Home > Jay Bookman > Archives > 2009 > January
January 2009
Another nominee with tax problems?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I thought Senate Republicans acted responsibly in not using Tim Geithner’s tax problems as a reason to fight his nomination as Treasury secretary. As I noted at the time, rejecting a Treasury secretary in times like these would be like rejecting a Defense secretary in time of war and leaving the Pentagon rudderless.
But it’ll be interesting to see how they now handle the tax problems of Tom Daschle, the Health and Human Services nominee. If they want to make a big deal out of it, they certainly have the ammunition. The fact that part of the $128,000 in unpaid tax was related to a car and driver supplied to Daschle by a wealthy Dem donor doesn’t help the “optics” of the situation. (Daschle was in private life at the time.)
I suspect that Daschle’s standing as a former Senate majority leader will buy him soft treatment. But if the Republicans choose to make this an issue, I couldn’t blame them.
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Congratulations, Chairman Michael Steele
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So I see the Republicans went and elected Michael Steele as their party chairman. The final ballot came down to Steele, a black man, and Katon Dawson of South Carolina, who until a few months ago was still a member of a whites-only country club. Steele won, 91-77. Under those circumstances, a Dawson win would have been disastrous for party image.
Although he tried to deny it in his campaign for chairman, Steele is more moderate than many in his party’s base, and I wish him success in bringing them back a bit toward the middle. The GOP has basically rendered itself uncompetitive, and that’s not good for anybody in the long term — not for the Republicans; not for the Democrats, who need the competition to keep them straight; and not for the country as a whole.
As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky warned his fellow Republicans last week, “the Republican Party seems to be slipping into a position of being more of a regional party than a national one. In politics, there’s a name for a regional party: It’s called a minority party.” McConnell also urged them to expand their outreach to minorities, an effort in which Steele could be a big help.
When I saw the news about Steele, though, I couldn’t help thinking about University of Alabama football and their legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. Well into the civil rights era, years after the university itself had been desegregated, the Alabama football team was still lily white. Bryant claimed later that he was afraid of fan reaction if he dared to recruit a black man.
USC’s Sam “Bam” Cunningham breaks through the Alabama line on his way to two touchdowns in a famous game in 1970.
Finally, in 1970, Bryant scheduled the University of Southern California for a game in Birmingham. USC’s black fullback, Sam “Bam” Cunningham, ran right over the Alabama players. He gained 135 yards on just 12 carries, scoring two touchdowns, and USC won the game 42-21, a humiliating defeat for Alabama on its home turf.
And legend has it that up in the stands that day, Alabama fans watched what Cunningham was doing to them, turned to each other and said: “Boys, we gotta get us one of those.”
I think that’s what happened to the Republicans. They looked at Obama and his popularity; they looked at the scoreboard, at the number of seats they’ve lost in the Senate and House. And they turned to each other and said, “Boys…”
Congratulations, Chairman Steele.
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The five o’clock whistle is a-blowin’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Given the tenor of the debate here today I was tempted to go with this as today’s Friday quitting-time traveling music, but in the spirit of bipartisanship I decided otherwise. (Taxpayer, I did like your suggestion as well.)
However, after a string of country-themed selections, I think it’s time to shake things up a bit. This should do it, literally and figuratively. I saw this guy a few years ago and it was a great show:
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Krauthammer critique of Obama outreach makes some sense
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I haven’t exactly been like-minded over the years with Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. And I do think that President Obama’s recent interview with an Arab TV outlet was a smart strategic move, a way to crack open doors that had been slammed shut in anger. There are no guarantees a new approach will work, but it’s worth a try given the alternatives.
However, I have to admit that I found myself agreeing more than I would like with Krauthammer in his recent critique of that Obama interview. Krauthammer doesn’t exactly tell the whole story of U.S-Muslim relations, and a lot of the history he recounts makes US policy seem far more selfless than it really was. But overall he makes some valid points.
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A couple of morsels to chew over….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The folks at Politico have a couple of intriguing stories posted.
“Politico has learned that tomorrow Americans United for Change, a liberal group, will begin airing radio ads in three states Obama won — Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada — with a tough question aimed at the GOP senators there: Will you side with Obama or Rush Limbaugh?
“Every Republican member of the House chose to take Rush Limbaugh’s advice,” says the narrator after playing the conservative talk radio giant’s declaration that he hopes Obama “fails.”
“Every Republican voted with Limbaugh — and against creating 4 million new American jobs. We can understand why a extreme partisan like Rush Limbaugh wants President Obama’s jobs program to fail — but the members of Congress elected to represent the citizens in their districts? That’s another matter. Now the Obama plan goes to the Senate, and the question is: Will our Senator”—here the ad is tailored by state to name George Voinovich in Ohio, Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, and John Ensign in Nevada—“side with Rush Limbaugh too?”
I think that’s pretty well played. I doubt it will have much impact, but it’s smart politics nonetheless. Casting it as a choice between Obama — with a 65 percent approval rating in the new Fox poll, and only 16 percent disapproval — and the controversial Limbaugh is a nice touch.
“Senate sources say that President Barack Obama is considering New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg for the still-open Commerce secretary slot — a possibility that could give Democrats the 60-vote margin in the Senate that they weren’t able to win at the polls in November.
Asked whether he’d been offered the Commerce job, Gregg told Politico: “I am not at liberty to discuss that.”
“I wouldn’t want to see him leave the Senate,” said Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). “That’s a pretty sneaky move — get a really good person as Commerce secretary and then put us in a bind politically.”
NH has a Democratic governor who would likely name a Democrat to replace Gregg. And as Politico points out, Gregg’s up for reelection in 2010 in a state trending blue, and has recently spoken well of Obama.
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Obama can’t inspire bipartisanship, but Blagojevich sure can….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Illinois Senate votes 59-0 to remove the clown.
But you know, I bet some of those senators got a little guilty listening to Blagojevich plead that what he had done was the same things they all do.
“You guys are in politics,” he told them. “You know what we have to do to go out and run elections. There was no criminal activity on those four tapes…. Take those four tapes as they are and you, I believe in fairness, will recognize and acknowledge those are conversations relating to the things all of us in politics do in order to run campaigns and try to win elections.”
Yes, Blago was more crude, crass, blunt and direct about it. Yes, he deserved to be removed as governor. But his mistake was more a matter of degree than many in politics, including many here in Georgia, would be comfortable admitting.
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$18.4 billion in Wall Street bonuses? Priceless
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By almost any measure, 2008 was a complete disaster for Wall Street — except, that is, when the bonuses arrived.
Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.
That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.
While the payouts paled next to the riches of recent years, Wall Street workers still took home about as much as they did in 2004, when the Dow Jones industrial average was flying above 10,000, on its way to a record high.
Some bankers took home millions last year even as their employers lost billions.
….All told, bonuses fell 44 percent last year, from $32.9 billion in 2007, the largest decline in dollar terms on record. But the size of that downturn partly reflected the lofty heights to which bonuses had soared during the bull market. At many banks, those payouts were based on profits that turned out to be ephemeral. …
According to Mr. DiNapoli, the brokerage units of New York financial companies lost more than $35 billion in 2008, triple their losses in 2007.
Lucian A. Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School and expert on executive compensation, called the 2008 bonus figure “disconcerting.” Bonuses, he said, are meant to reward good performance and retain employees. But Wall Street disbursed billions despite staggering losses and a shrinking job market.
“This was neither the sixth-best year in terms of aggregate profits, nor was it the sixth-most-difficult year in terms of retaining employees,” Professor Bebchuk said.
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The Great Recession of ‘09
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Jobless rolls jumped to a record peak in mid-January, while new orders for durable goods fell for a fifth straight month in December, data showed on Thursday, underscoring the deepening economic malaise.
The number of people remaining on the benefits roll after drawing an initial week of aid, or continued claims, rose 159,000 to a higher-than-forecast 4.776 million in the week ended Jan. 17, the most recent week for which data is available.
The Labor Department said this was the highest reading since its records on this series began in 1967. … Initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits increased to a seasonally adjusted 588,000 last week from a revised 585,000 the prior week. … The Commerce Department is expected to report on Friday that gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy, contracted at an annual rate of 5.4 percent in the fourth quarter, according to a Reuters survey.”
But if you really want to get depressed, watch this interview with Nouriel Roubini, the NYU economics professor and analyst who in 2006 essentially predicted this catastrophe. Since then, his analysis has continued to seem prescient — time after time, Roubini predictions initially scoffed at by other economists have come true six months later.
The two biggest “takeaways” from the interview:
The Obama stimulus package may create or save some 3 million jobs. But that will only cut this year’s projected job loss from 6 million to roughly 3 million. It’s still going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
More stunning still, the $700 billion in TARP funds won’t be close to enough to solve the banking industry’s problems. In effect, the U.S. banking system is already insolvent, and bringing it back to life will require another $1.4 trillion, a lot of it from the feds. In effect, we’ll have to nationalize the banks for the short term. Roubini believes we have no choice but to take that route, even as he acknowledges the long-term dangers.
Have a nice day.
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America swings toward the Dems
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With the Republican National Committee meeting in Washington, trying to elect a chairman and set a new direction for the party, and with every Republican in the House deciding to vote against the Obama stimulus package, it seems appropriate to look at where things stand between the parties.
“PRINCETON, NJ — An average of 36% of Americans identified themselves as Democrats and 28% as Republicans in 2008. That eight-point advantage is the largest for the Democratic Party since Gallup began regularly conducting its polls by telephone in 1988…
The year-by-year trend shows that Democrats have gained ground against Republicans in each of the last five years, going from a deficit of two points in 2003 to the most recent eight-point advantage.
Additionally, the 36% of Americans who identified as Democrats last year matches the high point in Democratic identification since 1988, when it was also 36%. But since fewer Americans identified as Republicans last year (28%) than in 1988 (31%), the Democratic advantage was larger in 2008.”
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Well, so much for bipartisanship
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“WASHINGTON — Without a single Republican vote, President Obama won House approval on Thursday for an $819 billion economic recovery plan as Congressional Democrats sought to hold down their own difference over the enormous package of tax cuts and spending.
All but 11 Democrats voted for the plan and 177 Republicans voted against it. The 244-188 vote came a day after Mr. Obama traveled to Capitol Hill to seek Republican backing — if not for the package then on future issues.”
There are many lessons to be drawn from that. One is that the president’s attempt to draw bipartisan support got him exactly nothing. The other is that even with all Republicans voting against him, and with 11 Democrats defecting, the plan passed overwhelmingly.
That’s what a mandate does for you.
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Rape by CIA chief in Algeria alleged
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Great. Just great. This is going to go over so very well in the Arab world…..
“The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
Officials say the 41-year old CIA officer, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.
The discovery of more than a dozen videotapes showing the CIA officer engaged in sex acts with other women has led the Justice Department to broaden its investigation to include at least one other Arab country, Egypt, where the CIA officer had been posted earlier in his career, according to law enforcement officials.”
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View the kissing of the godfather’s … ring
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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“Who’s your daddy? HE’S your daddy!”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“I think that our leadership, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, are taking the right approach. I mean, it’s easy if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows and you’re living well and plus you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base and that sort of that thing.”
— U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey, a Marietta Republican, defending his party leaders against attacks from Limbaugh and other right-wing talk radio hosts. That was Tuesday.
“Because of the high volume of phone calls and correspondence received by my office since the Politico article ran, I wanted to take a moment to speak directly to grassroots conservatives. Let me assure you, I am one of you….As long as I am in the Congress, I will continue to fight for and defend our sacred values. I have actively opposed every bailout, every rebate check, every so called “stimulus.” And on so many of these things, I see eye-to-eye with Rush Limbaugh. Regardless of what yesterday’s headline may have read, I never told Rush to back off.
…Now more than ever, we need to articulate a clear conservative message that distinguishes our values and our approach from those of liberal democrats who are seeking to move our nation in the wrong direction. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and other conservative giants are the voices of the conservative movement’s conscience. Every day, millions and millions of Americans — myself included—turn on their radios and televisions to listen to what they have to say, and we are inspired by their words and by their determination.”
— Rep. Gingrey, just a day later.
I suspect the good congressman has gotten a lesson in who his daddy is.
(sorry for the earlier glitch)
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The Republicans and the stimulus package
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Even before President Obama went to the Hill Tuesday seeking Republican support for the stimulus package, House Speaker John Boehner had instructed his caucus to oppose the measure.
Fair enough. That’s politics.
But the GOP is trying to rebuild its political appeal on a stance widely rejected by the American people. Poll after poll shows strong to overwhelming support for the $825 billion spending plan, which isn’t surprising given continuing headlines of major layoffs. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, for example, 57 percent said the stimulus was a good idea; 36 percent said it was a bad idea.
Of course, sometimes the public is simply wrong; sometimes leadership means bucking public opinion to do the right thing, the smart thing.
However, the overwhelming consensus of economists is that the public and Obama and the Democrats are right: a large stimulus is absolutely necessary. Although there are certainly exceptions, that consensus includes many if not most conservative economists.
“”Most conservative economists are all for it,” according to Mark Zandi, a founder of Moody’s Economy.com and an advisor to John McCain’s presidential campaign.
“”Countering a deep economic recession requires an increase in government spending to offset the sharp decline in consumer outlays and business investment that is now under way,” Martin Feldstein, chief economic advisor to the sainted Ronald Reagan, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month. “Without that rise in government spending, the economic downturn would be deeper and longer.”
