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Thursday, July 02, 2009  BARACK OBAMA President Obama May Be Getting One Right . . . for Now Closing Velocity finds a bit of reason for good cheer this Fourth of July: Michael McFaul, special assistant to the president and senior White House director for Russian and Eurasian affairs, declares, "We're not going to reassure or give or trade . . . anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense."
(Let us put any possible expiration dates out of our mind until Sunday.)
I can't help but think it relates to North Korea's "possible prelude to the launch of a long-range missile toward Hawaii over the July Fourth holiday." 07/02 04:52 PM  Share
 SOMETHING LIGHTER It Takes More Than Throwing Tea Into Boston Harbor This Fourth of July, a lot of grassroots activists will be holding their second round of tea parties — 612 at last count. If you attend one this weekend, go, enjoy yourself, get fired up, take reassurance and confidence that you're not alone. But if I may make a recommendation, try to walk away with something of a plan. As Glenn and I have noted, chanting and waving signs are great, but if you really want to influence the way government works, you have to put yourself in front of the folks who make the decisions. And those at the lowest levels — city and town councils, mayors, county boards, members of Congress — are rarely used to crowds of people passionately making the case for spending less money.
Hopefully, Tea Partiers this weekend will come away with plans to attend city-council meetings, Congress members' meet-and-greets, their town-hall meetings with constituents. Don't be rude, but be firm. 07/02 04:25 PM Share
Wow, the Market's Bad, and — Hey, New Michael Jackson Footage! Hmmm. The New York Stock Exchange extends trading an extra 15 minutes in order to "execute customer orders impacted by system irregularities."
At one point on CNBC, the top of the screen had the DJIA down 170; in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, it's down 212. They're now in sync, down 212.
Meanwhile, CNN and MSNBC continue showing us video of Michael Jackson's final dress rehearsal. 07/02 04:06 PM Share
BARACK OBAMA Obama: Stop Blaming Me for the Economy, I Just Got Here in January Obama, moments ago, responding to unemployment hitting the highest it's been in 26 years: "It took us years to get into this mess, and it will take more than a few months to get us out."
This ignores the fact that after the stimulus passed, the economy has not merely not "gotten out out of the mess," but the mess has gotten worse. 07/02 02:41 PM Share
Sanford Watch: State Law Enforcement Reports . . . 'No Improper Use of Funds.' I have yet to hear from anyone in South Carolina circles who strongly believes that Gov. Mark Sanford should not resign. With his latest round of comments, the tone has shifted from the usual shock, disappointment, anger, etc., to a bit of concern that Sanford may not be playing with a full deck at this point.
The State Law Enforcement Division has scheduled a 2 p.m. news conference in Columbia to announce its findings in a review of whether his travel budget was misused. If it's bad, expect those who are privately expressing their concerns to make those concerns less private.
UPDATE: The South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division declares that it has reviewed the relevant records and "in regards to this relationship, we have found no improper use of public funds. That is the scope of our review. The governor's office was extremely cooperative. The governor even made himself available for an interview. And in the end, we have found absolutely no suggestion that any state funds were used improperly."
Sanford has denied misusing state funds. He initially told the AP he would show them his financial records to prove it, then changed his mind.
In other news, his book deal has been canceled.
UPDATE: At this point, Sanford's office is offering no indications that he has any interest in resigning; the plan is that he will spend the weekend in Florida with his family.
That's Florida the state, not Florida the street.
ANOTHER UPDATE: On MSNBC, the anchor just asked Dan Abrams whether Sanford's turning down "perfectly good stimulus funds" counts as evidence that he is not psychologically stable. 07/02 01:33 PM Share
SARAH PALIN Why They Hate Her, the Angelina Jolie of Politics Tuesday night on Hugh's program, we discussed the Vanity Fair article about Sarah Palin and why, eight months after the election, Palin still arouses such fury amongst liberals and so many rank-and-file Democrats.
After all, even if you think her election to the vice presidency would be the worst disaster ever to befall the Republic, Palin has, by and large, gone away. She's mostly focused on her work as governor of Alaska. She doesn't appear on many talk shows or do many interviews. She's been outside of Alaska . . . four times? Once to the National Governors Association meeting, once to a pro-life dinner, once to the Alfalfa Club dinner, and once to Albany for an event raising money for a museum honoring William Seward, the 19th-century U.S. secretary of state who acquired Alaska for the United States. There's no clear sense of her future plans; the near-daily denunciation seems to be just in case she decides to run for national office, a far-from-certain event that would occur, at the earliest, three and a half years from now.
My first thought was that it tied heavily to her appearance. In liberals' minds, conservatives are supposed to look like the couple from the painting American Gothic: Dour and joyless, aged, spartan and frail. Political leaders aren't supposed to be young, really good-looking women, full of energy, smiles, and winks.
