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Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
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Thursday, July 31, 2003
Josh Marshall has weighed in on the Valerie Plame Wilson story. Marshall's main advance is to confirm that Plame "formerly worked abroad under nonofficial cover and has more recently worked stateside. Her position today may be less sensitive than it was when she worked abroad. But she still works on WMD proliferation issues. " He doesn't say how he knows this, just attributing the information to "sources". Marshall also focusses on what is still the most striking part of the story, what he calls the "awfully weaselly" response of the White House. There is clear evidence that a crime, and one seriously affecting the country's security, has been committed. A prominent Republican, known to be a supporter of the Bush administration, has publicly and explicitly said that it was committed by two senior White House officials. The Press Secretary flatly refuses to deny that senior officials have betrayed the country. The administration has no interest in investigating to see if it is true. And the media, naturally, doesn't see a story there.
Marshall writes nicely about the media's standards:
A few years back, this town sped into paroxysms over claims that the Clinton White House had used FBI files to smear its critics. Even according to Ken Starr, those charges turned out to be baseless. This outrage, on the other hand, actually happened. And, when you think about it, that sort of makes it worse. We still don't know, and probably won't for years, just how much harm has been done. But I suspect it is greater than has been admitted. Marshall didn't offer any details, nor has anybody else, on what Plame's official job was. This leads me to believe more and more that she was working for a front company, and her exposure indirectly burned other agents working in the same front, as well as herself.
If you're tempted to believe that this administration would never put going after a political enemy ahead of the country's security, remember that they already have. In 2001, Bush officials declassified a document that clearly should have remained classified, a secret transcript of a conversation between Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak less than a year old, in order to score points by showing that Clinton was personally involved in the pardon of Marc Rich. The harm was not as severe as in this case, but the message put out, that foreign leaders can't talk to the President with confidence that their discussions will remain secret for a reasonable time, could hardly have been beneficial to the national interest.
Monday, July 28, 2003
Via Matt Yglesias, I learn that yet another gubernatorial candidate has thrown her hat (or possibly her thong) into the ring. Hey, I'm sold. From her site, it's apparent that Georgy Russell is not merely a babe but that rarest of beings, a geek babe. She appears to have designed her own site, which is put together nicely, although not as nicely as the candidate. And she largely makes sense when she talks about issues, which is more than I can say for most of her opponents.
Georgy says in an open letter, "For the first time in a long time, this recall will give us a chance for four years of something new - leadership by the people. It's about time we regular people wise up to a system that's gradually making us irrelevant. " The problem is, this is nothing new. Californians have been trying to toss out the politicians and bring the government back to the people since I was a child and Georgy wasn't born. We elected an actor Governor. We passed Prop 13, which saddled the state with a deeply unfair and regressive tax system, where taxation of real property is based not on value but on sale date. We adopted a three strikes bill written by a photographer which hands out life sentences for petty theft. We passed term limits which result in legislators dependent on lobbyists because by the time they understand the ins and outs of governing the state they get booted out. Now we have a recall of a Governor elected only a few months ago, which has helped to give us the weakest debt rating of any state, one step above junk bonds. None of these turned out to be good ideas.
Back in the days of Pat Brown before all this started, California was widely seen as the best governed state in the best governed nation in the world. Maybe Georgy should adopt a truly revolutionary slogan and advocate power to the politicians. Sunday, July 27, 2003
Just in Case This Wasn't Weird Enough Reports this morning say that one of California's most famous Democrats, after years living in Washington DC, is preparing to go on the ballot in the upcoming recall. Dianne Feinstein? Nancy Pelosi? Leon Panetta? Nah, any of those would make sense. Instead it's none other than Gary Condit, the man most famous for probably not murdering the intern he was sleeping with. One - more or less - Democrat has already declared. Audie Bock presents herself as a Democrat on her web site, but in fact she's most famous for having been briefly, after winning a special election, the only Green Party member of the California Legislature. Feeling that she failed to accomplish anything in Sacramentoas a party of one, she became an independent and then a Democrat. She worked for the Nader campaign in 1996, but I was unable to discover in some quick googling whether she backed Nader in 2000.
