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Congressional Sleaze In The Spotlight

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Last February, I wrote a piece entitled, “License To Steal”, concerning a certain legal loophole which allows members of Congress to trade stocks using “insider information”:

On January 26, 2009, Congressman Brian Baird introduced H.R.682, the “Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act” (STOCK Act).  The bill was intended to resolve the situation concerning one of the more sleazy “perks” of serving in Congress.  As it presently stands, the law prohibiting “insider trading” (e.g. acting on confidential corporate information when making a transaction involving that company’s publicly-traded stock) does not apply to members of Congress.  Remember how Martha Stewart went to prison?  Well, if she had been representing Connecticut in Congress, she might have been able to interpose the defense that she was inspired to sell her ImClone stock based on information she acquired in the exercise of her official duties.  In that scenario, Ms. Stewart’s sale of the ImClone stock would have been entirely legal.  That’s because the laws which apply to you and I do not apply to those in Congress.  Needless to say, within six months of its introduction, H.R.682 was referred to the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties where it died of neglect.  Since that time, there have been no further efforts to propose similar legislation.

At a time when the public is finally beginning to understand how our elected officials are benefiting from a system of “legalized graft” in the form of campaign contributions, more attention is being focused on how the “real money” is made in Congress.  A new book by Peter Schweizer – Throw Them All Out – deals with this very subject.  The book’s subtitle is reminiscent of the point I tried to make in my February posting:  “How politicians and their friends get rich off insider stock tips, land deals and cronyism that would send the rest of us to prison”.

Peter J. Boyer wrote an article for Newsweek, explaining how Peter Schweizer came about writing this book.  Schweizer is the William J. Casey research fellow at the Hoover Institution and as Boyer pointed out, Schweizer is considered by liberal critics as a “right wing hit man”.  It’s nice to see someone from the right provide us with an important treatise on crony capitalism.  The book exposes insider trading by both Democrats and Republicans – hell-bent on profiteering from the laws they enact.  Boyer’s essay provided us with some examples of the sleazy trades made by Congress-cretins, as described in Throw Them All Out.  Here are a few examples:

Indeed, Schweizer reports that, during the debate over Obama’s health-care reform package, John Boehner, then the House minority leader, was investing “tens of thousands of dollars” in health-insurance-company stocks, which made sizable gains when the proposed public option in the reform deal was killed.

*   *   *

One of the more dramatic episodes in the book recounts the trading activity of Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus, of Alabama, who, as the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, was privy to sensitive high-level meetings during the 2008 financial crisis and proceeded to make a series of profitable stock-option trades.

Bachus was known in the House as a guy who liked to play the market, and in fact he was pretty good at it; one year, he reported a capital gain in excess of $150,000 from his trading activities. More striking is that Bachus boldly carried forth his trading in the teeth of the impending financial collapse, the nightmarish dimensions of which he had learned about first-hand in confidential briefings from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke.  On Sept. 19, 2008, after attending two such briefings, Bachus bought options in an index fund (ProShares UltraShort QQQ) that effectively amounted to a bet that the market would fall.  That is indeed what happened, and, on Sept. 23, Bachus sold his “short” options, purchased for $7,846, for more than $13,000—nearly doubling his investment in four days.

Around the time Congress and the Bush administration worked out a TARP bailout, Bachus made another options buy and again nearly doubled his money.

*   *   *

After the first briefing from Bernanke and Paulson, brokers for Democratic Congressman Jim Moran, of Virginia, and his wife sold their shares in 90 companies, dodging the losses that others who stayed in the market would soon face. Republican Rep. Shelley Capito, of West Virginia, sold between $100,000 and $250,000 of Citigroup stock the day after the first meeting, recording capital gains on Citigroup transactions in that rocky period.

Peter Schweizer’s analysis of the bipartisan culture of corruption on Capitol Hill reinforces one of my favorite criticisms of American government:  Our Sham Two-Party System.  The Republi-Cratic Corporatist Party owes its allegiance to no population, no principle, no cause – other than pocketing as much money as possible.  Just as there have been some recent “pushback” efforts by outraged citizens, Schweizer is now advocating a “Throw Them All Out” campaign.  This could have a potentially significant impact on Congress, because the term of office in the House of Representatives lasts for only two years.  Consider Schweizer’s thought at the close of the Newsweek piece:

“I was troubled,” he says, “by the fact that the political elite gets to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us.  In the process of researching this book, I came to the conclusion that political party and political philosophy matter a lot less than we think.  Washington is a company town, and politics is a business. People wonder why we don’t get more change in Washington, and the reason is that the permanent political class is very comfortable.  Business is good.”

I concluded my February 28 posting with this point:

“Inside information” empowers the party in possession of that knowledge with something known as “information asymmetry”, allowing that person to take advantage of (or steal from) the less-informed person on the other side of the trade.  Because membership in Congress includes a license to steal, can we ever expect those same individuals to surrender those licenses?  Well, if they were honest  .   .   .

A successful “Throw Them All Out” campaign would obviate the necessity of attempting to convince this Congress to pass the “Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act” (STOCK Act).  If the next Congress knows that its political survival is depending on its passage of the STOCK Act, we might see it become law.


 

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Political Correctness And The Death Of Bin Laden

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It was bound to happen.  In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death, an incomprehensible number of debates have begun, concerning alleged violations of that cherished doctrine known as, “Political Correctness” or “PC” (to the amusement of Mac users).