Hugh suggested it tied to the contrast between her lifestyle and her critics: "She is the embodiment of the anti-choice, the opposite of every choice that lefty elites have ever made — as to going back home instead of moving to the west coast, having children, having a child with Down's, staying married to one man the whole time, choosing rural or suburban over urban and living a generally conservative lifestyle, working with her hands . . . That everything she is is the antithesis of everything that liberal urban elites are, so it's not just enough to say, 'I disagree with you,'; she has to be repudiated and crushed."
And now, I would submit a slight refining of that idea, that the seeming happiness of Palin's life is a 24-7 irritant because it challenges the way some liberals see the world.
Liberals believe that their ideas, philosophy, worldview, and policies liberate believers, and that the conservative equivalents limit people. Liberals see themselves as rejecting outdated beliefs and obsolete ideas, overturning established orders, and discarding traditions established by superstitious and ignorant forebears who weren't as enlightened as we are. Conservatives, in their minds, are runaway cultural superegos, always wagging their fingers about individual responsibility, dismissing excuses, reminding people that they can't always do what they want because of the consequences to themselves and to others.
Conservatism, they suspect, will leave you in a marriage that doesn't satisfy you, burden you with children you don't want, repress your passions, and trap you in a empty, boring, and unfulfilled life, with no hand of government able to help.
Today almost everyone faces some sort of challenge in balancing work and family; I don't know too many people who believe there are sufficient hours in a day. And then along comes this woman who's made all of these "conservative" choices and now has an amazing career, a supportive husband, a beautiful family, and great health and appearance, and she bears it all, including the inevitable hard times, with pluck and a smile, as far as we can tell. (For all we know, perhaps behind closed doors, Sarah Palin screams into a pillow when it all gets to be too much. But what we know about her suggests she relieves her stress by shooting moose.)
A short while back, Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum suggested, only half-jokingly, that actress Angelina Jolie's "entire Oscar-winning, serial-adopting, Brad Pitt-snagging, plane-piloting, unattainably hot-looking existence makes women around the world feel hopelessly inadequate and therefore unhappy." Perhaps Sarah Palin is the Angelina Jolie of the political world.
In her opponents' minds, Palin's made all the wrong choices, and cannot, they insist, be very bright. Yet she's happy and successful. She is an anomaly that invalidates their worldview, and for that, they attempt to immiserate her — regardless of whether she wishes to run for national office again. 07/02 12:04 PM Share
BARACK OBAMA, HILLARY CLINTON Connecting the Dots on a Hillary-Obama Rift . . . Ordinarily, the fact that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton isn't joining President Obama on his trip to Moscow next week wouldn't be worth a second glance. The secretary of state doesn't always join the president on big overseas trips, and she did just injure her arm.
But then you recall this story from a few days ago . . .
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged President Obama for two days to toughen his language on Iran before he did so, and then was surprised when he condemned Iran's crackdown on demonstrators last week, administration officials say.
And then a few days before that . . .
Even while supporting the president’s approach, senior members of the administration, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, would like to strike a stronger tone in support of the protesters, administration officials said.
It's supremely unlikely those leaks came from Obama's people; for them, there's no upside to a story that implies, "the secretary of state thinks the president is wimping out."
We saw some foreign-policy disagreements during the primary, and now the secretary's traditional role as the point person on all events, crises, and issues beyond our borders is being hemmed in by various special envoys and czars. Yesterday, the White House announced Vice President Biden would be overseeing progress in Iraq.
Is she tiring of him? Is he tiring of her? Or is this just the usual sand in the gears? 07/02 10:57 AM Share
BARACK OBAMA The Red Dot Only Went Up a Little This Month The good folks at Innocent Bystanders have updated their chart, comparing the administration's predictions on unemployment against the actual rate:
By the way — notice that under the Obama administration's predictions, the unemployment rate only returns to what it was at the beginning of 2008 in early 2013. 07/02 10:46 AM Share
HORSERACE Plus, She's Auctioning Off Some Stuff She Had in Her Attic The campaign of Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and Republican candidate for governor of California, announces that "her exploratory committee has raised more than $6.5 million since launching her campaign just five months ago. Whitman was the last Republican candidate to form an exploratory committee, yet she has quickly attracted contributions from every corner of California and far surpassed the other candidates' fundraising totals during the first reporting period ending June 30, 2009."
For comparison, Steve Poizner's campaign announced over $1.2 million raised to date, "highlighted by a strong June fundraising month." 07/02 10:28 AM Share
BARACK OBAMA The Average Worker's Work Week Has Never Been Shorter . . . . . . and we don't mean the Fourth of July holiday.
