Cap’n Ed Morrissy reports on new information that extraordinary rendition of GWOT detainees started under the Clinton administration, back in 1995. And, the Bush administration actually curtailed the program. Not mentioned in either Ed’s post, or his primary source article, is if Congress was aware of rendition in the ’90s. If so, this would be yet another example of Congressional Jackasses exercising a double-standard on the Bushies verses the Clintonistas.
This from Aero-News:
Department of Defense representatives told Bloomberg News Friday the Pentagon plans to end a development program for a backup powerplant for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF.)
The move — which would have to be approved by Congress — aims to save approximately $1.7 billion through 2011, according to a DoD memo released last week. That’s not a small amount of money by any means — but it is a relative drop in the bucket compared to the $256 billion total cost of the fighter jet development program.
The backup program was initiated by Congress in 1995, according to Bloomberg, with the intent of maintaining competition and, thus, lowering costs of the Pratt & Whitney-designed powerplant intended to be the primary engines for the JSF. In a $2.2 billion deal, GE and Rolls-Royce teamed up to develop a backup powerplant — which also would have been utilized had technical problems cropped up with the P&W F135 units (below).
This would seem to me to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Single-sourcing on any major component is just never a good idea. Even if there are no technical problems with the Pratt & Whitney design, any of myriad problems can develop to disrupt supply over the decades which this aircraft is expected to be in service. And I don’t believe, on a program of this size, any economies-of-scale will be realized by giving the entire production to one supplier.
My feeling, however, is that this cutback will not last. General Electric simply has to much clout in Congress (and Rolls-Royce in Parliament) to be nudged-out without a major fight.
But, as Military.com reports here, engine development is not the only part of the program facing cutbacks:
The plan would scale back the Pentagon’s requested JSF research, development, testing and engineering funding level by $108 million. The Senate-passed appropriations bill called for a larger $270 million reduction. The House’s defense spending bill fully funded the Pentagon’s $2.4 billion JSF RDT&E request.
The report accompanying the conferees’ FY-06 defense appropriations bill contains no language explaining the JSF reduction. But in a separate September report on the version of the defense spending Legislation that was later approved by the full chamber, the Senate Appropriations Committee said “continuing uncertainties” surround the joint Air Force-Navy program, making it “difficult to estimate the resources needed for the program.”
I find it a bit unsettling that these “continuing uncertainties” exist this far into the program. But it would seem to me that cutting development money would only hinder their resolution.
Today on FNC’s Cavuto on Business, conservative firebrand Ann Coulter stated her belief that White House Machiavellian Karl Rove is giving Capitol Hill Democrats enough rope to hang themselves with on the NSA wiretapping issue. Knowing that a strong national defense is politically popular, she says, “just let Barbara Boxer keep calling for impeachment.”
So, if one follows that logic out, the question is presented, “did Rove actually provide (or, more likely, instruct another Libby-esce underling to provide) the original leak?”
Well, for anyone short of the most raving Jackass Party partisans, it may be tough to believe that anyone in the White House would give up highly classified national defense information for political gain. However, we must take into account that we are up against a clever and nimble enemy, and any intelligence program instituted 4 years ago might not be effective today. If that is the case – if the unwarranted NSA wiretaps were no longer delivering much, if any, valuable information (something quite plausible if one is to believe, as most pundits claim, that Al Qeada no longer exists as a cohesive organization) – it becomes conceivable that a leak of the program’s existence could become a viable political tool.
When I was a teen, the rule of thumb was that being a civil servant meant taking a lower rate of pay than one might make in an equivalent position in the private sector, in exchange for greater job security. But, for at least two decades, that has hardly been the case:
According to the Manhattan Institute, the average bus or subway driver–the most-skilled job in the union by most standards–is already paid $63,000 a year. The person who sits behind the bullet-proof glass in what used to be called a token booth, and who now says for most purchases you have to use the metro-card machines, takes down an average of $51,000. And the least-skilled work, though certainly the dirtiest, is the subway cleaner who clocks in at an average of $40,000.
Compare that with the average New York worker. Take out Wall Street, where mega-bonuses skew the average unfairly, and the average private sector worker earns $49,000. Peel off the college-educated (which you don’t need for most transit jobs) and the average income drops to well below $35,000. That includes everyone from a skilled factory worker to the clerk in Bloomingdale’s.
Nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average unskilled worker (we’ll put the cleaners in that category) earns $23,753 a year in the private sector; in the public sector that jumps to $30,056, but is still ten grand less than a New York subway cleaner. The disparity jumps even further when you look at the nationwide “transportation workers” as a specialty. There the average annual wage is $30,846 in the private sector and $34,611 in the public sector. Clearly, it pays to work for the government. But it pays even better to work for the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority)–indeed 80% better. New York is expensive, but not that expensive.
The reason? compliant elected officials have failed to hold the line against public employee union demands
* In 1994, then-Gov. Mario Cuomo signed a law giving transit workers the right to retire at age 55, with a half-pay pension, after just 25 years on the job. At the time, employees opting for this 25/55 benefit were required to make an added pension contribution equal to 2.3 percent of their annual salaries.
* In 2000, as part of a series of pension sweeteners affecting every government employee in the state, Gov. George Pataki and the Legislature agreed to reduce transit workers’ regular pension contributions by one-third, and to eliminate the added contribution for the 25/55 benefit. This effectively amounted to a 3.3 percent increase in transit workers’ base pay, on top of pay hikes in that year’s contract.
* In 2003, fresh from another negotiation with the MTA, the union persuaded state legislators to introduce a bill allowing transit workers to retire with half-pay pensions at age 50, after just 20 years on the job.
Coming at a time when the state, city and MTA were awash in red ink, the 20/50 pension sweetener would have cost more than $100 million a year. Nonetheless, just before adjourning in 2003, the Legislature approved the bill. The vote tallies were as good as it gets — 148-0 in the Democrat-dominated Assembly, and 62-0 in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Pataki killed the measure with a “pocket veto” in early 2004. Even then, however, he didn’t object in principle to 20/50 pensions. Instead, in a tepid veto message, the governor cited technical problems with the bill, expressed qualms over its cost and said he was “constrained to disapprove the bill” based on the objection of the MTA and Mayor Bloomberg, “who contend that this type of enhanced benefit should be the subject of mutual agreement through collective bargaining.”
Indeed, this problem is nationwide:
The pension deficit now reported by state and local governments totals $278 billion. If these governments adopted the more conservative estimates used in the private sector, however, the total deficit would be $700 billion. This amount does not include retiree health benefits.
New York City put $2.46 billion into its pension fund in 2004 — eight percent of the total city budget. By 2007, the City expects pension contributions to hit $4.9 billion, or 12 percent of its total budget. Illinois’ pension plans are facing a $35 billion deficit in a state with a total operating budget of $43 billion.
Legislation to end defined benefit pensions in favor of defined contribution plans similar to 401(k)s for government employees has been proposed in Alaska and Maryland. Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Carolina and Virginia are all considering a shift to defined contribution plans.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed ending the California defined benefit plan and instituting a 401(k)-type plan instead. California contributed $3.5 billion for pension and health care benefits for its retirees this year, almost triple what it paid three years ago. Schwarzenegger has indicated that he will put the public employee pensions issue on the ballot in 2006.
For years, state legislatures and local governments were able to justify higher overall benefits for public sector workers because wages in the private sector were generally higher. With the employer attack on private sector unions and the decline in wage growth in the private sector, however, public sector labor costs are now higher than private sector costs.
Total compensation costs for state and local government employees were $34.72 per hour worked in 2004, compared with $23.76 for private-sector workers, according to BLS and Census Bureau data. Public sector benefit costs are approaching 40 percent of total compensation, compared to 30% in the private sector, and pressure is building to cut these costs dramatically.
The disproportionate political power of public employee unions has not only been due to their massive financial power, but that they have always been able to muster legions among their membership, to man phone banks and walk precincts, in support of their favored candidates.
But, as the rush of angry comments – on the TWU’s own blog – demonstrate, the general public is feed-up:
The Transport Workers Union Local 100 has a blog. The Blog had comments. But no longer. Fortunately the comments were cached before the union tried to make all those angry New Yorkers go away. Bloggers wrote a lot about the strike, but the comments on the union site really seemed to catch the enmity of a lot of New Yorkers towards the union.
Sample Quote: “You guys really have a lot of balls. All you do is drive around in circles. Your job isn’t hard at all. You get paid as much as cops and firemen, while much more as teachers. Something is wrong. You’re asking for way too much here. Back down and know your roll. You guys aren’t as high and as mighty as you think.”
