 47 percent, to replace retiring Rep. Jim McCrery, a Republican.
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NATO supply route under attack
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Things in Pakistan seem to sliding rapidly toward the abyss. It’s hard to believe sites like this have such little security.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Suspected militants attacked a Pakistan transport terminal used to supply NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, killing a guard and burning 106 vehicles on Sunday.
The assault was the boldest yet on trucks carrying critical supplies to foreign troops in Afghanistan, feeding concern that Taliban militants could cut or seriously disrupt the route through the famed Khyber Pass.
Up to 75 percent of the supplies for Western forces in the landlocked country pass through Pakistan after being unloaded from ships at the Arabian sea port of Karachi.
About 30 assailants armed with guns and rockets attacked the Portward Logistic Terminal near the city of Peshawar before dawn Sunday, police official Kashif Alam said.
A guard at the terminal was killed in the attack and fire swept through the parked vehicles. Alam said 62 vehicles were destroyed.
But terminal manager Kifayatullah Khan said 106 vehicles were destroyed, including 62 that were carrying Humvees. The other torched trucks were carrying sealed shipping containers or other vehicles, including fire engines and dump trucks, Khan said.
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Talk about frozen in time….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We’ve all had the experience. Somebody famous dies, and your first thought is: “Really? I thought (s)he died 20 years ago.”
But this one is a little ridiculous:
Martha (Sunny) von Bülow, the American heiress who was first married to an Austrian playboy prince and then to a Danish-born man-about-society who was twice tried on charges of attempting to murder her, died Saturday at a nursing home in Manhattan. Mrs. von Bülow, who was 76, had been in a coma for nearly 28 years.
Mrs. von Bülow’s death came 27 years, 11 months and 15 days after she was found unconscious on the floor of her bathroom in her mansion in Newport, R.I., on Dec. 21, 1980.
In her long, silent years at the Milstein Building at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital and then at the nursing home on the Upper East Side, doctors said Mrs. von Bülow never showed any signs of brain activity; she was fed through a tube in her stomach.
Her second husband, Claus von Bülow, was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to kill her with injections of insulin so as to aggravate her hypoglycemia, a low blood sugar condition.
His trials were among the most sensational of the 1980s. The news media from around the world were irresistibly drawn to the drama of the beautiful heiress who lay in a twilight zone, the debonair husband accused of attempted murder, two royal children pitted against their younger stepsister and the glittering social milieus of Newport and New York providing the backdrop.
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Five indicted in Blackwater shooting spree
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This is pretty big, and pretty surprising too.
From the AP:
“Five Blackwater Worldwide security guards have been indicted and a sixth was negotiating a plea with prosecutors for a 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqis dead and became an anti-American rallying cry for insurgents, people close to the case said Friday.
Six guards have been under investigation since a convoy of heavily armed Blackwater contractors opened fire in a crowded Baghdad intersection on Sept. 16, 2007. Witnesses say the shooting was unprovoked but Blackwater, hired by the State Department to guard U.S. diplomats, says its guards were ambushed by insurgents while responding to a car bombing.
Young children were among the victims and the shooting strained relations between the U.S. and Iraq. Following the shooting, Blackwater became the subject of congressional hearings in Washington and insurgent propaganda videos in Iraq.
The exact charges in the indictment were unclear, but the Justice Department has been considering manslaughter and assault charges against the guards for weeks. Prosecutors have also been considering bringing charges under a law, passed as part of a 1988 drug bill, that carries a mandatory 30-year prison sentence for using a machine gun in a crime of violence.”
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Suddenly, the auto bailout is on again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An auto bailout, which seemed very unlikely until yesterday, now suddenly appears as if it’s going to happen, at least in some form.
But I don’t think it was the silver-tongued testimony of the auto executives that turned the tide. As the Washington Post story suggests, I think those huge jobless numbers — more than a half million jobs disappeared last month alone, with more sure to come — really frightened a lot of people in both parties and in both the executive and legislative branches…
“Jolted by news of the worst job losses in more than 30 years, congressional Democrats were near an agreement with the White House yesterday on a plan to speed at least $15 billion to the faltering Detroit automakers in hopes of averting the collapse of an industry that supports millions of U.S. jobs.
In talks with White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) dropped her long-standing opposition to tapping a loan program created by Congress to fund the development of fuel-efficient cars. Pelosi agreed instead to use the money to provide immediate cash to General Motors and Chrysler. Without government help, GM executives have said their company may not survive the month.