Of course, economists are just pointy-headed academics — what do they know? What matters is the opinion of American business, the entrepreneurs and leaders with real-life, firsthand experience in capitalism. Well, most business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, strongly support the stimulus as a whole even if they disagree with some aspects of it.
So why the strong Republican opposition? In a sense, they have fallen into a trap of their own making. Spending and deficits grew so fast during the past eight years under largely Republican rule that the GOP lost all credibility as fiscal conservatives, even (or especially) among their own base.
This vote is an effort to placate that base and begin to re-establish that credibility, even if by doing so they alienate the strong majority of US voters who support the stimulus. That’s a mark of how bad it’s gotten for the GOP: They have to first patch up their support from their own hard-core 30 percent of the electorate before they can even think about trying to expand that number closer to 50 percent.
They have to do what Rush Limbaugh tells them to do.
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Sarah Palin makes early move
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“In a sign Sarah Palin wants to continue to be a player on the national political stage, the Alaska Governor has started a new political action committee to raise funds, SarahPAC.
The PAC is registered in Virginia and is modeled after HillPAC, Hillary Clinton’s former political committee. Palin’s committee allows her to raise money for other Republicans.
According to the Web site, the committee will also support Palin’s “plans to build a better, stronger, and safer America in the 21st century.”
Palin continues to have a huge political following. As of noon today, she has 464,000 friends on Facebook.com.”
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Atlanta housing prices fell 11 percent in a year … which ain’t bad
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to Standard & Poor, November sales data show “continued broad-based declines in the prices of existing single family homes across the United States, with 11 of the 20 metro areas showing record rates of annual decline, and 14 reporting declines in excess of 10 percent versus November 2007.”
The Atlanta metro area is one of those reporting a double-digit decline from a year earlier, with sale prices down 11 percent compared to November ‘07. But overall the picture here isn’t that bad compared to other metro areas.
Yes, housing prices in metro Atlanta have fallen 14.6 percent from their peak in July ‘07. But prices in Phoenix are down 42.6 percent from their peak in June ‘06; in Los Angeles, prices are down 35.6 percent since September ‘06, and in San Diego they’re down 38.9 percent.
If you look at S&P’s Excel spreadsheet, sale prices in those markets went through the roof, essentially doubling between 2002 and 2006. That’s where the bubble was; that’s where a lot of this mess really began.
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Dirty tricks in internal GOP fight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
South Carolina has a special place in GOP dirty-tricks lore. It was the home of Lee Atwater, the political strategist who specialized in the use of race and wedge politics and dirty tricks. It was the place where the George W. Bush campaign helped to kill off John McCain’s 2000 presidential hopes with a whisper campaign that McCain’s daughter, adopted from an orphanage in India, was actually the product of a McCain affair with a black woman.
And in last year’s GOP presidential nomination fight, someone mailed fake Christmas cards to SC Republicans that supposedly came from Mitt Romney (Romney’s Mormon religion was a problem among the state’s Christian evangelicals).
“It’s a fake card that had quotes out of the Book of Mormon, and it was a Christmas card from the Romneys and said ‘Paid for by the Boston Tabernacle,’ which it was not,” Katon Dawson, then chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, said at the time.
Today, Dawson himself is a target. He’s running for chairman of the Republican National Committee, and somebody among his opponents is trying to make an issue of the fact that for 12 years Dawson was a member of an all-white country club. He resigned in September, only a couple of months before announcing his candidacy for the national office.
The anonymous “reminder” of Dawson’s recent past is being sent to RNC voters via an email campaign. Personally, I think it’s a legitimate issue. It’s the 21st century and we have a black man as president. If the GOP elects a party chairman who felt at home in a club that barred black membership … well, they’ll deserve the criticism they get if they do that.
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We now have a Treasury secretary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Timothy Geithner was just confirmed as Treasury secretary by a 60-34 vote, the most votes against a Treasury nominee since World War II. You can’t say the opposition was unfounded, not with Geithner’s tax problems. In other times, that alone would have been enough to squelch his nomination.
But other times aren’t these times. Despite the 34 votes against him — at least three of which were Democrats — Senate Republicans made no real effort to try to block Geithner. To their credit, they understood that the stakes are too high; the consequences too serious to risk leaving Treasury without leadership. It would be like blocking a Defense nominee in time of war.
Personally, I’m not thrilled with Geithner’s nomination either. But I don’t know how you find someone experienced and knowledgable enough for that position who also isn’t deeply embedded in the culture that helped produce these problems. I suspect some of those “yes” votes were produced by a similar thought process.
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Bloody Monday on job front
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Home Depot said Monday it will cut 7,000 jobs — including 500 at its Atlanta headquarters — and shutter all 34 of its Expo design centers.
The company, battling the recession and housing industry collapse, said about 5,000 of the cuts will come from the closings of the Expo stores and another 14 outlets specializing in yard or bath remodeling supplies.
Another 2,000 will come from a restructuring of “store support” functions. Those will include the headquarters cuts.”
So today’s announced carnage:
Caterpillar: 20,000
Sprint 8,000
Pfizer/Wyeth 26,000
Home Depot 7,000
Total: 61,000
And those workers have spouses and children and mortgages and other bills to pay.
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Congress ought to freeze its pay
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Yeah, it’s of purely symbolic value. But it ought to happen anyway….
“Lawmakers and budget watchdogs who support stopping an automatic pay raise for Congress next year see President Obama’s decision to freeze the salaries of top White House staffers as a huge boon to their cause.
“I hope it gives Congress a nudge because I think it really shows that the president understands what people are going through and that we all have the responsibility to tighten our belts,” said Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.), who sponsored a bill that would deny lawmakers the automatic pay raise they receive every year.
As one of his first acts as president, Obama pledged to freeze the salaries of more than 100 staffers in his administration making more than $100,000 per year…
Mitchell sponsored a similar bill last year, but the measure, which attracted 34 cosponsors, failed to make it out of committee. As a result, members received an automatic $4,700 pay raise at the beginning of this year.
But with 82 cosponsors so far this year, and Obama’s parallel move in the White House, Mitchell is optimistic that his bill will pass if it makes it out of committee.”
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Fixin’ to pitch a fit over Wall St. greed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you’re looking for a place to put the pittance you salvaged from the stock market, I’ve spotted the next hot commodity, the next growth industry. Under these conditions, demand is going to soar for this item, and there’s money to be made.
You ready? I’ll whisper it in your ear, just between us friends:
“Pitchforks.”
Yup, pitchforks. With good solid handles and sharp tines. When the angry mobs start assembling to march on Wall Street and Washington, ready to take out their anger at the greed and excess of the last few years, they’re gonna need pitchforks and torches. We’ll sell ‘em by the thousands, like Obama buttons at the inauguration.
Tar-and-feather futures might not be a bad investment either.
I’m kidding of course, but only sort of. Like a lot of Americans, I’m aggravated and frankly astonished to see the sense of royal entitlement to other people’s money that developed over the years on Wall Street. And nothing seems to shake it.
The story of Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Merrill’s former CEO John Thain illustrates that sense of entitlement all too well.
Last year, Merrill Lynch lost tens of billions of dollars —- $15 billion in the last quarter alone. Yet even after that performance, Merrill executives felt they were entitled to billions in bonuses paid with stockholders’ money.
It didn’t matter that Merrill’s losses were so bad that in effect the brokerage had to be rescued by taxpayers. It didn’t matter that the U.S. Treasury had to give Bank of America a total of $45 billion in TARP funds to help the bank buy Merrill and save it from bankruptcy.
Not even that was enough to shake the sense of royal entitlement. Late last month, just before the merger was made official and with Bank of America still finalizing the taxpayer subsidy, Merrill executives collected an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion in bonuses. They even accelerated the payment schedule by a month to make sure the money flowed their way before anybody could stop it.
Like I said: Pitchforks.
Thain, Merrill’s CEO, at first tried to include himself in the gravy train, pushing for a $10 million bonus even as the company collapsed. Public outrage prevented that injustice, but it did not stop Thain from pocketing a separate $9.7 million payment triggered by the change of ownership. That was on top of the $15 million bonus he received just for taking the Merrill job just a year earlier.
And as the cherry on the sundae, Thain had also spent an estimated $1.2 million just redecorating his office.
On the scale of threats to the economy, such sums are admittedly almost too minor to notice. Officials in government and on Wall Street are trying to free up the flow of credit; they’re trying to bolster confidence in the banking industry; they’re trying to save the jobs of millions of Americans. And the honest ones admit that they aren’t really sure what will turn things around.
“The answer is nobody knows. The economists don’t know. All you know is you throw everything at it …” Warren Buffett said last week. “What we do know is to stand by and do nothing is a terrible mistake or to follow Hooverlike policies would be a mistake.”
The American people seem to understand that. President Obama said in his inaugural address that it’s time to put away childish things, and most Americans have taken a pretty mature approach to a frightening situation.
However, their support for committing hundreds of billions of additional taxpayer dollars to corporate bailouts hangs on the belief that Wall Street shares their understanding of the gravity of this situation. People have lost half of their life savings, and perhaps their homes and jobs too, and they want some assurance that the greed and excess has ended. They want to know that they’re not being scammed again.
And if government officials aren’t willing or able to provide that assurance —- well, the public probably won’t respond with pitchforks. They’ll just insist the bailout be stopped in its tracks, and it’ll be hard to blame them.
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Guantanamo “something beyond a travesty”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and a prosecutor with well over a hundred criminal jury trials under his belt, was assigned in May 2007 to prosecute the case of Mohammed Jawed, a Gitmo prisoner, in the military commissions established by the Bush administration.
It was a job that Vandeveld accepted and pursued eagerly as a patriotic American. However, as he looked into the specifics of the case assigned to him, the colonel became appalled.
He learned that Jawed had been arrested in his native Afghanistan at the age of 15 or 16 and charged with throwing a hand grenade that had injured U.S. soldiers. But in the six years Jawad had been held, the military had made no attempt to examine or even compile the alleged evidence against him. Vandeveld discovered scraps of supposed evidence scattered in desk drawers, bookcases, tossed on empty desks or even thrown into a locker and forgotten. The story he tells makes it clear that the military had no real interest in Jawed’s guilt or innocence.
The most damning piece of evidence was a handwritten confession supposedly obtained by Afghan police from Jawed before he was turned over to the Americans. But Vandeveld’s faith in that document was shaken when he discovered that Jawed was illiterate, meaning he could not have written or even read that statement. Furthermore, the confession was written in Farsi; Jawed speaks only Pashto.
“It seemed increasingly likely that the statement attributed to Mr. Jawad in his original interrogation had simply been contrived by one of the Afghan policemen, which they then amateurishly sought to ‘authenticate’ by having Jawad place his thumbprint on the document,” Vandeveld concluded.
Vandeveld still continued to press his case, believing that there must be other evidence that Jawad was guilty. But he began to have reservations about the propriety of prosecuting an adolescent as a war criminal. His confidence was shaken further when Jawad claimed to have been beaten and abused by the U.S. military.
Vandeveld initially dismissed that claim as ludicrous; he believed in the probity of his colleagues in uniform, and he knew that al Qaida teaches its members to make such claims. “We accepted as an article of faith that the detainees either fabricated outright or grossly exaggerated their seemingly continual complaints of abuse,” he said.
Vandeveld also personally assumed, “based on media reports, that a small number of detainees had been subjected to less than congenial interrogation tactics, but only because the interrogators had some basis to believe that such detaineees possessed intelligence critical to our efforts to disrupt and destroy al Qaeda.”
Vandeveld was confident that a mere Afghan teenager, a boy who was at worst just a simple foot soldier in al Qaida with only a few weeks of experience in the group, would not have been treated that way. Torture and abuse were surely reserved for those who had important information that they refused to divulge.
But the prosecutor quickly discovered evidence to the contrary — the abuse was far more common that he had allowed himself to believe. At one point, for example, young Jawad had been denied sleep for two straight weeks; it damaged him so deeply that he later tried to commit suicide by banging his head against a wall. Other evidence supported Jawad’s claim that he had been physically assaulted by U.S. soldiers and shoved down a stairwell while hooded and handcuffed.
Eventually, Col. Vandeveld came to a troubling conclusion: Jawad was innocent and should be released immediately.
“It is my opinion, based on my extensive knowledge of the case, that there is no credible evidence or legal basis to justify Mr. Jawad’s detention in U.S. custody or his prosecution by military commission,” Vandeveld wrote in a signed, sworned statement taken two weeks ago. “There is, however, reliable evidence that he was badly mistreated by U.S. authorities both in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo, and he has suffered, and continues to suffer, great psychological harm. Holding Mr. Jawad for over six years, with no resolution of his case and with no terminus in sight, is something beyond a travesty.”
“Even a statement that we believed linked him to (a terrorist group) and was thought to contain Mr. Jawad’s fingerprint was sent to the Army’s crime lab for analysis, which concluded that the fingerprint was not Mr. Jawad’s,” Vandeveld wrote.
Vandeveld tried to make those arguments within the military justice system but got nowhere. He eventually concluded that even if he got the charges against Jawad dismissed, the Bush administration “would continue to hold Mr. Jawad indefinitely as an enemy combatant, no matter the paucity or unreliability of the evidence asserted against him.”
So in September 2008, Vandeveld resigned in frustration. Now in civilian life, he is supporting a legal effort to get Jawad freed through U.S. civilian courts.