From the Department of Labor's report:
In June, the average workweek for production and nonsupervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls fell by 0.1 hour to 33.0 hours — the lowest level on record for the series, which began in 1964.
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased by 433,000 over the month to 4.4 million. In June, 3 in 10 unemployed persons were jobless for 27 weeks or more.
The unemployment rate for men hit 10 percent.
When you add up the total unemployed, plus all "marginally attached workers, plus total "employed part time for economic reasons", as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers, you hit . . . 16.5 percent.
NYU professor Nouriel Roubini, the "Doctor Doom" of economists — I always wish he would wear a mask and cape when making his assessments — tweets, "Job report suggests green shoots are yellow weeds turning into brown manure. Jobs, hours, wage losses pushing down labor income."
There was a reason the stimulus was the first major agenda item of the Obama administration; the president-elect started laying out some of the concepts before he was sworn in. Health care, cap-and-trade, even the Iraq war had to take a back seat to pulling the economy out of its nosedive and minimizing the slump.
Obama defenders will argue, yet again, that the stimulus can work, and that it will work, but that we just haven't given it enough time. But if you had asked them when it was signed into law whether the economy would still be shedding nearly 500,000 jobs a month by June, they probably would have dismissed it. They certainly would have dismissed the idea that construction employment would drop considerably month by month; one of the selling points of the bill was that it would cause the hiring of construction workers, engineers, planners, designers, and builders for all these "shovel-ready" projects. But, it now seems, few of those projects were all that shovel-ready.
In the end, Obama put his faith in the government's ability to spend money quickly, wisely, and efficiently, instead of, say, a one-year suspension of the payroll tax or the GOP plan to get every credit-worthy home-owner down to a mortgage interest rate of about 4 percent. Both of those ideas had their flaws, but they would have worked much quicker; instead, we're left watching the economy get worse at a marginally slower pace, greeted each month with a new prediction from stimulus defenders that the big stimulative impact will be seen next month . . . 07/02 09:55 AM Share
BARACK OBAMA, HILLARY CLINTON Preaching to the Converted Over on the home page, I've written a review of President Obama's health care town hall in Annandale, and offered an open question of what, precisely, those events are supposed to do . . .
. . . besides remind us of some easily forgotten history: "Fifteen years ago this month, Hillary Rodham Clinton launched a nationwide bus tour to promote her and her husband’s ultimately doomed proposal for an overhaul of U.S. health care . . . Hillary’s tour ran into trouble at the outset. At the second stop — in Seattle — half of the crowd of 4,500 had been urged to attend by a local radio-talk-show host, and they vocally opposed her plan. The New York Times reported that she “struggled to be heard above the cacophony of shouts, boos, and whistles.” In Portland, Ore., a plane appeared above the event with the banner, “Beware the Phony Express.” Nigel Hamilton wrote in his biography of Bill Clinton that “when the caravan reached the first highway, there was a broken-down bus swathed in red tape and bearing a forbidding notice: ‘This Is Clinton Health Care.’” 07/02 08:56 AM Share
BARACK OBAMA Feel That Stimulus! Stimulus! Unemployment hits 9.5 percent, a 26-year high, as the economy lost 467,000 jobs in June's initial estimate.
In June, the economy lost 79,000 construction jobs. Thank goodness we borrowed all that money to fund all those shovel-ready projects.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs picked a heck of a week to say we can start evaluating the success of the stimulus "now." 07/02 08:51 AM Share
SOMETHING LIGHTER An Early Time for the Washington Times In a few moments, I'll be appearing on the Washington Times morning radio program. Likely topics: Mark Sanford, Helen Thomas, and perhaps Arlen Specter. 07/02 08:26 AM Share
Wednesday, July 01, 2009 HORSERACE Not If, but When I'm pretty sure when Arlen Specter flipped parties, he didn't expect to see headlines like this on in the Christian Science Monitor as early as July:
Are Specter’s Senate days numbered?
The answer, of course, is yes, as is every senator's. The real question is, "what is that number?" Specter's final day in the Senate could be prompted by Joe Sestak in the primary, Pat Toomey in the general, or retirement six years from now. 07/01 04:57 PM Share
JOHN MCCAIN Get Out the Spelunking Gear Mark Hemingway goes deep, deep, deep into the fights within the McCain campaign last year. 07/01 04:41 PM Share
BARACK OBAMA When You've Lost Helen Thomas, You've Lost . . . Something Chip Reid and Helen Thomas gave White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs a great deal of grief over the White House's methods of pre-selecting questions for today's town-hall meeting on health care. Gibbs scoffed, saying that the question was premature, and that the reporters should see what questions were asked at the event.