The apparent breakthrough comes as the House and the Senate prepare to return to Washington next week to respond to requests from the Detroit automakers for as much as $38 billion to help them survive the economic downturn. The auto executives appeared on Capitol Hill for a second day yesterday, making a desperate plea for the funds. News that the nation had shed 533,000 jobs in November — the most since 1974 — added urgency to their appeal.
The sums being discussed by lawmakers and the White House fall well short of the automakers’ request. Democratic aides said they are talking about providing $15 billion to $17 billion, which would be expected to see GM and Chrysler through the end of March, when president-elect Barack Obama would be in position to take over long-term plans for returning the industry to profitability.”
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… and don’t even THINK about singing ‘New York, New York’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As we slide into the weekend, a little off-topic story from The Guardian to send you along your way:
“A Malaysian karaoke enthusiast hogged the microphone for so long that people set upon him and stabbed him to death.
Abdul Sani Doli refused to hand over the microphone at a coffee shop that doubles as a karaoke bar in the town of Sandakan, Borneo. Two men have been arrested on suspicion of murder after the altercation erupted a few minutes before midnight.
The town’s police chief, Rosli Mohammad Isa, said initial investigations showed the victim had sung several numbers on Wednesday night. Other patrons fumed as Abdul Sani hogged the microphone, a scenario perhaps familiar to karaoke devotees the world over.
Karaoke rage is not unheard of in Asia. There have been several reported cases of singers being assaulted, shot or stabbed mid-performance, usually over how songs are sung.
Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” has reportedly generated such outbursts of hostility that some bars in the Philippines now no longer offer it on the karaoke menu. In Thailand this year, a gunman shot eight people dead after tiring of their endless renditions of a John Denver tune.”
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Another Senator Kennedy?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The crazy speculation about Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat may not be so crazy after all. A Democrat who would know tells ABC News that New York governor David Paterson has talked to Caroline Kennedy about taking the seat, which was once held by her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy. It’s not exactly shocking that Paterson would reach out to one of the most highly respected public figures in New York, but this is: Sources say Kennedy is considering it, and has not ruled out coming to Washington to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate.
A few years ago, the famously private Caroline Kennedy would be the last Kennedy expected to serve in Congress, but of course, she took on a much more high-profile role during the presidential campaign and, if she does it, would be more than New York’s junior Senator; she’d have closer ties to the Obama White House than any of her colleagues, a direct line to the East Wing.
When Robert Kennedy, Jr. took himself out of the running for the seat earlier this week, he told Jonathan Hicks of the New York Times, “Caroline Kennedy would be the perfect choice if she would agree to it.” And one more thing: We hear that President-elect Obama has made it clear that he thinks Caroline Kennedy would be a great choice.”
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New jobless numbers frightening
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ooooh boy.
It seems there are two categories of working-age Americans: Those without jobs, and those worried about being without a job.
From the Washington Post:
“U.S. employers shed more than half a million jobs in November, accelerating a steady decline in the labor market with the worst monthly showing in 34 years.
The unemployment rate rose from 6.5 percent to 6.7 percent, the highest rate since the recession of the early 1990s. The figure was tempered by the fact that 422,000 workers left the labor market, likely discouraged by their inability to find a job. The unemployment rate only includes people actively looking for work.
The latest jobs report “is bad news. No matter how you look at it is really, really bad news,” former Treasury Secretary John Snow said this morning on the CNBC cable television network.
Some 2.7 million jobs now have been eliminated since the economy moved into recession a year ago — nearly 1.3 million of them in the last three months, following Labor Department revisions that showed even steeper employment losses in September and October than initially reported.
Currently more than 10.3 million people are out of work, the Labor Department said.”
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Telling the Bair truth at FDIC
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sheila Bair, a Bush appointee as head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, has been one of the few Washington figures ahead of the game on the housing crisis. To her credit, she has also been willing to speak out publicly in favor of tougher restrictions in the Wall Street bailout, and has been an early champion of an aggressive federal effort to help struggling homeowners, not just big financial firms.
Others, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, are now belatedly coming around to her point of view.
But according to Bloomberg, that candor has made Bair some enemies. They report that Timothy Geithner, President-elect Obama’s choice for Treasury secretary, is trying to push Bair out of office because she’s a little too independent for his taste.
