QSR10

Breaching faith; losing face

2006-11-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

That the Illinois Legislature’s veto session is even considering reneging on the rate freeze deal it struck 10 years ago with the utilities that serve the state of Illinois speaks volumes about what is so wrong in Springfield.

First, whatever its original merits, the rate freeze deal struck by the Legislature previously was just that: a deal. As in any deal, both sides to this one committed to doing something. Now one of the sides having performed (the utilities), the other side is backing out of its commitment (we, "the people").

Is there anything "fair" about this?

When the deal was struck, neither side had perfect foresight, and things may not have worked exactly as either side could have predicted. But both sides knew that there was a risk of that when the deal was struck.

Either side could have insisted on different outcomes under different scenarios. Both sides did. But just insisting that we could renege on the commitment if things didn't work out as we expected was not one of them. Had that been one of the original terms, there wouldn't have been a deal now, would there have been?

So far no one is contending that the utilities didn’t do what they promised to do, which was to roll back and freeze for ten years the rates then in effect. Apparently what the Legislature expected to happen in the meantime was that the deregulation of the industry that also was part of the bargain would bring down utility rates to something at or near the frozen rates.

Didn’t happen, apparently.

But did anyone on the utility side of the table guarantee to the State of Illinois that it would? Why does only one side of the deal get to pretend that it's commitment was only binding if what it expected to happen did happen?

The utilities having performed their side of the bargain, on what possible grounds do we, the public, get to renege on our side of the bargain? This is not to say that we can not renege; of course we can. Maybe there will be a lawsuit over it, but resolving that will take forever and where is an Illinois court likely to come down? But just because we can, on what grounds ought we to do so?

Rest assured though that if we do, just as in our personal lives, the State's audacity will come back to haunt. Will any utility ever fall for such a stunt again? If not, does that bode well for utility rates in the future?

More likely, won't such dashed expectations cause the utilities in the future either to avoid such “deals” in the future altogether, or to structure them in such a way as to backstop themselves financially against the Legislature reneging again?

And if the Legislature knows that the utilities are backstopping against default, won’t that just increase the likelihood of a default? Is it really in our interest to impose that inflexibility on later generations of Illinois utility consumers?

Second, how can imposing a rate hike freeze ever make sense, much less extending one? When the freeze was imposed, either the Legislature knew that the utilities were then overcharging, such that they could "grow into" the frozen rates, or the Legislature knew that the utilities were not overcharging, in which case we were deliberately starving them for a 10 year period, assuming that they would be in a position somehow to recoup their losses at the other end, when the freeze ended. Was that strategy a wise one to impose on our utilities as a matter of sound public policy? Was taking such risks smart?

Next, is there not something incredibly hypocritical about our political class complaining over and over about the unreliability of our utility services (brown outs, black outs and the like) but now contending that these same utilities ought to somehow make due for another three years without an increase in rates? What other sector of our economy do we assume can absorb such restraints on investment and modernization but still provide reliable levels of services?

Most irresponsible of all are those who, speaking for the "public (and themselves having nothing at risk) contend that even if the utility companies really are in as dire financial straits as they allege, such that the rate freeze will put them under water, letting them go under is no big deal. This is because, we are assured, someone else will come along, buy up the assets, ditch the losses and continue to run the businesses better than ever.

There are at least two things sickeningly amiss about that analysis.

First, what about the employees, third party vendors, and shareholders who will absorb that financial hit when that happens? Is it really reasonable to force those “stakeholders” we always are so concerned about to absorb the loss we’re about to impose on them? Perhaps if the losses could be somehow charged to the account of those who claim it won't matter (like the Citizens Utility Board (CUB) for instance), it genuinely wouldn't matter.

Second, once the capital markets understand that the State of Illinois won't keep its word, what happens to our cost of capital down the road? When these successor utility companies that we are assured will spring up themselves go to the capital markets, say to modernize their generating facilities, what kinds of rates are they likely to have to pay for new funds? Indeed, when the State of Illinois itself goes to those markets for any reason, and it does so early and often, won’t there be a higher cost to pay across the board for this institutional breach of trust?

In the long run, these costs can be shifted to others but never escaped altogether. In the long run rate payers, not us but in the future, our children and our children’s children, will finally be stuck with the bill for our profligacy, and the sticking will be a doozey. In the meantime, we will still have to contend with the deteriorated condition of our existing energy utilities, above and beyond the impact of own shortsightedness on that market.

Today's headlines read “Price freeze would cost ComEd millions.” But ComEd doesn’t print money, and neither by the way does the Stateof Illinois). It’s going to cost us, not ComEd.

It always does.

Post Modern at the Washington Post?

2006-11-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

Those who would contend we are in a post-modern and more progressive age regarding our dealings with women, “Forgeddaboudit .”

In a recent Washington Post piece about the first day at work of Congresswoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, former House leader Tom DeLay’s GOP successor from Sugarland Texas, the Post's reporter, Peter Carlson, worked in at least half a dozen thoroughly condescending remarks about Ms. Sekula-Gibbs, the worst having to do with her physical appearance.

Thus, according to the Washington Post writer, it was important that his readers to know that Ms. Sekula-Gibbs 1) had “bright” blond hair (wink, wink); 2) was wearing “a blue pantsuit with a fuchsia blouse and a string of pearls;” and that 3) she was married to her third husband, and that her two previous husbands had died.

Watch and see whether any Washington Post profiles of new male House members include such details.

Catching Flak

2005-10-13T16:23:00.000-06:00

If confession is good for the soul, then let’s get mine out of the way right now: I don’t have a clue what the conservative columnists and talk radio pundits attacking the President’s nomination of Harriet Miers think they are accomplishing. Or how they think that, in the unlikely event their attacks succeed, it somehow will play out to a better result.

Is it not Politics 101 in the confirmation process that first impressions count? Why then are we racing the Left to paint a picture of Harriet Miers as a clue-less crony of an inept and crony prone President? Is that a picture of the President that we really believe? If it is, then by concealing that view of him from the public for five years implicates all of us.

My utter puzzlement only increases as the details slowly begin to emerge as to who this nominee is, and how she actually spent at least the last five years of her life, across three different working for the President in the White House.

If only a sitting judge, or only an Ivy League law professor, or only a male, is qualified to understand and apply the Constitution, then of course Harriet Miers is not qualified for the Supreme Court. But that has never been the litmus test before; why is it now? Is that really the only pool we want to draw from now on?

There is no evidence to date that Harriet Miers is not a brilliant woman. In this morning’s Washington Post, Amy Goldstein and Peter Baker discuss Miers’ White House tenure, albeit in a perfunctory way only. Nevertheless, they reveal a lot more that is favorable about Miers than they probably intended.

Read the way I think the writers and their editors probably intended, Miers is a petty, workaholic bureaucrat, obsessed with pointless paper pushing details (like the text of a White House Christmas card) which, they imply, just give her an excuse to avoid the inside-the-beltway “real world” that all of the rest of Washington revels in. Oh yes, they tell us: she works hard. But if she had a real life, she wouldn’t work so hard.

In the days last November after he was elected to a second term, President Bush had chosen Alberto R. Gonzales as his next attorney general, and word was spreading that the president might replace him as White House counsel with longtime confidante Harriet Miers. A small number of advisers inside and outside the White House grumbled that she was ill-suited to become top lawyer to the president.

As a deputy chief of staff, these detractors quietly warned, Miers could be slow to make decisions, with a penchant for detail over strategic thinking. "People came to me with concerns," recalls Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society, who said he heard complaints "that her management style was one that could miss the forest for the trees." Leo, who favored a friend for the job, confirmed that he forwarded the concerns about Miers when consulted by the White House.

Funny, do you recall anyone accusing John Roberts of missing out on the stuff of life, because he worked too hard? These anonymous detractors, of course, came out on the wrong side of the President, most likely because he just flat out knew the nominee up close and personal, as none of her detractors did.

To lend some weight to these “detractors,” the Washington Post article then goes on to state, in a thoroughly patronizing tone, that dear old Harriet was a hard worker, eager to please, but thoroughly a part of the background buzz:

The thing about Harriet is, it wasn't about Harriet," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a friend. "To her, it was a matter of moving the grist through the mill. . . . She was a manager of the process."

Unlike some high-level presidential aides, Miers has never sought to advance her own views.

* * *

"She was always pleasant, always polite, always being tough as the paper kept moving," said former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. "Is that a skill you need to be a Supreme Court justice? No, I don't think so. But it's a reflection of, when she has a mission, she knows how to accomplish it."

* * *

Fleischer recalled that Miers had hoped she would become White House counsel from the outset. Instead, she was offered the job of staff secretary to the president. It is, Daniels said, "a thankless job. . . . Always a flak-catching job.

But references to what Miers actually did at the White House belies what seems like was their careful spin against her. Miers was a flak catcher all right, but at the most demanding doorway in the world: if the flak didn’t get caught where she was catching it, then it didn’t get caught.

As staff secretary, Miers was the last person to handle every piece of paper that went to [President] Bush, and, with scores of employees, it was her task to make sure each document was accurate and ready for the president's eyes. The papers ranged from correspondence to bills Bush was signing into law to memos synthesizing policy recommendations from White House and agency staff.

Early every evening, she delivered to the president's residence in the East Wing a binder consisting of his schedule for the following day and tabbed sections that contained background material on the people and issues he would face. Fleischer called it "a perfectionist's job."

Well, yes, but is that too not a bum rap? Don’t we assume that every high level employee in the White House, at least in this White House, is a “perfectionist?” If you’d ever seen Ari Fleischer conducting a morning press briefing, you’d certainly call his "a perfectionists job."

And the “scores” of “employees” referenced weren’t just petty bureaucrats; if paper even got to Miers’ level, wasn’t it pretty important stuff? Were not the “scores of employees” referenced likely cabinet secretaries, assistant cabinet secretaries and the like?

The kind of people who John Roberts worked for when he was in the White House, except not the President of the United States?

“You would have a particular phrase [in a memo] or a particular addition, and she would call you and explore at great length what that meant," said John Bridgeland, former director of the White House domestic policy council and the USA Freedom Corps.

“You had to meet her standards, which are very, very high standards, to get documents in to the president," said one former administration official who agreed to speak of a former colleague only on the condition of anonymity. "I would be fibbing if I didn't say at times that was frustrating."

Frustrating perhaps, but if the next place these documents went were to the President of the United States and then, in reliance on that same vetting, right out the door to an incredibly hostile world, wouldn’t it have taken a pretty brilliant and analytic mind to handle the flow effectively?

In this context, is it a reasonable criticism that Miers was a slave to detail? And what about such obsessive attention to detail would hurt her work product on the bench at the Supreme Court? These weren’t press releases she was working on; it was policy making.

Later in the article, but in the same mildly condescending sniff, Miers was described in her “staff secretary position” as a mediator without portfolio:

Miers played the quiet arbitrator. David W. Hobbs, the former White House director of legislative affairs, said he got calls from Miers "at 10 or 11 at night that [presidential counselor] Karl [Rove] or another White House staffer wanted the president to do something, but she wanted to check and make sure I was aware of it and didn't think it was going to cause damage on the legislative front."

Next, Miers was named the President’s deputy chief of staff. Just to remind ourselves of her caliber, when named as deputy chief of staff in July 2003, she replaced current budget director Joshua B. Bolton. Bolton, in turn moved on to serve as Director of the Budget after Mitch Daniels, his predecessor, went on to win election as Governor of Indiana.

There is no evidence that in appointing her to replace Josh Bolton at the White House, who in turn had replaced now Indiana governor Daniels, that Bush was “dumbing down” the assignment.

To the contrary,

[T]he deputy chief's job plunged her into a range of issues, some of which would become themes of Bush's reelection campaign. They included immigration policy, the space program, health information technology, Social Security, and a sequel to the No Child Left Behind law that would affect high schools.

Last fall, as the country faced a shortage of flu vaccine, Miers immersed herself in the administration's eventual decision to import supplies from Germany. "I remember Harriet wanting to understand every nook and cranny of how vaccines are manufactured, how the approval process works," Spellings said.

Most of the same conservative pundits who were plumping for Roberts, but now not for Miers, thought that this same mastery of such tasks in the Reagan White House (albeit at a far more junior level—after all he was only in his 20’s) proved his fitness for greater things.

Why is it that when the nominee is Miers, she doesn’t get credit for doing exactly the same kind of work, except at an exceptionally more sophisticated level? We may not be entitled to see the memos that Miers wrote in her advisory capacity; we have seen the work product of her advice to the President, though on public display for all to see for the last 5 years. And in the process Miers more and more was gaining his utter confidence.

Consider too what these positions require do Miers:

"She was an impeccably honest broker and accurate conveyor of information to the president with no spin or distortion," said budget director Joshua B. Bolten, who was Bush's first deputy chief of staff for policy.

Others held a less charitable view. Some colleagues "really felt she was the place where the action stopped and the hand-wringing began," said a former administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

By July 2003, when Miers succeeded Bolten as deputy chief of staff, the dominant policy issue before the White House was a drive to push through Congress a new prescription drug benefit for elderly patients on Medicare.

Thomas A. Scully, who was running the Medicare program, remembers Miers at all the meetings at which Bush was briefed. She impressed Scully as smart, but he said, "She had a very limited ego and was the ultimate Bush staff person. . . . I remember her at one point saying, I'm not a health care expert, so I'm not going to question."

"She can either dial it way down or way up as the situation calls for," said Spellings, who added that when her friend asserts herself, she does so "with the utmost intelligence."

“An impeccably honest broker” . . . with a limited ego but who, when necessary also asserted herself “with the utmost intelligence,” while dealing with the myriad complicated issues presented by a modern president’s agenda?

Why are these not strong credentials for the bench? Did anyone ever describe H. R. Haldeman or John Ehrlichman, Harold Ickes or John Podesta, to name just a few of Ms. Miers’ predecessors, in such terms? And when it was John Roberts we were talking about, didn’t we point to these same character traits as evidence of his “collegiality,” and “judicial temperament?”

And if as gatekeeper to the President, in so politically sensitive and critical a position, after all her time in the White House the worst the Washington Post can find someone to say about her, and then on condition of anonymity of course, that she was a “hand wringer,” why does that not give us comfort?

Finally, Miers followed Alberto R. Gonzales as White House counsel. As a factual matter, Gonzales and Miers did not both bring the same background to the position of White House counsel. But they both filled the same place on the organization chart. There is no reason to think that job description was scaled back when Miers took over.

The pundits now attacking Miers’ supposed lack of qualifications for the Supreme Court were not willing to argue that Gonzales was not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, at least in terms of his professional abilities. Why are the same pundits now asking us to assume that, even though she now is carrying out the same duties as did Gonzales in the White House, Miers is not also qualified?

That element of the conservative punditry, and it is not everybody, who is opposing the Miers nomination has misfired badly here, and to no good end. These attacks have needlessly muddied our arguments regarding what qualifies a nominee for the Court, undermined the President’s entire agenda (among other things feeding directly into the “cronyism” argument the Democrats unleashed against him after Katrina) and as a result has confused and divided the base.

To what end? Does anyone really believe that Harriet Miers is that dangerous a choice? I do not. And it will only compound the damage if she withdraws, or is withdrawn, from consideration at this juncture of the process.

Prosecutorial Indiscretion-The Squeak Heard Round The World

2005-10-04T09:19:00.000-06:00

Ronnie Earle’s prosecution of House Majority Leader Tom Delay got off to a ridiculous but not unprecedented start. Turns out that the criminal statute that prosecutor Earle brought his charge under, after an “investigation” of several years, didn’t even go into effect until a year after the acts complained of in the indictment. The new batch of screaming headlines about a “second indictment” naming DeLay gave little prominence or omitted mentioning this latter point all together.

So, faced with a fatally defective indictment, in a matter of hours Earle ginned up new charges against DeLay, this one based on the same conduct as in the earlier indictment, but construed against DeLay this time as an act of “money laundering” and conspiring to launder money.

What was the aim of the new alleged conspiracy? According to the indictment, I kid you not, it was to elect Republicans! In Texas, or at least in Austin and its liberal environs, that's a criminal offense, I guess.

Earle presented the new indictment to a new grand jury (the old one had been asked to approve the previous indictment of DeLay on the same day that it was scheduled to go out of existence). Lo and behold, the new grand jury approved it!