Arianna Huffington is considering a run, as I noted earlier. And, if she does run, one of her opponents is likely to be her ex-husband, Michael. Michael Huffington made a considerable fortune running a family oil business, blew about one third of it in 1994, running what was then the most expensive senatorial campaign in history but losing to Dianne Feinstein, then divorced Arianna when he discovered, at the age of 50, that he was gay.
Still, the ballot seems to be missing something. How about a Nazi? Michael Savage says that he is thinking about a run, since getting fired from MSNBC didn't get him enough publicity. With the strange rules of the California recall, who knows? Maybe this fall will be springtime for Hitler. Savage's stated platform includes mandatory hospitalization of the mentally ill, so his candidacy could have a silver lining: if he actually gets a strong bill passed, he may be the first governor in history to be taken away from a signing ceremony in a straitjacket.
And of course there's the only definite candidate, Congressman Darrell Issa, the man who parlayed his youthful experience stealing cars into a multi-million dollar fortune making obnoxious car alarm systems. I'm betting against him - it's tough to win over the voters when you've woken all of them up at 3 a.m.
If Arnold does run in this field, I recommend the slogan: "Sure I'm an Austrian weightlifter whose father was a Nazi and my main qualifications are being in movies, helping to create the steroid craze, and sleeping with about 5000 women, but have you seen the rest of these guys?" Friday, July 25, 2003
Yellowcake Update Josh Marshall has the exact quote from Condi Rice that I was looking for earlier. Tim Noah has another conflict between Rice's previous accounts and Hadley's recent story, which he uses to give Condi his "Whopper of the Week" title. In the midst of researching my last post about Plame, I discovered that conservatives have yet another complaint againt the Times: that their editorial writers are inadequately trained in the topics they write about. I'm all for the NYT responding to complaints from such obviously impartial observers as Messrs Hobbs and Luskin, so I herewith offer a modest proposal to restore the Times' credibility: they should pick an important subject - economics, say. Hire an op-ed writer who's an undisputed expert in the topic. Somebody whose credentials are just over the top - say, a degreee from an Ivy League school such as Yale, and a PhD. from somewhere equally impressive, like MIT. Add in experience teaching at both of those schools, and maybe Stanford and another Ivy League college to boot. Plus governmental experience, something like the President's Council of Economic Advisers. And just to top it off, somebody who has won prestigious awards for his work from his fellow economists, such as the AEA's John Bates Clark Medal, the Nikkei Prize, and the Adam Smith Award from the National Association of Business Economists. I'm sure if the Times could find a columnist like that, scrupulously fair conservatives such as Luskin and Hobbs would stop complaining right away. Recall News The recall election of Gray Davis has now been formally certified and scheduled for October 7. The latest Republican to show up as a possible candidate is Jack Kemp, who formally served in the House as a New Yorker. This strikes me as one of the less plausible story lines, given his lack of roots in this state, unless you count the house he used to make available for Reagan staff parties. At this point I think Schwarzenegger is unlikely to run. He clearly wants to, but his wife is against it. If Schwarzenegger doesn't step in, former LA mayor Richard Riordan will, but Riordan has said he will wait for Schwarzenegger's decision. The best line on Schwarzenegger's potential candidacy comes from Bill Maher: "Finally, a candidate who can explain the Bush administration's positions on civil liberties in the original German."
Former Republican Arianna Huffington has also been making noises about running. That's an intriguing proposition - as an outsider with lots of money, a conservative background and now populist leanings, Hufffington doesn't need to worry about offending Davis and could compete for the votes of Democrats, Independents, and even some Republicans. She could be a strong candidate.