Thanks to Bill for finding this cache!Hey, Local 100: you guys weighed the options, asked for support and chose to go on strike. So you ought to own and acknowledge citizen’s reaction. Censorship is so lame.
Think about this: Reagan replaced the air traffic controllers without much problem (largely due to highly trained, but unemployed vets). But what do you think it takes to train someone (even with military experience) to manage a crowded airspace, verses sitting in the front of a train, to put on the brakes, should the (virtually infallible) computerized controls go awry?
I have no issue with their right to strike – regardless of New York law. But we must recognize that these people are the Deltas of the world. And, while our private sector is blowing off these high pay/low skill workers in droves, they keep holding on in the public sector. This situation cannot endure.
I have never had much respect for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D. TX). But, on today’s Kudlow & Co. on CNBC, she surpassed even her own level of idiocy: On the economy, it was just her whole stock monotone – “the only ones to benefit are the top 1%.” So Sheila, do I take it all the new jobs that have been created are for CEOs?
But then the discussion turned to the domestic (actually domestic/foreign) communications spying kerfuffle. And she issued a demand the Bush administration SHOULD RELEASE THE NAMES OF EVERY TARGET OF THE PROGRAM! It took me a minute to scrape my jaw off the floor after hearing this. As if our national security hasn’t been damaged enough already – let’s just compromise everything. What does she think this is, an Easter egg hunt?
In case you haven’t heard, the cloture vote, to close filibuster in the Senate, on the Patriot Act extension, went down – getting only 52 yeas with 60 required.
I will have to take a look at the actual text of the bill currently on the Senate floor to make a definitive judgement. But my initial reaction to this is positive, as most of what Congress does is pure mischief. But, in this case, as Orin Kerr at Volokh points out, much of this bill (at least at the instant he reviewed it) pulls back the iron hand of government:
For those of us who think of the Patriot Act as actual legislation rather than a symbol of the Bush Administration, this is rather puzzling stuff. The dirty little secret about the Patriot Act is that only about 3% of the Act is controversial, and only about a third of that 3% is going to expire on December 31st. Further, much of the reauthorization actually puts new limits on a number of the controversial non-sunsetting provisions, and some of the sunsetting provisions increased privacy protections. As a result, it’s not immediately obvious to me whether we’ll have greater civil liberties on January 1, 2006 if the Patriot Act is reauthorized or if it is allowed to expire. (To be fair, though, I’d have to run through the effect of every expiring section and all of the reauthorization language to check this – maybe I would feel differently if I did.)
Well, perhaps that’s good – if that’s actually what happens. My greatest problem with the Patriot Act is with its potential for abuse. But I must admit, actual abuses have been rather rare. But they have not been non-existent.
This from Max Borders at TCS Daily:
Whether you’re a 220 lb. guzzler with an iron liver or a 120 anorexic who’s just had her first drink, you will be evaluated by the same standard in determining whether you’re capable of driving. The standard in most states is a .08 blood-alcohol content or BAC. But other states have policies in which an even lower BAC can send you to jail. Recently, for example, the Washington D.C. city council voted in favor of raising its legal BAC from .01 to .05 — where between .05 and .079 police may use their discretion about whether to make an arrest.
[…]
It turns out that while the BAC standard is an objective standard for measuring the percentage of alcohol in the blood. It isn’t an objective standard of someone’s ability to drive safely. The very term DUI stands for “driving under the influence.” But the breathalyzer and other BAC measures can’t determine the influence of alcohol on one’s reaction times, faculties, and motor skills. If we were trying to determine whether someone is actually impaired, aren’t reaction times, faculties and motor skills what we ought to be looking at?
To be fair, there was a time in which the BAC standard made sense. In the absence of a better standard, a proxy standard would have had to suffice — just as age 65 might be a reasonable proxy standard for testing elderly drivers for the degenerative effects of aging.
I might also add that, while alcohol also generally lowers a person’s inhibitions, that effect varies greatly from one individual to another. I have in my life known several people who tend to throw caution to the wind after they’ve had a few drinks. I’ve also known others who recognize that they are below their peak performance level, and compensate with additional caution, just as a responsible senior citizen should.
