Obama v. Clinton

There was a tussle this past week between Barack and Hillary that began during the YouTube debate: Barack said he would extend diplomatic conversation to horrible dictators, and Hill said he was naive for saying so. Or for saying so without caveats of the sort she would insert, or something blah blah blah.

Who cares? (except for the fact that Barack's right - talking to people is not in its own right some kind of reward. That's Thing #432 that has been very very dumb about the Bush Administration.)

Instead, what I wanted to discuss under the header "Obama v. Clinton" is this interesting fact. Their primary fight is the 2008 presidential race.

Because none of the Republicans is going to win. Period. Boom. There you go.

Are you amazed? Wooough.

Observe:

• Giuliani is getting whacked by the NYFD, and has skeletons in his closet like that he ended his thirty-fourth marriage in a press conference (okay, that skeleton is in his foyer). His employees and campaign operatives keep getting busted for cocaine, involvement in prostitution rings, and bedding Judith Regan (of O.J. Simpson's If I Did It fame) in a penthouse overlooking the WTC site. Much, much worse than any of that: Rudy's pro-choice. Worse than that: his 9-11 soft-shoe is gettin' old. He ignored the problem with the firemen's radios for years, and he insisted on putting his command center in WTC7 rather than Brooklyn. Watch the firemen's video.
  
• I don't know how much the Mormonism thing hurts the Mittster with the evangelical lunatics, but it doesn't help. Could Romney win? I dunno. The phrases "Boston brahmin" and "Massachusetts liberal" come to mind. Oh, and "flip-flopper". It would be a truly amusing irony if this guy were the '08 Republican nominee. Is it me, or do you think he looks a little French?
  
• John McCain is so dead in the water that there's no need enumerating the sixteen reasons why that's so. But his breathtakingly Bushlike (read: ignominious) position on Iraq actually matters much less in terms of the Republican base, than his lack of corn-pone nativism (ie, his support of "comprehensive" immigration reform). And - wistfully reminiscent of Giuliani - he's got campaign officials out there doing stuff like getting busted for attempting to pay money to administer fellatio. If only I were making that up....
  
• Fred Thompson is - and I hate to break this to the world, but here goes - a non-starter. He hasn't had to do a day's real campaigning, so all the dissatisfied Republicans of the world have been free to pretend he's whoever they wish he were. (Remember a couple months ago, when Barack Obama was John F. Kennedy warmed over? Barack has held his own since then, but there's no doubt that he's lost some glow by having to actually go out and talk to people). Recent stories also point up Thompson's drooping financials and the fact that, sans staff, his quasi-campaign is being badly managed by his Republican-operative-cum-trophy-wife Jeri (not to be confused with the Jeri-named trophy wife of that other Republican crash-and-burn from Illinois). Add to that the fact that his experience is limited to one senatorial term, some time spent carrying water for Nixon during Watergate, and a decade or two of lobbying (including for a pro-choice concern, Thompson's non-denial denial of it notwithstanding).
  
• Who else is running, again? Ron Paul?

[By the way, an aside about Fred Thompson in general: can we at long, long last put this foolishness to rest wherein everybody in the country gets to enjoy the freedom to hold and express political opinions, except Hollywood actors? This complaint is routinely trotted out on the assumption that outspoken "Hollywood actors" are liberal (which somehow validates the complaint?) - but yet the most activistic (ie, office-seeking) of them are always Republicans. Ronald Reagan, Sonny Bono, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gopher, Cooter, ad nauseam, ad nauseam. I'm wracking my brain right now to think of a Democrat in this vein, and all I can come up with is Al Franken. Who hasn't even won his primary yet. Okay - I guess Michael Moore got himself onto the Flint School Board when he was 18. But as they said in junior high, "big whoop." But back to my original point....]

So the Republicans will lose the 2008 presidential race (I can't wait to check back on 11/5/08 and see how well the prediction holds). A well-publicized poll of week before last tells us that Republican primary voters now favor - ahead of all the candidates currently running, plus Thompson - nobody. Ergo my claim: the Democratic primary, anointing as it will either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, is the 2008 presidential election.

(Hint: it's going to be Hillary. [... with Obama as VP?])

