Public Nuisance |
|
|
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
Party Animals:
Jewish Bloggers Join >>  
|
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
We constantly hear that Bush is losing support on Capitol Hill, that Republicans there are in a rebellion against him. A Novak column some time back, the source of extensive gloating in the left blogosphere, stated, "In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment." An opinion piece in yesterday's WaPo, repeating what seems to be conventional wisdom these days, said: Although congressional aides and GOP strategists said it was unfair to blame Bush alone, the collapse of the immigration bill late Thursday was a reflection of the weakened state of his presidency. Those aides said the bill's troubles were exacerbated by Bush's deteriorating relations with congressional Republicans and his inability to combat an unexpectedly fierce attack on the bill by grass-roots conservatives. "This is sort of what his life is going to be like for the rest of his term," veteran GOP strategist Ed Rollins said. "There are Republicans defecting from him now. He's not going to have any great success on anything that's controversial." And yet we still see almost no effects of this in actual voting behavior of Republicans in Congress. In yesterday's Gonzalez vote, only 7 GOP senators crossed the line. Four of them [Sununu(NH), Coleman(MN), Smith(OR), Collins(ME)] are running in 2008 in states where their party label is likely to be a liability. The other three [ Hagel(NE), Specter(PA), Snowe(ME)] are in the very small club of Republicans who regularly avoid traveling in lockstep, although that's generally just where they can be found when it really matters. Indeed, with McCain having quit and Chafee gone, they are the whole club. From the core of the party, not even one defection. And party loyalty was even more solid in the recent votes on Iraq. Novak's latest column is again about Republican anger at Bush, much of which he blames on the choice to keep Gonzales. There aren't even key graphs to quote, the whole thing rips Bush and insists that Republicans are furious. Not so furious they're willing to vote against him (except by going to his right, as on immigration), but mighty furious. Clearly a pattern is emerging of Republicans claiming 'distance' from Bush because they're now ready to criticize him publicly, although they continue to vote as loyal Bushies. The crunch point will be the votes on Iraq coming in and after September. For all the talk that there will be a revolt and Bush will have to compromise or have his vetoes overridden, I think the votes will stay for Bush to do just as he likes. Saturday, April 21, 2007
Atrios is shocked that the IRS considers forgiven debts as income. But in this case, there's actually a sensible reason for the rule. If I were to give Atrios a new Mercedes (sorry, Duncan, much as I love the blog, this is strictly a hypothetical) he would naturally have to pay a substantial tax on that valuable gift. Suppose instead, he were to agree to pay me the market price plus interest in 1 month. That's not income to him, since he's paying the market price. But if I immediately after forgive the debt, that is income - he gets a free Mercedes. The practical result is identical to a gift of the car, so the IRS believes, not unreasonably, that the tax result should also be the same. The potential for abuse by employers in forgiven debt is ignored is even broader. There would be major advantages, in such a system, for employers in paying personnel in the form of loans which could after be forgiven. No payroll tax, just for starters, and the employee wouldn't have to pay income tax. Furthermore, the company could, by paying bonuses in the form of loans which can later be forgiven, pay out large bonuses without showing any actual expense on the current books - since all the payments would become accounts receivable, an asset. Those receivables could then be carried on the books until a quarter in which it would be convenient to forgive them. Lastly, since the company could exercise the option not to forgive some debts, such as those of employees who resign or are fired, the company could use the promise of forgiveness as a sort of golden handcuffs to hold current employees. These problems probably aren't insoluble. You could create a rule which would cut a break to consumers who are renegotiating their debts without encouraging the sort of shenanigans I've described. But the task isn't as trivial as Atrios suggests, and simply not treating forgiven debt as income would be a big mistake. Thursday, March 22, 2007