These are the reasons the checkpoints advocated so vigorously by MADD, and similar organizations, are such a waste of valuable resources. Dangerous drunks make themselves known readily, by virtue of their actual driving, to even the casual lay observer – much more so to the trained and experienced patrol officer – so long as he/she is actually on patrol, not manning stationary checkpoints.
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
…We have the common cold and allergy sufferer, who will have a much harder time getting the medication they need, due to a “Combat Meth” amendment snuck into the Patriot Act:
TalkLeft has previously criticized North Carolina's use of its “weapons of mass destruction” law to charge a meth lab owner (follow-up here), as well as Oklahoma's law and John Edwards and John Kerry's plan to introduce a federal restriction on buying cold pills.
As TChris wrote here, the meth crisis is a myth. The only effect this bill will have on those who cook meth is to cause them to steal the pills instead of buy them. Plus, here's who will get busted under the cold pill laws – convenience store clerks, probably those that have difficulty understanding English, who thought the undercover cop was talking about a barbecue when he mentioned a “cook.”
Henry Hyde tried to slip a provision into the Patriot Act that increased drug law penalties by designating them “narco-terrorism offenses.” The Patriot Act has been used to bust a marijuana smuggling ring.
We need to be vigilant about keeping terror laws and drug laws separate, except in such instances where the two clearly are linked. We already have laws that penalize terrorism and laws that penalize illicit drug activity. There is no need to combine them.
In Oregon, and other states, there’s talk of making pseudoephedrine “prescription only,” None of this will do anything to stem the use of methamphetamine. Besides increasing the incidence of burglaries, as Jeralyn notes, it will simply move more production south of the border – where most of the meth is produced already – further enriching ruthless Mexican drug gangs.
This is of grave concern to me. I don’t have to worry, at this point, because while I rely on 120mg/day of pseudoephedrine, along with some other medications, to control my chronic sinus drainage, I get mine on prescription already. However, it’s but a step from requiring prescriptions to outlawing altogether – “first they came for the…”
The surest way to reduce consumption of meth? Make cocaine legal.
This from David S. Cloud at the NYTimes:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 – The Navy wants to increase its fleet to 313 ships by 2020, reversing years of decline in naval shipbuilding and adding dozens of warships designed to defeat emerging adversaries, senior Defense Department officials say.
The plan by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, who took over as chief of naval operations last summer, envisions a major shipbuilding program that would increase the 281-ship fleet by 32 vessels and cost more than $13 billion a year, $3 billion more than the current shipbuilding budget, the officials said Friday.
[…]
The Navy is planning to squeeze money from personnel and other accounts, and ask shipyards to hold down costs, even if it means removing certain capabilities.
[…]
Now Admiral Mullen is seeking a fleet that will give the Navy a greater role in counterterrorism and humanitarian operations.
The plan calls for building 55 small, fast vessels called littoral combat ships, which are being designed to allow the Navy to operate in shallow coastal areas where mines and terrorist bombings are a growing threat. Costing less than $300 million, the littoral combat ship is relatively inexpensive.
Navy officials say they have scaled back their goals for a new destroyer, the DD(X), whose primary purpose would be to support major combat operations ashore. The Navy once wanted 23 to 30 DD(X) vessels, but Admiral Mullen has decided on only 7, the Navy official said. The reduction is due in part to the ship’s spiraling cost, now estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion per ship.
The plan also calls for building 19 CG(X) vessels, a new cruiser designed for missile defense, but the first ship is not due to be completed until 2017, the Navy official said.
The proposal would also reduce the fleet’s more than 50 attack submarines to 48, the official said. Some Navy officials have called for keeping at least 55 of them.
The choices have led some analysts to suggest that the Navy is de-emphasizing the threat from China, at least in the early stages of the shipbuilding plan. Beijing’s investment in submarines, cruise missiles and other weapon systems is not expected to pose a major threat to American warships for at least a decade. That gives the Navy time, some analysts argue, to build capabilities that require less firepower and more mobility, a priority for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The plan also calls for building 31 amphibious assault ships, which can be used to ferry marines ashore or support humanitarian operations.
“This is not a fleet that is being oriented to the Chinese threat,” said Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a policy research center in Arlington, Va. “It’s being oriented around irregular warfare, stability operations and dealing with rogue states.”
I bet Murtha won’t like this.