One of the first PC controversies arose as a result of the front page of the New York Daily News on May 2, which featured bin Laden’s photo with the following headline:  “Rot In Hell!”  Here at TheCenterLane.com , the headline I wrote, just after midnight, was:  “Bin Laden Dies – Goes To Hell”.  Accordingly, I was pleased to learn that the New York Daily News has been absolved of any PC violation.  CNN’s Deputy Political Director, Paul Steinhauser, reported on the results of a poll conducted by CNN Polling Director, Keating Holland:

“This is one question on which there is little partisan division – at least six in ten Democrats, independents and Republicans all believe bin Laden is in hell,” adds Holland.

On the other hand, I was disappointed to learn that bin Laden’s code name during the Navy SEAL raid was “Geronimo”.  The choice of that code name was (apparently) the only stupid decision made in the planning of this operation.  It should have been obvious to those planning this raid that the use of Geronimo’s name would offend Native Americans.  Most of the commentary dismissing criticism of the code name “Geronimo” is laced with very transparent bigotry.  To get an objective opinion on this issue, one need only look across the pond to The Guardian, where Steven Newcomb wrote this:

In my book Pagans in the Promised Land, I use the theory of the human mind (cognitive theory) to explain the “cognitive unconscious” of the United States.  Certain ingrained traditions of thought, both conscious and unconscious, have been used for generations by US government officials. Such thinking has resulted in the development of predominantly anti-Indian US federal Indian laws and policies.  The result has been laws and policies that have proven detrimental to Indian nations and peoples.

*   *   *

In the reported stories of Osama bin Laden being killed by US military forces, Bin Laden was codenamed “Geronimo”.  According to a CBS News report, those who came up with that “inappropriate code name” apparently “thought of Bin Laden as a 21st-century equivalent” of Geronimo.  In other words, the codename was based on an extension of the metaphor “Indians are enemies” to “Geronimo was a terrorist”, thus perpetuating the US tradition of treating Indian nations and peoples as enemies.

In my humble opinion, bin Laden’s code name should have been, “Lindsay Lohan”.  To anyone intercepting communications about the raid, the discussion would have seemed like typical, shallow, American gossip about a Hollywood Snow Queen.  A likely reaction by someone overhearing the historic communiqué might have been:

Lindsay Lohan EKIA?

Allah be praised!

I thought she was just a D-cup!

A more far-reaching Political Correctness debate has focused on the handling of bin Laden’s corpse and the suggested publication of the reportedly gruesome photos of his face.  Since the days of the Bush Administration, great pains have been taken to demonstrate that America is not waging a war against Islam – we are at war with terrorists.  Since we clarified that almost ten years ago, there should be nothing wrong with warning those who attempt to wage jihad against us that we will do everything in our power to make sure that terrorists are disqualified from becoming “martyrs” with an eternal harem of 72 virgins.  Accordingly, I believe that immediately before a terrorist is executed, he should be baptized as a Christian to die as an “infidel” and suffer the damnation Allah bestows on such individuals.  If bin Laden had been restrained and baptized just before he was shot, Islamic funeral tradition would have become irrelevant.  Baptizing condemned terrorists would also serve as an effective deterrent to aspiring jihadists.  Such a practice should not be offensive to legitimate Muslims, because there are many serious, respected Islamic authorities, who have repeatedly emphasized that terrorism is abhorrent to the Islamic faith.  What better way to distance the Islamic religion from such deviates, than to disconnect them from Islam just before they are dispatched to the hereafter?

Although some PC purists have objected to the execution of bin Laden, they constitute a fringe minority among even the most orthodox devotees of Political Correctness.  Any attempt to transition bin Laden from waterbed to waterboard would have been logistically impossible, serving no valid purpose.

As for the question of whether to publish the bin Laden photos, it is important to be mindful of recent reports that the Taliban has demanded release of the photos as proof that Osama is dead.  It is generally a good idea to do the opposite of what the Taliban demands.  Accordingly, the photos should be suppressed.


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Turning Point

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As we approach Election Day, many commentators are confirming an observation used as the theme of my posting from September 6:

The steps taken by the Obama administration during its first few months have released massive, long-lasting fallout, destroying the re-election hopes of Democrats in the Senate and House.

Too many people whom the President thought he could count among his supporters have become his biggest critics.  One might expect that after eight years of outrage over the antics of the Bush administration, Maureen Dowd would be thrilled about the work done by the Obama White House.  Nevertheless, her most recent discussion of Obama’s performance was less than flattering:

In 2008, the message was him.  The promise was him.  And that’s why 2010 is a referendum on him.

With his coalition and governing majority shattering around him, President Obama will have to summon political skills — starting Wednesday — that he has not yet shown he has.

*   *   *

With the exception of Obama, most Americans seemed to agree that the “right” thing to do until the economy recovered was to focus on jobs instead of getting the Congress mired for months in making over health insurance and energy policy.  And the “right” thing to do was to come down harder on the big banks for spending on bonuses instead of lending to small businesses that don’t get bailouts.