Of course, at the town-hall meeting, three early questions came from a single-payer advocate, a representative of the liberal activist group Health Care for America Now, and a member of the Service Employees International Union, who essentially asked, "What can I do to help you?" 07/01 03:55 PM Share
Culture of Corruption, Part Thirty-One A lovely detail in a recent article about Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, a Democrat who claims the Department of Justice is investigating him and other local officials for corruption at the behest of Karl Rove:
AT LAST WEEK'S commissioners meeting, Dimora was ready to take a stand — at least against his arch-nemesis, county Republican leader Rob Frost. But he let his colleague Hagan browbeat a kid first.
"My name is Charles Thomas, and I am going to be a senior at Solon High School," said the Sunday-suited boy during a short discussion on an agenda item involving yet another Dimora-connected contract. "I am clearly no expert in the Cuyahoga County government or in the ways its taxpayers' money is used; however, something that appears very simple to me clearly doesn't appear that simple to some of our elected leaders. If men like [former county IT manager and alleged Dimora bagman] Kevin Kelly in a roundabout manner force contractors to give bribes, such as trips to Las Vegas, expensive meals and expensive gifts, is it even possible for honest businessmen and women to get those high valued government contracts. It undoubtedly is not . . ."
Hagan shut him up. This is not the justice system. Does he have a question? Charles skipped to the end of his spiel and started to ask, "What procedure has been instituted that ensures government officials cannot accept bribes such as agenda item 3 . . . ?"
You're done, Hagan told him. The boy sat back down. Later, he claimed not to be a Republican, just "a little conservative."
"Are you a little more conservative today?" He nodded and raised his brow.
Thank goodness we have the likes of Dimora and Tim Hagan to protect the public from high-school seniors asking questions. 07/01 11:38 AM Share
HORSERACE New York Democrats Will Get a Senate Primary The New York Daily News: Rep. Carolyn Maloney has decided to take on Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in the 2010 Democratic primary.
That primary will have huge ramifications for gun owners, as one of Maloney's big issues is gun control, while Gillibrand has been generally pro-Second Amendment in Congress. (Eh, scratch that; while she was that way in the House, I'm told that since she joined the Senate her voting record suggests another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)
Rep. Peter King, who represents part of Long Island, is the likely Republican candidate.
UPDATE: Eh, maybe not on King; apparently a slot on the House Select Committee on Intelligence is enough to make him lose interest in the Senate. 07/01 09:44 AM Share
Culture of Corruption, Part Thirty I'm sure this was on the up-and-up:
Sen. Daniel K. Inouye's staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.
The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm's losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn't meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.
Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye's office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.
It is, at this point, the only known instance of a U.S. senator intervening with the Treasury Department to get aid to a bank in which he owned shares.
One of the reasons for the "Culture of Corruption" series is to note than in 2005-06, Democrats argued that the majority party in Congress had lost all of their moral bearings, had forgotten, scorned, or ignored the public trust, and had abused their power to line their own pockets and increase their perks. Republicans gave them plenty of ammunition, most notably Randy Cunningham and Bob Ney. (Tom DeLay was indicted, but the case has yet to be brought to a jury, four years later.) Then, with the revelations about Mark Foley, the floodgates opened.
But the temptation of corruption knows no partisan boundary. You'll hear about the Mark Sanfords and John Ensigns and Larry Craigs. The aim here is to call your attention to those emerging scandals, every bit as important if less salacious, just under the radar . . . 07/01 09:41 AM Share
HORSERACE A Sentinel Watches Grayson, and Sees 'Category 5 Waste' The NRCC sees Alan Grayson of Florida as one of the more vulnerable Democratic congressmen heading into the 2010 cycle. Usually when a member of the House tries to bring a big federal project to his district, the local press covers the upside. But the Orlando Sentinel can't find any way to justify $50 million on a new national hurricane research center in that city.
Mr. Grayson says the center in Orlando would be affiliated with NOAA and could be tied to the University of Central Florida.
But UCF doesn't even offer a meteorology degree. It does some worthy research into beach erosion and other climate issues related to hurricanes, but even UCF doesn't pretend that it's among the leading institutions on hurricane research. Why should Mr. Grayson?
Why, in fact, didn't he even bother to first talk to UCF officials before working to get funding for a research center that could heavily involve them? . . .
There's an excellent chance the $50 million won't ever make its way to Orlando. It's not mentioned in the House bill. And the Senate has yet to take up the bill. But Mr. Grayson will promote to his constituents the commitment he secured for the research center, and the jobs it will create. In fact, he already has.
But it may never happen. And it's not needed. Congress should show financial restraint.
We're all for bringing new jobs to Central Florida, but not like this.
They call the project "Category 5 Waste." 07/01 09:04 AM Share
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