Almost any political debate has an element of “dueling citations”, where each party will come up with a brace of “recognized experts” – each with their own analysis of the matter at hand. And those experts will generally spout the results of some survey, or collection of surveys, in an effort to give their argument some gravitas.
However, on matters of public policy, surveys of the general public will frequently diverge widely in their results. And particularly partisan experts can then pick and choose those surveys which tend to reinforce their preconceived opinions. This is nowhere more true than on matters concerning Iraq.
It then becomes necessary for the debater to go to the rigor of critiquing the surveys themselves. Well, if the expert even cites what survey he/she is relying upon for the information (frequently not the case in brief op-ed pieces), the debater is lucky if the information source even makes details of their surveys available to those other than paid subscribers to their service. Then there’s the matter of actually dissembling the raw data and techniques – a bit of real drudgery, even for those of us with the skills to do it.
Well, for the past year or so, Mark Blumenthal, an opinion poll wonk, has been putting out a blog, Mystery Pollster, which gets to the bottom of these things for us. I, for one, couldn’t be more happy about it. In a post from a few days ago, he goes after the recent RT Strategies poll of public opinion relative to the Iraq War. This is quite extended, for a blog post, as Mark goes into excruciating scope and detail. But he writes at a level accessible to the average lay political blog reader.
I’ll just excerpt a particularly “meaty” piece here:
When pollsters move beyond general ratings to more specific questions about policy – as we do in almost every public political poll – we move to shakier ground. Here Americans often lack preexisting attitudes, yet most will work to answer our questions, often forming opinions on the spot based on the text of the question. When that happens, responses can be very erratic and contradictory across polls. Very small variations in wording, the number of answer choices offered or the order of the questions can result in big and often surprising differences in the results.
With that in mind, consider the three RT Strategies questions:
Thinking about the war in Iraq, when Democratic Senators criticize the President’s policy on the war in Iraq, do you believe it HELPS the morale of our troops in Iraq or HURTS the morale of our troops in Iraq? (IF HELPS/HURTS, ASK:) And do you believe it (HURTS/HELPS) morale A LOT or just SOME
44% hurts a lot
26% hurts some
6% helps some
7% helps a lot
17% not sureWhen Democrats criticize the President’s policy in Iraq, do you believe they are (ROTATE) Criticizing the President’s policy because they believe their criticisms will help the United States’ efforts in Iraq, OR, Criticizing the President’s policy to gain a partisan political advantage?
31% believe will help
51% to gain advantage
6% some of both (volunteered)
6% neither (volunteered)
7% not sureAnd thinking about the future of our policies in Iraq, do you believe the U.S. military should…. (ROTATE FIRST TWO, ALWAYS ASK "Set a fixed timetable" last) Withdraw our troops immediately, regardless of the impact OR Withdraw our troops as the Iraqi government and military meet specific goals and objectives OR Set a fixed publicly available timetable for withdrawal.
16% withdraw immediately
49% withdraw when goals met
30% set fixed timetable
3% none (volunteered)
2% not sureA few reactions: First, all three of these questions fall into that second category of issues about which many Americans appear to lack preexisting attitudes. Non-attitudes are most evident on the morale question (something that Armando at DailyKos picked up on). The telltale clue is that 17% were completely unable to answer the question, a sure sign that many more came up with an answer on the spot. The fact that nearly a third chose one of the softer "some" categories (26% hurts morale "some," 6% helps "some") is consistent with that argument. Also consider the respondent who believes such criticism neither hurts nor helps troop morale, but does not realize that "neither" is an o[o[p]tion. Odds are good they will end up in the "hurts a little" category.
On the partisan advantage question, nearly one in five respondents (19%) could not choose between the two offered answer categories. Finally, for reasons that I’ll discuss below, I’d argue that the large number of respondents in the middle category of the future policy question (49%) suggests that it was an attractive choice for those respondents who were simply not sure how to answer.
Now MP is not averse to survey questions that offer new information and push respondents a bit to see where they might stand in debates they have not followed closely. And in this case, the results of the RT "morale" and "criticism" questions are more or less consistent with the similar questions asked elsewhere. For example, a Fox News poll in early November found that 58% of Americans agree that those "who describe U.S. military action in Iraq as a mistake" are "hurting U.S. troops." Only 16% believed they were "helping." The rest had mixed opinions (9%), believed the criticism had no effect (9%) or could not answer the question (8%).