Too bad, Timmy. Bair must stay.
The American people already fear that the taxpayers’ $700 billion Wall Street bailout is being run by Wall Street insiders for the benefit of other Wall Street insiders, even though Wall Street is responsible for a lot of this mess. Dumping Bair, one of the few influential voices who has dared to challenge that little Wall Street club, would send exactly the wrong message.
On a side note, Bair also came out Thursday to make clear that the Community Reinvestment Act, the conservatives’ favorite villain, had little or nothing to do with creating the housing crisis.
““I want to give you my verdict on CRA: NOT guilty,” Bair said Thursday.
“Point in fact, only one in four higher-priced first mortgage loans were made by CRA-covered banks during the hey-day years of subprime mortgage lending. The rest were made by private independent mortgage companies and large bank affiliates not covered by CRA rules.”
“Let me ask you,” she proceeded. “Where in the CRA does it say to make loans to people who can’t afford to repay? Nowhere.” The facts are simple, Bair said. The lending practices that are causing problems today were driven by a desire for more market share and revenue growth, not because the government encouraged certain lending practices.
John Dugan, another Republican and a Bush appointee as comptroller of the currency, agrees with Bair. “CRA is not the culprit behind the subprime mortgage lending abuses, or the broader credit quality issues in the market place,” he said in a recent speech.
Dugan and Bair are far from alone. Housing and financial experts agree almost unanimously that CRA is not at fault. In fact, it’s hard to find anybody with any credentials in that field who blames CRA. The only people making that argument are politicians, for political reasons.
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Methinks the GOP protests too much….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I can understand Republicans taking solace from Saxby Chambliss’ victory Tuesday. It was an important win for the party, while a loss would have been devastating.
But really — let’s keep the celebration within bounds of reality, shall we?
Mike Duncan, chairman of the Republican National Committee, has other ideas. He writes in Politico that with the Chambliss victory, “Georgians refuted any notion that the ideology of the country has shifted to the left.”
No, they didn’t. At most, they refuted the notion that Georgia had shifted to the left, and I doubt they even did that much. In a state that favored George Bush by 16 points in 2004, four years later an incumbent Republican senator got forced into a runoff by an earnest if uninspiring opponent. Georgia shifted to the left, even if the shift fell well short of a Democratic win.
Duncan goes on to claim that “Notably, Chambliss won in spite of strong support by President-elect Obama and Democrat organizations for Jim Martin. Georgians clearly sent a message that any rhetoric about a liberal mandate is nothing but hot air.”
Hot air? Yeah, there’s some hot air around. But not from the source Duncan claims.
Look at the numbers. In November, Democrats picked up seven Senate seats after picking up six in ‘06. In the House, they picked up 30 seats in ‘06 and picked up at least 20 more in ‘08.
Oh, and they also won the White House.
Given all that, it’s going to take more than a widely predicted runoff victory in Georgia to “sen(d) a message that any rhetoric about a liberal mandate is nothing but hot air.”
Nonetheless, Duncan argues, “Chambliss’ reelection sends a message to all those who believe the Republican Party and its core principles are anything less than strong and competitive.” Personally, I’d say Duncan’s desperation is showing a bit.
In fact, he’s acting like a football player who gets flagged for excessive celebration with his team losing 48-7.
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When did Gingrich turn holy on us?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Michelle Goldberg at The New Republic takes note of something that has perplexed me for a while: Newt Gingrich’s wholesale embrace of the hard-core Religious Right and the issues they think important.
In his heyday back in the ’90s, the thrice-married Gingrich had a respectful but hardly close relationship with the Christian Coalition and similar groups. He was more comfortable being Newt the Science Guy, and he tended to refrain from the gay-bashing that was popular at the time, speaking instead of toleration, not condemnation.
But something changed in the last couple of years, with the ex-speaker now trying to sound holier than James Dobson even as the American mainstream moves the other way.
“Gingrich, after all, likes to imagine himself an innovator. And yet, at a time when he seems to be hoping to take advantage of Republican disarray to return to the political fray, he’s doing it in the most tired way imaginable. There he was on the O’Reilly Factor a couple of weeks ago, warning of “gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us.” Visitors to his website are asked to sign a petition on behalf of an issue surely disturbing the sleep of a crisis-ridden nation — insufficient references to God in the new Capitol Visitor Center….