If Kenneth Starr had tried this kind of stuff, he’d have been filleted by the Main Stream Media (MSM) and rightfully so. Instead, the media is treating Ronnie Earle like another Archibald Cox.

Now I’m not a criminal lawyer and I’m not going to do Earl’s homework for him, although surely someone ought to. But a conspiracy based on violations of a campaign finance law that didn’t even exist when the acts complained of occurred sounds like a bit of a stretch. A conspiracy to elect Republicans sounds like even more of a stretch. Allegedly, Earle had to throw something together because on the day he issued the indictment, the statute of limitations on the new charges was about to run out.

These kinds of shenanigans confirm what we said originally, that a prosecutor in Texas can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, if he chooses to. Incompetence by Earle, or downright prosecutorial abuse likely will go unchecked here of course because Austin, Texas, where Earle holes up, is a liberal Democratic holdout in an otherwise pretty much Red State.

Moreover, Ronnie Earle is about to retire. He’s not planning on running again for re-election. So, unless a courageous and principled judge, so far in short supply, steps up to the plate and confronts this bully, Earle’s going to continue to have the run of the roost.

But that’s perfectly OK with the Democratic Party powers-that-be in Austin. After all, the object of this game is not simple justice but to knock DeLay off his perch in the House, and to keep him knocked off. Until Delay gets this and any other indictment Earle chooses to throw at him dismissed, under the strict ethics rules that House Republicans have imposed on themselves, DeLay can’t resume his leadership position.

The Democrats in Washington, on the other hand, who were originally urging Earle on, should be having second thoughts. Not only does the prosecution of DeLay look inept; it’s also looking more and more like the blatantly political hit job that DeLay said it was. Which is causing the Republican caucus in the House to rally to DeLay’s side, instead of shunning him, as was the hope.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. And Ronnie Earle is a mouse of the lowest order.

Another Shrewd Choice?

2005-10-03T08:48:00.000-06:00

President Bush has named Harriet E. Meirs to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Supposedly, the Right is upset with the choice. Why?

We know little about Ms. Meirs, except the following, none of which ought to give us pause: She is a lawyer with a long and distinguished career in the private sector bar. She has known the President for many, many years and, presumably, he has known her. She's tough. She is also well regarded by her peers in Texas, who elected her President of the Texas State Bar. She helped The President locate and then urged him to nominate now Chief Justice John D. Roberts.

So far there are two “raps” against Ms. Meirs from conservatives: 1) Ms. Meirs is not in "the mold" of Justices Scalia or Thomas, and therefore the President is breaking his promise to nominate only such persons; and 2) the President has named Ms. Meirs only because she is an old fried of the President’s from Texas (the “cronyism” charge).

Nothing we know about Ms. Meirs validates either criticism. Worse, to accept either criticism as valid, we have to assume that the President is both a liar and a jerk. On what basis would we ever assume either?

It’s not hard to fathom what the President might have been thinking, if indeed Ms. Meirs' judicial philosophy is aligned with that of a Scalia or a Thomas. Figures the President, the Senate just approved by a comfortable and bipartisan majority a nominee who everyone (including the Left wing of the Democratic Party: Mssrs. Durbin Obama, and Clinton) believes will be as conservative judicially or even more conservative than his mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist.

The lesson, the President could well have reasoned, that we should take from the Roberts’ confirmation vote is that despite the Democrats’ bluster, ideology can’t matter, if a nominee is otherwise well qualified professionally.

If ideology was dispositive, and if Roberts was suspected of being staunchly conservative, refused to tell us how he was going to vote, but then was confirmed anyway, doesn’t it follow that any other well qualified nominee who also won’t tell us how she’ll vote deserves to be confirmed as well?

Not needing to know how a nominee will vote also means that a nominee need not have a record of opinions, or even necessarily be a judge. Bingo! Let's nominate Harriet.

Ms. Meirs appears to be very well qualified as a lawyer. Unlike Justice Souter, Ms. Meirs rose to the top of her profession, but in the private sector. Can that be a bad thing? If she had a roster of high profile clients, and I suspect that she did, wasn't it because she was so good at what she did? She also did the requisite pro-bono work ("Meals on Wheels"), so she has a heart, right?

A trial lawyer by training, Ms. Meirs knows her way around the inside of a courtroom, but can work a banquet hall too. She was the first woman elected to serve as President of the Texas Bar Association. She also served and retired from service unscathed as Chairperson of the Texas Lottery Commission. Are these too not great credentials for an associate justice? No brooding homebody she. Just the kind of person I'd love to see parsing over fine points of the law with the likes of Justices Souter or Ginsberg.

Whether she is in “the mold” of Thomas or Scalia I guess depends on what that "mold” is supposed to include. It needn’t be very complicated, really. The “mold” referred to can't include one’s biological sex. We aren’t demanding that, to be in the Thomas or Scalia mold, every nominee has to be a male. Or Italian Amewrican, or African American or Catholic.

Nor can “the mold” include judicial temperament. Thomas and Scalia are themselves of very different judicial temperaments. Scalia can be scathing in his dissents and participates actively at oral argument. Thomas’ writing is more reserved, and to date he has yet to ask a question of an advocate appearing beforew him.

The "mold" can’t include either the nature of the professional training a nominee has to have had in their working life either. Thomas and Scalia came to the court from the bowels of the federal bureaucracy, although Chief Justice Roberts did not. Therefore, if we can accept that Justice Roberts is in the "mold" of Scalia and Thomas, and I do, then how a nominee rose in his or her profession also is not a disqualifying factor. The key is that she is highly regarded by her professional peers. Ms. Meirs is.

No, so far as I can tell the only attribute of the “the mold” that the President has ever referred to is the one that he has mentioned so often: his nominees must express a fervent fidelity to the traditional role of judges in our Constitutional system, one that confines them to deciding actual cases and controversy and applying the law as it is actually written and not as they might prefer it to be written.

To date the President has consistently, and even in the face of great controversy appointed only such nominees. The Appellate Courts are now rife with them. What evidence have we that with the nomination of Ms. Meirs The President has not done so again? If he has, and she can’t be forced to disclose that in her confirmation hearings, what is the problem from the conservative perspective with her nomination?

As for being a friend of the President, though we have not been told as much (one’s personal counsel need not also be a friend, although it helps), let’s assume that she is a friend of the President. By what logic ought that to disqualify a candidate for any appointed office? Do we not trust the President to choose his friends carefully? Has he not shown a remarkable knack for making superb personnel choices?

It is also true, not coincidentally, that the Democrats right now are trying to paint the Administration as rife with “cronyism.” That term, “cronyism,” has a tainted connotation now. If the Democrats were charging the President only with appointing only his “friends” to high places, it wouldn’t be so incendiary an allegation. Today cronyism implies appointments not qualified for their positions.

But there is no evidence to support that charge, in connection with other appointments or with this one. Indeed, the President’s appointments have been pretty uniformly superb. And I certainly haven’t noticed a surfeit of Texans in his administration. That the "cronyism" charge is being leveled by Democrats also ought to give us serious pause before we adopt that characterization of any of his appointments, much less this one.

This brings us full circle to the start of this conversation. Ms. Meirs has had a high-profile and distinguished legal career. There is no evidence Mr. Meirs isn’t qualified, albeit in a way very different than was John Roberts, for her appointment.

So what’s our problem with the appointment?

Let’s Delay A Little on DeLay

2005-09-30T14:41:00.000-06:00

The Left is in high dudgeon over the recent indictment of Tom Dale DeLay.

Tom DeLay, of course, is the majority leader of the House of Representatives. Under the GOP’s House Rules, far more strict and unforgiving than any that House Democrats ever imposed on themselves when they were in the majority, until the indictment is disposed of, no matter how frivolous it might be, DeLay must step down as House GOP Leader.

These circumstance being so gleefully seized upon by the most partisan of the Left’s partisans in Congress and the media, doesn't it behoove us all to take a long deep breath and to think about what is really going on here?

What’s Really at Stake?

First, everyone who thinks this has anything to do with political reform in Texas raise your hand. All right, now that we have that out of the way.

Leading the charge here are some of the same political figures who, to avoid a remapping of Texas congressional districts that the courts have repeatedly validated, and which reflected the new found and widespread strength of the GOP in Texas, high tailed it out of Austin and into neighboring states to avoid forming a legislative quorum on the issue.

Recall too, that Tom DeLay has been re-elected by his constituents in Texas repeatedly. He also has been elected repeatedly to high leadership positions by his own GOP colleagues in the U. S. House.

Leadership positions in the House are not imposed on the GOP membership from on high, or the outside. These are positions that can only be filled by the vote of the party’s caucus. It stands to reason then that such positions are filled by people who most GOP House members,if not nearly all of them, believe can best herd cats.

So, if any of us are concluding now, and on the basis of screaming and inflammatory headlines in a media scathingly hostile to all things Republican, that Tom DeLay was not the right guy in the Leader’s seat, then we have to also be questioning the collective judgment of the entire House GOP caucus.

Said another way, for us to assume immediately that DeLay’s constituents, and all of his fellow GOP caucus members, who know him best and work with him every day to accomplish incredibly complicated work, all made so gross an error in collective judgment really should not to be our first instinct.

Notice too another warning sign that the collective judgment of the GOP House caucus and DeLay’s constituents was not unsound can be found in the very same breathless Main Stream Media (MSM) accounts of DeLay’s imminent demise.

Noted the New York Times’ Philip Shenon and Carl Hulse yesterday in one such story, DeLay has not just played a pivotal role implementing the conservative Republican Party’s agenda for many years; he’s also been a key part of getting the agenda of President Bush accomplished over the last six years.

Observed the Times:

For years, first as the House majority whip and then the majority leader, Mr. DeLay has been an aggressive partisan as well as a proponent of socially conservative ideas. When others were urging that Republicans drop the idea of impeaching President Bill Clinton in 1998, Mr. DeLay almost single-handedly kept up the pressure that led to the House impeachment vote.
* * *
Mr. DeLay has been a linchpin of Republican success over the past decade, since playing a role in the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. He is often called the Hammer in print for his hard-nosed approach, though it is not a nickname anyone uses with Mr. DeLay himself.
* * *
During his career in the House, Mr. DeLay has used Armpac [not the PAC at issue in the indictment] to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate donations for other Republican candidates, who in turn showed their loyalty to Mr. DeLay by electing him to the House leadership.

With the Texas committee, Mr. DeLay mapped a Republican takeover of his home state's Legislature, which the party achieved in 2002. The victory allowed Republicans to redraw Congressional districts in Texas, making it easier to elect Republicans to the House and solidifying Mr. DeLay's power in Congress.

A story yesterday by David Rogers, Brody Mullins and Jeanne Cummings in the Wall Street Journal also confirmed that it is really the conservative agenda that is most threatened by this indictment:

The disabling of Mr. DeLay means Republicans and the White House have lost, at least for now, the daily leadership of a man who has been aggressive in moving the conservative agenda, from tax cuts to free-trade pacts and regulatory overhauls, as well as an array of social issues that have led him into fights with the federal courts.

So let’s read between the lines, buckos: as a way of derailing the conservative Republican Party’s agenda, nothing could be quicker or easier than for the Democrats to get DeLay’s highly coveted scalp.

And all the better that the Democrats won’t even have to prove anything, much less win an election to do it like John Thune had to do.

The Indictment:

The stakes being sky high, now let’s think a little bit about this indictment, and how the press has chosen to showboat over it.

Indictments are funny things. Historically, a prosecutor had to obtain an indictment from a local grand jury to satisfy the locals that he wasn’t just on a witch hunt. That element of “local” control today, particularly in major cities like Austin, Texas, is pretty much gone.

Grand juries today are not much better or much worse than are juries generally. The difference is though that the target of a prosecutor working through a grand jury has no right to any say in how the grand jury is empanelled, what evidence it is seeing or hearing, or even to know that it is investigating him.

Prosecutors seeking indictments nowadays also don’t have much trouble getting what they’re asking for, since they only have to present to the grand jury the evidence tending to support the charge the prosecutor is seeking. Prosecutors don’t have to present any of the evidence tending to rebut their charges (after all that’s what trials are for).

Thus,if a prosecutor seeks an indictment, he gets it. Today, it is widely cited truism that, if asked, most grand juries would indict a ham sandwich. There is no reason to think this is not also true in Texas.

That is not to say that indictments should not be taken seriously; an indictment is a deathly serious thing. Or ought to be. At least in the federal system, highly trained and politically sensitive prosecutors, like Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, don’t lightly bring indictments generally, much less against political figures. That is why we take such notice when such indictments are handed up.

That is to say that the only effective deterrent currently against political (or politicized) indictments is not the grand jury itself, but the prosecutor’s own personal sense of professional propriety, referred to generally as “prosecutorial discretion.”

Most prosecutors don’t want to run the risk that, having brought a flimsy or unsubstantiated indictment, they will be nailed by the press, politically or professionally as an out of control hack.

Is Ronnie Earle, the Austin, Texas prosecutor here, politically or professionally such an out of control hack?

Well, at this point in the analysis let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume at the least that he’s fully qualified to hold his office in Travis County, Texas.

But a few circumstances about the indictment sure suggest that it’s a highly unusual one, to say the least.

For one thing, and with the exception noted below, the indictment nowhere accuses Tom DeLay of actually doing anything in furtherance of the conspiracy of which he was a part.

That is, while DeLay’s name appears in the caption, along with two other individuals as a listed “defendant,” nowhere else in the indictment is it alleged what DeLay did in further of the conspiracy.

Indeed, DeLay's name appears most prominently towards the end of it, where the prosecutor acknowledges at length that DeLay agreed to waive the applicable statute of limitations as to the offense charged.

That appears to mean that the prosecutor, Mr. Earle, has been relieved by DeLay of what might have been the significant burden of explaining to the court why he ought to be allowed to bring charges against DeLay now, related to alleged conduct occurring almost 3 years ago. That is not a concession a man makes who is not in a hurry to get to trial.

But nowhere else in the indictment is DeLay mentioned, much less alleged to have said or done anything, except in the rote language of the charge of unspecified participation in a “conspiracy.”

Now conspiracies too can be funny things.

In the criminal law, conspiracies allow a prosecutor to charge everyone involved in a wrongdoing, even when each participant in that wrongdoing did not necessarily have a very active part in it.

Typically, co-conspirators are of two types. There are those who actually engage in prohibited conduct and those who, with knowledge of the planned wrongdoing, and through at least one overt act, prove that they are supporting it. .

In the DeLay indictment, and in boilerplate terms, DeLay, the Texans for a Republican Majority PAC and two others are alleged to have entered into an agreement to act unlawfully, although no authenticating particulars (when, where, how, etc)are provided. But unlike the two other co-conspirators, nowhere in the indictment is DeLay alleged to have engaged in any overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

PACs, of course, like “corporate” entities of every stripe, are inanimate legal fictions. PACs can only act through human agents. So, it is possible that the prosecutor’s theory has DeLay involved as an agent of the PAC, although if he does, that’s not mentioned in the indictment.

Second, as recently as a few weeks ago, Prosecutor Earl reportedly had confirmed that DeLay was not either a “subject” or “target” of the grand jury investigation, and was criticized locally for it. According to the New York Times:

DeLay said that prosecutor Ronnie Earle had said as recently as two weeks ago that DeLay was not the target or focus of his probe into election spending in the 2002 state legislative campaigns.

If this really is what DeLay was told, then it is not insignificant.

This is because, while prosecutors don’t have to tell a person they’re after anything about the status of their investigations, if asked and the prosecutor does say anything, they are supposed to be candid about whether a person is either the “subject” (i.e. an identifiable and discrete part of an active investigation) or a “target” (i.e. being actively investigated as a potential defendant) of the investigation.

Assuming that Ronnie Earle was asked just two weeks ago whether DeLay was either the “subject” or the “target” of an investigation, and confirmed that he was not, then either something remarkably pertinent just came to Earle’s attention, or he was being pressured over the last two weeks to bring a phony indictment or he was not being candid two weeks ago when asked whether DeLay was a subject or a target.

That something new just came to Earle’s attention seems possible, but unlikely. The conduct that is the subject of the investigation occurred 13 years ago, and has supposedly been under investigation for several years. Presumably has been investigated to death.

Reports that Earle was pressured to bring the indictment, valid or not, are trickling out of Austin, however. DeLay contends that’s what happened, according to the New York Times:

DeLay said that prosecutor Ronnie Earle had said as recently as two weeks ago that DeLay was not the target or focus of his probe into election spending in the 2002 state legislative campaigns.