The Democrats continue to put up a united front, refusing to field a candidate. I'm still not convinced this will hold, and I see no reason to hope it will. Democrats should oppose the recall, and I will vote against it. I see it as part of a pattern with such incidents as Florida 2000 and recent events in Texas of Republicans pushing to and sometimes past the very edge of legality to grab more power than they can get within the bounds of traditional partisan competition. But Davis is unpopular for good reasons, and he has not been so good for either the party or the state that there's any reason to put all our eggs in this one shaky basket.
Incidentally, I previously said in another post on the recall that Dianne Feinstein had never lost a statewide race in California. A commenter caught me on this and correctly noted that Feinstein ran unsuccessfully for Governor in 1990, losing to Pete Wilson. Plame Wars The number of Google pages on Valerie Plame is now double what it was when I tried only a few days ago - 78 actually displayed from 39. The actual hits have increased by more, but the percentage is smaller. Due to the mysteries of Google ranking, this blog is in the highly desirable #3 position, which has given me dozens of hits today. There are a few extra accounts in mainstream media, including this very brief and uninformative reference by Howard Kurtz, the only reference to appear to date in the Post. Still not a word in the news columns of the Post, Times, or WSJ. Conservatives remain mostly quiet. This attack on Wilson is so over the top nutty that I had to check other material at the site to convince myself that it was a real right wing crackpot and not a liberal satire. Donald Luskin writes an odd post which also seeks to blame Wilson:
Who outed her, the White House or the CIA? Both. Both are understandably furious with Wilson -- the White House for the embarrassment he has caused and for what they see as his disingenuous and partisan statements in the media. But outing Ms. Plame was not to punish Wilson, but to refute him: Ms. Plame's involvement in Wilson's selection for the Niger assignment trivializes him, makes him seem less an expert and more of a hack on a nepotistic boondoggle. The administration officials who spoke to the press probably weren't even thinking about outing Ms. Plame, as such -- after all, Wilson had effectively already done that when he outed himself by going public with his CIA-sponsored work. And therein lies the reason why the CIA is furious at Wilson -- what he has done is an enormous breach or protocol and security. But Wilson revealed very little when he went public on his trip to Naimey. After all, he has been an ambassador and a senior State Department bureaucrat. For those jobs he had to be publicly nominated and approved by the Senate. Wilson's connections to the US government were easily discoverable for anybody who wanted to know them, and surely all intelligence agencies already had a dossier of some sort on him. Based on publicly available records, as I've said before, his experience in both Iraq and West Africa made him a natural selection for the assignment.
Luskin's posts make a real effort to be honest, but you can see the conservative blinders holding off reality. In an earlier item, which he has now been honest enough to substantially back away from, Luskin goes after Paul Krugman:
I smell another New York Times retraction coming up. And a big one. Paul Krugman has made a statement in his Times column today which -- if it had been directed against a private individual rather than public officials -- would almost certainly trigger a libel suit. It's an extraordinarily serious allegation, tantamount to accusing Bush administration officials of treason. There can't be a libel suit since the charge was not made against a specific person. More to the point, there hasn't even been a denial, although the White House press corps has repeatedly invited McClellan to issue one. Luskin also makes the unintentionally amusing observation: "I can't imagine how a scandal-crazed press could not be spreading this story all over the front page every day -- it's certainly been a topic at White House press briefings." You can almost hear Luskin's thoughts: "How is this possible? The media jumped all over scandals much less significant to get Clinton. Why it's almost as if the press doesn't really have a liberal bias. And I know that isn't possible. Can't allow mere evidence to shake that doctrine. It has to just be a mysterious, inexplicable event, like the records that showed Bush completing his National Guard duty for not existing for some unknown reason."
Bloggers Minuteman from the right and Mark Kleiman from the left have both written extensively and well about this topic and are must reads for anybody following it closely.
The topic was raised again at the White House press briefing, with very similar non-answers from McClellan. The White House flatly refuses to deny that its senior officials have violated national security and committed a felony. The media continues to regard this as not a story.