“One has to wonder — is this really all they’ve got? …. I’d have expected some attempt to modulate the message of perpetual kulturkampf in the wake of the election results, the public disaffection of so many prominent conservative intellectuals and the cascading economic disasters threatening millions of Americans. Perhaps, though, people like Gingrich can’t imagine any other way. And so, with the defeat of Republican moderates rendering the rump GOP more right-wing than ever, he apparently sees a path to power in challenging Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee for leadership of the Elmer Gantry wing of his beaten party. Maybe he’s clueless about the future of Republicanism, but if he’s right about it, it’s hard to see what kind of future Republicanism has.”
Personally, I don’t think Gingrich harbors serious thought of major political office any longer, and for good reason. Even among his own party, he has too much baggage. In a recent poll, 48 percent of Republicans told Gallup they would NOT like to see Gingrich run for president.
Instead, Gingrich is carving himself a nice, profitable niche in the conservative market, hoping to build a base that will keep buying his books and paying his speaking fees. It’s all about the marketing.
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Detroit, Congress playing chicken
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The United Auto Workers union has backed off considerably from its arrogant announcement a few weeks ago that it would accept no further concessions in wages and benefits to save the industry. Management of the Big Three is also a lot more humble these days, with CEOs of Ford and GM saying they are willing to take salaries of $1 a year if necessary to save their companies. They also drove from Detroit to Washington this time instead of flying in their corporate jets.
But the damage may already have been done. According to a new CNN poll:
“Sixty-one percent of those questioned … are dead set against the federal government providing billions of dollars in assistance for the automakers, with 36 percent favoring such a bailout….
In early November, polls indicated that nearly half the public supported federal assistance to the big automakers when this issue first came before Congress.
But evidence in surveys from other organizations suggests that the poor performance by executives from GM, Ford and Chrysler at congressional hearings, and the admission that they had taken private jets to get there, resulted in a steep drop in support for government assistance to automakers.
The new CNN poll indicates that those wounds have yet to heal as the executives return to Capitol Hill for more hearings this week.”
GM has warned that it lacks the capital to last through the end of the month, and Chrysler’s situation isn’t much better. But there don’t seem to be enough votes in Congress at the moment to approve the $38 billion in loans and lines of credit that they seek.
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How to deny victory to terrorists
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Every time terrorists strike, the civilized world vows not to let them win. Yet time after time, we give them exactly the victory they seek.
In the Middle East, Palestinian terrorists have attacked repeatedly in hopes of disrupting peace efforts; time after time, they’ve gotten their way.
In the attacks on Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden made it clear that he was trying to provoke the United States into an overreaction; by invading Iraq, an oil-rich Islamic country that had nothing to do with 9/11, we gave him just what he wanted. Iraq became a great recruiting tool and rallying point for al-Qaida.
So it’s pretty simple: If you want to deny victory to terrorists, you figure out what they’re trying to get you to do. Then you don’t do it.
But given the emotional impact of terrorism, that can be extraordinarily hard, as the people of India know.
The goal of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last week was not to kill hundreds of victims. “Victims are just the language of war,” as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of Sept. 11, told his captors.
Muhammad and other terrorists are engaged in “asymmetric warfare,” in which a much weaker party faces a much stronger opponent. Unable to win a head-on struggle, the weaker party tries to provoke its opponent into reacting in anger or fear, an overreaction that weakens it in the eyes of the world, reduces its legitimacy and makes it vulnerable.
To the Mumbai terrorists, those many dead innocents were a means of achieving their goal, which was to undermine relations between Pakistan and India and provoke the two nuclear-armed nations to war. The world is now trying to ensure that rising anger in India — anger that is natural and justified — doesn’t give the murderers what they sought.
Ironically, one of the best lessons about how to respond to terror can be drawn from a seemingly unlikely source, the career of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In his own, very different form of asymmetric warfare, he too tried to provoke his more powerful opponents into an overreaction that would weaken them, with the very important moral difference that King chose to provoke through nonviolence. And as King discovered, some foes are too smart to play along.
In 1962, King was drawn into the struggle to desegregate the town of Albany, Ga. He led protests and marches, trying to provoke local officials into an overreaction that would reverse the power dynamic. But the Albany sheriff, Laurie Pritchett, had studied King’s tactics and refused to give King what he sought. As Pritchett later explained, he met nonviolence with nonviolence.