Oh, there are always reasons an upset could occur. Suppose there were a massive terrorist attack: that's a wild card. Would it help Republicans, as the folks who have claimed for decades to be the ones who will keep us safe? Or would it finally prove that this claim has been utter nonsense all along?

And what if - per his appearance on today's "Fox News Sunday" - NEWT GINGRICH jumps into the race? Golly, one can only imagine Hillary Clinton holed up beneath a down comforter, quaking in fear.

Dear me. Newt Gingrich is supposed to save the Republicans from their primary field. I rest my case.

Pets in the News

I'm late posting this one because I left it in the fridge. So pretend this is last week:

Some football guy was caught allegedly running dogfights, so as I'm sure you're aware there was a lot of coverage this past week about that. There was also a story on NPR Saturday I think you would be saddened but compelled by - they follow around an Animal Control officer in Texas as part of a discussion of the nationwide dog and cat overpopulation problem. At present they say 4 to 6 million animals are euthanized annually in the US; however, in some areas, mandatory sterilization laws have been able to halve those rates in just the past couple of years. Also, they say that right now 17% of owned dogs were originally adopted from shelters. If this number could be boosted to something more like 25 or 30%, the dog problem would be solved, cold. So maybe a little education on that point - on not going to the pet shop for an animal when you're looking for one - could make quite a difference.

Privilege and Prerogative

I took this picture of 666 Folsom Street, San Francisco, in 1997, when I worked there.

Later on, the building became notorious for housing, in an entire secure floor cheerfully furnished by your friends at AT&T, a National Security Administration computer network which to this second is robo-analyzing Americans' phone and internet traffic. I don't know which floor we're talking about, but I prefer to assume it's the ninth. Since that's where I worked.

My great regret: that I wasn't able to squeeze the huge sign reading 666 into the photo frame.

Post-Scriptum: A flag flown upside-down is the international signal for distress.


Hey Lauryl,

So Bush's Administration did two pretty amazing things this week. First the better-known one: on Friday afternoon he issued a proclamation stating his Justice Department will not pursue contempt-of-congress charges filed against anybody in his administration he chooses to cover with an executive privilege claim.

To explain what that means. As you know, Harriet Miers (Bush's old lawyer) and Joshua Bolten (his current chief of staff) were subpoenaed to testify before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to explain the White House's role in dismissing 7 US Attorneys for what clearly seemed to be political reasons. (ie, they wouldn't prosecute prominent Democrats on dubious bases in the month or two before the November elections when Repubs like Pete Domenici told them to. So they got fired.)

Neither Miers nor Bolten showed up for their testimony. Because Bush told 'em not to.

Now, Congress can actually go one of two ways in holding these two in contempt. They can go the vanilla route, which means filing charges with the US Attorney in DC (you will note that by definition this will be somebody not fired for Bush-Admin. disloyalty. Ironic, yes?). And this is where Bush weighed in on Friday - he said, go ahead and file your contempt charges with my boy in DC if you want; I'm telling him to blow you off just like I told Miers and Bolten to blow you off.

So in addition to being a shameless breach of the constitutional separation of powers, this also implies a pretty doctrinaire, "unitary-executive" attitude toward the Justice Department, which has traditionally been regarded as maintaining some independence from the office of the President. Rather than being regarded as, you know, a gang of paid lackeys.

But be that as it may, it leaves us with Congress' second recourse, which is to make use of a constitutional provision called inherent contempt. This means they don't need to dither around with the executive branch (Justice Department); they can just send out their sergeant at arms to grab the contemptibles and detain them in Capitol Hill.

This would be quite dramatic. Apparently it hasn't been done since the Postmaster General was so-detained in the '30s.

But I have my doubts that Conyers and Leahy will follow through.

***

Allright, here's the less-known (and potentially more disturbing) thing. Tuesday Bush issued an executive order saying that any "US persons" who "undermin(e) efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq" can have all their assets seized.

What the hell does that mean? Who the hell knows? It could mean just about anything. I posted a picture of a roll of George W. Bush toilet paper last week - does that count? I guess it could, if you wanted it to. Undermining is in the eye of the seizer.