McClellan says that the White House doesn't know anything, which is natural enough because, as he admits, they've made no effort to learn anything. He says there are no grounds for an investigation because, as long as any investigation is carefully avoided, he has no evidence that anybody in the White House is guilty. As for the fact that the White House does have something to investigate, since a crime of revealing the identity of an undercover agent has been committed, some of the small number of people who knew the information and could have potentially been the guilty party are close to the President, and a prominent conservative journalist has explicitly said that the deed was done by two senior administration officials, McClellan has nothing to say.
It reminds me of an explanation I once saw from a tabloid editor about a story he had printed - in this case I believe it was that NASA had located WW II bombers on the moon. He explained that it was company policy not to investigate those stories - the ones that they knew were obviously fake - too closely. If they investigated, after all, they'd find out it was false. But as long as they didn't investigate, they didn't actually know it was false. And, as long as it might hypothetically be true, the story was OK to print.
Why does the White House go to considerable lengths to act guilty? Perhaps they're just praying this will go away, and figure that announcing an official investigation would just draw attention to a story that the press is generally ignoring. But as Bush is learning in Iraq, optimism is a poor substitute for a plan.
A formal inquiry in Congress now appears likely, although the dangers to Bush from this look small. As an intelligence matter, the inquiry is likely to be held in private, and both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are headed by loyalists who won't rock the boat in an election year. Wednesday, July 23, 2003
I Don't Know Nuttin' The Valerie Plame controversy reached the daily White House briefing yesterday, with Press Secretary McClellan being asked a series of questions. One obvious fact jumps out of the exchange: McClellan clearly is unwilling to make a flat denial that senior administration officials outed Plame. While it is true that McClellan sometimes seems unwilling to make a direct statement about what the date is, this non-denial denial still strikes me as significant. The relevant exchange follows: Q The Robert Novak column last week identified the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson as a CIA operative who was working on WMD issues. Novak said that identification is based on information given to him by two administration sources. That column has now given rise to accusations that the administration deliberatively blew the cover of an undercover CIA operative, and in so doing, violated a federal law that prohibits revealing the identity of undercover CIA operatives. Can you respond to that? Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum have been discussing the possibility of Joe Biden joining the Democratic race. Ezra (who is a Dean man) likes the idea, because he thinks it will strengthen Dean. He's probably right about that, but there are several flaws in his argument:
I have no real objection to Biden, and I always thought the plaigiarism bit from 1988 was a bum rap - most of what politicians say was written by someone else. If Biden somehow makes a fool out of me and wins the nomination, I'll have zero problems in supporting him. But I see little or nothing new that he brings to the race. The only real point in his favor against some of the existing candidates is that he's been in Washington longer. That's a legitimate argument - the idea in American politics that a President should have as little direct exposure to the Federal government as possible has always struck me as fairly strange. But election returns clearly show that a lot of voters think that way. While experience is a valid qualification, it isn't a big selling point in a campaign. If Biden does try, my guess is that Kerry knocks him out quickly, so Dean will still have to run against a candidate who has some money and a national organization.
One other thing: Biden has been around for a while, but what has he done? I follow politics far more closely than most, but really couldn't say off hand how liberal or moderate he is. I have a hard time thinking of any cause or issue that he's strongly linked to.
For an opposing viewpoint, look here. And a real sign of the times - the Biden campaign doesn't yet have an organization or a declared candidate, but it does have its own unofficial blog. Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Condi Rice's original statements about the yellowcake question are by now looking rather absurd. Rice stated that knowledge that the reports of Iraq seeking to buy uranium in Africa had been questioned by intelligence experts had remained buried in the bureaucracy and not reached anybody at the senior level. (Does anybody have the exact quote? I remember hearing it on one of the Sunday morning gabbles, but couldn't find a transcript.) But a briefing by an unnamed official at the White House Friday said that both Rice and Bush had been given an NIE detailing the skepticism of some experts about the claim - but hadn't bothered to read it carefully. Really, I know that the NSC Chair has a lot of stuff crossing her desk and can't read every word, and the President even moreso - but doesn't it seem that reports on countries they're preparing to start a war with ought to be marked for special attention and actually read? Today Rice's top aide, Stephen Hadley, admitted that he also had been warned - several times. But it seems he forgot. And only a week after the SOTU, Colin Powell, who nobody claims was acting off new information, knew enough about the questionable background of the uranium story to ignore it entirely when he spoke to the UN. In fact, the State Department, as Powell surely knew, had gone further in the NIE and advanced a challenge to the whole idea of an active Iraqi nuclear program that we now know was almost certainly correct: "Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, [the State Department's intelligence office] is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors or to project a timeline for completion of activities it does not now see happening."