''Soon thereafter, Mr. Earle's hometown newspaper ran a biting editorial about his investigation, rhetorically asking what the point had been, after all, if I wasn't to be indicted,'' DeLay said.

The editorial, published Sept. 11, questioned why Earle's probe had resulted in indictments of organizations, but not individuals. DeLay was not mentioned by name

That editorial was pretty scathing in its analysis of what Earle had been up to:

The editorial, published Sept. 11, questioned why Earle's probe had resulted in indictments of organizations, but not individuals. DeLay was not mentioned by name.

A state political action committee that DeLay created, Texans for a Republican Majority, was indicted earlier this month on charges of accepting corporate contributions for use in state legislative races. Texas law prohibits corporate money from being used to advocate the election or defeat of candidates; it's allowed only for administrative expenses.

Arnold Garcia, editorial page editor for the American-Statesman, said the newspaper was doing its job in writing the opinion piece.

''We're commenting on an item of public interest,'' Garcia said. ''But you should never forget the newspaper didn't indict Mr. DeLay. A grand jury did.''

The editorial said Earle and the grand jury may have good reason for indicting just organizations, but ''time is running out, and on the face of it, the felony indictments returned last week against the Texas Association of Business and the now nonexistent Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee are disappointing.''

The Prosecutor

Ronnie Earle also has a prior history of engaging in just these kinds of tactics. Just a little over a month prior to the last election, in September 2004, and with similar media fanfare, Earle had indicted three other DeLay associates in the same case.

Earle’s uses of such indictments are not flukes. Several years before the carefully timed September 2004 indictments, Earle had indicted and began to try a case against Kay Bailey Hutchison, now U.S Senator from Texas that was so riddled with error that the judge threw out the indictment and completely exonerated Hutchison.

Notes her lawyer, now working for DeLay:

"What happened is (majority leader) Tom DeLay put an entirely new face on Texas politics," said Dick DeGuerin, a Houston lawyer who represents DeLay. "And Ronnie Earle is trying to destroy him for it."
* * *
"He indicts for the political effect it will have on those people," DeGuerin said.
* * *
DeGuerin represented U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican, when she was indicted at Earle's request in 1993 on charges of misconduct while she was state treasurer.

But when the case went to trial, Earle asked to drop the charges after the judge said some of the evidence might be inadmissible. Rather than permit Earle to dismiss the case, the judge acquitted Hutchison.

DeGuerin says Earle is selective about who offends him.

Supporters say he has charged more Democrats than Republicans, 12 to 3. Detractors say those Democrats were conservatives, not liberals like him. And they say Earle never went after the many national Democratic figures in office during his tenure. "It's no answer for him to say he's indicted more Democrats than Republicans," DeGuerin said.

And if there were reasonable questions raised about what motivates Ronnie Earle, yesterday’s disclosure that for the last two years he’s been allowing a couple of filmmakers to watch him build his case against DeLay sure didn’t put them to rest either.

According to an article posted at The National review:

For the last two years, as he pursued the investigation that led to Wednesday's indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Travis County, Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle has given a film crew "extraordinary access" to make a motion picture about his work on the case.

The resulting film is called The Big Buy, made by Texas filmmakers Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck. "Raymond Chandler meets Willie Nelson on the corner of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in The Big Buy, a Texas noir political detective story that chronicles what some are calling a 'bloodless coup with corporate cash,'" reads a description of the picture on Birnbaum's website, markbirnbaum.com.

The film, according to the description, "follows maverick Austin DA Ronnie Earle's investigation into what really happened when corporate money joined forces with relentless political ambitions to help swing the pivotal 2002 Texas elections, cementing Republican control from Austin to Washington DC."

"We approached him [Earle], and he offered us extraordinary access to him and, to an extent, to his staff," Birnbaum told National Review Online Thursday. "We've been shooting for about two years."

So Let’s Delay on DeLay

Earle also thinks nothing of riding the celebrity speaking and fund raising circle for the Democratic Party in Texas:

Partisan fighting between Republicans and Democrats is particularly intense in Texas, but Republicans were particularly angered by the district attorney's speech in May at a Democratic fundraiser in Dallas.
* * *
Characterizing the DeLay case as involving money, power and corruption, Mr. Earle told Democrats: "This case is not just about Tom DeLay. If it isn't this Tom DeLay, it'll be another one, just like one bully replaces the one before."

The dinner and the speech raised $102,000 for Texas Values in Action, a political action committee created to help fund Democratic Party efforts to recapture control of the state legislature.

Texas Republicans demanded Mr. Earle's resignation, and a spokesman for Mr. DeLay said the speech demonstrated that the Travis County prosecutor was using his investigation as "a fundraising effort for Democrats."

Which brings us full circle to our original point: let’s “DeLay” drawing any quick judgments on the DeLay indictment.

There is much at stake, and lots of reasons to believe that this indictment may be a highly partisan tactic by Democrats eager to derail not Tom DeLay but the entire conservative Republican agenda, on the eve of the likely confirmation of a conservative Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and of a second associate justice far more conservative than her predecessor.

Countless high profile Democrats have been telling us for months that the votes on these nominees are as momentous as whether or not to go to war. The mid-term elections are just around the corner. In just one 24 hour news cycle every MSM mouthpiece for the Democratic Party used this indictment to convict DeLay, remove him from office, execute and bury him and kick dirt on his grave. They also projected a massive defeat for the GOP at the polls in 2006.

But based on what, exactly?

Perhaps for once we should take at face value what those Democrats opposing John Roberts have been saying about votes for Supreme Court nominees being as grave and important as votes for war. But understood a different way.

The Democrats who opposed Roberts weren’t voting against a disagreeable nominee; they were voting to go to war. The opposition to Roberts was the arcing flare marking the commencement of the first battle. The war is one to the death over the conservative Republican agenda

exas.

Just Send Shingles, Nails, Lumber, Plaster Board and Bleach. . . And Please, Please, Please Leave Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts

2005-09-14T11:44:00.000-06:00

Once again, how we finally react to a national tragedy of Katrina will say an awful lot about what kind of a country we are, and about what kind of a country we are destined to become.

On the one hand, private charities, corporations and individuals have ignored the talking heads and the hand wringers and moved in to do what needs to be done to get people back on their feet and functioning again. The Wall Street Journal has reported several times on these remarkable efforts:

The straightforward generosity of the corporate sector has been well reported. By last count, donations had exceeded $200 million. Besides cash, companies have handed out free drugs, suspended finance payments on cars and mortgages and helped emergency personnel with equipment. As interesting, though, has been the application of corporate best practices -- from supply-chain management to logistics -- to a natural disaster.

The private-sector planning began before Katrina hit. Home Depot's "war room" had transferred high-demand items -- generators, flashlights, batteries and lumber -- to distribution areas surrounding the strike area. Phone companies readied mobile cell towers and sent in generators and fuel. Insurers flew in special teams and set up hotlines to process claims.

This planning allowed the firms to resume serving customers in record time. Katrina shut down 126 Wal-Mart facilities; all but 14 are now open. Entergy, the power company for 1.1 million households and businesses that lost electricity, had restored electricity by Monday to 575,000 customers, including areas of flooded New Orleans.

Businesses offered near-instant support to their own employee-victims. Staff set up hotlines and began tracking down missing workers. Thousands of workplace victims were provided with places to stay, promises of continued pay and even offers of replacement jobs elsewhere in the country.

At the heart of the corporate response was a stunning array of advanced communications networks that kept firms in touch and coordinating. Following on last year's tsunami aid effort, the Business Roundtable had by August of this year arranged for each of its 160 member companies to designate a disaster relief point man. These folks were in place and ready to help before Katrina made landfall. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, through its non-profit Center for Corporate Citizenship, became a clearinghouse, fielding calls from many of its 3,000 state and local organizations and compiling lists of needed supplies.

By the weekend the Chamber's CCC was turbo-charging a new computer program, designed by tech firm i2, which served as a kind of bridal registry for needed relief supplies. Each donor company indicated what order it would fill, avoiding duplication or delay. IBM got to work on a computerized job bank to help place those who'd lost work. The American Trucking Association set up a Web site to update everyone on road conditions.

Companies then focused on doing what each did best. In some cases it was simply ramping up operations, as with Black & Decker, whose employees worked Labor Day weekend to churn out extra generators. In other cases, it was firms using their modern logistical skills to get into hard hit areas. FedEx and other delivery companies used computer systems with designed-in flexibility to reroute vehicles and adjust flights to get in aid. FedEx has already moved more than 100 tons of relief supplies.

Wal-Mart mined its vast databases of past purchases to compile lists of goods most desired after a hurricane. (Among the top items? Strawberry pop tarts.) Because of its advance logistics planning, the big retail chain was able to quickly move in to devastated areas with mini Wal-Marts to hand out goods. Other firms leveraged similar supply-chain capabilities; Pfizer dispensed pharmaceuticals via Wal-Mart and other retailers. "What companies do is solve problems," says Johanna Schneider, an executive director at the Business Roundtable.

These are the kinds of efforts that brought Chicago back after the fire and that brought San Francisco back after the earthquake. Both cities came back to life with a breathtaking alacrity. None would have succeeded had the government, at any level, been involved.

One of the hallmarks of “compassionate conservatism,’ at least as this writer understands it, is its commitment to prevent big government from getting in the way of the highest and best of our human impulses—“the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln so memorably framed it.

Whether from sheer incompetence, as in the case of the state and local authorities in Louisiana, or through a misplaced and in hindsight undeserved deference to them, as in the case of the federal authorities, the private sector has had a relatively free hand in doing what needs to be done. On can seek to do so for philosophical and moral reasons, as do I. But one can also look at history and advocate such an approach because any other approach is so ineffectual.

At the individual level, consider those who rode out the storm in their homes, and even now refuse to leave their abodes. Many, but far fewer than the hysterical mayor forecasted, paid with their lives for their intransigence. But others and most apparently, did not.

The decision to stay in their homes, , and to protect the most valuable property that most have—that shelter—was hardly an irrational one. The news stories of bands of looters are not ones with which we are unfamiliar; past experience from similar storms taught the good people of New Orleans well that if they valued their property they had better stand fast, stay and protect it, and with loaded weaponry if necessary (as it was).

It is true that these people did not have summer homes in neighboring states to retreat to, nor could they afford to stay for weeks on end in hotels. But what all of these kinds of lamentations most overlook is that, whether they could have afforded to have gone somewhere else or not, they definitely could not afford to lose their homes. And in that are they not just like us? Who among us could?

Even as we speak, these same hardy individuals are in New Orleans, cleaning up and repairing their homes, streets and surrounding properties and getting on with their lives. They are not waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Or worrying about myriad environmental hazards that may, or may not be there. Some, the “statists,” say they ought to be forced to leave. One social worker interviewed on NPR, not from the area, said that she lived for the experience of talking someone into leaving their home. It was what got her out of bed in the morning, that she could arm twist someone into leaving.

The local and state officials on the ground are hesitant to force anyone out. If these officials don’t want to do so, ought we to want to do so? Of course not. Give them the tools, if they need even our tools, and then get out of the way and let them do the job.

The response of private enterprise has also been astounding, and a potent reminder of what our ‘thousand points of light” are capable of, when the government stays out of the way. Wal-Mart, Ironically, one that is leading the way, Wal-Mart, ever since the last election has been in the cross hairs of Democratic Party activists and others for its low cost imports and allegedgly abusive labor practices, lead the way. The response of the corporate sectoralso has been “under the radar." None of these private enterprises sought government’s permission before providing basic necessities to victims of the storm, nor have the Main Stream Media provided them much coverage or credit for their efforts.

Hopefully, the state and local authorities, themselves now so obviously responsible for the diasters on the ground in the immediate wake of katrina, and the the levee break a day later, will continue to dither and blather and, most important of all, just stay out of the way. FEMA is on the ground and in control now, it appears, and to the extent that any overall direction is needed, let the federal government provide that structure and framework, and then the feds too hopefully will step aside and get out of the way.

Most horrific of all is what the radical left now is talking about imposing, which is a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority approach to rebuilding the entire region, as though it has been reduced to the pathetic condition of Depression-era Appalachia. Ted Kennedy took the lead on this trial lead balloon. Said Kennedy in a press release,

We cannot be an America of haves and have nots. We cannot be an America of 50 separate isolated states. As we rebuild the Gulf Coast, we must also come together to tackle these disparities. We must be a united America--one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. And when we say all, we mean all.

To address this challenge, our government must respond in ways that are as good and compassionate as the American people. We can't just fix the hole in the roof. We need to rebuild the whole foundation.

I propose that we create a New Orleans and Gulf Coast Redevelopment Authority modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority in its heyday. We should invest at least $150 billion in its actions to work with governors and mayors and citizens and communities to plan, help fund, and coordinate for the reconstruction of that damaged region. And it should help hire workers to put people back to work rebuilding their own communities and help them get back on their feet again.

Perhaps that the proposition has so distinguished a sponsor should comfort us beyond peradventure that nothing will come of it. It is further evidence though of how determined is the left to convert us into a socialist type planned economic system.

That “Ground Zero” in New York City looks much today as it did three and a half years ago is vivid testimony to the likely course of the kind of rebuilding effort that Kennedy would have us do. Indeed, parishes in and around New Orleans have been burned before waiting for aid to arrive from outside government authorities. Noted a story in this morning's New York Times:

The citizens of St. Bernard Parish - home until Hurricane Katrina to 67,000 predominantly white, middle-class people - were weary, fearful and, some of them, angry. They were as hard hit as New Orleans, they were saying, but got less attention and they wanted the world to recognize their plight and to help.

They had another reason to be angry, or at least skeptical. History again. In 1927, when the Mississippi River flooded, the leaders of New Orleans dynamited a levee, deliberately flooding St. Bernard and a neighboring parish to save the big city. Then the political establishment reneged on its promise to compensate the destroyed communities. The money never came.

This is a story that all residents of St. Bernard Parish know and can recite, and so they are nothing if not wary of outside politicians, the ones who are not their own local leaders.

They wonder just how much of the rebuilding money heading into the state will reach just plain folks like them after the elected officials, the lobbyists and the contractors take their shares.

"It's a way of life, it's the political way," explained a steamfitter. "Everybody gets his hand in somewhere along the line."

To bring back New Orleans, and the entire region for that matter, please don’t impose Soviet style central planning; our fellow citizens down there have suffered enough.

Instead, how about setting up a regional system of massive supply depots all over the region, where for a highly reduced cost anyone can bring in his or her pick up truck and haul away all the lumber, nails, roofing plaster board and bleach as they can carry.

To authenticate need, the driver would have to present nothing more than a clear set of photos of the property being restored, and its street address. All would be scanned and be entered on a confidential computer site. To get anything else, make the driver present little more than a set of the same photos originally sdubmitted, and updated photos showing restoration process and identify it to the same address. After one year, withdraw all such offers wand shut down the distribution centers. End of story.

New Orleans and everywhere else hit by Katrina would rise again, phoenix like, in a matter a months, and as good as or better than ever.

A Home Run That Roberts Took A Lifetime to Write

2005-09-12T16:54:00.000-06:00

Omitting for a moment all the acknowledgements, perfunctory or not, that he had to make, Judge John Roberts' opening statement, as meaty as any one could have imagined or hoped for, consisted of little more than the following:

My personal appreciation that I owe a great debt to others reinforces my view that a certain humility should characterize the judicial role.

Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.

The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules.

But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.

Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.

* * *

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. We do, because of the wisdom of our founders and the sacrifices of our heroes over the generations to make their vision a reality.

Mr. Chairman, I come before the committee with no agenda. I have no platform. Judges are not politicians who can promise to do certain things in exchange for votes.

I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.

* * *

If I am confirmed, I will be vigilant to protect the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court, and I will work to ensure that it upholds the rule of law and safeguards those liberties that make this land one of endless possibilities for all Americans.

One of this writer's favorite adages is, “I'm sorry for writing so long a letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

We can now predict confidently that these confirmation hearings are going to be blessedly short, because Roberts opening was short, but also carefully crafted to telegraph to the Senators assembled that he has indeed spent the time to write a short opening, to prove the power of his intellect and of his personal mettle.