“I have taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and I remain confident that I have done so, spending over four of the past seven years away from my family, my home, my civilian occupation (as deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania) — all without any expectation of or desire for any reward greater than that the knowledge that I have remained true to my word and have done my level best to rise to our nation’s defense in its time of need,” the colonel wrote in his statement, noting that two of his friends had been killed in combat and “one of my very best friends in the world had been terribly wounded.”
But if he met Jawad in Iraq or Afghanistan, “I have no doubt at all — none — that Mr. Jawad would pose no threat whatsoever to me, his former prosecutor and now-repentent persecutor. Six years is long enough for a boy of 16 to serve in virtual solitary confinement in a distant land for reasons he may never fully understand.”
Mohammed Jawed, one of the “worst of the worst,” remains in Guantanamo.
(h/t Washingtonmonthly.com)
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A good cup ‘o mental health
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Drinking coffee may do more than just keep you awake. A new study suggests an intriguing potential link to mental health later in life, as well.
A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.
After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions.”
So excuse me while I enjoy a cup or two of mental health. I think some of you out there ought to take up the habit too — you know, to ward off dementia.
But it’s clearly too late for some of you.
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Job security has appeal these days
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“After years of struggling to get their wages up, the nation’s workers are trying to find jobs that will simply last, at least through the deep recession,” says the New York Times. “…there is a new allure developing around jobs likely to keep a person employed, at reasonable pay, through a prolonged downturn.”
You mean, like working at a newspaper?
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Continue the good policies, dump the bad ones
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Good. From the New York Times:
“ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Two missile attacks launched from remotely piloted American aircraft killed at least 15 people in western Pakistan on Friday. The strikes suggested that the use of drones to kill militants within Pakistan’s borders would continue under President Obama.
Remotely piloted Predator drones operated by the Central Intelligence Agency have carried out more than 30 missile attacks since last summer against members of Al Qaeda and other terrorism suspects deep in their redoubts on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan.”
Obama said during the campaign that he would take such steps, and it touched off a controversy. Then President Bush adopted and implemented the policy. As long as the strikes are carefully selected based on good intelligence, they should continue. Pakistan has no real control or governance over the areas in question, so it has no real complaints about what we’re doing there.
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In honor of Nashville …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s Friday evening again, rolling past the 5 o’clock hour, and time for a little traveling music to see you all home.
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Nashville voters reject English-only effort
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This is mildly surprising, and in a good way. And good surprises are pretty rare these days. Good on Nashville.
From the Nashville Tennessean:
“Nashville listened to its leaders — the governor, the mayor, and a vast coalition of churches, businesses and universities — and defeated an English-only measure by nearly 10,000 votes in Thursday’s special election.
No one predicted the massive turnout on the special election, one that inspired strong emotion from voters on either side. Ultimately, opponents said, the message that diversity is a good thing came through.
“With the defeat of this amendment, the citizens of Nashville tell the rest of the country that we are an incredibly warm city with an entrepreneurial spirit,” said Tom Oreck, a vacuum cleaner company owner who worked to defeat the measure.
The final was 32,144 for English only and 41,752 against — at about 19 percent, the largest turnout for a special election in a decade.”
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Kennedy hardly a victim of bias
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“With her abrupt exit this week from consideration for the Senate, Caroline Kennedy added her name to a growing list: women who have sought the nation’s highest offices only to face insurmountable hurdles.
Like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin before her, Kennedy illustrated what some say is an enduring double standard in the handling of ambitious female office-seekers. Even as more women step forward as contenders for premier political jobs, observers say, few seem able to get there.”
I’m sorry, but that’s nonsense. Kennedy’s problems began with the fact that she seemed unprepared for the job she sought, just as Palin had before her. Furthermore, it’s impossible to make Kennedy the symbol of a glass ceiling in politics because, well, she’s a Kennedy. That was the sole reason she got serious consideration in the first place, and it makes her case different from that of any other woman in America. If she symbolizes anything but herself, it’s the enduring power of celebrity, and that’s whole ‘nother story.
Is there a glass ceiling in politics? Given the numbers of women in the House and Senate, the answer is of course. Despite the presence of Barack Obama in the White House, minority candidates still face problems too. The 100-person Senate still has only one black member, and he was appointed.
But throughout the selection process, NY Gov. David Paterson was said to be seeking a woman to fill the seat left vacant by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (the third woman in recent years to fill that powerful post).
And the NY press is now reporting that Paterson’s pick will be U.S. Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, a woman.
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Billions in bonuses at Merrill … but for what?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What really gets me aggravated — and still leaves me frankly astonished — is the sense of royal entitlement to other people’s money that developed on Wall Street. It’s just mind-boggling.
The story of Merrill Lynch and Bank of America illustrates that sense of entitlement all too well. Merrill Lynch lost tens of billions of dollars last year — $15 billion in the last quarter alone. Yet still Merrill executives felt they were entitled to bonuses.
Merrill’s losses were so bad that in effect the company had to be bailed out by taxpayers, who gave Bank of America $45 billion to help BoA buy Merrill and cover its losses.
Yet executives at Merrill STILL felt entitled to billions in bonuses paid by other people’s money, in this case the taxpayers. They even accelerated the payment schedule to make sure the money flowed their way.
“NEW YORK — John Thain resigned under pressure from Bank of America on Thursday after reports he rushed out billions of dollars in bonuses to Merrill Lynch employees in his final days as CEO there, while the brokerage was suffering huge losses and just before Bank of America took it over.
The bonuses were paid before Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill became final on Jan. 1, and while Bank of America was privately telling the government that Merrill was losing so much money that the deal might fall through unless it could get more federal bailout money.
Bank of America later received an additional $20 billion from the government, in part to offset the unexpected Merrill losses. The brokerage lost $15 billion in the fourth quarter and more than $27 billion for the year.
The bonuses, typically paid in January, were instead given in December and totaled $3 billion to $4 billion, the Financial Times reported Thursday. Bank of America would not confirm the size of the bonuses.
Scott Silvestri, a Bank of America spokesman, noted that Merrill was still operating as an independent company at the time the bonuses were paid. Had Thain not acted early, it would have been up to Bank of America to pay or reduce the bonuses later.”
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Public patience wearing thin with TARP funds
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On the one hand, this is flatout wrong. According to the Wall Street Journal, Barney Frank helped steer $12 million in TARP money to a problem Boston bank that should not have been eligible. That’s wrong, and stupid.
But then there’s the question of scale. While Frank helped guide $12 million, you’ve got former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson diverting many billions to Goldman Sachs, where he used to be chairman. And of course that’s just one of many examples of the incestuous relationship between Treasury and Wall Street firms.
The government promised transparency and accountability in how it allocated the $350 billion in TARP funds and so far it has delivered neither. Yes, there have to be limits on how much the public is told, out of fear of undermining confidence in specific banks. But there’s no reason that the process and standards for allocating TARP funds shouldn’t be transparent.
Unless of course a real process and standards don’t exist.
“Troubled OneUnited Bank in Boston didn’t look much like a candidate for aid from the Treasury Department’s bank bailout fund last fall.
The Treasury had said it would give money only to healthy banks, to jump-start lending. But OneUnited had seen most of its capital evaporate. Moreover, it was under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses, including owning a Porsche for its executives’ use.
Nonetheless, in December OneUnited got a $12 million injection from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. One apparent factor: the intercession of Rep. Barney Frank, the powerful head of the House Financial Services Committee.
Mr. Frank, by his own account, wrote into the TARP bill a provision specifically aimed at helping this particular home-state bank. And later, he acknowledges, he spoke to regulators urging that OneUnited be considered for a cash injection…
Several Ohio banks received funds after Ohio’s congressional delegation complained bitterly about the treatment of Cleveland-based National City Corp., which regulators forced into a merger rather than provide with cash. And in Alabama, the state’s top banking official says a windfall there — five banks are slated to receive funds — is testament to the influence of two powerful Alabama lawmakers who sit on key congressional committees.”
As the WSJ story goes on to explain, those two Alabama lawmakers were Rep. Spencer Bachus, top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, and Sen. Richard Shelby, ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee.
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Roberts, Obama practice for 2013
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Just to make sure it’s official, Chief Justice John Roberts readministered the presidential oath to Barack Obama yesterday at the White House. And if both men stay healthy, I suspect he’ll get to administer the oath to Obama yet again in 2013, making them the answer to a presidential trivia question for later generations (“What Supreme Court justice administered the presidential oath three times to the same person?)
But in the meantime, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has an interesting and even funny little piece in the New York Times explaining just how and why Roberts flubbed the oath in the first place.
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Gambling not downtown’s answer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hard times can be good times. Pawn shops do brisk business hocking jewelry, guns and electronics; the foreclosure and bankruptcy industries hire new employees to handle the workload. And of course, lottery-ticket sales often boom as people hope for a get-rich-quick solution to problems.
In hard times, officials looking to boost revenue and provide jobs start thinking similar thoughts, and they find themselves drawn to the idea of casino gambling as a solution. But like the lottery, it too is a sucker’s bet.
Here in Georgia, leaseholders of Underground Atlanta have suggested installing up to 5,000 “video lottery machines” —- in effect, slot machines —- as part of a $450 million redevelopment project, with revenue to be shared with the Georgia Lottery Board and thus the HOPE scholarship.
(Former Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell takes the opposite position, arguing here in favor of a casino proposal to revive Underground.)
The idea is that by using machines owned by the lottery board, and by promising the state half the proceeds, Underground operators would sidestep prohibitions against gambling in the state constitution.
Not surprisingly, downtown tourism and hospitality boosters laud the idea. They like the thousands of jobs promised by promoters, not to mention the additional convention draw of a major gambling facility. A handful of elected officials, including Fulton County Commissioner Robb Pitts and state Rep. Roger Bruce of Atlanta, are even resurrecting the far-fetched idea of changing the state constitution to allow full-fledged casino gambling.
That last approach would require approval of two-thirds of the state Legislature and then a statewide referendum. In other words, it’s not going to happen, not in a state where legislators still won’t let you buy beer on a Sunday.
But the lottery proposal is a little more sly in its approach. Legally, the state lottery board may already have the power to put the idea into action. If it worked —- if the project got funded and built and became the revenue and job generator promised by its backers —- the door to full-blown casino gambling that is now slammed shut would probably swing open.
But it would still be a terrible idea.
Casino gambling is to economic development what slot machines are to investment strategies. Both may promise quick and easy money, a way around the slow, hard work of building something sustainable. But they seldom pay off, and when they do, even winners pay a heavy price.
Slowly, painfully, downtown Atlanta has begun to revive itself. The growth of Georgia State University, bringing youthful energy and dollars downtown, has helped immensely, as did the investment in Centennial Park, which in turn helped draw the immensely popular Georgia Aquarium. Hotels and restaurants are appearing. Nightlife is still spotty, but it exists. You can see the pieces of a vibrant, organic downtown beginning to self-assemble.
But there is no shortcut to that process, and casino gambling would halt it altogether. Casino gambling sucks life and money off the streets and into the casinos. It alters the nature of its environment, rendering it oddly sterile. That’s because gamblers have little interest in anything but what happens at the slot machine or table, and little interest in spending their dollars anywhere else.
It’s been a while, but back in my wild and crazy youth I worked as a journalist in Las Vegas for a few years, and you could see the warping influence of gambling on a community. People would tell each other that living in Vegas was just like living in any other town, except it had casinos. But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t close to being true.
In a gambling town the ethos of the casino, the cheap sadness, spreads well outside the casino walls. Desperate places such as Detroit may have no choice but to go that route, but Atlanta has more going for it than that.
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A historical document from an era now passed….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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‘Every Israeli shell is a vote for Hamas’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Israeli editor Bradley Burston, writing in the newspaper Haaretz, assesses the impact of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and reviews Israel’s role in creating and fostering Hamas. He is not pleased:
“In the often acrid debate over how best to deal with Hamas, a curiously unifying theme has underscored arguments across the whole of the political spectrum, from the hardline Jewish right to the anti-Israel left:
In its war in Gaza, Israel has played directly into Hamas’ hands.
A contention as old as Hamas, now entering its second generation, it remains a argument with a great deal of validity. In fact, its validity predates Hamas itself.
It held as early as the 1970s, when Israel began to effectively foster Hamas’ precursor, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s ostensibly apolitical Gaza-based branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It held for much of the 1980s, when IDF Civil Administration occupation officials hoped to see Yassin’s social welfare institutions.
It held when Israel spared Hamas institutions in Gaza in the early years of the Second Intifada, battering into oblivion key institutions of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and bolstering Gazans’ reliance on Hamas for education, health care, and other basic social services.
It held when Israel, in effect, acted as Hamas’ campaign manager for the Hamas-Fatah elections in 2006, and has since refused to recognize Hamas, blockaded Gaza, and simultaneously denigrated Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority.
The axiom also holds that every Israeli shell is a vote for Hamas, and every thousand pound bomb 10,000 votes. There is every reason to believe that the adage is as true as ever.”
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Time to get to work, President Obama
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lest anyone underestimate the seriousness of the situation, bad financial news from major banks overwhelmed whatever optimism might have been generated by inauguration of a new president Tuesday.
Markets fell around the world by 2 percent or more, and Wall Street had its single worst Inauguration Day in history. In London, Lloyds Banking stock fell by 31 percent, and the pound fell by 5 percent against the yen.