That's four senior officials who should have known or seemed to know - most of the top security figures. And probably more - it seems likely that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and probably others would have been on the distribution list for the NIE.
Spy Games New reports seem to validate charges that White House officials intentionally blew the identity of a CIA covert operative, Valerie Plame, in order to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson. Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday yesterday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity - at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak. Although a CIA agent and the wife of a thoughtcriminal who has openly criticized Our Leader, Plame does not appear to be either gay or Canadian.
If true, this is vastly more serious than the original misstatement that the White House is trying to protect. It is at least as serious as the 'smoking gun' tape that finally forced the resignation of Nixon. And, so far, it is drawing little attention from the SCLM.
A look at Google shows that it is mostly blogs, actually mostly liberal blogs, that are following the story. Google gets 172 hits for Valerie Plame, of which it shows 43. Some of these are mainstream media, some are mentions in bios of Wilson. Most are references in generally liberal blogs. Oddly enough, the only right-leaning blogs showing on the search were seeming to hint at some sort of a vast left-wing conspiracy to discredit Bush, although they never really explained just what the conspiracy was. If any conservative bloggers so far have actually thought that exposing a CIA agent and weakening our defense against WMD might be an excessive tactic to score political points, Google hasn't yet heard about it.
Plame is described as working for a "private research group" which never seems to be identified. Such groups, if they employ a CIA covert asset, are often CIA fronts. Did outing Plame compromise more than one CIA operative?
Update: I missed earlier this piece, linked by Instapundit. It also criticizes the reporting about Plame but, more than the posts I linked earlier, does raise some meaningful issues. MinuteMan's main point, which is correct and worth noting, is that neither of the two pieces which launched this controversy, by Time and Robert Novak, explicitly say that reporters were told by administration officials that Plame was a CIA operative. But Novak does say, "Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report." Since Wilson stated in his NYT piece that he was asked to go by the CIA, that isn't quite pointing the finger, but comes pretty close. It at least is a clear statement from Novak that senior administration officials made statements which clearly implied that Plame had tight Agency connections. Time attributed the ID of Plame to "government" rather than "administration" officials, a distinction which MinuteMan thinks is clearly significant. He may well be right, but whether it is a difference in substance or merely wording seems ambiguous to me. Time's anonymous government officials do appear to have an anti-Wilson, pro-Bush agenda.
In all of this, nobody seems to have produced support for the allegation that Plame was behind the choice of Wilson to make the trip. In fact Wilson, who had served in both Niger and Iraq, was a rather obvious selection. Nor has anyone explained why it would be a problem, even if true. Wilson received no payment for his efforts. His expenses were reimbursed, but a free trip to Naimey is not exactly a plum equivalent to Paris or Hong Kong. A lot of people had quite a lot of fun mocking Bill Clinton's "Clintonian" evasions, but at least his cleverly-parsed statements were actually true. In his most notorious line, Clinton said: Q Mr. President, I want to, before I go into a new subject area, briefly go over something you were talking about with Mr. Bittman. Clinton was not discussing a statement made by himself, but his attorney's inaccurate description of an affadavit by Monica Lewinsky. And since the statement is plainly in the present tense, and made long after the physical relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky had ended, it is technically accurate.
By contrast, Bush's defense of technical accuracy relies on pretending that "learned" and "said" are synonyms. And even that makes sense compared to this exchange from the very first press briefing given by Scott McClellan, a man who, in the words of a prominent figure in the SCLM "May not give you all the information, but he'll never lead you astray."