It is also worth noting that Americans tend to dismiss much of the debate in Washington as attempts to gain "partisan advantage," so the results of the RT question are not particularly surprising. For example, back in September (9/8-11), Gallup asked about politics in the context of Hurricane Katrina:
"Do you think Democrats who criticize the way the Bush Administration has handled the hurricane response mainly want to find out what went wrong, or mainly want to use the issue for political advantage?"
36 find out, 60% use for advantage, 4% unsureSeven years ago, ABC News and the Washington Post asked a similar question about the impeachment of President Clinton with nearly identical overall results:
"Do you think the House voted to impeach Clinton on the basis of the facts of the case, or on the basis of partisan politics?"
36% facts of the case, 61% Partisan politics, 3% no opinionQuestions that push respondents to consider questions for which they do not have pre-existing opinions do have a role in opinion research (one that should not be labeled as a fraudulent "push poll" — but that’s another subject for another day). However, in those instances pollsters need to take care to provide respondents with new information in a way that does not bias subsequent questions. For that reason, I am a bit surprised that RT Strategies asked two questions that mirrored the Bush administration talking points just before asking respondents their preference about prospective Iraq policy. Would the responses to the third question have been different if they followed a question about say, whether Bush "intentionally misled the American people about the presence of weapons?" We will never know, but it certainly seems possible that they would.
To be fair, Gallup asked a very similar question a few weeks ago (11/11-13) with similar results:
"Here are four different plans the U.S. could follow in dealing with the war in Iraq. Which ONE do you prefer? Withdraw all troops from Iraq immediately. Withdraw all troops by November 2006 — that is, in 12 months’ time. Withdraw troops, but take as many years to do this as are needed to turn control over to the Iraqis. OR, Send more troops to Iraq."
19% withdraw now, 33% withdraw within 12 months, 38% take as long as needed, 7% send more troops, 3% unsure.Note that Gallup showed 19% ready to withdraw immediately; RT Strategies show 16%. Gallup shows 52% supporting withdrawal either immediately or within 12 months, RT shows 46% support withdrawal either immediately or on a fixed timetable.
Having said this, I want to caution readers against taking these these prospective policy questions at face value. I also tend to agree with those who argue that the questions on the RT poll are, in essense, the wrong questions, that other measures give a better sense of true, pre-existing opinions on the Iraq War. This is not necessarily a criticism of Riehle and Tarrance, merely a caution that focusing on these three questions alone can give a misleading impression. For example, review the questions asked since Labor Day as posted by the Polling Report and you will find some highly consistent results:
- Approval of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq varied between 32% and 36%, with disapproval between 62% and 65%, as measured by six different pollsters.
- Differently worded questions about the worthiness of the war (asked by Gallup, CBS, ABC/Washington Post and NBC/Wall Street Journal) found between 31% and 40% that found the war worth the cost and between 52% and 60% that said it was not.
- Differently worded questions about whether the decision to go to war was right or wrong (asked by Gallup, CBS and the Pew Research Center), found 42% to 45% who say the US made the right decision in going to war, between 50% and 54% who say we made the wrong decision or should have stayed out.
However, look at the range of questions about prospective policy and the results are all over map. Here is a sampling (full details at the Polling Report):
CNN/USA Today/Gallup (11/30): "If you had to choose, which do you think is the better approach for deciding when the U.S. should withdraw its troops from Iraq: to withdraw U.S. troops only when certain goals are met, or to withdraw U.S. troops by a specific date and stick to that time-table, regardless of conditions in Iraq at that time?"
59% when goals are met, 35% by a specific date, 6% unsureFOX News/Opinion Dynamics (11/ 29-30): "Do you think there should be a publicly announced timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq?" 47% should, 41% should not, 12% unsure
Harris (11/8-13): "Do you favor keeping a large number of U.S. troops in Iraq until there is a stable government there OR bringing most of our troops home in the next year?"
35% wait for stable government, 63% bring home next year, 3% unsureFOX News/Opinion Dynamics (11/8-9): "What do you want U.S. troops in Iraq to do? Do you want them to leave Iraq and come home now or do you want them to stay in Iraq and finish the job?"