One More Thing Here's a tidbit from the DoJ docs that I should have included in last night's post. A close reading of the doc dump suggests evidence that there has been interference in prosecutions from DoJ. Section 2-3 includes (pp 4-5) a proposed opening statement for William Moschella, Principal Associate Deputy AG, perhaps in preparation for his congressional testimony of March 06. The first draft (author uncertain but perhaps Kyle Sampson) states, "The Department has not taken any action to influence any public corruption case." The final draft of the same document contains a change requested by Moschella himself: "The department has not asked anyone to resign to influence any public corruption case." (2-4, p 22, emphasis added) So why did DoJ want the original statement to be weakened? I went out to see Barak Obama on Saturday. I can't say much about his speech - I had to leave shortly after it started. And I can say even less about Obama - I never got close enough to actually see him. Which leaves nothing to talk about but the crowd, and the crowd was extraordinary. It was the largest political gathering I've been to since the peace marches I attended as a child. My first choice for 2008 is still Clark, and my second Gore. But I no longer expect Clark to run, and Gore I've never believed was going to run. So it looks like I'll have to find a number 3. Like most in the netroots, Hillary is not a contender for my vote. I've been very hesitant to embrace Obama, mainly because I see his candidacy as a creation of the MSM. Like Edwards - Hillary too, for that matter - his experience is short of what I would like to see in a President. But my big problem with him has been his popularity with the DC media - the same guys who gave us Dubya, lied endlessly about Gore, and have a downright embarassing crush on McCain, have somehow decided that Obama is acceptable, even if he is a Democrat. And a gang of idiots who hate us, our party, our values, and the people we represent, don't strike me as the folks who I want to entrust with the choice of our next nominee. But after Saturday, I have to change my mind. To draw a crowd like that 9 months before New Hampshire is extraordinary. And Obama has been pulling crowds like it all over the country. However deep my distrust of the MSM, I can't dispute that there's something real in his support which goes far beyond them. The man himself is certainly impressive. And I'm still looking for a real progressive who can win against Hillary and win again in November. As things stand now, it looks like Obama's that man. Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Dump Run I've been through about 200 pages of the celebrated Document Dump of 2007. That's a larger subset of the total dump than it seems, due to the frequent repetitions. Some observations: The sequence should be stated more plainly: even the outstanding Josh Marshall misses some points and gets one just wrong. The plan to fire the attorneys was set out in a memo from Elston to McNulty on November 7 (not 15, as Josh incorrectly said). At that point the plan was to make the calls very soon - the same week. Note that the date was election day - at the time the plans were drawn up, it wasn't clear that the new Senate would be Democratic. And the original plans don't envision using the Patriot Act - they intended to "have president make nominations and work to secure confirmation". (doc set 2-1, pp 10 - 11) The same plan, with the dates pushed out a week, is discussed between Meirs and Sampson on 11/15. This message, which also discusses whether Bush should be briefed on the plan, looks to be the last one before an 18 day gap in which only two messages, of limited relevance, have been found in the dump. It is clear that during the gap, the plan is under discussion in the White House. In the last exchange before the gap, Sampson say "We'll stand by for a green light from you." In the first after, William Kelley says that "WH leg[al], political, and communications have signed off". (ibid, pp 14, 18) Worth noting: Kelley is the Deputy Assistant to the President and was the recipient of Sampson's infamous email complaining about "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam". Also interesting is that that original email refers specifically to 11/18/06, the date that Lam's original four year appointment expired, and right in line with the time Lam would have left if the original plan to do the firings on November 8th - 9th had been carried out. Some other points of interest here: the plan of 11/7 and 11/15 lists 6 prosecutors to be dropped. Not listed: Ryan (SF) and Cummins (AR). Ryan has been added to the list in the post-gap messages. But Cummins isn't discussed in any of these plans. The plans also specify that, along with the firing calls, calls are to go out the Republican Senators from the Attorneys' states asking for names of replacements. (In states represented by Democrats, the calls are to go to "Bush political leaders".) One Republican Senator is always left off the list, which appears in multiple places: McCain. Although there is subsequent discussion of alleged performance shortcoming of the fired USAs, that doesn't seem to be at all a factor in the actual decision. DAG McNulty says of Bogden (NV), "I'll admit have not looked at his district's performance". (ibid p. 23) In the mass of material we do have, it should be noted what we still don't. Nothing in the docs that I have read or seen discussed by others explains how the original list of targets was reached, or how Ryan and Cummins were added. (There's little doubt, although no proof, that the latter was Rove's initiative.) It isn't at all clear who gave the final go-ahead. Not coincidentally, we have no discussion from the White House, which seems to be where the decisions were made. Update: We now know more about how Ryan made the list. As usual, this is too rich to make up: the attorney who was added at the last minute apparently was a Bush loyalist who DoJ wanted to protect but had to drop because his incompetence was about to be publicized. Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Joe Klein is peeved with Arianna Huffington for challenging his claim that he opposed the war from 2003. In support of his attack, Klein links to these three columns. These columns are in fact critical of Bush and the neocons - although generally more critical of progressives. But not one of them actually criticizes the plan to go to war. The first isn't really about Iraq at all, but about Israel. In it, Klein does note the more grandiose theories of the neocons that invading Iraq would lead to a democratic, pro-Israel revolution throughout the Arab world. Klein properly describes this, more than once, as a "fantasy". But while dismissive of this particular rationale, the column nowhere discusses the broader case for war. 'Two Cheers for the Peacekeepers' is primarily about the UN. It does contain the closest thing to an actual criticism of the war in these columns, "In foreign policy, there is a wildly idealistic pro-democracy jihad. (Iraq will be the first of many dominoes to fall, it is said.)" But again, this really isn't a criticism of the plan to invade Iraq, but a criticism of the most grandiose theories of justification. 'A Screech of Hawks' is the only column of the three that's primarily about Iraq. It criticizes the "intemperate" Bush diplomacy and the administration's "righteous arrogance and dim-witted machismo". But it is the style, and not really the substance, of Bush's policies that Klein dislikes. Klein quotes 3 people in this column, all of them pro-war: Kenneth Pollack, an anonymous administration source, and Leslie Gelb, who says "[Business leaders] want a smoking gun. It doesn't make a difference when I point out that we have a smoking forest, that it's clear Saddam has these weapons and doesn't want to disarm." Of course, this is Joe Klein, so he is harsher on Democrats than on Bush, and, in keeping with the style of the time, goes out of his way to blast France. Let's begin with a provocation: ever since Vietnam, the hawks have almost always been right on major questions of national security....George H.W. Bush was right to liberate Kuwait (and wrong not to push on to Baghdad when he had the world on his side)....Bush seems to have been blindsided by the institutional entropy of the U.N.--and the chronic grandstanding of the French and Germans. ('A Screech of Hawks') In fairness, there is one paragraph in the 'Screech' column which points out the danger of the post-war occupation: "[Bush] will have to be honest about what comes next, after the inevitable military victory: the likelihood that large numbers of American troops will have to remain in Iraq for years to come. There should be no illusions about the difficulty of Mesopotamian nation building. It has been attempted on this same ground many times before, by many other superpowers, and none — none — has ever succeeded." Remember, these aren't columns I've picked to undermine Klein's claim. These are the columns Klein himself chose to document it. And they don't. He wasn't a pure down the line Bush man. He expressed some concerns before the war, and was quite negative about the most extreme flourishes of neocon dogma. But the only time he addressed the question directly before the war, he plainly said that he supported invasion. Klein ends today's post by saying, "These are the last words I'll have to say about this matter." He doesn't want to debate the matter with Huffington or with "the take-no-prisoners left". When you can't support your claim, best to just state it and move on to other topics. Note: Huffington responds here. Monday, January 08, 2007
Last Thursday, the Democrats officially took over Congress. On Friday, the headline on ABC's news coverage was, "House Dems Move to Increase Spending". The story under the headline was, in fact, about a move (re-instituting pay as you go) that will reduce spending significantly. But the official narrative is that Democrats love to spend for the hell of it, so the headline has to reflect narrative rather than, say, reality. Meanwhile, NBC's headline was, "So much for congressional lobby reform?". At first glance, one might think this reflects frustration. After all, the 110th Congress was almost a day old. If no lobbying reform had been done in all that time, presumably it wasn't going to get done at all. But in fact, lobbying reforms were passed on the first day, as the story admitted. The problem was that, after pretending to pass reforms, Pelosi then committed the deeply hypocritical act of raising money. Pelosi isn't the first Democrat guilty of this outrage. It was one of the many crimes committed by Al Gore in 2000. The MSM is overwhelmed by the stench of hypocrisy when Democrats criticize campaign funding and then, rather than unilaterally disarming, engage in activity that is completely legal in the current system. When Saint McCain raises a fortune from PACs and lobbyists, of course, the only odors present are roses and manly authenticity. So if you had 1 in the office pool for how many days it would take before the MSM started attacking the Democratic congress with lies pulled straight from the GOP smear book, you won. If you had something else, what on earth were you thinking? |