Q Two quick questions, one on Iraq. When the President said of Saddam Hussein, we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in and he wouldn't let them in, why didn't he say that, when the inspectors went into Iraq? When Bush says Saddam wouldn't let inspectors in, he meant he obstructed the inspectors he did let in. What could be clearer? Thursday, July 17, 2003
The Empire Strikes Back The leaks are now coming fast and furious, and for the next several days it figures to be just about impossible to follow the yellowcake story. But my feeling is that Bush has made a huge mistake, and I don't just mean that sentence in the SOTU. This post from Billmon may well turn out ot be prophetic. Really, George Bush's son should have known better. That's Our Story, and We're Sticking With It Remember, guys, we're just doing it for our health. (Link from Atrios.) Changing Standards As the pResident continues his attempts to shift blame for his own goofs to anybody in the vicinity, it might be worthwhile to look at the rules of one of his predecessors, the last Republican to bring real integrity and distinction to the Oval Office. "To tie [subordinates] to the leader with unbreakable bonds one rule must always be observed - take full responsibility, promptly, for everything that remotely resembles failure. Give extravagant and public praise to all subordinates for every success." The State Department then issued a [false] statement that the flight [in which Francis Powers was shot down and taken prisoner] had not been authorized by the President. [DCI] Allen Dulles offered to take the blame and be fired. Eisenhower was angry at Dulles for insiting on another flight so close to the summit, but when [his son] said, "You ought to fire him," Eisenhower's temper erupted. Wednesday, July 16, 2003
The Party of Responsibility Rumsfeld MR. RUSSERT: But the very next day, Mr. Secretary, this is what you said, talking to the press on January 29th: ”[Saddam’s] regime has the design for a nuclear weapon ... and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Let me see if I have this straight: the President can't be held responsible for the content of his speeches because the speeches are written and cleared by his subordinates. And the subordinates can't be held responsible because they are merely repeating the President's position. Nobody can be held to account unless they are Bill Clinton - or a Clinton appointee like George Tenet. Lying is so habitual for the Bush boys that they can't even hold themselves to one lie per story. In projecting a deficit of $455 B for the current fiscal year (the projection a few months ago was only $305 B, another lie), the White House is lying since the numbers don't include the cost of the war or the ongoing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The actual numbers for this year and the next will likely be over $500 B each. At the same time, OMB director Joshua Bolten said: White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten labeled the new deficit figures "a legitimate subject of concern," but he called the red ink "manageable." He offered no new proposals to bring the budget back into balance. "Restoring a balanced budget is an important priority for this administration," he said, "but a balanced budget is not a higher priority than winning the global war on terror, protecting the American homeland, or restoring economic growth and job creation." In other words, the White House has put out a budget number that doesn't include the cost of the war - and then blamed the war expenses that they aren't counting for the size of the deficit.
During Bush's first months in office, the White House projected a $334 billion surplus for 2003. Of the $789 billion swing to a $455 billion deficit, Bolten attributed 53 percent to the economic downturn, 24 percent to war, homeland security and other new programs, and 23 percent to the three successive tax cuts enacted since 2001. 53% of 789 is 418. So Bolten is now claiming that from the weak economy alone, we would now be running a deficit of $74 B. But when the OMB was trying to sell the original 2001 tax package, they stressed that a weak economy was no threat to the surplus. In fact, Bush's earlier OMB director, Danials, was speculating that his claim that the government could pass the 2001 tax package and still have $1 trillion or more surplus, after excluding the SSI surplus, might well be overly pessimistic:
Q How concerned are you -- one other thing Democrats continually mention is that this was built on a house of cards, because the surplus won't materialize because the economy is going to tank. How concerned are you that the economy is going to tank and that will affect your surpluses? MR. DANIELS: Well, we're not concerned about the economy tanking. We think that the economy is struggling along at the moment with unacceptably low growth, but at least it's still growing. The heart of your question really is how secure are these long-term forecasts. And the answer to that is, that they are necessarily uncertain. They could just as easily be wrong on the low side as the high side. I refer you to CBO for whom $5.6 trillion is the midpoint estimate. They have estimates as high as $8 trillion. And what I can tell you about the economy is that even a substantial recession in this year, which does not seem to be in prospect, would hardly move the needle over 10 years. In order to really change the 10-year projection, you would have to have a sustained, slow-growth period on the order of 1 or 2 percent lower growth than the 3.2 percent that we forecast.