36% leave now, 55% finish the job, 9% unsureNBC News/Wall Street Journal (11/4-7): "Do you think that the United States should maintain its current troop level in Iraq to help secure peace and stability, or should the United States reduce its number of troops now that Iraq has adopted a constitution?"
36% maintain level, 57% reduce number, 4% both depends, 4% unsureABC News/Washington Post (10/30-11/2): "Do you think the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties; or do you think the United States should withdraw its military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further U.S. military casualties, even if that means civil order is not restored there?"
52% keep forces in, 44% withdraw forces, 4% unsureCBS News (10/30-11-1): "Should the United States troops stay in Iraq as long as it takes to make sure Iraq is a stable democracy, even if it takes a long time, or should U.S. troops leave Iraq as soon as possible, even if Iraq is not completely stable?" 43% stay as long as it takes, 50% leave ASAP, 7% unsure
Pew Research Center (10/6-10): "Do you think the U.S. should keep military troops in Iraq until the situation has stabilized, or do you think the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible?" 47% keep troops, 48% bring home ASAP, 5% unsure
So there we have it: A consistent majority of at least 60% of Americans now disapproves of President Bush’s performance on the Iraq war and believes it not worth the cost. A smaller majority now says that the war was a mistake. The consistency of the results suggests these are real attitudes, not opinions formed on the spot in the response to the language of the question.
The White House has issued this paper on our strategy in Iraq, which the President’s speech today tracked. Glenn Reynolds reminds us of Steven Den Beste’s seminal post from two years ago, and links to TigerHawk, who has been keeping the flame alive.
What I’m not seeing, however, is some tie-in between achievement of objectives and redeployment of troops.
Scott Johnson at Powerline is concerned with this from Mark Steyn’s Telegraph article, “Wake Up and Listen to the Muezzin“:
Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic missionary group, has announced plans to build a mosque next door to the new Olympic stadium. The London Markaz will be the biggest house of worship in the United Kingdom: it will hold 70,000 people – only 10,000 fewer than the Olympic stadium, and 67,000 more than the largest Christian facility (Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral). Tablighi Jamaat plans to raise the necessary £100 million through donations from Britain and “abroad”.
And I’ll bet they do. I may be a notorious Islamophobic hatemonger, but, watching these two projects go up side by side in Newham, I don’t think there’ll be any doubt which has the tighter grip on fiscal sanity. Another year or two, and Londoners may be wishing they could sub-contract the entire Olympics to Tablighi Jamaat.
I was slightly surprised by the number of e-mails I’ve received in the past 48 hours from Britons aggrieved about the new mega-mosque. To be sure, it would be heartening if the Archbishop of Canterbury announced plans to mark the Olympics by constructing a 70,000-seat state-of-the-art Anglican cathedral, but what would you put in it? Even an all-star double bill comprising a joint Service of Apology to Saddam Hussein followed by Ordination of Multiple Gay Bishops in Long-Term Committed Relationships (Non-Practising or Otherwise, According to Taste) seems unlikely to fill the pews. Whatever one feels about it, the London Markaz will be a more accurate symbol of Britain in 2012 than Her Majesty pulling up next door with the Household Cavalry.
Scott’s chief cause of concern is the true nature of Tablighi Jamaat. His post, and the accompanying links, are well worth a read. But that wasn’t the central theme of Steyn’s article, which is what piqued my interest:
I notice, for example, that signatories to the Kyoto treaty are meeting in Montreal this week – maybe in the unused Olympic stadium – to discuss “progress” on “meeting” their “goals”. Canada remains fully committed to its obligation to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by six per cent of its 1990 figure by 2008.
That’s great to know, isn’t it? So how’s it going so far?
Well, by the end of 2003, Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions were up 24.2 per cent.
Meanwhile, how are things looking in the United States? As you’ll recall, in a typically “pig-headed and blinkered” (Independent) act that could lead to the entire planet becoming “uninhabitable” (Michael Meacher), “Polluter Bush” (Daily Express), “this ignorant, short-sighted and blinkered politician” (Friends of the Earth), rejected the Kyoto treaty. Yet somehow the “Toxic Texan” (everybody) has managed to outperform Canada on almost every measure of eco-virtue.
How did that happen?
Actually, it’s not difficult. Signing Kyoto is nothing to do with reducing “global warming” so much as advertising one’s transnational moral virtue. America could reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 87 per cent and Canada could increase them by 673 per cent and the latter would still be a “good citizen of the world” (in the Prime Minister’s phrase) while “Polluter Bush” would still be in the dog house, albeit a solar-powered one.