Now pair this with Bush's earlier executive order of May (NSPD 51) - in which he claims broad powers over all aspects and assets of the Federal government in the case of a disaster or emergency - and your head starts to spin. Because these executive orders could be followed out in a way altogether salutary to the American public and exemplificative of a measured response to exigency in a time of war. Or they could be used to annihilate the conventions of American democracy in favor of perpetual despotism.

You know. It's one of those things that could go either way.

Russ Feingold is about to introduce a censure resolution in the Senate (he already tried this once, and it went nowhere). And that's great, but as I was saying week before last, what we unequivocally need is an impeachment here. These sorts of abuses of power cannot be allowed to sediment into precedent. Because if they do, for God's sake - whatever will become of us when another Clinton is in the White House?

I refer to Chelsea, of course. She's a real constitutional hellion.

July 9 - 15, 2007

Hi Lauryl,

Here are some things from the past week you may find entertaining:

Everyone had only glowingly positive things to say about the former First Ladybird, who passed on last Wednesday. I have nothing to add here, except that I wanted to take this opportunity to say, "the former first Ladybird".

***

David Vitter is one of those pro-family blah-blah-blah'ers, who took over the VA Senate seat resigned by another pro-family blah-blah-blah'er, Bob Livingston, back in '98 during the Lewinsky non-issue when Larry Flynt outed his (Livingston's) extramarital affairs. Well, Vitter came public with his own extra-marital affairs last week when Larry Flynt threatened to out them.

But Vitter vehemently denies visiting the prostitutes in New Orleans. It was strictly the D.C. Madam stuff, yessirrie.

Anyway, I don't especially care about his hypocrisy. What I think is funny found interesting is what his wife said to the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2000. She was asked about the stand-by-your-man decisions Hillary had made over the years in her marriage with Bill. And she said:

I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he [Husband Dave] does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me.

This week she announced that she has forgiven him of all his indiscretions.

***

You can now buy square watermelons.

***

I'll try to be quick about this one, since it's sure to have its sequels in the weeks to come. Sara Taylor is a flunky from Karl Rove's office who'd worked there from right out of college (2004ish) until she resigned earlier this year to pursue other opportunities. John Conyers and Patrick Leahy, chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, wanted to know what she knew about the firings of the US Attorneys, and so dragged her in for some questions Wednesday. On the advice of the President, she refused/declined to answer pretty much everything she was asked, beyond name, rank, and serial number. (Although after refusing to answer the same question early on, she did say late in her testimony that she'd not discussed the attorney firings with Bush.) It was awkward, and it didn't look good for the administration.

So when the time came the next day for Harriet Miers to drop by and answer some questions about the same stuff, Bush's solution was to tell her just not to show up at all. His claim here is that (1) executive privilege allows him not to cooperate with Conyers and Leahy, and (2) he's being cooperative. Because as usual, the administration is offering up this nonsense deal about allowing interviews in closed session without transcripts or even note-taking allowed. Which is why the subpoenas were issued in the first place that led to this (lack of) testimony.

Well, great: so now Leahy and Conyers can just place their two interviewees in contempt of congress (which apparently allows them to physically detain Misses Taylor and Miers) and let the courts sort it out, right? But it's not clear whether that's smart. Six years of Bushdom have sufficiently stacked the Federal courts with moon-eyed conservatives that it's quite possible any ruling would be in his favor. Which would help establish precedent for a very broad interpretation of executive privilege and of presidential power generally.

So it's dicey. We'll see where it goes.

***

The no-progress report offered about Iraq Wednesday was roundly debunked by Fred Kaplan at Slate. A good article to look at. Summary: Bush reports genuine progress in Iraq in only 8 of 18 pre-defined areas. You will surely be shocked to learn that he's taken liberties with both facts and logic to help himself to even that middling level of optimism.

***

In Senate debate on Defense spending this last week, Jim Webb (D-VA) proposed an amendment to the appropriations bill which would give troops as much time stateside between deployments as they're required to spend in warzones abroad.

Before joining in a successful Republican effort to filibuster that one, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said about Webb's amendment, "It would be a dangerous precedent to allow troop rotations to be regulated by politicians looking toward the next election."

Well ain't that funny. Isn't that exactly what Webb's amendment was meant to prevent?