Q Mitch, if, in fact, your estimates of surpluses are below the mark and there is more money on a yearly basis, can you describe for us the priorities of the administration as to what's to be done with that extra money? Is it to be devoted entirely to tax cuts? Is there a formulation -- one-third, one-third, one-third more -- whatever? What would happen, based on your conversations with those involved, in charting the future with that extra money? MR. DANIELS: I think it's premature to say. It's a very valid question because, again, the chances are at least as good that revenues and surpluses will be higher than expected, not lower. They've been higher for five straight years. And that pattern could continue. So it's a question that could arise. Here is what Bush said at the same time:
Tax relief is central to my plan to encourage economic growth. And we can proceed with tax relief without fear of budget deficits, even if the economy softens. Projections for the surplus in my budget are cautious and conservative. They already assume an economic slowdown in the year 2001. Even if the slowdown were to turn into a recession similar to that of 1990 and '91, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the 10-year surplus would shrink by only 2 percent, from a little more than $5.6 trillion to a little less than $5.5 trillion. Two percent, one hundred twenty percent - hey, no major difference. Just some of that fuzzy math.
Update: Those inaccurate economic predictions are obviously the fault of George Tenet, who failed to warn Bush that his programs would actually cause massive deficits, as Oliver Willis explains.
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
Sorry, Jonah On June 9, Jonah Goldberg in the Corner wrote: Hillary's book will be dropping on the best-seller list within 2 weeks and be off entirely in less than a month, if not sooner. Once the media boomlet is over, no one will feel the need to read the thing and there will be no "it's a great read" word-of-mouth. It is now one month since Living History was published, and it today stands at #1 on the NYT best-seller list, ahead of the more recently published Treason. On Amazon, Hillary stands currently at #12. Coulter is currently ahead of her (#7), but my own prediction: she (Coulter) will be lower than 12, probably out of the top 20, by a month after publication. Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Knowing What We Know The White House has now now admitted that the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Niger was bogus: "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech," a senior Bush administration official said last night in a statement authorized by the White House. The administration's statement capped months of turmoil over the uranium episode during which senior officials have been forced to defend the president's remarks in the face of growing reports that they were based on faulty intelligence. But what we now know is what the White House has known for a long time now. Here's Ari Fleischer on the NYT article that made public details on the inquiry into the forged Niger documents previously known only to government officials:
FLEISCHER: Well, there is zero, nada, nothing new here. Ambassador Wilson, other than the fact that now people know his name, has said all this before. Monday, July 07, 2003
Some Good News MSNBC has fired neo-Nazi talker Michael Savage after he told a gay caller to "get AIDS and die". Although the slur was the official reason, it was so normal for Savage that I suspect that the real reason was his anemic ratings, along with the success of activists in scaring away advertisers. MSNBC just seized on the latest psychotic ramble as an excuse to get rid of him without drawing further attention to its terrible ratings. With his radio show no loger heard on his home station and apparently getting weak ratings in other markets, Savage's 15 minutes seem to be coming to an end. Update: Roger Ailes (permalinks bad) expresses similar views and gets in a good shot: "MSNBC wasn't bothered by Savage's anti-gay views; it only acted when Savage said he hoped for the death of one of the channel's three viewers." Saturday, July 05, 2003
Some good 4th of July posts from On the Fritz (note the impressive display of cluelessness in the comments), IMAO (who also tells you everything you need to know about hurricanes), and Charles Dodgson. |