Here at home, Bank of America, once considered the strong among the weak, fell by 29 percent. Regions Financial fell by 24 percent. State Street, also considered relatively strong until now, fell more than 50 percent.
“Problems with overseas banks contributed to weakness in U.S. stocks, said Alan Valdes, a floor trader with Hilliard Lyons. “It’s an aberration — I think we’re going to get an Obama honeymoon rally,” he said.
Traders see few banks that can survive without more government intervention. After performing as one of the best large banking stocks in 2008, Wells Fargo declined 24%. …
“At this time, a retest of the November lows appears inevitable,” said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. “We had the false breakout on the S&P 500 above 920 two weeks ago, and since then the bears have been in complete control. Couple that with the fear that no bank is safe, no matter how much money the government throws at them, and we are once again in a ‘sell first, ask questions later’ environment,” Mr. Detrick said.
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Obama speech challenged America
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In his historic campaign for president, Barack Obama talked often of the need for change both in Washington and in the country at large. In a time of national doubt and uncertainty, that message clearly resonated with the American people.
Yet in Obama’s much-anticipated inaugural address Tuesday, the new president spoke less about change than about a recommitment to old-fashioned values and responsibility. It is time, he suggested, to once again take up what he called “the price and promise of citizenship.”
Yes, he acknowledged, we face difficult times:
“Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”
Yet as he reminded the American people, we have seen tougher times than these and emerged stronger from the challenge. He summoned the collective memories of Valley Forge, where “snow was stained with blood,” of the struggles against fascism in World War II and communism in the Cold War.
And how did our forefathers wring success from such crisis?
They did it because earlier generations “struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life,” Obama said. They succeeded “not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents.”
“Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations,” Obama reminded his fellow Americans. “Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”
Some saw those and other words as a rebuke to Obama’s predecessor, but that’s unlikely. Whatever his failings, Obama has always had a feel for the big moment, and he would not waste this one on so petty a message. Instead, when he invoked scripture, noting that “the time has come to set aside childish things,” he was chiding Americans of all political parties and persuasions, its leaders as well as its people.
“… our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed,” he said.
In his campaign, Obama also spoke often about audacity, and there was something deeply audacious in this speech. Leaders rarely have the courage to challenge and criticize even implicitly those who elected them. The safer course, the more politic course, is to promise to protect voters from sacrifice and to reassure them that responsibility for their problems belongs elsewhere.
Obama has taken the road less traveled. If we are to solve the problems that confront us, we the people will have to do it. We the people have to acknowledge what it had become fashionable to deny, that all Americans “have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly.”
“Our challenges may be new,” he said. “The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old.”
The years ahead will test whether Obama is willing to match that audacious rhetoric with audacious action; more importantly, they will test whether “we the people” are worthy of what others have handed down to us.
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President Barack Hussein Obama …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I like that he didn’t shy from “Hussein” in taking the oath.
The inaugural address was tough-minded and sober, I thought, and it succeeded in placing these difficult days in historic context. Other generations of Americans have risen to the challenge; we will too. He called upon the best of this country.
The language about staying true to our principles and values, of not sacrificing liberty in exchange for security and expediency, was particularly strong. Overall, it did not rise to the level of eloquence that Obama has displayed in the past, but I suspect that was a conscious decision on his part. He left the poetry to the poet; this was about governing, and about the difficult decisions ahead.
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After two thousand, nine hundred and twenty two days …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
a new president is about to take the reins of power.
The American people certainly understand the gravity of the problems facing President-elect Barack Obama, both here and abroad; few presidents have come into office under more difficult circumstances. But polls also suggest that Americans have confidence in their new leadership to handle those problems — for example, more than two-thirds believe that Obama will be a good or great president, and a similar number tell pollsters that they are very or somewhat optimistic “that the new Obama administration will be able to improve the way things are going in this country.”
That’s important. Confidence in leadership can go a long way, especially on the economic front, and we’ve been missing that for some time now. It also suggests that Obama will be able to bring others to his side to push in the direction he sets.
In fact, Barton Gellman, writing in the Washington Post, lays out the case that under the circumstances, Obama could become one of the the most powerful and important presidents in history:
“The opportunity is there for Obama to recast the very nature of the presidency,” said Sean Wilentz, a presidential historian at Princeton. “Not since Reagan have we had as capable a persuader as Obama, and not since FDR has a president come in with quite the configuration of foreign and domestic crises that open up such a possibility for the reconstruction of the executive.”
No president has begun his term with so broad a wave of public confidence — 78 percent approval in the most recent Gallup poll. There are precedents for single-party control of the White House and Congress, but the early signs suggest that House and Senate Democrats will be far more united in loyalty to Obama than their counterparts were to President Jimmy Carter. The Republican opposition, by contrast, appears to be as fractured as at any time since Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964. If Obama keeps the loyalty of the online social networks he used to win election, with unprecedented success in fundraising and recruiting, his White House could be the first to harness a meaningful grass-roots movement as an ongoing tool of governance.
The federal government itself is a far more potent instrument, in its breadth and depth of command over national life, than it has ever been before. Largely in response to the threat of terrorism, the Bush years and President Bill Clinton’s two terms saw “an incredible period of state-building that’s unrivaled in American history except by the creation of the national security state in the 1940s and ’50s,” said Jack Balkin, a professor of constitutional law at Yale whose blog, Balkinization, is often cited by members of the Obama team.”
…….
Today, history of one sort will be made when Obama becomes the first African-American inaugurated as president. But history of the more important sort will be made in the many days that will follow, in days that will determine the course of this country and the world.
UPDATE:
My older daughter — memorably referred to once as “Bookman’s demon spawn” by one of our conservative posters — drove up to Washington for the event and files this on-the-scene report (liveblogging!):
“We’re standing in front of the Washington Monument and the Capitol is hazy in the distance but the crowd extends for miles. It’s certainly the most diverse event I’ve ever seen and there are still hours until anything starts. Its so cold that I can’t type much more but it’s really great to be here.”
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Has Obama made Dr. King’s vision come true?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Historically, black Americans have been more likely than white Americans to believe that racism remains a major problem. But a new CNN poll on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration reverses those numbers:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — More than two-thirds of African-Americans believe Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for race relations has been fulfilled, a CNN poll found — a figure up sharply from a survey in early 2008….
The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King’s vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 “I have a dream” speech — roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.
But whites remain less optimistic, the survey found.
“Whites don’t feel the same way — a majority of them say that the country has not yet fulfilled King’s vision,” CNN polling director Keating Holland said. However, the number of whites saying the dream has been fulfilled has also gone up since March, from 35 percent to 46 percent.
So according to CNN’s poll, white Americans are a third LESS likely than black Americans to believe that King’s vision has been realized. How do you explain that?
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Tuesday, America’s promise will be kept
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Jan. 20, 2008, a longshot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination came to Atlanta to speak at the home church of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the occasion of the King holiday.
That isn’t so long ago, but a lot has changed. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes or both; many others lucky enough to still collect paychecks are anxious about their future and that of their family, and roughly $7 trillion in value has disappeared from Wall Street, destroying not just wealth but confidence.
Much has changed for that one-time longshot as well. Tomorrow, one year to the day from his speech in Atlanta, Barack Obama will take the oath of office, becoming our nation’s 44th president and our first of African heritage.
To celebrate the event, Americans of every race, creed and age are converging by the millions on Washington. Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, both in this country and around the world, will gather to watch on television as Obama delivers his inaugural address, probably the most anticipated in living memory.
In fact, the popularity and even reverence in which Obama is already held by some is a little disconcerting. Part of it can be attributed to Obama’s own gifts, and part to an eagerness to change leadership after eight years under a president widely perceived as a failure. But there’s also a whiff of desperation to the fervor, a sense that the crowd wants more from Obama than any one person can deliver.
I suspect Obama will say as much in his address. If his past rhetoric is any guide, he will speak in terms of “we,” not of “I,” stressing the idea that he alone, and government alone, cannot solve our problems. In fact, he may draw heavily on the dual themes of his speech a year ago at Ebenezer Baptist, in which he preached about the importance of unity and the power of hope.
In that speech, Obama noted the importance that King himself had placed upon unity as a force for good.
“‘Unity is the great need of the hour. Unity is how we shall overcome’,” Obama said, quoting King. “It is the great need of this hour as well. Not because it sounds pleasant; not because it makes us feel good; but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.”
That deficit, Obama said, was not the budget deficit or trade deficit, but a moral deficit. A people that no longer thought it important to look out for one another —- that in fact saw it as a sign of weakness —- could not thrive in the years ahead, he suggested. But through unity and sacrifice, the hope of progress could never be a false hope.
“Imagining and then fighting for and struggling for and sometimes dying for what didn’t seem possible before —- there are no false hopes in that,” Obama said. “Imagine if John F. Kennedy had looked up at the moon and said, ‘That’s too far —- false hopes, we can’t go there.’ Imagine if Dr. King had stood on the Lincoln Memorial and said, ‘Y’all go home. We can’t overcome.’”
Earlier this month, Obama and his family paid a visit of their own to the Lincoln Memorial, a step widely interpreted as evidence of Obama’s interest in Lincoln. Presidents have long found comfort in stories of their predecessors. President Bush, for example, has cited his own father, along with Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, as his role models.
Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking out at the reflecting pool and beyond it to the Capitol, Obama probably had thoughts of King as well.
On those same steps in 1963, speaking on live national television, King stressed the importance of acting in “the fierce urgency of now.”
King spoke of the power of unity, noting that “many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.”
In that same speech, of course, King also spoke of his hopes for America, his dream that one day this country would make good on its promise of equality and freedom. Obama is proof that too was not a false hope.
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Let’s go Steelers!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
They draw first blood, up 3-0.
UPDATE:
And that’s how it’s done. Troy Polamalu, who returns an interception for the clinching TD, is a Hall of Famer.
Steelers will be favored by what, 9 or 10 points in the Super Bowl?
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When Bush told us to just go shopping
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In his Washington Post column yesterday, David Broder looked back at the last eight years and located what he considers “the greatest moral failing of the Bush presidency” in the days right after the attacks of September 11:
“‘But in that moment, when the country was truly unified and the people were more than ready to sacrifice, Bush asked for … nothing. He spoke of the need for ‘patience’ and ‘resolve,’ but at a news conference at Camp David on Sept. 15, 2001, he was asked, ‘Sir, how much of a sacrifice are ordinary Americans going to have to be expected to make in their daily lives, in their daily routines?’
Bush’s first words were: ‘Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatsoever. We would like to see life return to normal in America.’”
The consequence “to the American people - both those living now and those yet unborn - was placing the entire cost of Bush’s ambitious, if not misguided, national security policy on the tiny fraction of American families with loved ones in the armed services,” Broder writes.
I think there’s some truth to that.
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So … seen any good movies lately?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Went to see “The Wrestler” last night. Good but not great. Mickey Rourke sure has changed since the days of “Diner.” A lot of himself in that character, I suspect.
For the cinephiles out there, what are the five Best Movie nominees, and which should take home the Oscar?
I haven’t seen it yet, but “Milk” would get a lot of support for Best Movie from those in our household who have…
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Israel wants to end war; Hamas refuses
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“With only four days remaining until the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama - a date widely regarded by Israeli analysts as the cut-off date for Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza, the prospects for a mutually agreed ceasefire between Israel and the Islamist terror group seemed slimmer than earlier in the week,” the Jerusalem Post reports.
However, with Hamas refusing to make concessions, Israel finds itself in the strange position of trying to end the war unilaterally, meaning Hamas will still be free to fire rockets into Israel (15 rockets were reported fired into Israel from Gaza on Friday). Under those conditions, it’s hard to call this a victory for the IDF.
“The cabinet will hold a vote on Saturday evening to decide whether to enact a unilateral cease-fire with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The decision would mean Israel has put an end to the three-week-long Operation Cast Lead without an agreement with Hamas, relying instead on the support of the United States and Egypt in battling arms smuggling into Gaza.
A government source emphasized that there has been great progress with Egypt in reaching an agreement on fighting arms smuggling. The deal would require the combined use of technological measures on the border between Gaza and Egypt, operations against smugglers in the southern Gaza town of Rafah and the use of international experts to identify smuggling tunnels on the border.”
In an editorial, Haaretz endorses ending the war, and suggests that its length has been a mistake:
“Three weeks following the start of Operation Cast Lead, and at least one week too late - it should be brought to an immediate end
This is the time to put the operation aside…. More importantly, disease, poverty and unemployment are the fertilizer in the greenhouse that grows the desperation and the radicalism that brought Hamas to power. Israel is the one that will reap the hatred and fear that Operation Cast Lead will sow in the hearts of the children of Gaza. These are the neighbors with whom Israel will have to reach a peace agreement and live next to for generations to come.”
And so the cycle continues….
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It’s that time on a Friday again…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
That golden hour again approaches, that moment when the factory whistle blows and we lay our tools on the workbench and head out the door to the company parking lot, climb into our pickups and head home to the family hearth.
As always, we’ll need a little travelin’ music to make the trip home even sweeter, and Miss Patsy Cline says she’s happy to help out.
But Patsy, if you go out walking after midnight tonight, you are gonna be COLD, girl!!
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Obama pledges entitlement reform too
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, this ought to be interesting:
“President-elect Barack Obama pledged yesterday to shape a new Social Security and Medicare ‘bargain’ with the American people, saying that the nation’s long-term economic recovery cannot be attained unless the government finally gets control over its most costly entitlement programs.