Contrary to the President’s expectations, the voting public has not overlooked the administration’s refusal to heed the advice of Bill Black, Robert Reich, and the roster of economists that included Adam Posen and Matthew Richardson advocating the use of the so-called “Swedish solution” of putting the zombie banks through temporary receivership.  To the dismay of everyone in the world (outside of Obama’s inner circle) the new President chose to follow the advice of Larry Summers and put the welfare (as in corporate welfare) of those insolvent, too-big-to-fail banks ahead of the nation’s economic health.  When President Obama appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on October 27, Stewart began the discussion by asking Obama to explain the rationale underlying his appointment of Larry Summers (a retread from the Clinton administration) as director of the National Economic Council.  President Obama fell back on his two-year-old claim that to follow any course other than that recommended by Summers, would have resulted in the failure of at least 100 banks.  Obama’s claim that the cost of the financial crisis was less than 1% of GDP did not slip past Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism website.  Ms. Smith (who voted for Obama in 2008) didn’t pull any punches in refuting that claim:

I’m so offended by the latest Obama canard, that the financial crisis of 2007-2008 cost less than 1% of GDP, that I barely know where to begin.  Not only does this Administration lie on a routine basis, it doesn’t even bother to tell credible lies.  And this one came directly from the top, not via minions.  It’s not that this misrepresentation is earth-shaking, but that it epitomizes why the Obama Administration is well on its way to being an abject failure.

*   *   *

The reason Obama makes such baldfacedly phony statements is twofold:  first, his pattern of seeing PR as the preferred solution to all problems, and second, his resulting slavish devotion to smoke and mirrors over sound policy.

*   *   *

But Team Obama is no doubt rationalizing this chicanery:  if they can keep from recognizing losses until the recovery takes place, then the ultimate damage will be lower.  But Japan’s post bubble record shows that doesn’t work.  You simply don’t get a recovery with a diseased financial system.  You need to purge the bad assets, only then will meaningful growth resume.

Financial risk management guru, Chris Whalen, recently expressed his anguish over the administration’s unwillingness to restructure the zombie banks:

The reluctance comes partly from what truths restructuring will reveal.  As a result, these same large zombie banks and the U.S. economy will continue to shrink under the weight of bad debt, public and private.  Remember that the Dodd-Frank legislation was not so much about financial reform as protecting the housing GSEs.

Because President Barack Obama and the leaders of both political parties are unwilling to address the housing crisis and the wasting effects on the largest banks, there will be no growth and no net job creation in the U.S. for the next several years.  And because the Obama White House is content to ignore the crisis facing millions of American homeowners, who are deep underwater and will eventually default on their loans, the efforts by the Fed to reflate the U.S. economy and particularly consumer spending will be futile.

The idea that Obama sees “PR as the preferred solution to all problems” surfaced again in a great piece by Peter Baker of The New York Times, which included this observation:

Rather than entertaining the possibility that the program they have pursued is genuinely and even legitimately unpopular, the White House and its allies have concluded that their political troubles amount to mainly a message and image problem.

Baker’s article focused on the most recent gripe made by Obama at another one of his highbrow fundraisers.  Remember the blowback from the President’s recent diatribe at a fundraiser hosted by the appropriately-named Rich Richman?  Well, something similar happened again.  The setting this time was a $15,200-per-ticket affair for doctors at the home of a wealthy hospital executive in Boston.  While addressing this audience, the President explained that the reason why the voters have not embraced the Democrats during this election cycle is because the voters are having trouble thinking clearly, as they are “scared”.  Not surprisingly, this re-ignited the controversy focused on Obama’s elitism.

The Tea Party spokespeople aren’t the only ones who are accusing President Obama of elitism.  The Progressive-oriented TruthDig website, recently published an interesting essay by Chris Hedges, author of  Death of the Liberal Class.  Hedges points out that elitism is exactly the problem afflicting not only Obama, but the entire group, referred to as “the liberal class”.  Consider his argument:

The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve.  During the Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible the New Deal.  During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the system to express the discontent of African-Americans and the anti-war movement.  But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless.  It offers nothing but empty rhetoric.  It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant.  It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass.  And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule.  The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate state.

*   *   *
As long as the liberal class had even limited influence, whether through the press or the legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even respected.  But once the liberal class lost all influence it became a class of parasites.  The liberal class, like the déclassé French aristocracy, has no real function within the power elite.  And the rising right-wing populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to reality and their presence has no influence on power.

As Maureen Dowd pointed out, Wednesday is going to be a big day.  If President Obama thought he had his hands full going into this election   .  .  .  wait until the aftermath.



The C Word

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June 8, 2009

I always find it amusing when politicians adopt the catch phrases and other expressions, obviously created by their lobbyist/puppeteers.  One of my favorites is “foreign oil”, as in:  “We need to end our dependence on foreign oil”.  Do they expect people to believe that Jesus made our oil different from that “Muslim oil”, which causes air pollution?  The expression:  “foreign oil” is obviously being used to vilify Arab countries for last year’s inflated gasoline prices, caused by oil speculators and American oil companies.  (Let’s not forget the price gouging by gasoline retailers.)  Most Americans realize that we have a serious problem with our dependence on petroleum products and, more generally fossil fuels, including coal, as sources of energy.  According to a March, 2009 Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans are “worried a great deal or fair amount” by global warming.  Although this is down from last year’s 66 percent, 76 percent of Americans are “worried a great deal or fair amount” by air pollution itself, independent of the global warming consequences (according to the same poll).