First, consider the very simple metaphor that Roberts used to illustrate his view of the limited role a court properly functioning has to play in our Constitutional system: a judge is like the umpire at a baseball game.

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.
The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.
Consider in America how powerful a metaphor that is. How many of us could imagine playing baseball without firm or permanent written rules, but instead with umpires making up the rule as the game unfolded.

That’s the “living, breathing” model of the Constitution that every Democrat and many of the Republicans in the hearing room historically have embraced. Roberts has telegraphed to us that he’ll have nothing to do with it. And that he’s prepared to pound home his convictions with analogies as American as apple pie.

Second, and almost immediately into his opening statement, Roberts embraced Ronald Reagan to his bosom, openly and without shame or hesitation, and then dared anyone in the room to challenge that embrace.

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. We do, because of the wisdom of our founders and the sacrifices of our heroes over the generations to make their vision a reality.
Roberts' evocation of Reagan struck like a shaft of bright daylight to scurrying vampires. With a snarl, at least mentally, all of the Democrats, and many of the Republicans in the room, were forced to turn away, at least figuratively if not physically for the searing pain caused by the Reagan reference.

There are two sources of that pain. The first is the Democrats’ recollection of Ronald Reagan himself, and of the world wide revolution Ronald Reagan started. How did a two bit Hollywood actor, they still wonder, who couldn’t even put a sentence together without index cards, manage to win the presidency? Twice? And to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union? And not get hounded out of office with investigations? The Democrats in that Senate hearing room, and some Republicans still can’t figure it out.

The second source of that searing pain is the fact that the revolution that Reagan started isn’t by a long shot yet over; his spirit still resonates.

During the recent funereal of Reagan, each of us found ourselves pausing to think, really hard, about what it was that we all found so magnificent about this man. Even the main stream media, against its mighty collective will, had gotten sucked up in it, and had begun to realize the depth of affection this country has for Ronald Reagan, as well as the depths of Reagan’s convictions and the common sense that he brought to governing.

Roberts having evoked him, embraced him warts and all, will any Senator dare deny the greatness of Ronald Reagan, slayer of the Soviets, much less the wisdom of the remarks Reagan made about the phony constitutions of that now defunct Soviet Union?

Statements like Reagan’s about the pointless promises of the constitution of the Soviet Union are just so obviously correct and common sensical that we love them. But that also is why they are also so dangerous for the Democrats, and some Republicans, to try to pick apart.

Because those kinds of statements, and any debates the democrats might start about the validity of those statements, will set us thinking about our own Constitution, and about what gives our Constitution its breathtaking power and influence.

Isn’t it that our own Constitution is, at least for the time being, still a solemn and eternal pact of sorts, created by our direct lineal descendents, renewed again and again and again, and sanctified over and over with the blood and treasure of those who have for more than 200 years defended it?

Can that pact be as powerful, and will we be embracing the same Constitution today if that earlier pact now is construed to endorse abortion, gay marriage and other private depravities, none of which would ever have been embraced by the original founders, much less by the generations after generations that followed, swearing fealty to that same original pact? Of course not.

Perhaps the only thing phonier, more ephemeral, and fleeting than the so-called constitution of the Soviet Union, would be a “constitution” composed of little more than 5-4 plurality opinions by unelected officials, the terms of which shimmer on the horizon but always just out of reach of our collective comprehension or understanding.

With every new and novel "right” injected into that kind of a constitution, it becomes less and less a real a pact to which we all are committed, and more and more the product of a process only, and an wholly undemocratic one.

Instead of chiseled in granite, that kind of pact seems more and more like a projector beam on a movie screen, little more than the fleeting and particular light and passions of a particular and peculiar generation. When our Constitution is not one that our ancestors also fought and died for, then why ought we?

All of this, Roberts threatens to bring out at his hearings by his simple and powerful arguments embraced in his opening statement.

Finally, Roberts has made clear he has no intention of committing to ruling a certain way on particular cases nor to discuss what he would have done had he decided cases already decided, much less any about to be decided? Said Roberts,

I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.

Why will Roberts refuse to answer such questions? Because it is inconsistent with his role as umpire.

Would anyone bother playing a game, if before the game began the umpire announced how many balls and strikes he would call, and against whom?

In our constitutional system a court is called upon to decide particular cases and controversies only. They must be real cases, representing real disputes, between people with a real interest in the outcome and therefore with a genuine incentive to argue their side to the fullest.

Roberts’ hearings will be fascinating theater and educational. We all should watch as much of them as we can. The hearings also will be blessedly short, because there is present in the Senate hearing room neither the intellect, the internal logic or the will to attack him, or to explain away the glorious constitutional office to which he is about to ascend.

Raw Political Partisanship, Disguising As Journalism

2005-09-09T09:39:00.000-06:00

To read the headlines, one would think that the upper echelons of FEMA, now leading the federal government’s efforts to respond to hurricane Katrina, was composed of political hacks.

"Reports" Spencer S. Hsu of the The Washington Post,

FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.

Confirming the old adage that the lie is half way around the world before the truth even pulls on its boots, Hsu’s Washington Post story was also carried on MSNBC, under the headline “FEMA Leaders Lack Disaster Experience.“

But a quick check with FEMA’s own web site, the accuracy of which the The Washington Post does not question, paints a completely different picture.

For example, it might be literally accurate to state that FEMA Director Brown “arrived at” the agency without disaster relief experience, but that was in 2001. It is also deliberately false and misleading to suggest, as the Hsu article and the headline over it does, that Brown just arrive at FEMA, or that when he did first arrive he immediately assumed the high position there that he holds today.

According to that same FEMA web site, which the Washington Post no where contends is inaccurate or misleading, prior to Katrina, Brown’s experience included the following:

Under Secretary Brown [since 2001] has led Homeland Security’s response to more than 164 presidentially declared disasters and emergencies, including the 2003 Columbia Shuttle disaster and the California wildfires in 2003. In 2004, Mr. Brown led FEMA’s thousands of dedicated disaster workers during the most active hurricane season in over 100 years, as FEMA delivered aid more quickly and more efficiently than ever before.

Previously, Mr. Brown served as FEMA's Deputy Director and the agency's General Counsel. Shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Mr. Brown served on the President's Consequence Management Principal's Committee, which acted as the White House's policy coordination group for the federal domestic response to the attacks.

Later, the President asked him to head the Consequence Management Working Group to identify and resolve key issues regarding the federal response plan. In August 2002, President Bush appointed him to the Transition Planning Office for the new Department of Homeland Security, serving as the transition leader for the EP&R Division.

Now if FEMA’s current critics want to contend that Brown did a poor job handling any of those prior disaters or emergencies, then let them try to document that charge.

That we haven't heard any hue and cry about Brown before now strongly suggests that Brown probably did a great job.

That no one is today is rummaging through those previous FEMA operations to find people to criticize Brown's previous management of those disasters also supports the suspicion that there is nothing in Brown's past performance to suggest he wasn't the right man for the job.

If Brown's critics are contending that someone seeking the Undersecretary’s position in FEMA ought to have even more expereince than just having been involved in responding to MORE THAN 164 presidentially declared disasters and emergencies, then let them defend that position.

That wasn't the argument, of course, when Bill Clinton brought in his FEMA director, a old crony from Arkansas who had himself also learned "on-the-job," except in (ahem)Arkansas. Clinton's nominee, James Lee Witt, a construction company owner, had experience in Arkansas with exactly three such presidentially declared disasters when he was named to FEMA. The rest of his training also was "on-the-job." Also, where in the private sector does one get that kind of experience? Haliburton, perhaps?

Thus to contend as the headline does, that Brown came to Katrina lacking disaster relief experience is not just sloppy journalism but just flat out, down right wrong on the facts.

It is sloppy work like this by the press that has left the credibility of the Main Stream Media in tatters with so many of us.

At best, it is just plain unprofessional work. At worst, these kinds of articles represent partisan Bush bashing disguised as journalism. Why Bush bashing? Because these articles are trying to fill in the gaps between the fact that Katrina struck and the wish that Bush is somehow responsible for what happened afterwards. Remember, the Mayor of New Orleans, and the Governor are Democrats.

Articles like these really ought to be counted outright as a campaign contributions to the Democrats?

If the same information, presented in a video format,with the same headline, was run as an advertisement on television, it would be treated exactly as a political attack ad.

But when published in “the media” this kind of partisanship is somehow exempt from the rules by which the rest of us must play.

Memo to:Senator John McCain, be careful what you wish for--were your version of campaign reform enacted this is the only kind of information we'd have access to going into federal elections.

Democrats Dare Not Play "Blame Game"

2005-09-06T17:11:00.000-06:00

The “blame game” is a fun one for the political class to play, but tedious for the rest of us.

This is because most of us understand the logical fallacy embedded in the rules of their game: something awful happened; someone somewhere had predicted that something awful might happen; therefore someone else, usually Republican by political persuasion, must be at fault for not preparing for it to happen, or not preventing it from happening all together.

The fallacy is the implied premise that, before it actually happened, the “awful thing” was so obvious to anyone who thought about it that, but for evil actors, we would all have agreed to anticipate and prepare for it. In a small “l,” liberal democratic republic like ours, of course, hind sight is always more acute than foresight. The requisite agreement before the fact as to what it is that will happen is what almost never something that can happen, because before something awful happens we are never so sure that it will happen as we are after it happens.

In New Orleans, an unusually ferocious storm caused a major levee to break. What didn’t happen when it should have in New Orleans? The most obvious answer, now, and with perfect 20/20 hindsight, is that the people living in that city who weren’t forcibly evacuated from it before the storm should have been.

But, on what basis could they have been forcibly evacuated, before what was predicted would happen actually did? Who would have tolerated the forced evacuation of 450,000+ people on the off-chance that a hurricane that had been reduced to a tropical storm, whose force was dissipating and whose direction was erratic at best, would develop into the classic “perfect storm” over the newest and most recently rebuilt part of New Orleans’s levees, and cause those parts of its levees not just to spill over, but to give way entirely?

Could such an order to evacuate have been issued from Washington, D. C.? Of course not. Noted the BBC in an article posted just last night

It [the evacuation] was announced at a news conference by the Mayor Ray Nagin on Sunday 28 August, less than 24 hours before the hurricane struck early the next morning.

The question has to be asked: Why was it [the evacuation] not ordered earlier?

The Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said at the same [Nagin] news conference that President Bush had called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation.

The night before, National Hurricane Director Max Mayfield had called Mayor Nagin to tell him that an evacuation was needed. Why were these calls necessary?

Why was it necessary? Because we don't have a hereditary monarch here in the United States who can just order people about. Absent an attack by a foreign power, and even then not easily, there just is no legal basis for the federal government to nullify and override the duly elected state and local governments in whose jurisdictions New Orleans and its environs lie.

And as we have seen, the surrounding environs of several states, like Texas and Alabama and Mississippi, not just Louisiana, would have been implicated in such an order. To effectuate a timely evacuation of New Orleans, the authorities in Washington, D. C., whoever it would have been, would have had to not only take over the city of New Orleans long before Katrina’s actual path was known; they would also have had to have authority to commandeer whole stretches of the economy, including interstate highways, hospitals, thousands of private vehicles and their drivers, and a multitude of private lodgings of various sorts, in half a dozen states.

How likely was that going to happen? When the chattering classes in and around Washington, D. C. will not even countenance the government examining the reading habits of foreign agents sworn to destroy us, on what possible ground does anyone think that, ahead of the tragedy materializing, the same chattering classes would have approved of legislation authorizing the federal government to commandeer all of the state and local resources needed to address the mere contingency of a drubbing by a tropical storm not yet even within striking distance of land? Fat chance.

State and local officials we know now, understood from myriad learned studies and previous near miss experience, that an evacuation was exactly what should have been done. We also know that because New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, ordered exactly such a “mandatory” evacuation of the city on Sunday August 28, two days before Katrina hit.

Nagin did so claiming that Katrina, then still a tornado, “could” bring as much as 15 inches of rain ands a storm surge of 20 feet or higher that would “most likely topple” the network of levees and canals protecting the city. Or not. Tornados over the gulf are fickle things.

Problem is, no one took Mayor Nagin very seriously, even himself apparently. For one thing, the good mayor hadn’t done anything previously to prepare his citizenry for such an evacuation. There was no publicly announced evacuation plan in place; no one had a pre-designated place to go, or any other directions.

And perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because he knew it would be politically perilous, even after Mayor Nagin declared the evacuation, he did nothing to make the “mandatory” part of his evacuation order mandatory-in-fact. Recall that the crowds that filled the Superdome and the convention center were people who had failed to evacuate when first "ordered" to do so. They moved out of their homes, and their hotel rooms; they just didn’t leave the city.

Many reports have suggested those who stayed in their homes, didn’t leave the city for lack of an automobile. But how likely is that? Not very. Recall, the city flooded slowly enough that anyone left in the city could have at least moved to higher ground, of which there was plenty located in places other that where the Superdome sits, before being trapped by the rising water. Indeed, there were whole sections of New Orleans that didn’t flood at all. But the people still in their homes now didn’t move to higher ground; they stayed put.

Likely these people who didn’t leave their homes when they should have, or could have, and then got trapped in those homes later, chose to stay for at least two obvious reasons, both of them, frankly entirely rational decisions, as events proved.

On the one hand, most people who stayed probably didn’t really believe that the city’s historic good luck finally would run out and that Katrina would hit it hard as some had predicted it could. There had been lots of false alarms before, not everyone fled then, and the city had lucked out. It is one ting to tell everyone to get out; it is another to make them do it. The mayor didn’t try to make anyone leave. But if the mayor didn't take his evacuation threat seriously, by putting some teeth in it, then why would anyone esle?

The second reason most of the people who stayed did so is that, even if they thought that this time the storm was "the big one" that they had always worried about, whether or not the storm hit, people feared that if they left their homes, and the storm didn't take everything, then the looters would. And that too probably a fair calculation of the odds, as it happens.

So what could or should the federal government have been doing about people making those kinds of rationale judgments? Declared martial law before the storm hit, to reassure everyone that it was not only too dangerous to stay, but also not too dangerous to leave? Imagine the howls of outrage from the civl libertarians we would have heard had that been attempted.

What else supposedly went wrong?

Not enough National Guard troops? So Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco seemed to complain later in the week. But on Monday, August 29, the New York Times was running photos taken on Sunday August 28 of uniformed National Guard troops coordinating the evacuation to the Superdome. This was the Sunday before the Tuesday the levee broke, and before the storm even arrived.

So were there not enough troops in the city when Katrina struck? If not, who was asking for more troops, and for what purpose? Who should have sent more troops, without having been asked?

Many complained that there were no relief supplies pre-positioned? Wrong again. On August 28, 2005 President Bush declared the Gulf Coast a disaster area, and FEMA Director Michael D. Brown was reported to be in Baton Rouge Sunday, ready to deploy the prepositioned supplies once the location of Katrina’s landing was known. According to the New York Times, as of Sunday, August 28,

Even before the hurricane hit the New Orleans area, FEMA had positioned 23 of its disaster medical assistance teams and 7 search and rescue teams around the region. It also delivered generators, and stockpiles of water, ice and ready-to-eat meals. It even sent in two teams of veterinarians, to provide care to any injured pets or other animals.

Only in America would a disaster agency pre-position vetrenarians! Is this a great country of what?

Trouble was, Katrina wasn’t cooperating; she was moving on an unpredictable course, and unless someone thought a FEMA convoy ought to have joined the storm chasers, there was little more FEMA could do until Katrina decided where she was going to land.

Was levee construction funding shortchanged, by the venal Bushies and the Republican Congress? Well, once again, no.

Likely it's true that the Army Corps of Engineers has never, in this budget cycle or any other, gotten all the monies it asked for, because in some quarters it's viewed as a little too quick to move mother nature around, particularly on the Mississippi River. But that’s also why the Corps can always be counted on to ask for more than it thinks it can use, or reasonably expect to get.

So this year as in most, it got more than President Bush preferred, but less than it asked for, and was given that by "We the People," in Congress assembled, that balanced The Corps demands with all of the other demands before it, but also BK—“Before Katrina” that is.

Isn’t that how federal budgets are supposed to work? Let’s give the President the line-item veto if that’s not the best way for the budget to get passed. Everyone in favor, raise your hands. Do we all get to second guess the budget, once passed? In a sense we do, and our second guessing will go into next year's budget calculations. Think the Corps will get all it wants? Not a chance.