That discussion will begin next month, Obama said, when he convenes a ‘fiscal responsibility summit’ before delivering his first budget to Congress. He said his administration will begin confronting the issues of entitlement reform and long-term budget deficits soon after it jump-starts job growth and the stock market.
‘What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further,’ he said. ‘We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else’s.’”
The Social Security trust fund is actually in pretty good shape as long as the federal government honors its pledge to pay back the many billions it borrowed from the fund to run the rest of government.
The real issue is Medicare, as Obama himself acknowledged.
“Social Security, we can solve,” he told the Post edit board. “The big problem is Medicare, which is unsustainable… . We can’t solve Medicare in isolation from the broader problems of the health-care system.”
Obama keeps pledging major efforts to address almost every big problem we face, from the Middle East to global warming to the budget and of course the economy. And he’s right — we can’t keep avoiding those problems. That’s in part how we got into this mess in the first place.
But the scope of the changes he claims to seek are mind-boggling nonetheless.
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Super Bowl vs. Obama inaugural
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Fox News snuck a funny question into its recent national poll: “Which do you think will be more interesting, the Super Bowl or the presidential inauguration?”
The clear winner? The answer’s in comments.
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Health care for kids coming soon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Good. The American people are already reaping the benefits of the ‘08 election:
“The House easily approved an expansion of government health coverage for low-income children yesterday, a top priority for President-elect Barack Obama and the first in a series of stalled measures expected to move quickly through the Democratic Congress as President Bush leaves office.
Obama hailed the 289-to-139 vote and nudged the Senate to act with the “same sense of urgency so that it can be one of the first measures I sign into law when I am president.”
The president-elect vowed as a candidate to provide health coverage to every child, and the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP, is a major step toward that goal. ….
The House legislation would cost nearly $33 billion over 4 1/2 years and would be funded in part by a cigarette tax increase of 61 cents to $1 per pack. Bush vetoed two similar bills in 2007, objecting to the tax increase and the expansion of government health care. The Senate Finance Committee will take up a similar measure today, with floor action expected to begin next week.”
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Boy, it’s getting tough all over
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Oil has fallen to less than $35 a barrel. “Prices have sunk 27 percent since last week and analysts say they may test a five-year low reached last month of $33.87 a barrel.”
New claims for jobless benefits increased more than expected “to a seasonally adjusted 524,000 in the week ending Jan. 10, from an upwardly revised figure of 470,000 the previous week. Analysts had expected 500,000 new claims.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down again, by more than 170 points today as of shortly after noon, and down more than 700 points from Friday, a decline of more than 8 percent.
And then, in my email, I get a message from the conservative outlet Human Events asking “Can America’s Greatness Survive Obama?”
Because we all know it’s President-elect’s fault.
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No torture prosecution, but let’s find the truth
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Susan Crawford did her country a big favor by telling us what we already knew: The United States of America — our nation, a country that has long taken justified pride in its role as a champion of human rights — tortured suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.
“I sympathize with the intelligence gatherers in those days after 9/11, not knowing what was coming next and trying to gain information to keep us safe,” Crawford told the Washington Post. “But there still has to be a line that we should not cross. And unfortunately what this has done, I think, has tainted everything going forward.”
What makes that statement notable is Crawford herself and the role she plays.
A lifelong Republican, she served as Army general counsel under President Reagan; under the elder President Bush, she was appointed the Pentagon’s inspector general. Those are both important national-security jobs. Under the current Bush administration, Crawford was appointed to a third major national security role, overseeing the military commissions created to try prisoners at Guantanamo.
What she discovered in that job left her aghast.
“It did shock me,” she said. “I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it.”
President-elect Barack Obama is now left with the task of trying to regain what has been lost and clean up this mess, including closing Guantanamo.
In one indication of the complexity of the task, the Pentagon this week announced that 18 of those already released from Guantanamo have been “confirmed” as returning to terrorism, with another 43 having a “plausible” link with terrorist activity.
There are several ways to look at that number. If those at Guantanamo were really “the worst of the worst,” as Donald Rumsfeld described them years ago, then surely many more than 18 of the more than 550 released since then would have returned to terrorism. Those numbers suggest that we vastly overreacted in imprisoning so many there.
More importantly, counter-terror experts will tell you that what happened at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib has radicalized hundreds and more likely thousands of Muslims, many more times than the 18 who have allegedly returned to violence. It is yet another example of a U.S. policy that has created more enemies than it takes out of circulation.
Obama also faces a decision in how to proceed internally. While torture is a crime under both American and international law, the Bush administration has adamantly maintained that no felony was committed at Guantanamo and elsewhere. It argues in effect that because its lawyers had ruled beforehand that no crime was being committed, no crime was committed.
Personally, I have no interest in prosecuting Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George Bush and anybody else. It would be unfair to turn them into convenient scapegoats for our collective national guilt. Yes, some Americans did protest the use of torture; yes, some brave American lawyers did challenge their own government in defense of basic human rights. But they were the exceptions, not the rule.
What was done in Guantanamo was not a secret to the American people, and it was supported at the time by a substantial majority of us. The shame is ours as a nation and should not be shunted off onto individuals. That would merely compound our hypocrisy.
However, lack of prosecution should not be an excuse to hide the truth from ourselves. We ought to know — we need to know — exactly what was done in our name. A commission should be empowered to give us what the piecemeal testimony of Crawford and others cannot, a comprehensive look at just what we did, to whom and why. If there is testimony that such steps were necessary, we should hear that too.
Because dark secrets lose their poison when dragged out into the light of day.
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Airport not quite a ghost town, but….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It had been a few months since I’ve flown anywhere, and the scene at the airport was frankly scary. No line whatsoever at security — you just walk right up to the person checking ID and boarding pass. TSA folks were standing at vacant conveyor belts and X-ray machines, waiting for business.
Like nothing I’ve seen before.
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Obama-mania … kinda strange, really
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve been up in Washington, DC, on business. Obama’s picture is everywhere: in store windows, on lightposts, on the fare ticket for the Metro subway system. The city’s gearing up for an absurd number of people — 2.5 million people expected for Tuesday, half million for a Sunday concert on the mall.
I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this, and I’m not just talking about the inaugural crowd. The outsized expectations, celebrity, etc….
I don’t know how to account for it: The thirst for effective leadership after eight years of Bush multiplied by Obama’s status as the first black president multiplied yet again by Obama’s own considerable personal gifts multiplied by anxiety about the future equals … something very strange, and not entirely healthy.
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If Bush insists on reassessment, OK….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If President Bush himself wasn’t driving it with repeated appearances, culminating in Thursday night’s speech to the nation, the current obsession with assessing his legacy would begin to feel like piling on. There’s just not much good to say about the last eight years.
The Washington Post, for example, has a good wrapup on the economic performance since 2001. It’s true that a president gets too much of the blame for a bad economy, and too much of the credit for a good one, but for a long time Bush and his supporters tried to cite the economy as an accomplishment. Says the Post:
“President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s thorniest fiscal challenges.
The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush’s tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans’ incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush’s father.
Bush and his aides are quick to point out that they oversaw 52 straight months of job growth in the middle of this decade, and that the economy expanded at a steady clip from 2003 to 2007. But economists, including some former advisers to Bush, say it increasingly looks as if the nation’s economic expansion was driven to a large degree by the interrelated booms in the housing market, consumer spending and financial markets. Those booms, which the Bush administration encouraged with the idea of an “ownership society,” have proved unsustainable.
“The expansion was a continuation of the way the U.S. has grown for too long, which was a consumer-led expansion that was heavily concentrated in housing,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a onetime Bush White House staffer and one of Sen. John McCain’s top economic advisers for his presidential campaign. “There was very little of the kind of saving and export-led growth that would be more sustainable.”
“For a group that claims it wants to be judged by history, there is no evidence on the economic policy front that that was the view,” Holtz-Eakin said. “It was all Band-Aids.”…
“It’s sad to say, but we really went nowhere for almost ten years, after you extract the boost provided by the housing and mortgage boom,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, and an informal adviser to McCain’s campaign. “It’s almost a lost economic decade.”…
Even excluding the 2008 recession, however, Bush presided over a weak period for the U.S. economy. For example, for the first seven years of the Bush administration, gross domestic product grew at a paltry 2.1 percent annual rate.
Some of the president’s defenders claim that people never gave him a chance, that the way in which he took office after the Supreme Court ruling of 2000 soured much of the country on him from the beginning. The facts don’t begin to justify that claim.
In the summer of ‘01, just a few months after taking office and before Sept. 11, Bush was enjoying favorability ratings of around 60 percent, with 30 percent disapproval ratings. And of course, after the terror attacks those numbers soared as Americans rallied around their leader. In the Fox poll, he peaked in December 01 with a favorability rating of 84 percent and unfavorables at 12 percent.
The unfavorables didn’t exceed the favorables until after Hurricane Katrina in ‘05, and they have stayed that way ever since. In other words, Bush isn’t a victim here. He got his historically low rating the old-fashioned way: He EARNED it.
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On Bush and his legacy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just saw Sean Hannity interviewing Bush on Fox. And the president, talking about his lack of popularity, argued once again that the American people ought to judge him by whether he stayed strong and stayed true to his convictions.
And I think that’s a key insight into his character and presidency, and into his failure as president.
I have some sympathy for the president’s position. Staying true to your convictions — staying strong — is important. I can also see how Mr. Bush could take comfort in that thought. But as president, the far more important question is whether you got it right, whether you made the smart calls.
He sees the presidency as a test of character, a test that in his own mind he passed, and not as a test of judgment, a test that he failed.
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Israeli Arab parties barred from election
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This does not bode well for the future, in ways too numerous to quickly count:
“The Central Elections Committee on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, drawing accusations of racism by an Arab lawmaker who said he would challenge the decision in the country’s Supreme Court.
The ruling, made by the body that oversees the elections, reflected the heightened tensions between Israel’s Jewish majority and Arab minority caused by Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip. Israeli Arabs have held a series of demonstrations against the offensive.
Knesset spokesman Giora Pordes said the election committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the motion, accusing the country’s Arab parties of incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Arab lawmakers have traveled to countries listed among Israel’s staunchest enemies, including Lebanon and Syria.
The 37-member committee is composed of representatives from Israel’s major political parties. The measure was proposed by two ultranationalist parties but received widespread support…..Roughly one-fifth of Israel’s 7 million citizens are Arabs. Israeli Arabs enjoy full citizenship rights, but have suffered from discrimination and poverty for decades.
Arab lawmakers Ahmed Tibi and Jamal Zahalka, political rivals who head the two Arab blocs in the Knesset, joined together in condemning Monday’s decision.
“It was a political trial led by a group of Fascists and racists who are willing to see the Knesset without Arabs and want to see the country without Arabs,” said Tibi.
Together, the Arab lists hold seven of the 120 seats in the Knesset.”
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‘09 Legislature has more tasks than money
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Politicians don’t make many friends by saying no.
However, faced with a budget deficit in the neighborhood of $2 billion —- a number more likely to grow than shrink as the true depth of this recession becomes apparent —- legislators are going to find themselves saying no to an awful lot of people in the 2009 Georgia General Assembly, which opens today.
No to spending on education, on health care. No to spending on the state’s mental-health system. No to business groups and transportation advocates demanding that the state finally begin to invest real money in its infrastructure, the key to future growth.
It’s a problem faced by every legislature in the country, but in some areas the looming cuts will hit Georgia harder because spending is already so inadequate.
For example, Georgia’s mental-health institutions are under federal investigation because shabby care has led in some cases to unnecessary patient deaths. And according to Transportation Commissioner Gena Evans, Georgia has the nation’s third-fastest-growing population, yet it ranks 49th in the amount of resources spent per capita on transportation. Over the long haul, numbers like that will inevitably produce a crisis, and it has done so here in Georgia right in the worst economic climate in generations.
The ‘09 session will also test the state’s political leadership, which even in good times hasn’t exactly inspired confidence in its vision or emotional maturity.
Halfway through his second and final term, Gov. Sonny Perdue has been a caretaker governor at best. He is by nature more of a manager than a leader, unwilling to risk the major initiative or change of direction. That approach has brought him strong approval ratings, but little real progress for Georgia.
In the Senate, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle has hopes of moving up to Perdue’s job. So far, though, Cagle has proved to be a politician whose considerable ambitions exceed his abilities. He needs to reverse that perception this legislative session before it hardens into accepted wisdom. At a time when interest groups ought to be coalescing around him as the state’s next governor, his support seems lukewarm at best.
For Speaker of the House Glenn Richardson, of course, it may already be too late. His reputation as a hothead has been cemented by repeated outbursts of public anger, pique and pettiness. This year, like last year, he starts the General Assembly reportedly determined to show a better side of himself, but as the session drags on, tempers rise and the decisions get more difficult … well, let’s just say that Richardson is to anger management what Oprah Winfrey is to weight loss. Best intentions sometimes go awry.
However, while all three men have a lot at stake in the ‘09 session, success or failure could also have a broader political impact on the state.
In a column for InsiderAdvantage.com, University of Georgia professor Charles Bullock III points out that in the ‘08 election, the dominance of the Republican Party in Georgia began showing some pretty large cracks. The party’s success has been built on drawing overwhelming support among white voters, he says, but that demographic group is shrinking pretty quickly, at least in relative terms.
According to Bullock, “The consequences of whites constituting less and less of the electorate are obvious. Georgia will turn blue again.”