King would organize mass demonstrations; Pritchett’s deputies would arrest the demonstrators, but they would do so calmly and professionally. King and his lieutenants would get themselves arrested, hoping to become high-profile martyrs; Pritchett would secretly arrange to let them go.
“I’ve been thrown out of a lot of places in my day, but never before have I been thrown out of jail,” King’s assistant, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy Jr., complained after his release.
Through patience, Pritchett denied King the images of brutal repression that could be broadcast worldwide by the media, images that would build sympathy for the underdog. Frustrated, King left Albany with segregation still in place.
But a year later in Birmingham, King met a more cooperative foe in Police Commissioner Bull Connor. When demonstrators marched, Connor responded just as King hoped, with firehoses and nightsticks and police dogs sicced upon children.
The images out of Birmingham of the strong attacking the weak horrified the nation and forced federal intervention. Within days, legal segregation in Birmingham was ended forever. The weak had beaten the strong.
“We were witnessing police violence and brutality Birmingham-style,” as John Lewis put it. “Unfortunately for Bull Connor, so was the rest of the world.”
Military force is a legitimate and necessary tool to defend ourselves and loved ones. When we can find terrorists, we should kill them, and where possible we should deny them sanctuary.
But it is important to remember that the civilized world is far stronger than they are. Whatever power they have is power that we give them through the anger and fear we allow them to provoke.
It’s hard to cite a segregationist sheriff as a role model, but Laurie Pritchett had it figured out.
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Obama was tortured by the British!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OK, so it was Hussein Onyanga Obama, the president-elect’s grandfather. But it was a little more extensive than forcing him to watch endless reruns of the Benny Hill Show.
“Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence, according to the Kenyan family of the US President-elect.
Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.
“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman Mr Obama refers to as “Granny Sarah”.
“He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she said.
The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly anti-British. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said. “My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.”
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Did the Chambliss victory send a message?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Fox News they’re asking whether voters were trying to send a message by re-electing Saxby Chambliss and denying Democrats a 60-vote margin in the Senate.
The answer is yes.
And no.
Georgia voters were sending the message that they like Republicans more than Democrats. But it’s the same message they sent two years ago and four years ago and six years ago.
This is Georgia, the very red state that George Bush carried by more than 16 percentage points in 2004.
When people do the same thing over and over again, and then do it one more time, there’s no message being sent. The fact that Jim Martin was able to push this to a runoff in the first place was the surprise.
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Plaxico Burress, NRA poster star?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Plaxico Burress, for you non-sports-fans out there, is a star wide receiver for the New York Giants who caught the game-winning pass in last year’s Super Bowl. But his season and perhaps his career have been cut short after a handgun in his possession discharged accidentally in a New York nightclub early Saturday, wounding him in the thigh.
Burress has since been arrested and charged with illegal possession of a handgun, a charge that under New York’s strict law carries a mandatory minimum sentence of three-and-a-half years in prison.
To Cajun Boy in the City, that raises an interesting question: “What would Charlton Heston do?”
As Cajun Boy puts it (H/T to Andrew Sullivan):
“Where is the statement expressing outrage from the NRA that a humble American gun owner like Plaxico, who was just trying to protect himself and his family by carrying a hand gun, is being mercilessly persecuted by The Man and his Draconian gun control laws?”
That’s a darn good point: How come Wayne LaPierre isn’t rushing to defend Plaxico? The man was just exercising his Second Amendment rights, after all!
It’s also interesting to point out that a lot of state legislators in Georgia want to allow concealed-weapon permit holders to legally take loaded handguns into bars and nightclubs. They think that’s a good idea, that it’ll make people safer somehow.
Personally, I think that’s nuts.
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Change that even Bush’s top people can believe in
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With the Bush administration in its waning days, its own top national security people are publicly embracing positions much closer to those of Barack Obama than to George W. Bush.
For example, Obama and his nominees have stressed the importance of “soft power” — diplomacy, outreach, and other ways of winning hearts and minds — rather than relying so heavily on hard military power.
Michael Chertoff, Bush’s hard-nosed secretary of Homeland Security, now embraces that position as well, says the Wall Street Journal:
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration’s point man in protecting America against terrorism says U.S. investments in safety should not be restricted to airport screening machines or border fences. Michael Chertoff says the U.S. also should spend more on foreign-aid programs, scholarships for foreign students and other tools of so-called soft power….