P.S. Webb and Graham were both invited onto Meet the Press Sunday, which led to an entertaining, if not illuminating, smackdown.

66% Disapproval Rating

Tied with Nixon at his lowest.

July 2 - 8, 2007

Something I'd wanted to mention last week is "The Angler", the Washington Post's four-part series on Dick Cheney.

Upshot: he is very secretive, and he runs the government.

***

Civil rights, schmivel rights. Late Friday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a challenge the ACLU had mounted to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. The reason the court gave wasn't that they consider the wiretapping program legal, but rather that, since the program is secret, nobody can prove for sure that he or she has been surveilled under it. In other words, the administration can break the law on a massive and ongoing basis - and as long as they don't tell us whose rights are being violated, we can't challenge or stop 'em.

But to the broader point here. I've long thought it's at least possible the administration is right about this program. That is, it's possible that when it comes to the threat of something like nuclear terrorism, the right thing for our society to do may be to seek out plots using broad statistical analysis, say, rather than to cleave unwaveringly to our original legal model: ie, prosecuting crimes with evidence obtained by probable-cause warrant. But once it's put that way, you can see how profound a thing this means - a basic change in our whole paradigm of law enforcement. An asterisk on the cherished principle that we're innocent until proven guilty. Were such a change to be adopted in a democracy, it should first be the subject of a searching public dialogue, culminating in new legislation - new constitutional amendments - defining what kinds of data about its citizens the government might now track, and what rights to privacy we retain. But what you don't, don't, don't allow, is for the executive branch to just up and start running this program on its own recognizance without so much as telling anybody about it first (Bush's fig leaf that he briefed a handful of key congresspeople about it, under conditions of sworn secrecy, notwithstanding). Where are the checks and balances in this system? Where are the guarantees that it will be used strictly to track terrorism and not, say, drug trafficking - or a President's political opponents? Because though Bush surely has America's best interests at heart, the next President may not be quite as glowingly scrupulous.

Put simply, this is as impeachable as impeachable gets. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday that it doesn't carry the merit of so much as a lawsuit.

***

In '06, Iraq was costing us about $8.7 billion a month. Thanks to the surge, that's now up to more like $12. Total expenditures to date are pushing $420 billionish, and by any measure we have clearly spent a fraction of what we ultimately will (VA services for 25,000 wounded soldiers for the next 50 years, anyone?).

To put this cost into perspective, the US GDP was about $13 trillion in 2006. What we've spent to date on Iraq comes to something like a dozen days of our total economic output. Which I guess is pretty darn reasonable, as wars go. Of course, we're not actually paying any of these bills yet, just charging them to the national credit card; and, of course, the total costs of the war should ultimately top well over a trillion bucks.

Never mind that what we're buying with all this money is international political destabilization and decades of future terrorism. Sis boom bah.

***

Distressingly, it turns out that Rumsfeld scotched a 2005 Navy Seal assault at the last minute (they were suited up and on the tarmac) which could have resulted in killing or capturing a number of top Queda leaders in Pakistan, including al-Zawahiri. I guess it's hard to criticize this sort of decision without knowing all of the operational details behind it. But Donald's big concerns at the time were apparently (a) the assault had grown into a large affair, with greater exposure of US troops, and (b) Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wouldn't have been happy about it.

Well, (a) since when did Rumsfeld start caring about the exposure of US troops?, and (b) with friends like Musharraf....

***

Republican lawmakers who've ditched Bush and are now calling for a significant change/drawdown-of-troops in Iraq, mainly in this past week:

1. Dick Lugar (Senator, IN)
2. John Warner (Senator, VA, and ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee)
3. George Voinovich (Senator, OH)
4. Pete Domenici (Senator, NM - currently under investigation for pressuring a US Attorney [David Iglesias] prior to his firing last fall)
5. John Doolittle (Congressman, CA - an Abramoff payee)

Republicans are starting to run scared from their own policy here, and it's probably too late for them to complete a U-turn by November '08. It might all have been different if Bush had paid attention to the Iraq Study Group and not responded to their fairly reasonable recommendations by ignoring them and beginning this surge.

But anyway, we face the prospect again - like last year - that Democrats may win less by their own merits and more by default. Thus setting the stage for a major Republican comeback after.