“Have Republican leaders begun to ponder how to frame issues either to attract a larger share of the black vote or to become the preferred option for the state’s growing numbers of Latino and Asian votes?” he asks. “They need not devise a strategy to succeed in 2010, but the clock is ticking.”
In another sign of state political trends, exit polls from November reported that among voters 39 and younger, Barack Obama actually beat John McCain in Georgia. I doubt that means the state will turn blue anytime soon, but it does mean it may at least become competitive, allowing the best candidates of both parties to come to the forefront.
That can’t be a bad thing.
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Georgia’s transportation crisis
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After years of denial, much of Georgia’s leadership now acknowledges that the state’s transportation system is in crisis and that the situation in metro Atlanta is particularly dire.
It’s not just that we’ve failed to modernize infrastructure; we have also failed to modernize our transportation thinking, our bureaucracies and our sources of transportation revenue, and are now reaping the consequences of those failures.
However, the broad acknowledgement that real change is needed has come at an awkward time. Fixing Georgia’s transportation system and bureaucracies will require vision, courage, money and time, but most of all money, and we don’t have any. With revenue projections plummeting in a harsh economic climate, state legislators gathering for the 2009 session face the prospect of cutting $2 billion from the budget, which inevitably means painful cutbacks in areas such as education and health care. Nor is there likely to be much enthusiasm for raising taxes.
Nonetheless, the state Department of Transportation is asking legislators for more than $400 million in new money from a general fund that’s already overspent. MARTA, the only major rail-transit system in the country that survives without state support, is asking for more than $100 million.
In both cases, the requests are stop-gap measures designed to ease the funding crisis in the short term. Legislators are also being heavily lobbied by business groups and transportation agencies to create a more long-term mechanism that will significantly increase transportation funding.
Last year, legislators came close to approving a mechanism that would have allowed metro Atlanta to tax itself to help meet its transportation needs. The proposal failed at the last minute in the state Senate, which is led by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, and that failure became a serious political problem for Cagle. With his bid for governor on the line, Cagle is now an enthusiastic supporter of transportation reform and funding.
The situation is so critical that it has even aroused the current governor, Sonny Perdue, who may finally be ready to take a leadership role in transportation policy. A study by McKinsey & Co., undertaken at Perdue’s request, has documented in stark numbers just how little Georgia has been spending on transportation and how much economic growth it could generate with a more aggressive approach. Perdue himself has not responded to those findings, but he will probably do so in the next few days.
It’s hard to know what to expect. Even in more prosperous times, the governor wasn’t exactly a visionary. His biggest initiative to date has been his “Go Fish Georgia” program. The current economic climate gives him the perfect excuse to once again “go small,” even at a time when much bigger steps are required.
However, the roots of our transportation problems go deeper than mere money. For example, Georgia’s 13-member transportation board —- one member for each of the state’s congressional districts —- is archaic. It was designed as a means to distribute patronage around the state, and that’s exactly what it does. Traditionally, board members have seen their first responsibility as diverting as many transportation dollars as possible back to the home district; setting policy to create an efficient statewide transportation system was a distant second. That approach has even been written into law with a “congressional balancing” requirement that money be spent equally among the districts, without regard to where it’s most needed or would have the most impact.
Even in the face of a fiscal crisis, some DOT board members are still reluctant to abandon that mind-set. The governor and Legislature should prod them along by repealing the balancing requirement, a step that would cost no money but do a lot to help spend wisely.
To its credit, the DOT may already be rethinking its past opposition to mass transit spending. At a rare summit meeting of state transportation officials Wednesday, DOT board Chairman Bill Kuhlke Jr., a builder from Augusta, acknowledged that metro Atlanta’s transportation needs probably can’t be met by more highways.
“Transit is going to be the biggest part of the answer for this particular region,” Kuhlke said.
While that statement suggests a major change of attitude, it’s not reflected in state law. The main source of state funding for transportation is the gasoline tax, and the state constitution bars use of gas-tax revenue for anything but roads and bridges. If metro Atlanta’s transportation future lies with transit, that provision must be changed.
(MARTA is also asking the Legislature to repeal a law restricting how the agency spends its own sales-tax revenue, yet another archaic provision in need of change.)
At the summit, state transportation leaders talked frankly about tapping into the billions in federal money expected to flow as part of an economic stimulus plan. But Georgia will have to change how it does things if it is to compete for that.
The incoming Obama administration has made it clear that it will fund transportation projects that cut consumption of gasoline and other greenhouse gases and that reduce dependence on foreign oil. Transit, in other words, will play a major role, and Georgia isn’t ready to move quickly in that direction.
The administration says it will also insist that states choose projects based on their transportation and economic impact, not on patronage concerns. Again, that’s not the way Georgia law and political culture work, and so far they have proved stubbornly resistant to reform.
Of course, with billions of dollars becoming available at a time of great need, maybe that could change.
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A good decision by President Bush
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“WASHINGTON — President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.
Last year, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel asked President Bush for bunker-busting bombs and permission to fly over Iraq to attack the plant.
White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.
The White House denied that request outright, American officials said, and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily.
…. The interviews also indicate that Mr. Bush was convinced by top administration officials, led by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, that any overt attack on Iran would probably prove ineffective, lead to the expulsion of international inspectors and drive Iran’s nuclear effort further out of view. Mr. Bush and his aides also discussed the possibility that an airstrike could ignite a broad Middle East war in which America’s 140,000 troops in Iraq would inevitably become involved.”
Troubled as things are right now, the world would be in a much bigger mess if President Bush had approved the Israeli request. But I have to wonder what advice Vice President Dick Cheney was giving Bush on the topic, or whether he was even consulted. Cheney’s influence has been notably diminished since the ‘06 elections, and that’s a very good thing.
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A question of alternative history
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How would things be different right now if it were “President-elect John McCain?”
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Congress, Obama at odds? Great!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Key measures of President-elect Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan are facing a barrage of criticism from some Senate Democrats, with one charging that the plan’s tax breaks were a return to “trickledown” economics. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, says many of the tax credits in the stimulus plan amount to “trickledown” economics.
During a lengthy closed-door meeting Thursday evening with Democratic senators on Capitol Hill, Larry Summers, chosen to head the National Economic Council, and senior Obama adviser David Axelrod heard complaints about the stimulus plan, according to two senior Democratic aides who attended the meeting.
“The concern seemed to be that people feel like the infrastructure projects are certain to create jobs and the business tax breaks are less certain to create jobs, and that’s what our focus needs to be,” one of the aides said.
In particular, members said they did not think the idea of giving employers a $3,000 tax credit for each employee they hire would work.
“I’d rather spend the money on the infrastructure, on direct investment, on energy conversion and other kinds of things much more directly and much more rapidly and much more certainly create a real job,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts.
That’s a great development, for a couple of reasons. First, the congressional Democrats are probably right. In an economy like this one, the goal is to inject a lot of money as quickly as possible and produce as many jobs as possible, and tax credits just won’t do that as efficiently. So anything they can do to push the administration in that direction is good.
Second, and perhaps more important, it means that Congress is going to insist on having its say with the Obama administration, and that the executive and legislative branches will once again operate as checks on each other, as the Constitution envisions. That didn’t happen for much of the Bush administration, and the administration — and the country — paid a heavy price for that groupthink approach.
Dissent is healthy. That’s what the country was built upon, and we shouldn’t be afraid of it.
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Close to quittin’ time…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
on a Friday afternoon, time for another little bit of travelin’ music, and this one’s a classic.
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Israel accused of blocking aid to wounded civilians
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It is always hard to know what is really happening in a war zone. First reports are always wrong, as the saying goes. And in its invasion of Gaza, Israel has contributed to the problem by refusing to allow journalists to view events firsthand.
However, if true and authenticated by later reporting, this graphic story coming out of Gaza — reported in The Washington Post — is chilling. The editors at the Post surely understood the gravity of the allegations before going to print, and I’m sure made every effort to nail it down.
“JERUSALEM, Jan. 9 — Emergency workers said they rescued 100 more trapped survivors Thursday and found between 40 and 50 corpses in a devastated residential block south of Gaza City that the Israeli military had kept off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross for four days.
Relief agencies said they feared more people remained in the rubble of several shattered houses in the Zaytoun neighborhood. Red Cross officials said that they began receiving distress calls from people in the houses late Saturday but that they were blocked by the Israeli military from reaching the area until Wednesday.
“There are still people under demolished houses — we are sure of it,” said Khaled Abuzaid, an ambulance driver for the Red Cross who treated survivors at the site Wednesday and Thursday. “But without water or electricity, we are sure they will die.”
In an interview at al-Quds Hospital, a Red Cross medical center in Gaza, Abuzaid said rescue workers found 16 bodies Wednesday in a large room of a house in Zaytoun: seven women, six children and three men, all members of the al-Samuni family.
Most had sustained trauma injuries from shelling, but many had gunshot wounds as well, he said. Four children, weak but alive, were found lying under blankets, nestled next to their dead mothers, Abuzaid said. Red Cross officials had said earlier that 12 adult bodies had been found in the house but otherwise corroborated Abuzaid’s account.
He said Israeli soldiers told the crew of Red Cross and Palestinian Red Crescent workers in advance that they were forbidden to take cameras, radios or cellphones to the site. It is standard practice for crews to carry such equipment on rescue missions.
The Red Cross has accused the Israeli military of repeatedly refusing to grant permission for ambulances to go to Zaytoun, even though soldiers were stationed outside the damaged houses and were aware people were wounded inside. In a statement issued early Thursday, the agency called the episode “unacceptable” and said the Israeli military had “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.”
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Why Social Security is not a 401(k)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The stock-market rout has ignited a crisis of confidence for millions of Americans who manage their own retirement savings through 401(k) plans.
After watching her account drop 44% last year, Kristine Gardner, a 35-year-old information-technology project manager in Longview, Wash., feels no sense of security. “There’s just no guarantee that when you’re ready to retire you’re going to have the money,” she says. “You either put it in a money market which pays 1%, which isn’t enough to retire, or you expose yourself to huge market risk and you can lose half your retirement in one year.”
Many retirement experts have come to a similar conclusion: The 401(k) system, which has turned countless amateurs like Ms. Gardner into their own pension-fund managers, has serious shortcomings.
“This is the biggest test that the 401(k) plan has seen to date, and it has failed,” says Robyn Credico, head of defined-contribution consulting at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, noting that many baby boomers are ready to retire. “We’ve put people close to retirement in a very challenging position.”
The most obvious pitfall is that 401(k) plans shift all retirement-planning risks — not saving enough, making poor investment choices, outliving savings — to untrained individuals, who often don’t have the time, inclination or know-how to manage them. But even when workers make good choices, a market meltdown near the end of their working careers can still blow their savings to smithereens.
‘That seems like such a fundamental flaw,’ says Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. ‘It’s so crazy to have a system where people can lose half their assets right before they retire.’”
Like most people, I’ve taken a pretty big hit in my 401(k) plan. But I don’t think you can blame that on a flaw in the program, nor is there any way to regulate the risk out of such a system. If you get a stock market crash of this magnitude, any stock-based retirement plan is going to be hurt. Period. I understand the impact it has had on people close to or in retirement, but there’s no solution to it.
However, this is a damn fine illustration why it would have been foolish to tie Social Security benefits to the market. If SSI payments had fallen in addition to the collapse of 401(k) accounts, the pain would have been doubled for millions of people. As it is, the defined-benefit basis of Social Security at least provides a firewall in retirement.
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Dick Cheney, the glower behind the throne
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In an interview with CBS Radio, Vice President Dick Cheney “insisted that his influence within the Bush administration was overstated throughout the past eight years.”
“The notion that somehow I was pulling strings or making presidential-level decisions. I was not,” he said.
“There was never any question about who was in charge. It was George Bush. And that’s the way we operated. This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened.”
That’s the party line these days … at least some times, among some parties. But among conservatives, the talking points change a bit. For example, conservative blogger Erick Erickson of redstate.com and Georgia’s own peachpundit.com was invited to lunch with Cheney recently. Erickson got a bit “verklempt” recounting the experience at peachpundit:
“This is about him — about Dick Cheney, the great, private conservative leader who whispers in the President’s ears. The untold story of this administration, and one that I asked him about with very little success at getting an answer (to be honest, my question was poorly formed as it is a difficult topic), is that Cheney has been the great conservative influence at the White House.
Solid, credible, dependable sources on Capitol Hill, both staff and elected leaders, tell me Cheney is the guy who they go to when they White House goes wobbly. It’s Cheney who calms the waters and straightens the spines.”
I have a pretty good idea which side the historians will take, but time will tell.
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Obama lays it on the line about economy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a speech at George Mason University in Washington, President-elect Obama painted a stark picture of the crisis confronting the nation:
“We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime - a crisis that has only deepened over the last few weeks. Nearly two million jobs have now been lost, and on Friday we are likely to learn that we lost more jobs last year than at any time since World War II. Just in the past year, another 2.8 million Americans who want and need full-time work have had to settle for part-time jobs. Manufacturing has hit a twenty-eight year low. Many businesses cannot borrow or make payroll. Many families cannot pay their bills or their mortgage. Many workers are watching their life savings disappear. And many, many Americans are both anxious and uncertain of what the future will hold.