Mr. Chertoff said he came to his views over the past six months or so, when he finally had time to think about big-picture challenges. Now, he said, “a lasting victory in the safeguarding of the country” can be achieved only by marrying traditional security with winning “a contest of ideas, and a battle for the allegiance of men and women around the world.”
“I don’t believe you can placate your way out of threat by terrorism,” Mr. Chertoff said. But at the same time, “if you can affect the recruiting and the sympathy and the pool of people in which terrorists recruit, from a long-term standpoint, that’s the effective strategy.”
And Robert Gates, who replaced Donald Rumsfeld at the Defense Department and injected some much-needed sanity into our military policy, has made it clear he will feel right at home staying on in an Obama administration:
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said closing the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay is a “high priority,” and he called on Congress to work with the new administration on legislation to make it happen.
Mr. Gates also said he is now comfortable with President-elect Barack Obama’s call for U.S. combat forces to leave Iraq by the middle of 2010, after earlier questioning Mr. Obama’s withdrawal timeline during the presidential campaign.
Mr. Gates, who will remain in his post in the Obama administration, was one of the first senior members of the Bush cabinet to push publicly for the Guantanamo prison’s closure, but his calls largely fell on deaf ears.
Some people, particularly on the right, claim to wonder where Obama’s much-promised change might be found. I think it’s pretty damn obvious myself.
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Chambliss looking strong in runoff results
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Congratulations to Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who looks to be on his way to a second six-year term in the U.S. Senate. Democrat Jim Martin has made a good race of it, pushing Chambliss to a runoff in a state in which Republicans remain strong favorites statewide, but he had a lot of the obstacles in his path.
Six year from now, this kind of race might end differently. But apparently not this year.
Lauren McDonald, running as a Republican for Public Service Commission, also looks to be winning. If so, I think Georgians are really going to regret that one — with important decisions to be made on multi-billion-dollar nuclear plants, we’ll pay for it literally and figuratively. Replacing incumbent Angela Speirs, an honest, pro-consumer and yes, Republican public servant, with someone like McDonald is a serious step down in class.
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Things looking bad for Franken in Minn.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today’s Senate runoff between Jim Martin and Saxby Chambliss has drawn national attention in large part because of the possibility that a Martin victory would give Democrats 60 seats in the Senate, enough to close off filibusters.
However, Sen. Jim Martin would become that 60th vote only if Sen. Al Franken became the 59th. And that seems highly unlikely. Franken has fallen behind by more than 300 votes in the Minnesota Senate recount (although the Franken camp claims the real margin is less than 80), with less than 10 percent of the votes still to be recounted.
According to The Hill, Franken’s camp is even considering taking the fight to the floor of the Senate:
“Al Franken’s (D) campaign may ask the Democratic-led Senate to intervene on his behalf to allow some disqualified absentee ballots to be counted in his quest to unseat Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.).
Franken attorney Marc Elias made the case to reporters Monday that as many as 1,000 absentee ballots were improperly disqualified and that the Senate or the courts may need to step in to resolve the issue.
“No recount can be considered accurate or complete until all the ballots cast by lawful voters are counted,” Elias said of the recount that became necessary when only about 200 votes separated the two candidates on Nov. 4.
Minnesota’s Board of Canvassers ruled last Wednesday that it would not revisit the improperly disqualified ballots. The bipartisan board ruled unanimously that it did not have the authority to order that the ballots be reviewed and counted.
Elias said that of the 12,000 disqualified absentee ballots in the race, “as many as 1,000” ballots were improperly excluded, and should be counted. He added that the campaign would appeal to the Board of Canvassers, courts or the U.S. Senate to ensure those ballots are counted. Last week, Elias had indicated that the campaign would not directly appeal the board’s ruling.
The U.S. Constitution allows each congressional chamber to be the “Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.”
Taking it to the Senate would be a big mistake, and Senate Democrats ought to refuse to get involved if Franken dares to push things that far. Franken has the right and even the obligation to press Minnesota officials to count every legal ballot, but in the end the decision should be made in Minnesota, not by politicians in Washington.
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Bush regrets mistakes of others
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson (transcript here), President Bush was asked about his greatest regret:
BUSH: “I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”
There’s a lot packed into that paragraph. First, note how neatly Bush absolves himself of any blame whatsoever. He regrets mistakes made by others, not any mistake that he himself might have made.
Second, he tries to extend the myth that the decision to invade Iraq was driven by concern that Iraq had WMD and that it might be given to terrorists. However, that was always just the excuse for invasion; it was never the reason.