But I get ahead of myself.

***

And the biggest political story of the week was obviously Bush's pardon Monday of the Scootster. Excuse me: his commutation of the Scootster's prison sentence. Why that difference is supposed to make any difference isn't clear to me. Sure, he's left with a $250,000 fine to pay and two years' probation. Considering that Libby's defense fund has so far raised about $5 million, the quarter-mil isn't so big a deal (yes, he made sure to pay it from his personal funds within two business days, but this goes precisely to the point that it was less than an unbearable hardship). And the judge in the case has been questioning whether you can even serve out a probation when you don't first do jail time....

Tony Snow and others made a howler of a case this week that following all the bad publicity, poor Irving Lewis will now have trouble making a living (before joining Cheney's staff, he was a high-powered lawyer, and ironically represented Mark Rich at the time of Clinton's more-than-dubious pardoning of him back in January '01). But yes, conservative folk hero that the man has now become, I'm sure poor Mr. Scoots will follow in the hard footsteps of (say) Oliver North, and will have a devil of a time landing a corner office at the Heritage Foundation, or seats on corporate boards, or the odd speaking engagement now and then. If he's capable of speaking, that is. One of the interesting things about this whole affair is how over the course of more than three years now, the guy's never given the press so much as a soundbyte. At least not that I've ever heard. "I am innocent." "I will not speak with the press about an ongoing investigation." "I am accused of no underlying crime - and perjury only counts if you're a Democrat lying about fellatio." But no, not a peep. All we've got to go by is that weird prose-poem he sent Judith Miller in prison about aspens turning with the seasons, or whatever.

Oh yes, and the novel he wrote where bears rape caged young women to train them to be prostitutes.

But who am I to criticize a fellow for writing bizarre fiction?

Anyway, I'm afraid this will be the end of the book on the Plame Affair. We've come a long way from the original issue, and it's hard to recall that what happened here involved not just the blowing of the cover of a covert CIA agent, but more importantly of her entire front-company - Brewster Jennings & Associates. Sure, she and her fake company may not have been doing anything very important... you know, investigating Iran's nuclear program or something. But the full damage done is unknown, since Plame was not the only covert agent using this company as a front. (Let us recall that it was the CIA itself that demanded an investigation of this matter in the first place).

The other part of the left-leaning argument about this whole brouhaha - that the Plame exposure was part of the Administration's effort to build a fallacious public case for war with Iraq - does, I admit, have the virtue of being true. But I wonder how much it matters. My vibe has been that the country was quite ready for war with Iraq back in 2003. Towelheads are towelheads, was really about as far as the reasoning went. And with some 40% of the public this is still true - they think to this day that Saddam was behind 9-11. So anyway, I think the Bush folks did overreach in trumping up their case: the fact is that they didn't need to try half as hard as they did. And therefore, anything that went on about outing Valerie Plame in order to retaliate against her whistleblower husband Joe Wilson in order to intimidate future possible critics of the administration... that really is what they call "inside baseball". And to suggest, however indirectly, (as I get the whiff of sometimes from the left) that this thing is an important part of how we ended up in Iraq today, is silly to me. What this is about is the Bush Administration's Mayberry-Machiavellian Stalinistic management of its own human resources.

Nonetheless: blowing the cover of a front company being used to investigate the Iranian nuclear program? To leak this kind of information to the public is, as papa Bush called it, "treason". (Conservatives, please give me an example of something Clinton's administration did that was as egregious.)

And yes, Dick Armitage leaked first, to Bob Woodward (Armtage's source being summary documents about Wilson drawn up at the request of Cheney's office). This is supposed to take the edge off of the scandal since Armitage was Colin Powell's #2 guy, and everyone knows Colin Powell is a birkenstock-wearing flower child. But Armitage did essentially drop the information to Woodward unwittingly, was mortified when the thing went public, and cooperated fully with Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation. Should he still have been punished? Maybe - the details of the Fitzgerald investigation have not been released to the public (a far cry from Ken Starr). Libby, contrariwise, leaked as an act of retaliation and then lied about it.

But anyway, you can see why this story is journalistically finished: it's way too complicated for anybody to bother following. Even my eyes are starting to glaze over.

Bad week: moving.