Also, whatever the levee or canal work that is on the drawing boards today, if it was supposed to have been supported with this year’s budget dollars, then it isn’t going to be finished for many years out into the future.

Alternately, whatever levees or canals didn’t get built in time to be ready for Katrina, didn’t get built because of funds not allocated many, many budgets ago.

When Hurricane Camille, a rare top Category Five storm, hit Mississippi in 1969, just missing New Orleans, the levees around the city were strengthened - but only enough to protect against a Category Three hurricane.

The gamble was taken that another Category Five would not threaten New Orleans anytime soon. This attitude prevailed among successive administrations.

Lt General Carl Strock, the Army Corps of Engineers commander, admitted that there was a collective mindset - that New Orleans would not be hit. Washington rolled the dice, he said.

After flooding in 1995, the existing system was improved. However, the sums were relatively small. About $500m was spent over the next 10 years.

Last time I looked, 1995 was five years before the Bush administration even took office. Last time I looked, in 1995 Bill Clinton was president If Bill CLinton and the Democrats way back then thought the "gamble" was worth taking, how was any Congress since, or President Bush supposed to have suddenly noticed the shortage of funds when no one else did, until Katrina struck?

Worse, for the hysterical critics, the primary levee that gave out was one just recently rebuilt and that was brand spanking new. Either it was poorly designed, or improperly built or both; but it wasn’t old or worn out or slated for any further work.

'"Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said [it] was particularly surprising because the break was "along a section that was just upgraded." "It did not have an earthen levee," Dr. Penland said. "It had a vertical concrete wall several feel thick."

Since Katrina’s landfall, the Congress has appropriated billions ($10.5 to be precise) towards. . .what? Who knows?

How fast will any of that money reach anyone? Who knows? The Bush administration will have to be very careful what it’s spending on, and account for every penny, especially if companies like Haliburton gets involved in reconstruction.

Were that to happen, why in no time at all the Democrats will be screaming that the Vice President is favoring his old cronies at the company with no-bid contracts. All in favor of releasing the government from any obligation to put those contracts out for bid, raise your hand.

The earliest polls coming out reflect that the “blame game” isn’t working very well. Lots of people think the feds have done a poor job so far, but even more think that the state and local authorities did even worse. Problem is, in Louisiana, at the state and local level, the political leaderships is heavily Democratic; only the federal government is Republican.

Thus, unless it can all be pinned on the feds, but it can’t be, the blame game is turning into a zero sum game for Democrats. Once again the American people seem to be more focused on substance over form, and we still are glad that the grownups remain firmly in charge.

Tokyo Needs A Dresden Moment?

2005-08-16T12:47:00.000-06:00

In today’s Wall Street Journal one Fumio Matsuo, former Washington bureau chief of Kyodo News Service, on the anniversary of the Japanese surrender to the United States marking the conclusion of World War II in the Pacific, suggests that “Tokyo Needs Its Dresden Moment.”

That is, to help heal what Mr. Matsuo describes as a still unresolved rift between Japan and the United States, an amendment to the descriptive plaque on the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institute would be in order.

Japan should ask for changes in the placards on the restored B-29s that dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- Enola Gay at the Smithsonian and Bock's Car at Dayton's Air Force Museum. The placards explain that the aircraft dropped the bombs toward the end of the war but do not mention the estimated number of victims -- 140,000 at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki. Listing the number killed is the least we can do to allow the dead to rest in peace.

Stating the number of victims is admittedly controversial. In 1995, the year of the Dresden Reconciliation, the Smithsonian organized an atomic bomb exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII, but many Americans objected to any reference to the number of victims. Today these displays should be of little concern to Americans since Japan and the U.S. have become so much closer, particularly in light of the deployment to Iraq. Most Americans believe the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives on both sides by bringing a swift end to the war. That stance is not incompatible with listing the number of victims or having Mr. Bush mourn them. In fact, those actions would be a minimal requiem for the dead. I believe Americans will accept these facts.

Although the Journal does not say how long he served here, likely Mr. Matsuo stewed too long in the peculiar juices of the Kyodo News Service’s Washington Bureau, and that is what makes him sound so much like a John Kerry "wanna be."

But frankly, and with just a slight further amendment, most Americans probably wouldn’t have any problem with Mr. Matsuo’s suggestion at all.

On the Enola Gay plaque let’s not mention only the number of Japanese “victims” of the bombing; let’s add to the plaque as well the best-guess estimates that President Truman made regarding how many victims of the Japanese war-making machine, whether Japanese, or Americans Chinese, Russians, Indonesians, Filipino, Korean or any other nationality who would be spared as a result of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That would be an informative plaque, and give the Japanese all the Dresden Moment that they should require.

Averting Our Eyes

2005-08-15T15:46:00.000-06:00

The Drudge Report, and the Wall Street Journal’s online blog “Political Diary” are both reporting on some of the Looney Left views of current media martyr, Cindy Sheehan, as though it has just discovered them. But it hasn't. It now appears that she's been ranting this stuff for months. Proving once again just how unreliable or unfair or both is the Main Stream Media (MSM).

Cindy Sheehan is the grief stricken mother demanding a second opportunity to discuss her son’s death in Iraq with the President. Sheehan’s intent on making a career of her press conferences attacking Bush and as usual the press is in full cooperative mode, since after all the target is the President.

Ultimately, the saddest thing about these reports is that it appears that the Sheehan woman may be genuinely unhinged mentally. One can only wonder, because until recently the press has not been reporting that Sheehan has the kinds of whacked-out political views she in now being quoted as spouting.

Sheehan type views are NOT uncommon, among a vast swathe of the Looney Left. That's why she now has so much company down on that dusty road near the President's ranch. But we just hadn’t heard before that she held such views.

If Sheehan didn’t have such views before, but has adopted them now, then she genuinely seems to be heading for or may even be in the midst of a mental crack-up.

That Sheehan may have been a little unhinged before the traveled to Crawford had already been hinted at, of course, when it was revealed early on that her account of her first meeting with the President several months ago differed substantially from the account she was giving of it to the press on her arrival on the dusty Texas plain.just outside of the Presidential compound.

In an earlier and near contemporaneous account of that first visit, Sheehan was quite laudatory of the President’s empathy and all around classiness as our “Commander -in-Grief.”

Accoding to a local newpaper's report of her account of the meeting:

The 10 minutes of face time with the president could have given the family a chance to vent their frustrations or ask Bush some of the difficult questions they have been asking themselves, such as whether Casey's sacrifice would make the world a safer place.

But in the end, the family decided against such talk, deferring to how they believed Casey would have wanted them to act. In addition, Pat noted that Bush wasn't stumping for votes or trying to gain a political edge for the upcoming election.

"We have a lot of respect for the office of the president, and I have a new respect for him because he was sincere and he didn't have to take the time to meet with us," Pat said.

Sincerity was something Cindy had hoped to find in the meeting. Shortly after Casey died, Bush sent the family a form letter expressing his condolences, and Cindy said she felt it was an impersonal gesture.

"I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis," Cindy said after their meeting. "I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith."

That was then.

This is now.

In her later accounts, like this one August 8, 2005 in the New York Times, the President was a thoughtless thug and a frat boy cad. According to the Times, Sheehan's account of the visit with the President was remarkably different than her own earlier account:

In Ms. Sheehan's [current] telling, though, Mr. Bush did not know her son's name when she and her family met with him in June 2004 at Fort Lewis. Mr. Bush, she said, acted as if he were at a party and behaved disrespectfully toward her by referring to her as "Mom" throughout the meeting.

By Ms. Sheehan's account, Mr. Bush said to her that he could not imagine losing a loved one like an aunt or uncle or cousin. Ms. Sheehan said she broke in and told Mr. Bush that Casey was her son, and that she thought he could imagine what it would be like since he has two daughters and that he should think about what it would be like sending them off to war.

"I said, 'Trust me, you don't want to go there'," Ms. Sheehan said, recounting her exchange with the president. "He said, 'You're right, I don't.' I said, 'Well, thanks for putting me there.' "

These contradictions were reported in only a few places, and not widely by the national media, so far as I have seen.

Looking around now, it’s not hard to find lots of other examples of what a coarse and nearly incoherent rambler about Bush and the war this Cindy Sheehan really is. But note carefully the date line on some of these accounts of her espousing these views. Did not the MSM have access to these stories quite a while ago? Were they not on notice back then that Cindy Sheehan was not the cute little old lade in tennis shoes that was depicted?

There is another possibility, of course, which is that Sheehan has held these wacko views all along, and that the MSM knew it. But it just didn’t think they would be important, in helping us to assess and understand what Sheehan was doing there down in Crawford.

The MSM does try try to help us this way, recall. This is the same press corps that inevitably tells us, when a court decision issues striking down an environmental rule imposed by the Clinton administration, what president appointed which judge on the appellate panel involved.

Or what the President "failed to mention" in his response to a question at a press conference. But it did not think that we needed to know about Cindy Sheehan's creepiness about the death of her son, indeed that she was so creepy on the subject that her own husband finally couldn’t take any more and moved out on her.

The press has told us, albeit only recently that Sheehan and her estranged husband were both “liberals,” and that was even more liberal than her husband. And of course none of her views are outside the mainstream of what passes for left liberal orthodoxy these days.

So could the press have known about Sheehan’s nuttiness all along, but in its zeal for impartiality and fairness, just chosen to conceal it from us? Likely.

If the press didn’t know, and as it now appears her views were readily “knowable,” then the MSM press has proven again that it is supine, when the “story” fits its narrow pre-conceived (and yet wholly erroneous) notions of how the American people ought to be thinking about such things. Too convenient.

No, if as it now appears the press did know that Cindy Sheehan had such opinions, but just failed to tell us, then the press has been complicit in her anti-Bush jihad.

And that’s just as sickening as is Cindy Sheehan’s rants in Crawford. Both Cindy Sheehan and the press coverage of her make you just want to avert your eyes, hoping that both she and the press covering it will be mercifully gone when we look back.

What's At Stake With The Roberts Nomination

2005-08-12T10:46:00.000-06:00

A story in this morning’s New York Times once again demonstrates what really is at stake in connection with the John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court. Do we want a super legislature? Or a judiciary?

The Times’ Eric Schmitt reports on efforts by certain Democratic governors to oppose the closing of air national guard facilities in their respective states. The threatened facilities were identified by the bipartisan base closing commission with which we have all become familiar.

Base closing recommendations are made taking into account the needs and recommendations of the Pentagon, among other things. The base closings in some states are accompanied, almost always, with the transfer of their military assets to bases in other states, or the phasing out of obsolete missions.

Regardless, the commission is very much an arm of the Legislative and Executive branches: it was formed by the Congress, mandated to work in close consultation with the Pentagon and is answerable to the Congress at several stages of its functioning.

The two state governors, Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, and Rob Blagojevich of Illinois both are democrats. Both have filed lawsuits in some court, somewhere challenging the Pentagon’s right to close or even to scale back bases in their states, arguing that the Pentagon’s proposals will in some manner inhibit their states’ ability to protect themselves against terrorist attacks and to call out their respective National Guards to perform fire fighting functions and the like.

The Schmitt article in the New York Times doesn’t dwell at any length on the validity of the legal positions of these governors, except to note that the Department of Justice recently issued a legal opinion to the effect that the Commission had the legal authority to do what it was doing, over the objection of these and other state governors. The legal merits to these lawsuits to one side, though, most revealing of all is what these state governors have to say about their perceptions of the power of the judiciary, as opposed to the legislative branch, or anyone else for that matter:

"We have a solid legal case that we will continue to fight because the law and common sense is on our side," Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, a Democrat, said in a statement. "What the Pentagon is proposing flies in the face of reason."

Adrian R. King Jr., deputy chief of staff to Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview: "The D.O.J. opinion is like any other opinion. At the end of the day, the state believes the only opinion that matters is that of a judge in a court of law."

So there you have it, in all of its stark simplicty. Forget about the Congress, forget about the Executive Branch, forget about the Pentagon, forget about the Department of Justice, forget about everyone in the whole d--n country if you have to: In the Democratic ethos: At the end of the day. . .the only opinion that matters is that of a judge in a court of law."

So, do we want a super legislature? Or do we want a judiciary?

NARAL’s Public Service Announcement

2005-08-11T10:29:00.000-06:00

Concluding not from anything Roberts ever said but by the support he is receiving from the Right, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) has started running an ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of defending abortion clinic bombers.

To substantiate this charge, NARAL juxtaposes a 1991 Supreme Court argument that Roberts made with news clips of clinic bombings in 1997. The ad is blatantly false and misleading, according to the non-partisan Annenburg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which apparently analyzes such things.

Understand of course, that accuracy is not what NARAL has any interest in whatsoever. NARAL and its ilk have learned long ago that most of us do not follow politics; indeed most of the time we loathe even hearing about political things, except on the eve of national elections and then we make up our minds late in the game, and on any host of factors that may, or may not, have any realistic connection with the candidates at issue.

The theory behind ads like NARAL is running is that if enough nastiness washes over us, often enough, and even even when we feign disinterest, some of it sticks. NARAL wants its message against Roberts, however disgusting and unfair, to stick, at least to a few of us.

Indeed, as this ad is demonstrating, groups like NARAL now try to make their ads as outrageous as possible, and then run it in a few obscure markets, alerting freindly media to it, and hoping that the controversy it generates will catapult the ad into the national media pool, where it will get free airplay, over and over again, and far beyond the initial ad run.

When called on to pull the ad, of course, you refuse, contending that it is true or somehow otherwise defensible. That response generates yet another cycle of free publicity. NARAL appears to be following that script to the letter.

And the mouthpiece for the Left, the New York Times, is bending over backwards to accommodate the strategy, running an above the fold page one story about the ad this morning, and reporting breasthelssly that the ad had provoked a “furor.”

[Recall that this is the same newspaper that, just yesterday, buried on page A13 a story that should have provoked a furor, about how the 9/11 Commission had failed to report on a Pentagon task force in 2000, during the Clinton administration, had specifically singled out and identified as potential plane hijackers Mohammed Atta and three others, but was told it could not share its information with the FBI. In a follow up story this morning, the NYT pushed the story even further back into the paper, to A14]

Contrary to the New York Times headline this morning, the NARAL ad had not, of course, created any such “furor” at least so far, because NARAL ran it in obscure (and hence inexpensive) media markets.

Until now, most of us had never heard or seen the ad. But now that the New York Times has spoken, the ad will be getting the free national exposure that NARAL counted on.

In a perverse and unintended way, though, the NARAL ad is performing a valuable public service, to the extent it reminds us of what is at stake with the Roberts nomination. To understand why, consider the ad, and the reality behind it.

What NARAL is unhappy about is that in the case at issue and by a 6-3 majority the Supreme Court declined NARAL's invitation to construe a Reconstruction Era civil rights law intended to target Ku Klux Klan violence against newly freed slaves to prohibit pro-life demonstrators from protesting in front of abortion clinics.

To make the statute stretch that far, of course, NARAL had to argue that, because only women had abortions, and the demonstrators were trying to discourage abortions from occurring, the demonstrators were acting to deprive women as a protected class of their rights as citizens, such that the conduct fell within the reach of the civil rights statute.

To reach that result, of course, the Supreme Court would have had to ignore not only the original and well documented purpose of the legislation; it also would have had to find that demonstrations at abortion clinics were aimed at women as a class, and not at the act of abortion itself. Indeed, had NARAL’s view prevailed, it is not clear how anyone anywhere could have continue to protest against abortion, in any way, without risking being charged with a violation of the civil rights of women.

On behalf of the United States government, as principal deputy solicitor general, and representing the Reagan administration, John Roberts argued against that result. His argument carried the day. Incredibly, the decision was not unanimous but only by a vote of 6-3.

Did that mean, as NARAL now says, that abortion clinics thus became fair game for demonstrators, or clinic bombers or anyone else? Of course not. It just meant that if the federal government was going to get in the business of extending to such clinics special protections, it would have to do so openly, in broad daylight and through the legislative process. And of course that is exactly what the federal government then did.

But for NARAL and its ilk, the legislative process is just too time consuming and frankly just too small ‘d” democratic. It just takes too much time and effort to develop legislation that can garner a majority vote, especially on tough issues like abortion. You have to talk to people, even people who may not agree with you, and reason with them, and take into account their point of view. Legislating in the judicial system is so much easier.