I don’t believe it’s too late to change course, but it will be if we don’t take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years. The unemployment rate could reach double digits. Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. We could lose a generation of potential and promise, as more young Americans are forced to forgo dreams of college or the chance to train for the jobs of the future. And our nation could lose the competitive edge that has served as a foundation for our strength and standing in the world….
It is time to set a new course for this economy, and that change must begin now. We should have an open and honest discussion about this recovery plan in the days ahead, but I urge Congress to move as quickly as possible on behalf of the American people. For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs. More families will lose their savings. More dreams will be deferred and denied. And our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”
That last sentence is the most chilling, and perhaps most important, in the speech. The stakes are that high. Full text here.
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Ground invasion a dangerous course
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The border between a necessity and a mistake isn’t as clearly marked as the border between nations. So when Israeli troops crossed the line that separates Israel from Gaza this week, they may also have strayed across the line into a mistake.
It’s impossible to argue that Israel had no right to respond as it has. With Hamas firing missiles into Israeli territory, Israel had every justification and indeed obligation to stop those attacks. The most fundamental duty of any government is to protect its people, and when the people have the tragic history of the Jews, that duty is close to sacred.
(Of course, Hamas and its supporters claim similar justification, arguing that it fired the missiles because Israel had sealed off Gaza and barred all but subsistence aid, denying its people a right to make a living. To which Israel responds that the embargo was necessary because Hamas is a terrorist group that refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, to which Hamas responds … well, the mutual recrimination can go all the way back to the days of the Bible.)
However, whether Israel had the right to respond militarily is a very different question than whether it was wise to do so in such all-out fashion, moving from a quite effective air campaign to outright ground invasion.
As powerful as it is, Israel’s military cannot impose peace. Any victory it achieves will be temporary; any cessation in missile launches will be fleeting. The idea that the Israeli military can “free” Gaza from the grip of Hamas over the long term is implausible.
And that’s the core of Israel’s predicament. In the short term, it has every advantage. It has the military might, the economic strength, the backing of the world’s sole superpower. In the short term, it has the ability to crush Hamas and is doing so.
But in the long term, the balance of power changes. The missiles acquired by its Arab enemies get longer in range and heavier in payload with every passing year. The Palestinians are producing many more babies than the Jews, threatening to change geography by demography, and international support for Israel, particularly outside the United States, is waning. According to our own analysts in the CIA and elsewhere, America’s power and influence will decline in the years to come, at least in relative terms, and so will its ability to protect Israel.
Conversely, while the policy of Hamas and the Palestinians may seem extremely self-destructive and foolish —- exposing their own people to death and destruction on a massive scale —- there is a perverted wisdom to it in the long term. By provoking attacks such as the bombing of the school at Jabaliya, which killed an estimated 40 civilians, including 10 children, Palestinian extremists ensure a simmering wrath against Israel that will nurture their cause for generations.
Somehow, Israel has to break that cycle. Somehow, it has to stop sacrificing its long-term survival hopes for short-term returns. But it will not do so without outside pressure, and that help can come from only one place —- the United States.
In that regard, President Bush has done Israel no favors. Rather than push Israel and its enemies to compromise, his unquestioning support has created a false sense of security for Israel. It has lulled its leaders and its people into believing that long-term survival really can be attained largely through force of arms, even though the map and demography say otherwise.
That hands-off approach has had an impact on many Palestinians as well. With no hope of intervention from the Americans, they have taken help where they could find it, from Iran. Through Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the mullahs in Tehran have what they long sought, a role in attacking Israel and by doing so winning standing in the Islamic world.
And so the spiral deepens into dark familiar violence. For both sides, war now feels natural, almost safe, certainly safer than the risk of trying to change things. And their “friends” are all too willing to supply the means to make war, but balk at helping them find peace.
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Ice cream? Yes we can!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’m a sucker for ice cream. A good French vanilla? Yummm. A nice scoop of coffee ice cream? Yes please. Sometimes in the summer I even make my own, in a hand-cranked ice cream maker.
My favorite indulgence, though, is a rich, smooth butter pecan. Downright sinful. And now Ben & Jerry’s has released a special variety of butter pecan timed for an upcoming occasion.
I’ll have to go get me some.
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Joe The Journalist, meet Christiane Amanpour
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter’s notebook.
The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.
Samuel J. Wurzelbacher says he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting.
He tells WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants to let Israel’s “‘Average Joes’ share their story.”
Wurzelbacher gained attention during the final weeks of the campaign when he asked Barack Obama about his tax plan.
He later joined Republican John McCain on the campaign trail. At one stop, he agreed with a McCain supporter who asked if he believed a vote for Obama was a vote for the death of Israel.
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Obama may actually succeed in barring earmarks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s 13 days and counting until President-elect Barack Obama sheds the “elect” qualifier and takes the reins of power that now sit slack in the hands of George W. Bush. I’ve said it before but it becomes more true as time passes — the circumstances under which Obama takes office will be the most dire that have faced any incoming president since FDR in 1933.
I really don’t think most of us comprehend yet just how bad the economy is getting. By March and April, I suspect, the true breadth of the problem will have started to sink in, and it won’t be pretty.
Yesterday, Obama promised again to bar earmarks from the big stimulus package he is trying to push through Congress quickly. I’m sure some of the committee chairs and appropriations members aren’t happy about being barred from the gravy train, but at a time like this they also don’t want to be identified as greedy powermongers holding up the process. They fear Obama “will make them famous and you will know their names,” to borrow a phrase.
As the AP put it:
“Obama said Americans will accept his proposed stimulus plan — expected to cost about $775 billion — only if they believe the money is being used wisely to boost the troubled economy and to make smart long-term investments in public projects.
He told reporters at his transition office that his package will set a “new higher standard of accountability, transparency and oversight. We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert projects without review.”
Details of the plan, which has yet to be drafted as a bill, will be available online, Obama said, “so the American people will know where their precious tax dollars are going and whether we are hitting our marks.”
….Long-running criticisms of budgetary “earmarks,” which some consider pork-barrel spending, are having an impact, however. Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said the stimulus package is likely to emerge from Congress free of earmarks, even though he notes that some earmark projects have proven tremendously popular and effective over the years.”
That’s a start, but only a start.
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Paging Dr. Gupta! Dr. Sanjay Gupta!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Your presence is apparently requested in Washington.
The Washington Post is reporting that Gupta, CNN’s medical/health correspondent and a neurosurgeon at Emory on the side, has been tapped as the new U.S. surgeon general.
I met Gupta years ago — very smart, very likable. At the time he had just come from a stint as a speechwriter in Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. I remember thinking: “Brain surgeon, journalist AND political wonk?”
Now he’ll apparently have still another item to add to his resume.
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‘Banksters’ … rhymes with ‘gangsters’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I like it!
I wasn’t familiar with the term until this morning, when I saw it in a NYT piece by Ron Chernow. Apparently that’s what they called the corrupt, thieving bankers who ran Wall Street back in the crash of 1929.
It’s an informative piece, casting an interesting light on our own all-too-similar times.
Your challenge, class, is to use our new word “banksters” in a sentence.
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A helluva way to run a democracy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So Roland Burris, appointed by Gov. Rodney Blagojevich as the junior senator from Illinois, is turned away by the Senate. What a mess. Blagojevich is certainly not one to go away quietly, now is he?
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a deal reached in which Burris is kept out of the Senate until after Blagojevich is removed, then have the new Illinois governor reappoint him. One possible sticking point might be whether Burris agrees not to seek election in two years. That’s pure speculation on my part, but it’s one way out of the morass that would satisfy both sides.
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., also awaits official entry to the world’s most exclusive club after his election was unanimously certified by the state’s bipartisan Canvassing Board. And in New York, there’s still no decision by Gov. David Patterson on his selection to replace Hillary Clinton.
The political weirdness just never seems to stop.
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GOP haunted by Reagan’s ghost
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I was watching the debate between the six candidates for GOP chairman and like others I was struck by how often the candidates invoked the holy name of Ronald Reagan as the answer to their party’s woes. By Dana Milbank’s count, Reagan was mentioned 16 times in the 90-minute debate.
Folks, Reagan is dead. He was first elected president almost 30 years ago, and the world in which he governed is long gone and ancient history.
In fact, when some presidents take office, it marks a new political era; for others, their election marks an era’s culmination. Reagan clearly falls into the second category. By the time he became president, he had been running for the office for 15 years, honing his language and politics specifically for that time and place. That time and place is over.
But the GOP can’t bring itself to accept that. The Republican Party is like an ancient rock band, still reprising its golden oldie hits from the ’80s long after its famous lead singer left the band. They’re Huey Lewis and the News without Huey Lewis, and they’re still telling themselves that all their troubles would be over if they could just find themselves another Huey.
And even Huey wasn’t Huey, so to speak. The real Reagan signed three major tax increases into law. He oversaw massive budget deficits. When he put troops into Lebanon and they got attacked, he turned tail and pulled them out as quickly as possible. He seriously tried to abolish all nuclear weapons. The mythological Reagan would do none of those things.
At one point in yesterday’s debate, the would-be party chairmen were asked by a college Republican what they can do to turn around the GOP’s dismal showing among young people. Getting past its fixation with Reagan and proposing modern solutions to modern problems is a very big part of the answer.
But of course, no one said that.
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Bernard Madoff belongs in jail…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
… and he may have given prosecutors the opening they need to make that happen.
“Prosecutors on Monday said disgraced financier Bernard Madoff violated bail conditions by mailing about $1 million worth of jewelry and other assets to relatives and should be jailed without bail.
“The defendant’s recent actions amount to obstruction of justice,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Litt told a judge at a hearing in federal court in Manhattan.
U.S. District Magistrate Ronald Ellis asked the lawyers to submit written arguments and said he would rule later.
Madoff’s lawyer, Ira Sorkin, described the items as heirlooms that included cufflinks and antique watches. He said they were not significant assets. The items were sent to Madoff’s children and to unidentified friends vacationing in Florida….
The judge said he was concerned whether any previous cases have claimed that potential economic harm represented a danger to the community.
‘In some instances, economic danger may be more severe than physical danger,’ he said.”
You live a different life when your lawyer can stand in court and argue with a straight face that a million dollars’ worth of jewelry does not represent significant assets. Given that the alleged losses amount to $50 billion, I guess in a strange way the lawyer had a point.
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Why abandon the gasoline tax?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The state of Oregon is toying with the remarkably stupid idea of trying to tax people for transportation based on how many miles they drive. The idea is to use that new tax revenue to replace the traditional per-gallon gasoline tax, which taxes people based on how much gasoline they consume.
“A state task force will look at equipping every new vehicle in the state with a Global Positioning System tracking device to quietly record every mile driven and where…. The plan still requires legislative endorsement, and the full details could take several more years to work out, but state analysts said the governor’s endorsement is a crucial step on a road many states are beginning to travel —- ending dependence on the gasoline tax.
‘This is a way to try to develop a fair funding mechanism that we’re going to have to have if we’re going to be aggressive in terms of looking at electric cars and hybrids and plug-ins and all those options, and at the same time continue to invest in our roads and infrastructure,’ said Rem Nivens, the governor’s deputy communications director.”
As the story suggests, the Oregon approach reflects a growing national disenchantment with the gasoline tax as a source of revenue. I’ve heard Georgia DOT Commissioner Gena Evans, for example, also speak favorably if theoretically about the idea of taxing by miles traveled instead of by gallons consumed. The fascination with tolls as a financing method for transportation is also motivated at least in part by that aversion to the gasoline tax.
But that makes no sense to me. For one thing, collecting revenue through a gasoline tax requires very little infrastructure or government bureaucracy, and no inconvenience to the motorist. It is simple and straightforward. By contrast, collecting revenue through tolls or a massive GPS-monitoring system is far more intrusive, complicated and expensive. (Do we really need to attach GPS systems to our cars so government can track our every move? Does the concept of privacy have no meaning any more?)
Second, the problem that Oregon is trying to address is that under the current gasoline tax, people who drive hybrids and other high-mileage vehicles will pay less in taxes than people who drive gas hogs. But that doesn’t sound like a problem to be solved; quite the contrary, it sounds like a solution to be encouraged.
Energy-wasting vehicles ought to be taxed higher, because they impose more external costs such as forcing us to import more oil and contribute more to air pollution and global warming. Using taxes to discourage energy inefficiency is a good idea, not a bad one.
Now, if all-electric cars ever become a major part of our transportation infrastructure, some kind of mileage-based tax might conceivably be necessary. But that’s a long, long way into the future. I see no reason whatsoever to abandon the gasoline tax.
As another writer recently put it:
“…. the virtues of a gas tax remain what they have always been. A tax that suppresses U.S. gas consumption can have a major effect on reducing world oil prices. And the benefits of low world oil prices are obvious: They put tremendous pressure on OPEC, as evidenced by its disarray during the current collapse; they deal serious economic damage to energy-exporting geopolitical adversaries such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran; and they reduce the enormous U.S. imbalance of oil trade which last year alone diverted a quarter of $1 trillion abroad Furthermore, a reduction in U.S. demand alters the balance of power between producer and consumer, making us less dependent on oil exporters. It begins weaning us off foreign oil, and, if combined with nuclear power and renewed U.S. oil and gas drilling, puts us on the road to energy independence.”
That writer is the conservative Charles Krauthammer, in the current issue of the conservative Weekly Standard, proposing a $1 increase in the federal gasoline tax with the revenue used to reduce federal payroll taxes.