Attention is increasingly focused on the concept of “clean coal” as an energy source.  In his February 24 address to the Joint Session of Congress, President Obama made it clear that he supported Congressional financing of the development of “clean coal” as a viable energy source.  The timing seemed intended to coincide with the aggressive advertising campaign against “clean coal”.  In case you’re wondering just what “clean coal” is  .  .  .  Ben Elgin wrote an article for Business Week last year, entitled:  “The Dirty Truth About Clean Coal”.  Here’s some of what he had to say:

The catch is that for now — and for years to come — “clean coal” will remain more a catchphrase than a reality.  Despite the eagerness of the coal and power industries to sanitize their image and the desire of U.S. politicians to push a healthy-sounding alternative to expensive foreign oil and natural gas, clean coal is still a misnomer.

*    *    *

Corporations and the federal government have tried for years to accomplish “carbon capture and sequestration.”  So far they haven’t had much luck.  The method is widely viewed as being decades away from commercial viability.  Even then, the cost could be prohibitive:  by a conservative estimate, several trillion dollars to switch to clean coal in the U.S. alone.

Then there are the safety questions.  One large, coal-fired plant generates the equivalent of 3 billion barrels of CO2 over a 60-year lifetime.  That would require a space the size of a major oil field to contain.  The pressure could cause leaks or earthquakes, says Curt M. White, who ran the U.S. Energy Dept.’s carbon sequestration group until 2005 and served as an adviser until earlier this year.  “Red flags should be going up everywhere when you talk about this amount of liquid being put underground.”

*    *    *

Companies seeking to build dozens of coal-fueled power plants across the country use the term “clean coal” liberally in trying to persuade regulators and voters.

Needless to say, President Obama’s advocacy on behalf of the “clean coal” lobby has outraged more than a few people.  Will Harlan wrote an article for the March 20 edition of Blue Ridge Outdoors magazine, entitled:  “The Dirty Truth Behind Obama’s ‘Clean Coal’ Stimulus”.  In addition to addressing the problems yet to be overcome with carbon capture, as well as the problems associated with mountaintop removal mining, sludge spills, dam breaches, poisoned wells, skyrocketing cancer rates, childhood asthma, premature deaths, slurry ponds, coal ash waste and mercury emissions, Harlan pointed out that:

Obama has also committed to reviving a boondoggle coal facility that even the Bush Administration decided to kill:  the FutureGen Carbon Capture and Storage Plant, which just happens to be located in Obama’s home state of Illinois.  Even though the facility costs have soared well beyond budget, and it is nowhere close to developing cost-effective technologies to safely capture and store carbon, Obama continues to support it.

Why are we letting Obama get away with greenwashing coal by perpetuating the “clean coal” myth?  The Democrats received close to $1 million in “contributions” in 2008 from the coal mining industry.  And southern Illinois is part of the country’s coal belt.

Eugene Robinson deserves a hat tip for his June 5 Washington Post column, criticizing Obama’s stance on this issue.  The strongest point made by Robinson was the cost/benefit analysis:

The Obama administration is spending $2.4 billion from the stimulus package on carbon capture and storage projects — a mere down payment.  Imagine what that money could do if it were spent on solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.  Imagine if we actually tried to solve the problem rather than bury it.

It should come as no surprise that the Greenpeace website would feature an essay, critical of “clean coal” with the following conclusion:

“Clean coal” is an attempt by the coal industry to try and make itself relevant in the age of renewables.  Existing CCTs do nothing to mitigate the environmental effects of coal mining or the devastating effects of global warming.  Coal is the dirtiest fuel there is and belongs in the past.  Much higher emission cuts can be made using currently available natural gas, wind and modern biomass that are already in widespread use.  Clean, inexpensive.  This is where investment should be directed, rather than squandering valuable resources on a dirty dinosaur.

Nevertheless, what does come as a surprise is that the very same article quoted above appears on Barack Obama’s Campaign for America website.  In case you’re wondering how to reconcile that point of view with Obama’s enthusiasm for “clean coal”, you have to read the disclaimer appearing at the end of the article on the Campaign for America site:

Content on blogs in My.BarackObama represents the opinions of community members and in no way should be interpreted as endorsed or approved by the campaign.

In other words:  “Don’t be dumb enough to believe that President Obama is really going to support anything you read here”.

In his June 4 opinion piece for The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne observed how the media are:

… largely ignoring critiques of Obama that come from elected officials on the left.

This was brought home at this week’s annual conference of the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive group that supports Obama but worries about how close his economic advisers are to Wall Street, how long our troops will have to stay in Afghanistan and how much he will be willing to compromise to secure health-care reform.

To the objective observer, it is becoming increasingly obvious that Barack Obama is as much of a hypocrite as any other politician who found his way to the White House.

Just Keep Walking

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April 23, 2009

Peggy Noonan had an esteemed career as speechwriter to former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.  She now writes a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal and she frequently appears as a panelist on many television news programs.  She has been on the blogroll of this website since its inception.