So now NARAL is attacking Roberts, not because it can with a straight face contend that he is, or is not, in favor of abortions, or because they know that he supports or does not support violence against abortion clinics.

No, NARAL is opposing Roberts because he appears not to consider the Supreme Court to be the kind of imperial superlegislature that the Left in general, and Democrats in particular, would prefer that it be (or that it be so long as it is safely peopled by left wing liberals like themselves).

In a Roberts Court, the judiciary would be back in the business of applying the law to particular cases and controversies, and not trying to solve every knotty social problem that we as a society are trying to contend with.

Thank you NARAL, for reminding us what is really what is at stake in this nomination. Do we want a NARAL superlegislature? Or a Judiciary?

Clinton's Pentagon Had Identified Mohammed Atta in 2000

2005-08-10T09:23:00.000-06:00

The New York Times reports that the supposedly non-partisan commission that was to determine how planning for the September 11, 2001 attacks could have occurred undetected by American intelligence, was unaware of a Pentagon data-mining operation that, in the waning months of the Clinton administration, had focused on the 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. Apparently through these efforts, and while Bill Clinton was President, the Pentagon had identified Atta and at least three of his associates as potential hijackers.

The Times buried the story on page A13 of this morning’s editions, since if true would demonstrate that it was the Clinton administration, by then well established in office for almost 8 years, and not the 8 month old Bush administration that had been asleep at the switch and culpable.

That the story indicts the Clinton administration for not preventing the 9/11 attacks explains why the Times buried the story deep within its bowels. Indeed, given its political elanings, that the Times buried the story would only seem to reaffirm that the story is a bombshell that, if accurate, calls into serious question the validity of everything that the 9/11 panel did.

According to the Times, unidentified retired intelligence officials have confirmed that

“by the middle of 2000 the [Pentagon] operation had identified Mr. Atta and three of the other future hijackers as a member of an American-based cell and that the information was presented that summer in a chart to the Pentagon's Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

The official said that the chart included the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and the others, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawar al-Hamzi. Mr. Weldon and the intelligence official said Able Danger members had recommended that the information be shared with the F.B.I., an the (sic) idea that was rejected.

The request to share information with the FBI was rejected, of course, as a result of “the Wall” erected between the FBI and our foreign intelligence gathering agencies like the Pentagon and the CIA.

It was this Wall that the Clinton administration, children of the sixties all, maintained and strengthened while in control of the Executive branch. It was this Wall between our intelligence agencies that prevented them from comparing notes and coordinating their intelligence findings.

Recall that while the Commission was operating, a tremendous controversy arose regarding whether Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton era Justice Department official directly responsible for reinforcing the Wall, should properly have sat on the Commission at all.

Tearing down the Wall was one of the primary recommendations made by the 9/11 Panel, and the Bush administration has acted with alacrity to do so. Questions about what Gorelick did or didn’t do as a panelist will rise again, given this startling new revelation.

If the 9/11 Panel currently seeking to continue their operations well beyond what Congress mandated had a credibility problem before, it has a huge new one today. "If this is true, somebody should be looking into it," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. No Duh, Tom.

The larger question of course is, how did Kean and his slapdash sleuths not come across any information about this data mining operation during its formal tenure? And what if anything does it tell us about the validity of the Commission’s final report?

Some commission members are trying to blame the Pentagon for failing to disclose the operation earlier. But it isn’t just the Pentagon at issue here. Who, at what agency, concluded that the Pentagon could not share what information that it developed with the FBI?

Kean of course was just in the news earlier this week complaining that, even though his panel was disbanded officially almost a year ago, no one was taking him seriously when he demanded that officials throughout the executive branch report to him on their efforts to implement his panel’s findings. Perhaps Kean’s time would have been better spent overseeing what the Commission itself had been doing in the first place, and making sure that it’s report was thorough, accurate, and complete.

Another Brushfire. . .

2005-07-27T12:14:00.000-06:00

In a previous post I predicted the Democrats and their cohorts in the Main Stream Media (MSM) would try to inflame public opinion against Judge John Roberts by any means at their disposal.

Today's brushfire is the charge that the White House is declining to produce to the public Justice Roberts' tax returns. The media is trying hard to fan the flames, contending that the White House (which hasn't asked for or received them) is itself declining to produce the returns and that this is a "break with precedent" that could exacerbate tensions over the nominee.

A scandal? A smoking gun? Stonewalling?

No, it turns out that the Bush administration hasn't been requesting or disclosing such income tax materials concerning any of its judicial nominees:

The change in policy on tax returns could fuel the debate. The Bush administration changed the policy in 2001, no longer requiring judicial nominees at any level to provide tax returns. Instead, the IRS performs a "tax check" of the past three years to detect any problems or disclose if investigations were conducted during that period. "The reason we changed it was an effort to reduce the duplicative paperwork and streamline the process," White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino said yesterday.

This means of course that this wasn't a "change" in policy; its been policy for the last four years. It also means that Judge Roberts didn't produce his tax returns when he was nominated, and confirmed overwhelmingly, to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia just two years ago.

If Judge Roberts' tax returns didn't matter to anyone in the Senate just two years ago, why should they now?

The Democrats, “Framed!”

2005-07-27T11:17:00.000-06:00

In recent weeks the Democrats have been widely lauded for discovering the art of“framing.” According to “framing” theory, arguments are won or lost in the opening inning, no matter how long and drawn out the game eventually becomes. Framing, the Democrats think will lead them out of the political wilderness that they now are wandering in. This is nothing new of course; the Greeks called framing “rhetoric.” And as a New York Times journalist recently noted, not even the best framing in the world can make a bad argument convincing.

Democrats and their allies in the Main Stream Media frantically are trying to frame the debate over the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court. They aren’t succeeding. By any historic or customary standard, the President has found an ideal nominee. Even Justice O’Connor, whose seat Roberts would be assuming, has described Roberts as an excellent choice, although (and stating the obvious---no?) disappointed that he was not a woman.

Modest, unassuming, a strict constructionist to the core, and just as Bush has promised repeatedly, Roberts is a justice in the mold of a Scalia or a Thomas, but perhaps even better. Roberts’ educational achievements are generally of a higher caliber, as is previous his career trajectory. But believe you me, we are arguing only at the margins here. Roberts is a brilliant candidate, whose accomplishments are all the more impressive as his previous work product comes into public view.

The Democrats are coming to realize this of course. Thus they have no hope of beating back Roberts’ confirmation, or even of wounding him on his way to the bench, but by the low, gutter-ball tactics for which the Democratic Party has become known: Gross distortion of the nominees’ record coupled with as many diversionary brush fires about “process” as they can light. This is “framing” played at its highest levels, at least for the Democratic Party.

To date the “frame” the Democrats have chosen is to depict Roberts as a “stealth” candidate, who is hiding his “conservatism” and actually intending to overturn a whole host of controversial opinions, once elevated to the bench. To that end, the Democrats are determined to learn his political opinions regarding a whole host of inflammatory issues, and to demand to know how he would rule on them once on the bench.

So far these tactics have been backfiring. This is predictable, because the whole Democrat attack is built on a false premise, namely that a nominee must have political opinions and that those political opinions are significant, because on the bench that is what he or she will be expected to assert.

This is proving to be a fatal flaw in the Democrat’s strategy for at least two reasons:

First, Roberts has not expressed his personal political opinions in many places. Responding to the demands of the Democrats, the Bush administration is producing reams of Roberts’ public work papers, drawing the line only at that kind of work product which, in the opinion of every currently living former Solicitor General, is outside the boundaries of what ought to be fairly sought from a nominee.

But in the reams of papers produced, Roberts has not disclosed his own political opinions on any topic. This should surprise no one. Roberts is not now and never has been a politician, or a pundit, or a talk show host, or political fundraiser or a party chairman or any other form of provocateur. Roberts has never having served in a position where his political opinions, per se, would have had any relevance whatever to his duties.

Remember, Roberts is a very well-educated and well-trained lawyer. And as a lawyer, Roberts’ personal opinion about almost anything, and particularly at the start of his career, was pretty much irrelevant. In his “political” positions, Roberts was hired and worked for people, like Chief Justice Rehnquist, with long established opinions of their own. What those employers, his clients if you will, sought from Roberts was judgment, which his papers to date have proven was superb.

That is, when Roberts was asked, on behalf of such clients, to analyze an issue or a position, it was not because his superiors sought to know what his personal opinions were about issues. Rather, his superiors sought his views, taking into account the larger context of a particular administration’s publicly stated policies, the current state of the law, and whatever other political considerations relevant to that client that ought to have been taken into account, regarding how that client ought to be handling those issues.

Second, the Democratic view of what the Supreme Ccourt ought to be, liberalisms last redoubt, is not one they've ever asked the American people to impose on themselves. As a result, the Democrats are going to have a real hard time explaining why Roberts’ opinions, except on the subject of how a judge ought to decide a case, really matter anyway.

Is a nominee with personal political opinions expected to vote according to his or her opinions, once on the bench? Wouldn’t our knowing how a nominee was going to vote on such issues undermine and subvert the credibility of the bench? And why would a nominee's political opinions be more valid than those who wrote the legislation being adjudicated, after all?

Moreover, if a nominee to the Supreme Court is expected to tell us not only how he or she will vote, but to keep his or her promise once in office, then what really is the point of appointing people to the bench in the first place? Couldn’t we just assign a well-trained circus bear to the seat, surround him or her with reliable clerks to write the appropriate opinions, and set them all loose?

No, the real problem for the Democrats, going into these hearings, is that they’ve “framed” Roberts in such a way that they can only win if they can convince the American people that their revolutionary conception of the Supreme Court, as just another branch of the legislature, and a liberal, free-wheeling, and unrestrained one at that, is one that the American people now ought to be willing to adopt.

But their view of the judicial branch is what has given us abortion on demand for minors, euthanasia, rights of full citizenship for terrorists, sweeping governmental property condemnation powers, the abolition of religion in the public square, and gay marriage. Do the Democrats have the intestinal fortitude to defend all of that on national television? I sure don’t believe that they do.

And all of this will come out in the wash of the Roberts’ hearings, and for the entire world to see, if the Democrats aren’t careful. Indeed, because of this very risk, I’ll predict that the Democrats, having seen the way Roberts has handled issues in the past, and knowing full well how able a thinker and a debater he is, will make darn sure that these hearings are going to be short, sweet, to the point and blessedly brief.

And I also will predict that Roberts will be confirmed by a comfortable margin, and in time to assume his seat on the Court by the October 3, 2005 start of the Court’s next term.

About The New Supreme Court Nominee:

2005-07-20T09:19:00.000-06:00

By any convention standard, President Bush's choice is superb; Judge Roberts is better qualified for his appointment than almost any of the current sitting justice. And I say “almost any” sitting justice only because, frankly, I don’t pretend to be intimately familiar with the background of all of them. That said, it is hard to imagine any who have better qualifications than does Judge Roberts.

Except for his gender, Roberts’ qualifications are infinitely better than were Sandra Day O’Connor’s when she was first selected by Ronald Reagan for the Court. Therefore, if we are looking for someone with excellent judgment to apply the law as written with to particular cases and controversies, then there is no principled ground for anyone to oppose this nominee, and he ought to be affirmed by acclamation. The Loonie Left knows this; that is why they are so subdued this morning.

Whether Judge Roberts in fact be confirmed will be determined not by the quality of Robert’s credentials, which are impeccable, but by what model of the Supreme Court we are opting for in the future.

Under the United States Constitution, the judicial branch of the federal government was intended to decide particular cases and controversies, and between particular parties. As a result, although capable of having an impact on the rest of the government, and as a check on some of its excesses, its decisions for the most part were expected to have only small, indirect, and incremental effects on our culture as a whole. And being the least democratic branch of government, it was never intended, nor equipped to create or enforce novel public policy.

That is not to say its decisions could not have a significant impact. If and when a case or controversy arose presented a particularly significant issue to the Court, and in particular regarding the meaning of the Constitution itself, then the Court could exert considerable influence indeed.

But here too, the Supreme Court’s power was severely circumscribed, as in that context too it was only construing a written document that anyone else could read and analyze, and arguably as easily as could the Court. Thus, if the Court strayed too far from a reasonable reading of the Constitution, its decisions would have no credibility. And because the Supreme Court has no power of enforcement, its own credibility is really all the Court can count on to have its decisions respected.

For this kind of a Supreme Court, deciding particular cases and controversies between real parties with actual disputes, as we anticipated that it would under a written Constitution, Roberts is a superb choice.

If Roberts is not readily confirmed, then it will be only because as a nation we have decided to institutionalize a new model of the Supreme Court, and of a kind not contemplated by our Constitution.

This new model of the Court, yet another by-product of the tumultuous sixties, pays lip service only to the original Constitution, and in a ritualistic and symbolic sense only. Under this model of the Court, our written Constitution becomes a sort of talisman only. As a “living, breathing” document, it is unconstrained by its own text or its origins, and capable of generating every manner of new “rights” not found anywhere in the document itself, depending on whatever influences 5 of the 9 justices writing on any given day.

If this is the new model of the Supreme Court we are adopting, then no one can yet know whether Roberts should be confirmed, because by profession he is a scholar, a lawyer and a judge, and not a politician. Therefore, he hasn’t got much of a record on any of the burning issues of the day. For this model of the Court, then, Roberts is not necessarily a good nominee at all, and, as some Democrats have already said, will have to prove himself “worthy” of his appointment.

If Roberts is not confirmed, then, it is because we are moving inexorably towards institutionalizing this new model of the Court, as some a kind of super-legislature, counsel of elders, not bound by any written Constitution, appointed for life, and “elected” only in the sense that at their confirmation hearings, the justices sitting had to satisfy 51% (or 65% if the Democrats launch a filibuster) of the Senate then sitting, that they were politically correct enough to sit on the bench, and free thereafter to create and enforce whatever public policy they desire.

But, frankly, were this the kind of Court for which he was nominated, then the fight wouldn’t be worth the candle anyway.

Our Bursting Pipelines

2005-06-09T14:37:00.000-06:00

If you're one of those opposed to the untrammeled growth of government spending you can’t help but marvel that our greatest ally in the fight against budget bloat is the growing evidence that the bureaucracy literally can’t spend the money being allocated to them fast enough.

So now we have a choice, do we just throw all accountability out the window and start distribute government cash from open crop duster cockpits? Or do we begin to think about returning to what in radically other contexts the Left likes to call a more “sustainable” model?

Three easy examples, all appearing in just this week alone, demonstrate what is happening:

Zero Need At Ground Zero:

Remember when the President, just after 9/11, was starting to get flack from, among others, Chuck Schumner and Hillary Clinton about not getting enough monetary aid to New York City? The Democrats sought to take advantage of national sympathy for their plight (and to exploit the tragedy for all that it was worth) by asking for more money than they ever believed a Republican administration would want to give them

But Bush called theirbluff. How much would be enough, he asked? Their answer, pulled out of that proverbial place and noweher else, was $20 billion. Then that’s what you’ll get, said the President.

And apparently Bush kept his word. Said another way, if he hadn’t, you can be sure there would be squealing out of Manhattan easily heard in the fruited plains and from sea to shining sea. No, New York City got the money.

Turns out though that they couldn’t figure out how to spend it all.

So, four years later, and assuming that if they couldn’t figure out what to do with it by now, according to Anahad O'Connor of the New York Times, the Bush administration is asking for a chunk of what’s left back.

Four years after scores of rescue workers were injured in the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center, the federal government plans to rescind $125 million that was allocated to help them, and many of those who requested compensation are finding their claims being disputed at 10 times the rate that typical workers face.

The money, included in a $20 billion aid package the federal government gave to New York in late 2001, was part of $175 million that was earmarked for the state's workers' compensation program. So far, only $50 million of the part set aside for trade center workers has been spent, and a provision in the Bush administration's budget for fiscal 2006 would reclaim the remaining $125 million.

But New York wants to keep the money. After all, it argues, we really don’t know what the long term effects of the attack were, and maybe we will need the money in the future. So why not just let us keep it?

But yesterday, lawmakers called on the White House to withdraw its proposal, saying the money was still badly needed by ground zero workers who are fighting for lost wages and facing the prospect of long-term health problems that doctors are only beginning to understand.

In 2004, for example, a study at Mount Sinai Hospital looked at 12,000 rescue workers and found that roughly half would need continued treatment for respiratory problems and psychological issues as a result of their work at ground zero.