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What is Israel trying to accomplish?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Max Boot, the neocon’s neocon, is a good writer with a schoolboy’s naive enthusiasm for the benefits of war. But even Boot is of mixed feelings about the Israelis’ huge gamble in invading the Gaza Strip. It’s hard to conceive what end state in Gaza the Israelis are trying to achieve that might justify the large risk it has taken, but we’ll see ….
Writes Boot in the Wall Street Journal:
“The essential dilemma Israel faces is this: It can’t ignore Hamas’s attacks, not only because of the damage they inflict, but also because of the terrible precedent they set. Israel has always been a state that is one battle away from destruction, and it cannot allow its enemies to think that it can be attacked with impunity. But at the same time Israel cannot do what it takes to wipe out the enemy, because of the constraints imposed by its own public, which is far less willing than in the past to suffer or inflict bloodletting.
So the Jewish state is forced to fight an unsatisfying war of attrition with Hamas, Hezbollah and other entities bent on its destruction. The current incursions are only one stage of this lengthy struggle. The odds are that once Israeli troops leave, Hamas will rebuild its infrastructure, forcing the Israelis to go back in the future.
This is the definition of a quagmire, yet Israel has no choice but to keep doing what it’s doing. Unlike the French in Algeria or the Americans in Vietnam, it cannot simply pack its bags and go home. If Israel is to continue to exist, it will have to continue to wage low-intensity war for a long time to come — definitely years, probably decades, possibly centuries.”
That’s the sad truth, and I’m far from sure that Israel can survive that long under those sustained conditions.
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Richardson withdrawal no surprise
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
from the AP:
“WASHINGTON (AP) — New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson abandoned his nomination to become commerce secretary under pressure of a grand jury investigation into a state contract awarded to his political donors — an investigation that threatened to embarrass President-elect Barack Obama.
Richardson insisted he would be cleared in the investigation and Obama stood by the governor as an “outstanding public servant.” But both men said it has become clear that a grand jury probe would not be finished in time for Richardson’s confirmation hearings and could keep him from filling the post in a timely matter.”
I can’t say this came as a surprise. Once news broke of the grand jury investigation in New Mexico, it seemed unlikely that Richardson’s nomination would survive. That doesn’t mean he’s guilty of anything — we’re a long way from even posing that question in a serious fashion — but Obama doesn’t need this hanging over his head before he even takes the oath of office.
Obama’s also lucky he didn’t pick Richardson as his veep — withdrawing the appointment wouldn’t be an option in that case. There’s no way Obama had any hint of this problem back when he made the veep decision, but sometimes pure blind luck is on your side.
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Nuke revival puts all risk on customers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While Georgia Power and other utilities eagerly advocate a “nuclear renaissance,” their enthusiasm for building new plants doesn’t extend to sharing the considerable financial risks involved. Nor have private investors flocked to put money in new nuclear plants.
To the contrary, Georgia Power’s proposal to build two reactors at its existing Vogtle plant on the Savannah River near Augusta calls for company ratepayers —- you and me and anybody else who pays an electric bill to Georgia Power —- to bear almost all the considerable risk while making sure its stockholders and private investors bear almost no risk at all.
If the cost of the project soars, or if the project is abandoned for some reason after billions are invested, ratepayers will be stuck with the entire bill and Georgia Power will walk off scot-free.
And with Georgia Power’s share of the project already estimated at
$6.4 billion for just 45 percent of the plant output, that potential exposure is very large.
Nobody, not even Georgia Power officials, speaks with any confidence in those cost estimates, and for good reason. The “new generation” reactors coming on line may be better engineered than their predecessors, and the threat of global warming has given nuclear energy an environmental sheen of green. But the economics, even with lucrative federal subsidies, remain uncertain.
In Finland, the first new reactor built in Europe in 20 years is already three years behind schedule and 50 percent over budget. A little closer to home, the Tennessee Valley Authority had to more than double its cost estimate for two new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors —- the same untested reactors that Georgia Power proposes to build —- to as high as $17 billion.
In Europe, the delays and cost overruns have been blamed in part on the fact that nuclear construction, management and production skills have atrophied after a generation of disuse. The same would be true here in the United States.
“This dramatic decline in the domestic supply chain is clearly having an effect,” the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told The Wall Street Journal last spring. “The global supply chain is stretched, if not to the breaking point, at least to the tipping point.”
For example, only one company in the world, Japan Steel Works Ltd., is capable of manufacturing the foot-thick reactor vessel needed in most designs, and the company is rushing to expand production from five vessels a year to 12 by 2012. That sounds reassuring until you realize that license applications for more than 30 new reactor units have been filed here in the United States alone, with more coming.
Compounding the problem, no AP1000 reactor has yet been built for commercial service, and its design is still being finalized with federal regulators. Yet Georgia Power is pressing the Public Service Commission to act by March to approve construction and financing of two such units.
Under the company’s proposal, ratepayers would have to start paying for the units immediately, long before they were actually built and producing power. Ratepayers would also bear most of the risks if anything went wrong.
The PSC’s advocacy staff has recommended that the commission reject that financing plan, arguing that Georgia Power and its stockholders should share some of the risk with the company’s customers, in part to ensure that Georgia Power has incentive to keep costs low. That seems reasonable, logical, even necessary. If the company doesn’t have faith that it can bring the project on line at a reasonable cost, it shouldn’t push that risk onto ratepayers.
And yet that’s the pattern everywhere. Utilities and private investors just aren’t willing to put their own money at risk. Ratepayers’ money, yes —- investors’ money, no.
“No private-sector entity is investing in or proposing to invest in a new nuclear plant without direct or indirect support from the public,” PSC Utility Finance Director Tom Newsome told the commission in written testimony.
Something’s not right about that. It’s hard to have faith in a chef who refuses to eat his own cooking.
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The vote counting almost done in Minnesota
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It looks like U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn. They’re in the process of counting the last thousand or so absentees right now, and Franken has added more than 130 votes to his 49-vote margin. Incumbent Norm Coleman will still try to fight this out in court, but the vote total is in Franken’s favor and there doesn’t seem to be any real grounds for overturning that result.
So the Senate will be 59 D, 41 R.
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Illinois politics - the gift that keeps on giving
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ta-nehisi Coates at The Atlantic links to a couple of folks making damn fine points about the highly bogus U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush and Roland Burris. They’re the duo — assisted by Gov. Rod Blagojevich — playing the race card in their attempt to get Burris the Illinois Senate seat.
Says one:
“Blagojevich has virtually no capital to spare and Rush won’t win any points even if he did manage to cram Burris into Obama’s seat. And his explicit appeal: ‘There are no African Americans in the Senate’ is possibly the most politically tone-deaf moment since, well, last week or so. That argument might’ve carried (limited) weight on November 3rd. At this point the logical rejoinder is ‘And there are no white people in the Oval Office.’”
The second blogger points out that in 2004, Rush chaired the campaign of Blair Hull, a white millionaire who spent $30 million running against two black candidates for the very Senate seat now at stake. One of those candidates was Joyce Washington, the second was some guy named Barack Obama. Hull lost that primary race, which raises a question:
“Rush went so far as to compare Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who in 1963 stood in the doorway of a University of Alabama school building to block two black students from entering. Reid and Senate Democrats pledged to refuse any appointee sent by Blagojevich, even Burris, who would be the chamber’s only black member…. If sending a black senator to Washington is so important now, why didn’t Rush support a black candidate four years ago?
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The line for handouts grows longer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ummmm, no. I don’t think so, no. But nice try.
from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
With the state and federal governments looking for ways to jump-start the economy, a New Jersey businessman has an ambitious public works project he says will create more than 5,500 jobs and provide $500 million or more to local contractors.
The businessman is Zygi Wilf, principal owner of the Minnesota Vikings.
The project: A $954 million, state-of-the-art stadium for his football team in downtown Minneapolis — to be constructed using more than $635 million in public money.
“Why not? The Vikings are a public asset,” said Lester Bagley, the Vikings’ vice president in charge of stadium development. “This is going to create an economic boost.”
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The ‘FDR made Depression worse’ fantasy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One the more remarkable aspects of the modern conservative movement is its eagerness to believe whatever it prefers to believe, whatever gives conservatives ammunition against their opponents, regardless of the facts and data and expert opinion.
The latest example of such behavior is the claim that FDR’s New Deal extended and deepened the Great Depression, a newly formed myth that is without any basis in fact. Yet it is embraced by some on the right solely because it bolsters their argument against policies proposed by President-elect Barack Obama.
It’s telling that in its last days in power, the Bush administration isn’t having much truck with that notion, having proposed significant stimulus packages of its own and agreeing to bail out Detroit over protests from the hard right. Bush officials recognize that our economic situation is so grave as to preclude political point-scoring. But those without the burden of responsibility are free to, well, just make stuff up.
David Sirota, writing in Salon, has a nice piece debunking the FDR claim, not that it matters much. People willing to believe that the Clintons killed Vince Foster and there’s no such thing as global warming can talk themselves into believing almost anything. You can’t reason someone out of a position when reason had nothing whatsoever to do with putting there in the first place.
Writes Sirota:
“On deeper examination, I discovered that the right bases its New Deal revisionism on the short-lived recession in a year straddling 1937 and 1938. But that was four years into Roosevelt’s term — four years marked by spectacular economic growth. Additionally, the fleeting decline happened not because of the New Deal’s spending programs, but because Roosevelt momentarily listened to conservatives and backed off them. As Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman notes, in 1937-38, FDR “was persuaded to balance the budget” and “cut spending and the economy went back down again….”
“Excepting 1937-1938, unemployment fell each year of Roosevelt’s first two terms [while] the U.S. economy grew at average annual growth rates of 9 percent to 10 percent,” writes University of California historian Eric Rauchway…
OK — if the verifiable evidence proves the New Deal did not prolong the Depression, what about historians — do they “pretty much agree” on the opposite?
Again, no.
As Newsweek’s Daniel Gross reports, “One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression.”
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Tighten your chin straps, fellas…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s time for New Years Day football (well, it will be as soon as my wife finishes watching the Rose Bowl parade).
At one, it’s Georgia vs. Michigan State, with the Dawgs favored by seven and a half…. I’d take the Dawgs if I were betting, but I’ll probably root mildly for the Spartans (I’ve become a bit of a Ga. Tech fan the past few years — the underdog thing, I suppose).
And this afternoon at 5 p.m., the BCS* national championship game at the Rose Bowl pitting Penn State against USC, with USC favored by nine and a half. I’m taking my Nittany Lions of course (but only if you’ll give me the points … mama didn’t raise no fools).
* (Bookman Championship Series)
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G’bye, 2008; hello, something better?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Break out the new calendar, we’re starting over. And it’s about time, in a couple of meanings of the term.
It’s about time in the literal sense, in the sense that time is a stream that carries us along in its current, each moment flowing seamlessly into the next. It is we humans who have insisted on trying to measure the flow by units, breaking time into arbitrary, discrete components of days and hours and years so we might try to organize it better, at least in our minds.
So today is said to mark a new year, an artificial distinction that nonetheless wields a certain magic. The changing of the calendar has long been thought a time for renewal, for starting over, for improvement.
Back in the old days, we used to say we were turning the page or turning over a new leaf or even starting with a clean slate, metaphors linked to the technologies of a now passing age.
In the 21st century, we instead hit the reset button. We empty the cache. Reboot. We pull the plug and wait 10 seconds before restarting, which sort of describes what many of us have been doing since Christmas Eve.
Now it’s almost time to put the plug back into the wall and go to work. Forget 2008 and look to the future, a message that is more compelling on this particular Jan. 1 than on most.
In that sense too, it’s about damn time.
And no, starting over doesn’t mean wishing we could go back a year, to the days when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was still above 13,000 and the economy seemed strong.
If only we knew then what we know today, we tell ourselves, before trillions of dollars disappeared in the crash. But the truth is, foreknowledge wouldn’t have made much difference.
If we had known a year ago the market would plummet and the economy would go into deep recession, we all would have tried to get out of the market even sooner and as a result the DJIA would probably be right where it is today, struggling to stay above 8,000.
In that respect and many others, hindsight is vastly overrated. Things that have been set into motion by so many factors over such a long period of time become inevitable, and a year ago was already too late to change the course of things.
Besides, it no longer matters what the Dow Jones average was a year ago. What matters is what it will be a year in the future.
How many of us will have good jobs a year from now, how will the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look, how much confidence will the American people have recovered?
Looking backward gets us nowhere. What we do in the next year creates the new set of circumstances that in time creates events that come to seem inevitable.
That’s true in politics as well. In less than three weeks, the Bush administration will become fodder for history, and we should all hope it fares better among the historians than it has among those who have experienced it in real time.
A better verdict from historians would mean that things that look bleak today won’t look so bleak a decade from now, and we should all hope for that.
A new administration will take office Jan. 20, promising more than just a change in the calendar. Barack Obama assumes responsibility under circumstances more threatening than those faced by all but a handful of previous presidents.
The American people have invested a lot of faith in Obama. In recent polls, 80 percent say they have some or a lot of confidence in his ability to deal with the economy, and given present circumstances that’s extraordinary. But we cannot look back and hope that Obama or anyone else can restore what used to be.
The Dow at 13,000, home values doubling every 10 years, easy credit —- that world is gone. Time flows only in one direction, and what was can never be again.
But if we can’t make things as good as they were yesterday, we can make things better tomorrow than they are today. This —- the world as it exists today, Jan. 1, 2009 —- is the new starting point.
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