On Sunday, April 19, she appeared as a panelist on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.  During that program’s Roundtable discussion, the subject eventually turned to President Obama’s decision not to prosecute the CIA operatives involved in the torture of detainees in the “War on Terror” as well as the decision to release the so-called “torture memos”.  Those memos were prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration.  They described the permissible use of such techniques as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement in a box with insects and other sadistic acts, intended to get detainees to provide valuable information.  Roundtable panelist Sam Donaldson expressed his opinion that the operatives who administered these interrogation techniques were not “just following orders”; they believed they were following the law because they were relying on the legal opinions expressed in those memos.  However, as Donaldson explained, if the people who devised those methods and wrote the legal memos condoning their use were “just trying to find cover” and just trying to find a way to get around American law and the Constitution, they should be held accountable in a court of law.  Donaldson added that if the President wanted to pardon those people, he should do so, although it would be important for those individuals to be held accountable before a court.

Peggy Noonan then remarked:

Oh, I have reservations about all of this.  It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking:  “Oh, much good will come of that?”  Sometimes in life you wanna’ just keep walkin’.

Sam Donaldson then interrupted with the question as to whether it was right “to let people walk who may have committed a crime”.  Noonan then replied:  “Some of life has to be mysterious”.

Noonan’s remarks drew immediate outrage from Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.  As Sam Stein reported for The Huffington Post, Feingold was harshly critical of the rationalizations for avoiding prosecution of these people, as expressed by government officials as well as those in the news media.  Stein quoted the Senator’s expressed indignation:

“If you want to see just how outrageous this is, I refer you to the remarks made by Peggy Noonan this Sunday” …  “I frankly have never heard anything quite as disturbing as her remark that was something to the affect of:   ‘well sometimes you just have to move on’.”

Noonan’s opinion is emblematic of the mainstream media’s all-too-frequent response to scandalous events and it demonstrates why so many people have turned to the Internet to get the news.  If you overhear someone in a restaurant arranging a bribe with a politician:  Just keep walking.  If you discover information about illegal toxic dumping by one of your publication’s sponsors:  Just keep walking.  If Harry Markopolos approaches you and tries to explain how Bernie Madoff is running a Ponzi scheme:  Just keep walking.

Peggy Noonan’s statement wasn’t just a situation where she “misspoke”.  It was the expression of an arrogant attitude held by too many in the media who decide it is up to them to determine when the public deserves to know something and when it doesn’t.  After all:  “Some of life has to be mysterious”.

Shame on you, Peggy Noonan!  Shame on you!

A Wake-up Call From Dennis Blair

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February 19, 2009

Although President Obama has been criticized for many of his appointments, the selection of retired Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence appears to have been a wise choice.  Blair graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1968.  He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar contemporaneously with Bill Clinton.  (However, I doubt that Blair was standing next to Bill when the former President “didn’t inhale”.)  Blair retired from the Navy in 2002.

On Thursday, February 12, Blair appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and surprised his audience with his new threat assessment.  As Tom Gjelten reported for National Public Radio:

National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair’s dramatic report last week — that the economic crisis is now the United States’ top “near-term security concern” — caught some members of Congress by surprise.  But it makes sense.

The global economic downturn could easily change the world. Previously stable countries could become unstable.  The geopolitical lineup could shift sharply, some countries becoming more powerful while others get weaker.  Allies could turn into adversaries.

Pamela Hess of the Associated Press provided this account of the hearing:

Blair’s 49-page statement opened with a detailed description of the economic crisis.  It was a marked departure from threat briefings of years past, which focused first on traditional threats and battlefields like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

“The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications,” he said in a written statement for the committee.

Blair cited the inability of other nations to meet their humanitarian obligations and hostility toward the United States for causing this crisis as potential causes for unrest, as this AFP report disclosed:

“Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period,” Blair said.

“Besides increased economic nationalism, the most likely political fallout for US interests will involve allies and friends not being able to fully meet their defense and humanitarian obligations.”

*   *   *

“It already has increased questioning of US stewardship of the global economy and the international financial structure,” Blair said, with trading partners already upset over a “Buy American” provision in a US stimulus bill.

Rosalie Westenskow of UPI noted Blair’s concern that the impact of climate change, coinciding with the economic crisis, could provide a troublesome combination to facilitate government instability:

“The impacts (of climate change) will worsen existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions,” Blair told senators last week.

As temperatures rise, scientists predict natural disasters like floods and drought will also increase and government instability worldwide is likely to follow, he said.

On February 17, during an interview in Tokyo with Martha Raddatz of ABC News, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ratified Blair’s concern about the security threat posed by the global economic crisis:

“Yes, we have to look at this as part of our threat matrix,” the secretary of state said.  “I know some people have criticized him and said, ‘what does the economy have to do with terrorism.’ That’s a very short-sighted view.  I think what director Blair was saying is that we get fixated sometimes on the headlines of dangers, and that is not in any way to underestimate the continuing threat from terrorism, the instability in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan and elsewhere.”

“But this economic crisis, left unresolved, will create massive unemployment,” she said.  “It will upend governments, it will unfortunately breed instability, and I appreciated his putting that into the context of the threat matrix.”

It’s nice to know that we have an intelligence director who is not wedded to the Bush administration’s fixation on September 11 -style attacks.  As this February 16 editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out:

The new threat isn’t as easy to identify – or vilify – as al Queda, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less serious.

*    *    *

No one knows what form the next wave of instability will take. The United States must start making preparations now – by shoring up our own flailing economy and supporting our allies as much as we possibly can.  Blair’s warning shows how dangerous it will be for Washington to continue battling along the same tired ideological lines that it has for the last several weeks.  This economic crisis could be putting more than our wallets at risk.