"We recommend that they not rescind this money, and that they make sure that every penny is there for these workers," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, referring to the White House as he spoke at a news conference yesterday afternoon on Church Street near ground zero.

Now recall: this isn’t New York money raised from New York Taxpayers; this is all of our money. More likely, its money being raised from us, our children, and several generations of Americans hereafter.

Pentagon spending out of control

The second example is at the Pentagon. No one is accusing the bureaucracy there of veniality—at least yet. Considering how much money is sloshing around in that gas tank, its amazing that there aren’t more scandals than the few we do hear about. But, as with New York City with 9/11 funds, the Pentagon has just got more money being thrown at it than than it has the ability to spend:

Nine years ago, the Navy set out to build a new guided missile for its 21st-century ships. Fiascoes followed. In a test firing, the missile melted its on-board guidance system. "Incredibly," an Army review said, "the Navy ruled the test a success."

Recently, the Navy rewrote the contract and put out another one, with little to show for the money it already spent. The bill has come to almost $400 million, five times the original budget.

Such stories may seem old hat. But after years of failing to control cost overruns, the most powerful officials at the Pentagon are becoming increasingly alarmed that the machinery for building weapons is breaking down under its own weight.
"Something's wrong with the system," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld recently told Congress.

The Pentagon has more than 80 major new weapons systems under development, which is "a lot more programs than we can afford," a senior Air Force official, Blaise J. Durante, said. Their combined cost, already $300 billion over budget, is $1.47 trillion and climbing.

Perhaps in regards to the military these problems are inevitable.

We are fighting a two front war, in the midst of a huge changeover in how we defend ourselves from and attack the enemy. And government work still probably doesn’t hold much appeal for our “best and brightest.”

But really, what is the point of sending more money down the pipeline than the Pentagon in any way is equipped to handle? According to the NYT that’s exactly what we’re doing, and with the absolutely predictable result we'd expect:

Oversight is dwindling, Pentagon officials acknowledge. While the dollar value of weapons contracts doubled over the last decade, the Pentagon halved the size of the work force that polices their costs. The government work of managing the design, development and production of weapons has been largely outsourced to the weapons contractors themselves.

Technological troubles add billions to the cost of armaments, Congressional auditors said. But no one knows precisely how much, since the Pentagon often cannot keep track of the money it spends.

No More Aid for AIDs

Finally, the Bush administration is getting a lot of flack from the press at least for not agreeing with Tony Blair to double our spending in Africa. Turns out though that the reason the President won’t do that is that we haven’t been able to find outlets for the funds already currently allocated to solving some of the most devastating problems facing that devastated continent:

Administration officials have also signaled that the White House is not inclined to commit itself to Mr. Blair's call for doubling aid to Africa. The officials said that in the last four years, the United States had roughly tripled, to $3.2 billion, the amount of money it provided to Africa. They said American aid would continue to increase, especially as existing programs to battle AIDS and provide financial assistance to well-functioning governments get more fully under way.

They said the levels of aid the United States provides in the future should depend primarily on what African governments and aid organizations are able to use effectively. They also said government aid in any case was only part of the economic equation for Africa, with increased trade and private flows of investment capital capable of playing a far more potent role in the continent's development.

Now, this article is lengthy enough as it is, so I’m not going to explore the same kinds of issues in regards to many other popular programs like Medicare, or No Child Left Behind, for example, where funds currently in the pipeline to the States also aren’t being spent, for lack of any idea what to do with them.

The real bottom line problem is that as a nation we seem to have come to the place where our first reaction to any cause that sounds like a good one is to throw money at it, even though there is no plan in place for how to spend the money, or whether the additional funds will do any good. Good. But there is no logical reason to believe that this is true.

And now a growing case file of anecdotal evidence suggesting that plainly it is not.

Another Flyer From Fantasy Island

2005-05-26T10:09:00.000-06:00

Jim VandeHei, a Washington Post staff writer, has just discovered that the country has been moving to the right! According to Jim, the GOP Is Tilting Balance Of Power to the Right.

Welcome to the party, Jim. We’re glad to hear that you’ve finally come out of that coma that had you in its grip.

In a grudging bow to the public’s increasing district of the Main Stream Media the Washington Post dubbed VandeHei’s musings as “analysis.” But it is really little better than left wing Democratic propaganda, and unconvincing as heck at that.

The problem is, and the Post editors have to know this, people who haven’t followed politics for the last twenty years might read it and believe that it is authoritative.

Well, it is authoritative, to the extent that it reflects the official Democratic Party world view. This kind of stuff just isn’t analysis though or, for that matter a very fair depiction of what’s been going on in Washington since the commencement of the Reagan Revolution.

But is it propaganda? Uh, yes. VandeHei has a theme, and distorted the “facts” recited to fit the theme ho chose. It’s easy to demonstrate, by the way, if you happen to have even a passing familiarity with what VandeHei is talking about. VandeHei recalls the Gingrich tenure in the Congress thusly:

House Republicans, for instance, discarded the seniority system and limited the independence and prerogatives of committee chairmen. The result is a chamber effectively run by a handful of GOP leaders. At the White House, Bush has tightened the reins on Cabinet members, centralizing the most important decisions among a tight group of West Wing loyalists. With the strong encouragement of Vice President Cheney, he has also moved to expand the amount of executive branch information that can be legally shielded from Congress, the courts and the public.

Of course what really happened is that House Republicans limited the independence and prerogatives of the Committee Chairmen in the Congress because they voted to discarded the seniority system. And at the time, almost everyone recognized this as a huge reform, not a power grab. Because that it exactly what it was, a reform.

Under the old seniority system, the chairman of every House Committee was chairman for life, and positions much to be coveted, not because of the good one could do as chair, but because of the power such chairmanships wielded. The chairs of these committees were who effectively ran the place, because they had absolute power over what went on in their committees. And if they didn’t like you, your career in the Congress went nowhere.

One way the institution responded to the problem of life time appointments to these positions was to create more committees, dozens of them, until almost everyone of any significance at all was the chairman of some committee or other. This didn’t make legislating, or oversight for that matter, much easier. All of those committees needed something to do, of course. And so they scheduled hearings, and issued press releases and reports and nonsense like that, or had turf battles with one another.

Recall that in the 9/11 Report there was much whining and gnashing of teeth about the myriad committees in the Congress that had oversight of essentially the same things. That was the direct result of the Seniority System for which VandeHei now laments.

VandeHei claims that now the Congress is “effectively run by a handful of GOP leaders.” Effectively? Perhaps that was intended as a back-handed compliment, but considering the source, we assume not.

VandeHei provides no evidence of how a handful of GOP leaders are running the Congress now. And the article coming on the heels of extended coverage of the deal just struck by 14 maverick Senators around the backs of the leaders of the GOP caucus and of their opponents caucus, it’s not hard to see why: Congress isn’t operating that way any more.

After all, if you assume the chairmanship of a committee, knowing you’re only going to be allowed to serve for one or at most two terms, and then have to seek a chairmanship somewhere else, you’re probably going to treat your fellow representatives a little more attentively than if you were designated the chair of your committee for life. That's what House GOP Leader Dennis Hastert has been doing, by the way.

According to VandeHei, having conquered the Congress, the “Right” now has its eye on the judicial branch:

Now, the White House and Congress are setting their sights on how to make the judiciary more deferential to the conservative cause -- as illustrated by the filibuster debate and recent threats by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and others to more vigorously oversee the courts.

Notice that VandeHei just assumes that his readers will agree with all of the arguments implicit in this statement. So he doesn’t even attempt to back them up. For instance, by what possible measure could the filibuster “debate” be construed to have the intended purpose of cowing the judiciary?

That debate was about whether the Constitution allowed the rules of the senate to be manipulated to require a supermajority vote for judges when no supermajority vote for judges is provided for in the Constitution.

The outcome of that debate could have no affect whatever on sitting judges, who are, as the Democrats have been screaming at us for months, appointed for life. And how intimidated would you really be by Tom DeLay’s remarks, when all he was lamenting was that judges fail to apply the law as it was intended by the legislature. Since when is the view that judges should just apply the law as the legislature intended it, and not create new law for its own policy purposes, right wing view?

Finally, VandeHei contends that the level of secrecy in government is somehow strengthening the conservative cause, as though the secrecy he’s talking about was just another policy instituted by the Republicans:

This has coincided with a dramatic increase in overall government secrecy. In 1995, the government created about 3.6 million secrets. In 2004, there more than 15.5 million, according to the government's Information Security Oversight Office. The White House attributes the rise in information the public cannot see to the security threats in a post-Sept. 11, 2001, world.
But experts on government secrecy say it goes beyond protecting sensitive security documents, to creating new classes of information kept private and denying researchers [sic] access to documents from past presidents.
"We have never had this kind of control over information," said Allan J. Lichtman, a professor of history at American University. "It means policy is being made by a small clique without much public scrutiny."

VandeHei provides no evidence to support these statements either of course. And even though a VandeHei “expert” (and he refers to many such “experts,” while citing only one) contends that policy now is being made “by a small clique without much public scrutiny,” no such clique is identified. Was there one, its existence certainly be an explosive development.

And if it were true, you’d think this enterprising reporter would deign to identify the membership of this “small clique,” which, being small, shouldn’t have been hard to do. VandeHei fails to do so of course, and I’d bet the kid’s lunch money that if challenged he’d fade away on that ridiculous assertion too. But there isn’t such a clique, of course, so VandeHei’s baseless assertion of its alleged existence appears deep in the article, perhaps where VandeHei’s editor figured no one would see it anyway.

What the editors of the Washington Post and others like them don’t seem to realize is that their circulation figures are plummeting because of this kind of tripe, and because more and more people know that it is tripe.

Unless and until analysis analyzes and news articles convey news, those numbers are going to continue to plummet.

And it's because of articles like this one.

Oh Please, Give Us A Break

2005-05-20T13:50:00.000-06:00

Whatever happens on the filibuster story, you’re not going to hear it first from the Main Stream Media (MSM). This is because the MSM, and the inside the beltway contingent of the MSM in particular, just hasn’t got a clue. One wonders if they will ever get out of their cocoons.

Case in point: today in the Washington Post political guru Don Balz purports to give a detailed analysis of the current state of the struggle. Balz places all the emphasis though on what he says washington insiders now are referring to “the Group,” six Democrats and six Republicans who are attempting to go around their respective party leaders to strike a deal on judicial nominees.
How exactly would they do this? By entering into a pact to break ranks with their parties and vote in such a way as to guarantee that certain Bush nominees make it to the bench, and that certain others do not. Supposedly this would force Bush to name only nominees acceptable to . .the twelve.

At times they have appeared agonizingly close to a deal. At other times their cause has seemed hopeless. But what is most remarkable about the dozen or so senators working to avert a historic showdown over President Bush's judicial nominees is their potential to control the Senate's destiny without the explicit blessing of their leadership or their party's most important constituencies.

In an era of polarized politics, in which party and congressional leaders have been increasingly responsive to their most ideologically driven activists, the bipartisan band of senators has attempted to steer a different course. Behind closed doors, they have tested whether it is possible to find language to codify the principles of trust and goodwill at a time when little of either is left in the political system.
The senators involved have found it difficult to overcome deep-seated differences and suspicions that now govern the relationship between Republicans and Democrats.

But they have acted with the knowledge that, if they strike a compromise, they alone have the power to control events from here forward in the battle over judicial nominees and the change in Senate rules that has come to be known as the "nuclear option." That, in the estimation of congressional analysts, has made their efforts almost without precedent in the legislative branch.

What is bizarrely wrong with this picture? Sigh. . . !

Where does one start?

First, the scenario these senators allegedly are spending time constructing assumes that these twelve senators can enter into a pact that each member of the group will actually honor. There is no sound reason to expect that this will happen. For one thing, how in good consceince could they commit to voting a certain way without even knowing who the nominees would be? Or for what court? Or to fill which vacancy?

Trying to imagine ahead of time all of the different scenarios that might come down the pike is almost impossible.

Also, in politics, no such “pact” is enforceable, except if the men entering into it are honorable men, in which case their individual word of each participant would be “pact” enough.

Obviously, if they 12 are thing to negotiate a pact not only is the deal a complicated one; those trying to negotiate it, or at least some of them don’t believe that all of them are, because they’re reportedly spending a lot of time haggling over the specific language that will describe their agreement.

Now I happen to believe that lawyers bring a lot to the legislative process, because lawyers have a better than average understanding of language, and of how to think about and to write clear and concise language to express what is intended. This is assuming, of course, that all of the parties involved are acting in good faith and want to be unequivocal about what they are drafting.

But the down side of having lawyers in the Congress is that they think that they can reduce everything to words, and to assume all agreements once reduced to a writing, can be “enforced.”

In politics, of course, none of these assumptions are true. That the participants in the Group of 12 either don’t know this, or think that in this instance they need something more enforceable thatn the usual “word is my bodes ill for the outcome.

Third, it also assume that votes for all future judicial nominees brought to the floor, known and unknown, will routinely be cast based solely on party affiliation. For the Group of 12 to have the power to work its will on the rest of the senate, they would have to honor their own commitments and have perfect knowledge regarding how every other vote on that nominee will be cast. That is, every Republicans will have to vote for every nominee, and every Democrat will have to vote against them. But how can anyone assume that that will happen?

Finally, this is politics we are talking about here. If all six of these senators are committed to their pact above the wishes of their respective party leaders, how will their own other legislative priorities do, once they have asserted their “pact” against the wishes of their colleagues and their respective party caucuses? If I had to guess, I would surmise that all 12 would become virtual pariahs.

Perhaps if the Democrats follow through on their threat to “nuke” the legislative process for the rest of the year, that won’t matter. But even the Democrats have conceded that they can’t (and won’t) prevent the doing of “essential” business. And definitions are everything in a room full of lawyers.

Is the Defense bill “essential?” Recall that when Newt Gingrich shut down the Congress in the Clinton era, these same democrats waxed eloquently of how much was at risk if they weren’t able to churn out legislation at their usual pace.

But what this Balz article really reflects is that the Main Stream Media people who supposedly are most knowledgeable about how things in Washington work don’t really have a clue. Second, that they even would depict this strategizing as anything other than the plotting of an anti-democratic palace coup, and as a potentially attractive way out of the current dilemma (if you believe we are in one) is even more bizarre.

The Left loves the courts, when they are able to people it with their own sympathizers, because then they can pass legislation with as slim as 5-4 majorities, instead of going through the messy and time consuming legislative process. Presumably they would love even more to turn over the whole process to a Group of 12, and do away even with the need for accountability of any kind.

But you heard it here first; it ain't gonna happan, and the Group of 12 are going to come out of this as The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.

Congress Would Be More Popular If It Did What We Elected It To Do

2005-05-19T16:22:00.000-06:00

According to John Harwood at The Wall Street Journal, the public's "approval" of Congress is eroding :

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that disapproval of Congress's performance is higher than it has been since 1994, the year voters swept Democrats out of power on Capitol Hill. Americans have grown gloomier about the nation's direction, the economy and Iraq, and by 65%-17% they say Congress doesn't share their priorities.
"If you're a member of Congress ... you'd better be looking over your shoulder," says Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who helps conduct the Journal/NBC survey. His Republican counterpart, Bill McInturff, adds that a particular concern for incumbents looking to 2006 is unhappiness among senior citizens, a group that disproportionately turns out to vote in midterm elections.

What we should take from these kinds of survey results is awfully hard to fathom, of course, because the surveys never really explore in any depth what irks the respondents about particularly Congressmen, or even the Congress in general.

This is because most of us just don’t give a rat’s behind what’s a going on in the Congress; we either have a vague sense that everything’s all right, or that it's not.

Only when a national election approaches will we start to think harder about it, if ever. And when a particular Congress is both pretty evenly divided by party, and intensely partisan as is the current one, shall we assume that the results indicate a public irritated about the pointless prattling on there, or about the specific legislation that the Congress is passing?

For example, several weeks ago, the Congress passed by significant bipartisan margins highly significant tort reforms and bankruptcy reform, and by similar or even larger margins a special appropriation for Iraq.

But more recently and also by solid bipartisan margins, the Congress pased hugely bloated highway legislation. And now Democrats are threatening to shut down the Capital, if they don't get their way on the filibuster rule, and if Tom DeLay doesn't resign, return to Texas and volunteer himself for a prison term (that last is the suggestion of that dear, old, sweet talker, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean).