In the words of the infamous Downing Street memo, written by a top British official after a visit to Washington in July 2002, long before most Americans were even aware a war was looming:
“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others saw Iraq as a piece of low-hanging, very ripe and oil-rich fruit, waiting to be plucked. They saw it as an Arab country that could be fairly quickly and profitably “Americanized” to serve as a permanent staging area for U.S. forces in the region and even as a pro-Israeli voice in the Arab world.
The claim that Iraq posed some danger to the United States — remember the dire talk of unmanned aerial vehicles supposedly capable of reaching our shores, the “mushroom cloud rising over an American city” — was manufactured to justify the picking of that fruit.
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Denying reality doesn’t change reality
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Through the early and middle parts of the political season, right up until the September collapse on Wall Street, the Republicans were still claiming that the economy was doing just fine, that all was well and that the rest of the country was just imagining a slowdown.
It was, as Phil Gramm put it, a mental recession. John McCain claimed the economy was fundamentally sound. Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss enlisted in the effort as well, claiming back in July that “We may not be in a recession. I don’t know what that term means.”
They were wrong, of course. Most Americans knew in their gut that something was wrong, and the GOP’s refusal to acknowledge that reality cost them a lot of credibility. Now, a committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research has officially confirmed that the current recession actually began back in December 2007, just as a lot of folks suspected.
Of course, the Republicans are hardly alone in their belief that if we all just refused to acknowledge trouble, trouble would disappear. And at least they didn’t take it as far as authorities in Latvia.
RIGA, Latvia — Hammered by economic woe, this former Soviet republic recently took a novel step to contain the crisis. Its counterespionage agency busted an economist for being too downbeat.
“All I did was say what everyone knows,” says Dmitrijs Smirnovs, a 32-year-old university lecturer detained by Latvia’s Security Police. The force is responsible for hunting down spies, terrorists and other threats to this Baltic nation of 2.3 million people and 26 banks.
Now free after two days of questioning, Mr. Smirnovs hasn’t been charged. But he is still under investigation for bad-mouthing the stability of Latvia’s banks and the national currency, the lat. Investigators suspect him of spreading “untruthful information.” They’ve ordered him not to leave the country and seized his computer.
Finance is a highly touchy subject in Latvia, one that the state tries, with unusual zeal, to shield from loose tongues. It is a criminal offense here to spread “untrue data or information” about the country’s financial system. Undermining it is outlawed as subversion.
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Palin concludes Georgia sweep
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sarah Palin is reportedly drawing decent but not great crowds in her sweep through Georgia on behalf of Saxby Chambliss. The turnout is certainly a lot better than any other political figure this side of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton could attract.
“The Saxby Chambliss signs are plentiful, but it’s clear even before you walk in that this is a Sarah Palin for President event, four years ahead of its time,” reports Jim Galloway from the Gwinnett Center.
The enthusiasm and turnout reflect Palin’s appeal to the party base and should be helpful to Chambliss in his re-election effort. But polls say that the same traits that endear Palin to the hard-core GOP are turnoffs to independents and moderates.
“Palin’s image, being the way it is for independents, puts her at a distinct disadvantage from a general election standpoint,” Tony Fabrizio, a veteran GOP strategist, told Politico. “But it wouldn’t be the first time the hard-core base ran off the cliff.”
I wonder: Does that candor put Fabrizio on Redstate’s “leper list?”
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Time for Pakistan to fix itself
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The terrorist attacks in Mumbai continue to have repercussions in India, where a second top government official has resigned in disgrace. Indian officials had apparently been warned that a terrorist attack was imminent and would be launched from the sea, but were still unable to prevent it.
However, the real repercussions should be felt in Pakistan. The Associated Press reports that “according to security officials, the sole surviving attacker has told investigators that his group trained for about six months at camps in Pakistan operated by Lashkar-e-Taiba. Pakistan banned the group six years ago after the U.S. and Britain listed it as a terrorist group.”
There is no evidence of involvement in the plot by Pakistan’s government. However, Osama bin Laden is believed to be in Pakistan, which has become a launching point for Taliban and al Qaida attacks into neighboring Afghanistan. Commandos trained in Pakistan have also launched previous attacks against India, culminating in last week’s horror.