Of course, we don’t really need another reason to stay awake at night and worry.  Fortunately, we now have someone in a crucial position, capable of identifying and focusing on new threats.  Thanks for the “heads up” Admiral Blair!

A Failure We Won’t Forget

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January 15, 2009

With less than a week before the end of George Bush’s Presidency, we are seeing numerous retrospectives on the successes and failures of the Bush Administration.  Of course, the failures have been plentiful and catastrophic.  Quite a bit of attention has been focused on the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina.  The use of warrantless wiretaps has become a rallying cry for those calling for the prosecution of Bush Administration officials.  The politicization of the Justice Department is back in the news with the disclosure that a former Justice Department official, Bradley Schlozman, refused to hire attorneys he considered too liberal.  The Administration’s use of torture at Guantanamo is also in the headlines with the revelation by Susan Crawford that Mohammed al-Qahtani (a man alleged to have been the would-be twentieth hijacker from September 11, 2001) was tortured.  Crawford explained that as a result of the treatment of this prisoner, she would be unable to bring him to trial.  Crawford is a former Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, who in 2007, was appointed to the position of convening authority for military commissions.  In that post, she is the top Bush Administration official overseeing the military trials of suspects held at Guantanamo.

As we reach the end of his second term in office, we cannot help but realize that George W. Bush, as Commander in Chief of our armed forces, never caught America’s worst enemy:  Osama bin Laden.  Despite the cowboy posturing, the “wanted: dead or alive” rhetoric and the numerous assurances to the contrary, George Bush has been unable to capture or kill bin Laden.  Once bin Laden escaped from the battle of Tora Bora, fleeing into the mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, many observers believed Bush had lost his chance at bringing this villain to justice.  These critics turned out to be right.  Some of my friends believe that Bush never really wanted to catch bin Laden.  Under that theory, bin Laden was more valuable as a “bogeyman”, who could be used to justify the infringements on our liberties and the “harsh interrogation methods” employed by the Bush Administration.  Regardless of whether such theories are true or not, Bush’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden has become yet another abject failure of this administration’s legacy.  If the al-Qaeda attack against the United States had taken place at a later time during Bush’s tenure, he could invoke the excuse that he “didn’t have enough time” to catch bin Laden.  As it turned out, Bush had seven years and four months to capture or kill bin Laden, yet he failed to do either.

In a villa somewhere in western Pakistan, bin Laden is probably watching an American cable newscast and chuckling with delight about his victory over George Bush.  Bush never got him, nor will he ever have a chance at it again.  He must enjoy watching the video clips of Bush doing his little bounce, squinting in attempt to make a tough, cowboy face, cranking up the faux Texas accent, and making some hollow threat to “get bin Laden”.  In his latest audio message, bin Laden taunts President Bush by emphasizing the harsh reality that Bush has been unable to catch him.  As reported by Khaled Wassef and Tucker Reals of CBS News, bin Laden’s newest discourse includes a dig at Bush’s low approval rating:

“Can America keep up the war with us for more decades to come?  All reports and analysis indicate that this is not possible. In fact, 75 percent of American people are happy with the departure of the president who got them into wars they could not possibly win.”

Bin Laden goes on to say President Bush “drowned” the American people in economic woes and “left his successor a difficult legacy, and left him one of two bitter choices … The worst heritage is when a man inherits a long guerrilla warfare with a persevering, patient enemy – a war that is funded by usury.  If he (Obama) withdraws from the war, that would be a military defeat, and if he goes on with it, he’ll drown in economic crisis.”

As President Bush and his minions struggle to re-define the Bush Legacy, we have America’s worst enemy providing an assessment of the Bush years in terms that are painfully close to the truth.  Heckuva’ job, Bushey!

The Return Of Jeb Bush

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December 4, 2008

I was surprised when I read the December 2 report by Beth Reinhard in the Miami Herald concerning the announcement by Mel Martinez, that he would not seek re-election to the United States Senate in 2010, at the end of his first term.  He has always been such an ambitious guy.  Immediately after the mid-term elections in 2006, Senator Martinez was named Chairman of the Republican National Committee (although he ultimately resigned from that post in October of 2007).  As Martin Kady reported in the November 14, 2006 edition of the New York Times:

Republicans are hoping that Martinez, whose family fled communist Cuba in 1962, will appeal to the pivotal Hispanic voting bloc, which went heavily for Democrats in the Nov. 7 elections.

Beth Reinhard’s article in the Miami Herald quoted the Senator’s explanation for not seeking another term:  the simple desire to spend more time in Orlando with family and friends.  However, Ms. Reinhard provided an alternative explanation for the motivating factors behind this decision:

His slumping poll numbers and lackluster reelection fundraising have fueled speculation for months that he would not seek another term.  But Martinez, a reluctant Washington insider recruited by President George W. Bush, insisted that he wasn’t deterred by the prospect of a tough race.  He added that he announced his retirement early to give potential candidates enough time to build campaigns.

The article went on to disclose that “a close ally” of former Governor Jeb Bush indicated that Jeb “was thinking about the race”.