If the survey reflects constituency anger, is it at any or all of this legislation, at the Democrats' grandstanding, both or none of the above? Is it because the public wants the Congress to go harder on deadbeats than it did in the bankruptcy bill, or softer; to spend even more on new highways, or less? Who knows?

Republicans ought to take more solace than Democrats from this poll however, I’d say. For one thing, in the most recent two election cycles, and against all odds, Republicans increased their margins in the House and in the Senate. The Democratic Senate Minority Leader, Tom Daschle, also was sent packing.

Therefore, if the public is now unhappy with how the Congress collectively is behaving, it seems more logical to assume it's because the Congress is not acting Republican enough, and not because it’s doing exactly what the candidates running for election, or for reelection promised that they would do if elected.

It does not seem as logical that the electorate is unhappy because the Republicans aren’t acting more like Democrats, although you can bet the farm that’s how the Democrats am
nd their colleagues in the Main Stream media will be spinning it.

From the vantage point of the Democrats, they also can spin this result as dissatisfaction with the kind of legislation that the Republicans are passing, if that legislation was radically different from what the Republicans said that they’d be passing if their majorities in the House and Senate were maintained.

Particularly in hindsight, admittedly always 20/20, this is a pattern we’ve seen with President Bush’s favorability ratings: he seems to do least well in the polls when he’s acting least “Bush-like.”

Thus, when the “insurgents” (that's spelled "t-e-r-r-o-r-i-s-t-s" to the rest of us) in Iraq were plundering Faluja unmolested, public support for the President’s handling of the war started dropping like a stone. When we sent in the Marines and succeeded in “neutralizing” the insurgents, Bush’s ratings started to tick up again.

Perhaps there’s a bit of projecting on my part. After all, if I were answering these kinds of poll questions, I would have expressed dissatisfaction with the Congress too, and in particular its members who are Republican. But my dissatisfaction would stem from my frustration that in both houses of Congress our representatives are doing so poor a job getting the Bush agenda enacted.

I really don’t buy into the argument that filibustering the President’s judicial nominees, or chasing after Tom Delay is the highest and best use of anyone’s time. But that explanation for my response would never be reported—-just that I was among the 65% dissatisfied with the job that the Congress is doing.

Finally, it is said that if both parties are unhappy about the settlement of their differences, then it’s probably a good settlement. I suspect the same things can be said about legislation.

If It's A "Mystery" To The New York Times, Its Gotta Be Clear As Crystal To The Rest of Us

2005-05-18T11:31:00.000-06:00

Every now and then one sees an article that illustrates with such startling clarity what is amiss among the wacked-out Left that one just scratches one’s head in wonder. The lead article in the Sunday New York Times Week in Review Section, The Mystery of the Insurgency, is one such article.

So incredibly hostile is the press to anything that the United States is trying to do in Iraq that the writer or the article, James Bennet, literally begs the “insurgents” there to behave better, for fear of its losing all legitimacy whatever!

Bennet never, ever comes close to conceding what his article makes plain, that the insurgents have no coherent program, except to impose their will, by brute and indicriminate terror, on an innocent people. And this is in an opinion piece!

Bennet’s frustration with the insurgents now slaughtering people in Iraq is palpable:

The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans. They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.

Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21 people.

Unwilling though just to call a spade a spade, Bennet then proceeds to speculate about what the insurgents must have in mind, they not being a bunch of cretin thugs, after all.
Offering the microphone first to American experts on insurgencies, Bennet solicits this unhelpful response:

Counter-insurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency; if, as in China in the 1930's or Vietnam in the 1940's, it is taking insurgents a few years to organize themselves; or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation.

"Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate, there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare. The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he continued. "And there's a name for these guys: Losers."

Losers! Can't call the insurgents "Losers;" that's the ultimate hipster insult today. This is because calling someone a loser doesn't require a value judgmenet about what you are doing; it just means that you're failing at it, and everything else that you touch for that matter. You just aren't cool when you're a loser.

Concluding that calling the insurgents “losers” is so, so—judgmental, Bennet then proceeds to look around for some other experts that might have a contrary view.

Adolph Hitler being passé, or perhaps too incendiary even for the New York Times, and Pol Pot not having left a lot of theoretical writings behind (at least that Bennet is familiar with) Bennet resorts instead to looking for suggestions from two of history’s bloodiest “insurgent” tyrants, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong.

Che has some useful revolutionary insight, Bennet thinks, although it too leaves little room for romanticizing the insurgents, which is what Bennet desperately seeks to do:

If the insurgency is trying to overthrow this regime, it is contending with a formidable obstacle that successful rebels of the 20th century generally did not face: A democratically elected government. One of the last century's most celebrated theorists and practitioners of revolution, Che Guevara, called that obstacle insurmountable.
"Where a government has come to power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality," he wrote, "the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted."

So Che also would depict the insurgents here as “losers,” or at best premature winners perhaps. Noting that the insurgents seem to be killing mostly Iraqis, i.e. the “people,” which makes it impossible to contend that they are “populists,” on behalf of, Bennet then notes that the insurgents’ choice of adversary is “unusual.”
Ah, but not to worry, “nuance” is what liberals do. According to Bennet, and as Mao noted, a revolution that seems to kill, torture, maim and otherwise terrorize the very people it supposedly is intended to serve has much historical precedent:

The relationship between insurgents and the general population is always complex. Mao Zedong famously postulated that guerrillas move among the people as fish move through water. But he also warned that "a revolution is not a dinner party," and many insurgents, including the Vietcong, effectively used terror - often selectively applied - against civilians to compel segments of the population into at least passive support.

So, Bennet appears to have painted himself into a corner: The Iraqi insurgents themselves are killing significant numbers of apparently innocent Iraqi civilians, to no obvious end, and the Left doesn’t know how to grapple with that. Surely there must be some way to blame the West, and more particularly the United States.
Then comes the “AHA!” moment. It isn’t that these are just a bunch of useless and ruthless thugs power tripping on their own impotence (that would be our military, if we were killing innocent Iraqi civilians left and right).

No, no. Nuance! Nuance! That we don’t understand the insurgency, that we can’t rationalize it, that we don’t know why it is occurring, that it looks like cold blooded murder, just shows how foolish we were ever to venture into this part of the world in the first place:

Yet it may prove to be one of history's humbling lessons that history itself fails to illuminate the conflict under way in Iraq. No one really knows what the insurgents are up to.

"It clearly makes sense to the people who are doing it," said Dr. Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. "And that more than anything else tells us how little we understand the region."

Pathetic. Just pathetic.

Finally, A Debate On Social Security?

2005-05-16T10:15:00.000-06:00

Now we can have a real debate.

Supposely against the wishes of his party's leaders, the first Democrat to break the party’s ranks and offer a plan to reform social security, other than to block the Bush administration’s plan, has come forward, according to Joel Havemann in the Los Angeles Times:

In new political maneuvering over Social Security, a Democratic lawmaker says he will introduce a plan Monday for shoring up the finances of the retirement system, putting him at odds with leaders of his party.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) says that by imposing a 6% tax on wages above $90,000, to be paid half by workers and half by employers, the government could raise enough money to solve Social Security's financial problems for 75 years.
Workers and employers pay a combined 12.4% Social Security tax on wages up to $90,000 a year, but none on amounts above that.

The Wexler plan does not include private savings accounts, although it doesn't appear to preclude them either. Even though it's not presented as one for cutting current benefits, of course like the current Bush trial balloon, that’s exactly what it does.

How is that? Because the historic social security compact between each of us and the government is that we will get back what we pay into social security. Historically, that meant if you were able to pay in more while you were working, the government would be returning more to you at the other end, when you retired. After all the funds taken from you while you work were yours, and being kept in the proverbial "lock box" right?

That’s why, until now, increasing the amount of income on the front end subject to the social security tax was self defeating as a way to bring the system into balance, because it was suppposed to be offset by an increase in benefitsn retirmemnt. otherwise, it was just another tax. Thus currently the amount of income taxed at the front end is capped at the first $90,000 of income.

If the government taxed more at the front end (current income), it would irritate people for one thing. And because under the historic formula, the more the government took at the front end, the more it had to pay back to you when you retired. If you’re already making that kind of money at the front end, chances are you’d be more irritated by the tax than grateful for the payment in retirement.

Wexler’s plan calls only for the government to take more in taxes at the front end, but pay no more (and maybe even less) in benefits at the back end. That means in effect that above the $90,000 amount, the Wexler plan would rewrite the benefits formula, and the so-called social security tax afte that would become just another tax on our income, to be transferred to someone else, not us, in retirement, and without any pretense that it’s part of a retirement savings fund at all.

The Democrats are livid at Wexler, for at least two reasons. First, after the Bush administration seized the “third rail of politics” Democrats they pulled out all of the stops to paint him as insane, and they thought it was working. So long as it was working, Democrats didn't have to present any alternatives. exler, from Florida seems to be saying that strategy isn't working, at least for his retiree consituents.

Second, the Democrats all know that the only alternative they have to offer to Bush’s plan is exactly this kind of alternative: a massive tax increase without a commensurate increase in benefits.

Now they either have to admit it and be pilloried for that (Does anyone, except Tipper Gore, really believe that any such tax increase will be “lock-boxed” away for future beneficiaries?) Or the Democrats have to deny that this plan is anything like what they have in mind.

Disingenuous to the core, the Democrats have gone into their standard denial mode:

Aides to the top House Democrat and the Senate Democratic leader predicted that Wexler would not draw much support from others in the party.

"He's a party of one on this," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Jennifer Crider, press secretary to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), said, "This is not the Democratic plan."

We think it’s always a good thing, of course, when Democrats start eating their own.

But really, what is the Democrats’ plan to reform social security if not something very m uch like the Wexler plan?

The Democrats' Whisper Thin Reid

2005-05-13T14:05:00.000-06:00

When Tom Daschle lost his November 2004 bid for reelection to Tom Thune, the Democrats also lost their chief spokesman in the Senate. That the Democrats chose the inept Harry Reid as Dashle's replacement proves that their bench is a very shallow one indeed.

Not having access to their inner councils, who can know whether the Democrats are happy with the job Reid is doing? But Reid is so offnsive to so many people that Republicans ought to be ecstatic.

The first of Reid’s contretemps, at least that made it through the Main Stream Media’s sieve that protects the Democrats from many of their pratfalls. was his questioning of the intelligence of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. According to Reid, Thomas just wasn’t very bright. As proof of this Reid argued that Thomas's opinions were poorly written. The exchange at issue, with Tim Russert on Meet the Press, went as follows:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to judicial nominations. Again, Harry Reid on National Public Radio, November 19: "If they"--the Bush White House--"for example, gave us Clarence Thomas as chief justice, I personally feel that would be wrong. If they give us Antonin Scalia, that's a little different question. I may not agree with some of his opinions, but I agree with the brilliance of his mind."

Could you support Antonin Scalia to be chief justice of the Supreme Court?

SEN. REID: If he can overcome the ethics problems that have arisen since he was selected as a justice of the Supreme Court. And those ethics problems--you've talked about them; every people talk--every reporter's talked about them in town--where he took trips that were probably not in keeping with the code of judicial ethics. So we have to get over this. I cannot dispute the fact, as I have said, that this is one smart guy. And I disagree with many of the results that he arrives at, but his reason for arriving at those results are very hard to dispute. So...

MR. RUSSERT: Why couldn't you accept Clarence Thomas?

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

Whatever one might think of Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice, there is not and never has been any evidence whatever that he is an intellectual lightweight. Anyone familiar with his personal story, his qualifications or who saw him triumph over what Thomas himself had termed an attempted "high tech lynching" of him by the Democrats know that Thomas is ahighly intelligent man.

And the fact that Reid could only cite as evidence of Thomas' lack of intelligence what Reid described as "poorly written opinions" also suggested that Reid didn't really have any fcatual basis for his charge either. This is because most Supreme Court opinions are written with the help of very sophisticated and well educated law clerks who can make any Justice look good. So its unlikely that the opinions of any of the Justices are not well written. They might be illogical, or even wrong, but they are never poorly written.

Subsequently, Reid was outed as more likely just a racist when he was later pressed to identify any Thomas opinions that he contended were poorly written. Eventually he managed to identify only one, on the Dec. 26, 2004 episode of CNN’s "Inside Politics:"

Henry: When you were asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether or not you could support Justice Thomas to be chief justice you said quote, "I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written." Could you name one of those opinions that you think is poorly written?
Reid: Oh sure, that's easy to do. You take the Hillside Dairy case. In that case you had a dissent written by Scalia and a dissent written by Thomas. There--it's like looking at an eighth-grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard.
Scalia's is well reasoned. He doesn't want to turn stare decisis precedent on its head. That's what Thomas wants to do. So yes, I think he has written a very poor opinion there and he's written other opinions that are not very good.

Unfortunately for Reid, Justice Thomas didn’t even write the opinion in that case. He wrote a concurring opinion of exactly one paragraph in length. In the Hillside Dairy case, Thomas states his concurrence as follows:

I join Parts I and III of the Court's opinion and respectfully dissent from Part II, which holds that §144 of the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996, 7 U.S.C. §7254, "does not clearly express an intent to insulate California's pricing and pooling laws from a Commerce Clause challenge." Ante, at 6-7. Although I agree that the Court of Appeals erred in its statutory analysis, I nevertheless would affirm its judgment on this claim because "[t]he negative Commerce Clause has no basis in the text of the Constitution, makes little sense, and has proved virtually unworkable in application," Camps Newfound/Owatonna, Inc. v. Town of Harrison, 520 U.S. 564, 610 (1997) (Thomas, J., dissenting), and, consequently, cannot serve as a basis for striking down a state statute.

Now Reid is (or ought to be) embroiled in a new controversy regarding a reference he made on the floor of the Senate to a confidential FBI report on Henry Saad, a Roman Catholic of Arab descent, and one of the President’s current judicial nominees. According to The Washington Times,

Minority Leader Harry Reid strayed from his prepared remarks on the Senate floor yesterday and promised to continue opposing one of President Bush's judicial nominees based on "a problem" he said is in the nominee's "confidential report from the FBI."

Those highly confidential reports are filed on all judicial nominees, and severe sanctions apply to anyone who discloses their contents. Less clear is whether a senator could face sanctions for characterizing the content of such files.

By making these remarks, Reid not only attempted the cheapest kind of political smear, since Reaid knew that neither Saad nor anyone else had access to those reports or were entitled to discuss anything in them pouiblicly.

Reid also appears to have violated an unequivocal Senate rule against the disclosure of such matters:

Republican aides pointed to Standing Rule of the Senate 29, Section 5: "Any Senator, officer, or employee of the Senate who shall disclose the secret or confidential business or proceedings of the Senate, including the business and proceedings of the committees, subcommittees, and offices of the Senate, shall be liable, if a Senator, to suffer expulsion from the body; and if an officer or employee, to dismissal from the service of the Senate, and to punishment for contempt."

Furthermore, a "Memorandum of Understanding" covering the use of FBI background reports limits access to committee members and the nominee's home-state senators. Mr. Reid would fall into neither category.

Recall that Reid is the leading Democratic member of the United States Senate, whose historic prerrogatives Harry Bryd is supposedly so determined to defend in the form of his right to filibuster. No doubt Byrd's taken Reid to the proverbial wood shed by now for so openly flouting the Senate's rules.
Reid's smear of Saad was not unintentional. The Detroit Free Press reported in a June 2004 story that both of Michigan’s senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow had made similar remarks about Saad’s background check, although without elaboration.

Reid not only repeated the smear; by doing so he was acting either without knowing any of the details substantiating the previous smear or knowing those details because they have been shared with him. If the latter, then Reid also acted in violation of the Senate’s rules and the above referenced “Memorandum of Understanding” in that respect as well.

The lesson here isn’t just that Harry Reid is loose cannon for the Democrats and a lummox; he is. The lesson is that this is exactly ho the Democrats want as their chief spokesman because that's how Democrats play poltics.

The lesson here also is that the Democrats will do anything to get their way. This utter lack of principal can be a challenge to their opponents, because if you get down in the mud with them you’re not only at a disadvantage because they are so much better than are we in wallowing there; you lose all credibility for them wallowing there in the first place.