That is intolerable. It’s time for the international community to force Pakistan to get serious about ending its status as a source of terrorism. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others, seems intent on making that point.
“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions myself on this, but I do think that this is a time for complete, absolute, total transparency and cooperation and that is what we expect (from Pakistan),” Rice told reporters earlier today.
Outside military force against Pakistan isn’t feasible and wouldn’t accomplish much except to weaken Pakistan’s central government, which would be counterproductive. But continued military and economic aid as well as trade relations should be made conditional on Pakistani authorities taking strong, effective and sustained action against terror.
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The blowback on torture
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Writing in The Washington Post, the leader of the U.S. interrogation team that helped track down and kill terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi talks about the use of torture and abuse by other American officials in Iraq, and its deadly consequences for U.S. soldiers:
“I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq.
It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.”
Experts in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency stress the importance of what they call “the say-do gap,” the gap between what we say and what we actually do. The larger that gap, the easier it is to recruit terrorists against us. The testimony of the anonymous interrogator in his Post piece suggests that the use of torture created a massive “say-do gap” that probably contributed to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers.
In his just-concluded remarks introducing his national security team, President-elect Obama tried to address that issue directly:
“We will show the world once more that America is relentless in defense of our people, steady in advancing our interests, and committed to the ideals that shine as a beacon to the world: democracy and justice; opportunity and unyielding hope - because American values are America’s greatest export to the world.”
He has the “say” part down. Come Jan. 20, we and the rest of the world can begin to judge the “do” part as well.
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Obama’s national security team reassuring
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The national security team scheduled to be announced today by President-elect Barack Obama is a serious, pragmatic group of people, and for that reason alone it provides a welcome contrast to the neoconservative radicals brought into power by President Bush.
Hillary Clinton at the State Department; Jim Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, as national security adviser; Robert Gates, a longtime mainstream Republican, remaining at the Department of Defense —- they are also a far cry from the Marxist, pacifist, naive radicals that Republicans claimed would come into power with Obama.
Gates, Clinton and Jones come from very different professional backgrounds, but they share an understanding with the president-elect that diplomacy must be our primary means of engaging with the world, with military power held in reserve and used only as needed.
The wisdom and necessity of that approach were confirmed last week with a new report by the National Intelligence Council, “Global Trends 2025.” The report, compiled by analysts from throughout the U.S. intelligence community, does not attempt to predict the future but to spot the trends likely to drive that future.
The coming world it describes is much more complicated, with many more moving pieces that the United States can perhaps influence but cannot hope to control.
“The United States will remain the single most powerful country but will be less dominant,” the analysts report. “Shrinking economic and military capabilities may force the U.S. into a difficult set of trade-offs between domestic versus foreign policy priorities.”
Overall, “the multiplicity of influential actors and distrust of vast power means less room for the U.S. to call shots without the support of strong partnerships.”
As the report points out, recent years have seen a historic and unprecedented transfer of wealth from the West to the East, a phenomenon it predicts will continue. That too cannot help but have national-security implications, in no small part because our military dominance is founded on an economic dominance that no longer exists.
Although the report doesn’t go into such details, among those trade-offs may be cancellation of expensive projects such as the Army’s high-tech Future Combat Systems and the Air Force’s F-22 jet fighter, assembled in Marietta. Gates has already expressed doubt about both programs, and his reappointment as defense secretary bodes poorly for their future.
While most conflict in the post-World War II era has been ideological in nature, the report suggests that has changed. The prime driver of conflict in the years to come is likely to be access to energy resources, and “descending into a world of resource nationalism increases the risk of great-power confrontation.”
That strengthens the case for investment in energy efficiency and alternative energy sources, which in reality are investments in our national security.
Since the end of the post-Cold War era, we have been groping our way through challenges without a real concept of the international role we want to play, and without thinking through hard issues such as matching our ambitions with our resources. We invaded Iraq, for example, without understanding the drain it would place on our manpower, economic and diplomatic power, all of which are finite.
As the report acknowledges, history takes its own unpredictable course. But it offers three important lessons of the past century:
— Economic volatility creates political volatility, which raises the risk of war.
— Geopolitical rivalries, more so than technological change, have been “significant causes of the multiple wars, collapse of empires and rise of new powers.”
— “Leaders and their ideas matter … As demonstrated by the impacts of Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman, leadership is key.”
For that and other reasons, including evidence of good judgment, the leadership team assembled by Obama is reassuring.
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