A December 3 report by Carol Lee and Jonathan Martin on the Politico website bore the headline:   “Jeb: I am considering Senate run”.  They noted the likelihood that in the event Jeb should seek the Senate seat relinquished by Mel Martinez, he would not likely face any Republican opposition.  What really stood out in this piece was Jeb’s strategic vision for the future of the Republican Party in the wake of the 2008 elections.  At a time when many Republicans expressed dread that the only “rising star” in their party might be Sarah Palin, it must have been nice to hear “the smart one” from the Bush family provide an enlightened perspective on the future:

In an interview with Politico immediately after November’s election, the former governor said the Republican Party should take four primary steps to regain favor with voters: Show no tolerance for corruption, practice what it preaches about limiting the scope of government (“There should not be such a thing as a Big Government Republican”), stand for working families and small business, and embrace reform.

Bush said conservatives should “do the math of the new demographics of the United States,” explaining that the Republican Party “can’t be anti-Hispanic, anti-young person — anti many things — and be surprised when we don’t win elections.”

Jeb let everyone know that there is at least one Republican who “gets it” and can provide change the Republicans can believe in.  The obvious next question is:  When is he planning on a run for the Presidency?  If his plan is to run in the 2012 Presidential election, he would have to begin campaigning immediately upon being sworn in as a Senator in January of 2011.  That simply would not make sense.  He would more likely spend a few years in the Senate, re-defining himself as a centrist and demonstrating the capacity for bipartisanship that his brother lacked.  He would then likely set his sights on the 2016 Presidential election, when President Obama’s term expires.

In the mean time, the Democrats need to focus on nominating a worthy opponent for Jeb in the Senatorial election.  Their best chance for victory would be the nomination of a Latin-American woman as their candidate.  Jeb’s wife, Columba, is a native of Mexico and this has always endeared him to the Latin-American voters in Florida.  A female candidate could attract the votes of independent female voters.

The Democratic Party’s response to Jeb’s likely senatorial bid is already taking shape.  The Politico website ran a second article on Jeb’s Senatorial aspirations on December 3, written by Amie Parnes and Charles Mathesian, entitled:  “Will voters elect a Bush again?” They quoted the response from Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz about the prospect of a Senator Jeb Bush:

“I don’t think Jeb Bush’s leadership style is a good fit for the US Senate or any legislative body. He governs with ‘my way or the highway’ politics. He was literally the most inflexible public official I’ve ever encountered in my 16 years in office,” said Wasserman Schultz. “I think they’re very similar in terms of his leadership style. When they decide that they are correct there’s no telling them that they are not.”

Who would have thought that before George W. Bush could move out of the White House, there would be serious discussion of another Bush candidacy?

The Biggest Challenge For Hillary

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December 1, 2008

The recent attacks in Mumbai, India focused international attention back to the continuing problem of organized terrorist activity.  As Hillary Clinton is presented to the world as our next Secretary of State, the more sensationalist elements of the media have their focus on terrorism.  Terrorism is highlighted to the exclusion of the other pressing matters to be faced during Secretary Clinton’s upcoming tenure, presiding over that all-important bureaucracy in the neighborhood known as “Foggy Bottom”.  Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton will have several other pressing issues on her agenda  — “leftovers” that have stumped the previous administration for the past eight years.  Among these abandoned, stinking socks on the floor of the Oval Office, the least fragrant involves the situation with Iran.  The Bush years took that bad situation and made it far worse.  A December 1 article in the Tehran Times focused on the remarks of Majlis Speaker, Ali Larijani, about what might lie ahead between the United States and Iran.  While suggesting that the Bush Administration “sabotaged” efforts to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, the article mentioned Larijani’s criticisms of what was described as the Democrats’ Iran containment policy.

A report in the December 1 Los Angeles Times examined the expectations of Arabs and Israelis, with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.  Discussing various forecasts concerning American strategy towards Iran, the article noted:

Some analysts predict the Obama administration will try instead to broker an Israeli-Syrian accord, aimed at drawing Syria away from Iran’s influence and diminishing Iran as a threat to the Jewish state.

Elizabeth Bumiller’s article in the November 22 New York Times described the “working chemistry” that has developed between Barack Obama and Ms. Clinton.  This chemistry resulted in a softening of Clinton’s position, expressed during the primary season debates, about negotiating with Iran:

But although Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Obama for being willing to sit down and talk to dictators, he has said he would have a lower-level envoy do preparatory work for a meeting with Iran’s leaders first.  Mrs. Clinton has said she favors robust diplomacy with Iran and lower-level contacts as well.

In the November 24 Jerusalem Post, Douglas Bloomfield gave us a refreshing look at how the Obama – Clinton foreign policy team might function:

Hillary’s great challenge will be to remember who IS President, who ISN’T and who WAS.  She will have to focus on rebuilding relationships damaged during the Bush years of “my way or the highway” foreign policy, taking the lead from the man she once described as not ready to be president.

*  *  *

In the Middle East peace process, as in other policy areas, Obama seems intent on charting a pragmatic, centrist course.  While that will disappoint both the Jewish Right and Left, it could prove a welcome change after eight years of the Bush administration’s faith-based foreign policy and not-so-benign neglect of the peace process.

As Inauguration Day approaches, the Bush Administration’s legacy of complete incompetence in nearly all areas is being documented by countless writers around the world.  By invading Iraq, Bush-Cheney helped Iran realize its dreams of hegemony.  Bush’s mishandling of Iran’s rise as a nuclear power became the subject of a thought-provoking opinion piece by David Ignatius in the November 30 Washington Post.  Mr. Ignatius noted that Iran had neither enriched uranium nor the technology to enrich uranium (centrifuges) when Bush took power.  As Bush’s days in the White House wind down, we now see Iran with nearly 4,000 centrifuges and approximately 1,400 pounds of enriched uranium.  The 2006 precondition that Iran halt uranium enrichment before the United States would participate in diplomatic efforts to address this issue, exemplifies the handicapped mindset of the Bush-Cheney regime.  As Mr. Ignatius pointed out:

It’s impossible to say whether Iran’s march toward nuclear-weapons capability could have been stopped by diplomacy.  But there hasn’t yet been a good test.  Because of bitter infighting in the Bush administration, its diplomatic efforts were late in coming and, once launched, have been ineffective.

By the time we finally have a President and a Secretary of State who are capable of taking on the dicey task of negotiating with Iran on the nuclear issue, it may be too late.  Hillary Clinton’s biggest challenge in her new job has already been cut out for her by the Bush Administration’s nonfeasance.

McCain Loses His Chance

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October 2, 2008

It was the opportunity for a “game-changing move” in the 2008 Presidential campaign.  Just as John McCain was dropping back in the polls, providing Barack Obama the chance to “close the deal” even more decisively than he did with Hillary Clinton, McCain missed the opportunity to turn the game around.  Last week, he arrived in Washington (after the pseudo-suspension of his campaign) on a mission to save us all from the crisis declared by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.  After McCain arrived, he found a number of both Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives opposed to the revised, 110-page, economic “bailout bill” (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008).  At that point in time, McCain had the opportunity to break with the unpopular Bush Administration and band together with the 133 Republican and 95 Democratic House members (who eventually voted against the bill) to form a “coalition of mavericks” (oxymoron, non-sequitur or both?) resisting this bailout of the big banks and other “fat cats” on Wall Street.  He didn’t.  He chose instead, to copy whatever Barack Obama was doing.  Besides, his move dovetailed well with the pseudo-“bipartisan” duet he had been playing, throughout the entire campaign, with Joe “The Tool” Lieberman.  Had McCain stood with those 133 young Republican members of the House and the 95 Democrats (many of whom consider themselves conservative, “Blue Dog” Democrats) he could have re-ignited his flatulent campaign.  (Is it really safe to do that?  —  Let’s ask Johnny Knoxville.)

Howard Fineman provided an interesting retrospective of this phase in the evolution the economic “bailout bill” at the Newsweek website on September 30:

The Paulson Plan is not great. Some two hundred academic economists have ridiculed it, and so have the House Republicans, by a 2-1 margin.  Public opinion (and not just the angry phone callers) is turning against the measure—to the extent that anybody understands it.

But the consensus is that Washington has to do something, and that the current version is far better than what the lawmakers started with.

McCain made a show of returning to Washington to try to jam the original measure through.  He deserves credit for the instinct. An old Navy motto is: Don’t just stand there, DO something!  That is McCain to the core, and so much the better for it.

But when he got to town, he realized something that no one had bothered to tell him, apparently:  the grassroots of his own party (the grassroots that has never really trusted him) hated the Paulson Plan.  They weren’t about to support it and risk their own necks.  McCain worked the phones, but fell back in the ranks.

When the second revision of this bill (at over 400 pages) finally made it to the Senate floor for the vote on Wednesday, October 1, there were 9 Democrats, 15 Republicans and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, voting against it.  McCain again missed the opportunity for a truly bipartisan resistance to this measure.  Such an act would have demonstrated genuine leadership.  He could have rejoined his old buddy, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, as well as Florida Democrat Bill Nelson and rising Democratic star, Maria Cantwell from the State of Washington, all of whom voted against this measure.  Such a move would have emboldened resistance to the “bailout bill” in the House of Representatives, where the term of office lasts only two years.  (The short term results in greater accountability to American voters, who are believed to have notoriously short memory spans.)

Is this bill really necessary?  On the October 1 edition of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman, Economics Professor at Princeton University, admitted that:

…  it will be relatively ineffective, although rejecting it will cause a big run on the system.  Then we will come back and do it right in January or February  …

When Keith Olbermann asked Krugman about the likelihood that nothing consequential would happen if this bill did not pass, Krugman responded by saying that such possibilities have “shrunk in the past week”.  Krugman went on to claim that “the credit crunch has started to hit Main Street”, using, as an example, the rumor that: “McDonald’s has started to cut credit to its franchisees.”  McDonald’s has issued a press release stating that this was not the case.  What is really happening is that the banks are acting like spoiled children, holding their breath until the government gives them what they want, using the threat of unavailable credit as a gun to the head of Congress.

Public opposition to this bailout was best summed up by Peggy Noonan, when she appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on October 1:

But we are in a real economic crisis and the American political establishment said we must do A, B and C to deal with it and the American people  …  said:  “No.  We don’t trust you to handle this.  We don’t trust you to do the right thing.”

John McCain had the opportunity to stand with those people, as well as the 133 House Republicans and 15 Senate Republicans, to do “the right thing”.  He decided to forego that opportunity.  Barack Obama said, on the Senate floor Wednesday, that it was not worth risking the American economy and the world economy by challenging this bill.  John McCain decided that it was not worth risking his Presidential campaign on such a challenge.  That’s too bad for him.  The gamble probably would have paid off.