This is pretty typical. If you think back to the Tsunami, while the governments of the world were busy making “pledges”, and berating the US, our government and NGOs were stepping up to the plate.
But it goes further:
Likewise, those public sector union workers determined to keep their right to retire at 60. I’ve had many conversations with New Labour types in which my belief in low – if not undetectable – levels of taxation has been cited as evidence of my selfishness. But what’s more selfish than spending the last 20 years of your life on holiday and insisting that the fellows who can’t afford to retire at 60 should pay for it?
Forget Kyoto and the problem of “unsustainable growth”; the crisis that Britain and most of Europe faces is unsustainable sloth. Their insistence, at a time of falling birth rates and dramatic demographic change, on clinging to the right to pass a third of your adult life as one long bank holiday ought to be as morally reprehensible as what Gary Glitter gets up to on his own weekend breaks. Apart from anything else, its societal impact is far more widespread.
And here’s where it hits home. Because we have a certain degree of that here as well. We could “fix” the Social Security crisis permanently, if we simply raised the retirement age to 75, and continued to raise it as life expectancy increases. But it would be political suicide for one of our elected representatives to take this stand.
Update: Clive Davis looks at contemporary attitudes to Kyoto. It seems the US was way ahead of the curve here.
After John Bolton’s success at getting the UN Security Council to condemn Hizbullah’s recent attack of Israel, OpinionJournal’s James Taranto want’s to know:
Would someone remind us again why senators filibustered Bolton’s appointment? Was it because he was supposed to be an ineffective diplomat, or an effective one? Or was it just because he hurt George Voinovich’s little feelings?
I don’t generally get around to WestHawk; this is from three weeks ago:
Yesterday the U.S. Department of Defense announced its troop rotation plan for Iraq for mid 2006. Only six Army brigades have been given warning orders for deployment to Iraq in mid 2006 (and only one of these six brigades is from the National Guard). In addition to these Army units, the Marine Corps will continue to support two regimental combat teams (equivalent to a brigade) in Iraq.
This winter and spring there will be 15-17 U.S. brigades in Iraq, including the 4-brigade strong 101st Airborne and 4th Infantry Divisions, 2 brigade-equivalents from the Marine Corps, and a variety of independent brigades (Stryker, armored cavalry regiment, etc.).
Thus, yesterday’s Defense Department announcement is a planned halving in U.S. maneuver units in Iraq between winter and summer.
Read the whole thing.
Hat Tip: Donald Sensing, who cites this as further proof that the Jackasses’ demands for Iraq drawdowns are nothing more than politics.
Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) came out with some language on withdrawal more reasonable than what we’ve heard from most of the Jackasses, prior to the vote on the “Murtha Resolution”:
“During the course of the next year, we need to focus our attention on how to reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq,” Obama said in a luncheon speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, a forum he had requested. “Notice that I say `reduce,’ and not `fully withdraw.'”
This is a good thing. Unfortunately, he followed it up with more language indicating that he really doesn’t have a clue:
“The administration has narrowed an entire debate about war into two camps: `cut-and-run’ or `stay the course,'” Obama said. “If you offer any criticism or even mention that we should take a second look at our strategy and change our approach, you are branded `cut-and-run.’ If you are ready to blindly trust the administration no matter what they do, you are willing to stay the course.”
If he had been listening to prominent members of the administration and the military, including Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Lt. Gen. John Vines, he’d know that they see our presence in Iraq beginning to come down within a three to six-month timeframe. Ah – some common ground!
The American people do deserve, and are increasingly insisting upon, some sort of forward visibility – a plan, if you will. But establishing time as a primary factor in that plan is foolhardy. It takes a very long time to create a fully functioning contemporary military – much longer than simply training and equipping ground combat units. It is likely that, barring a “cut-and-run” bill passing in Congress, we will have trainer/advisors, medical corps, air support units and the like, in Iraq for several more years. But the word is that Iraq has more than thirty battalions of ground troops which can function with only minor embedded coalition assistance.
What is needed is an objective oriented plan, which says, item-by-item, “once the Iraqi forces have such-and-such a level of capability, at such-and-such a function, then so many of these sorts of our units can come home” – with projections of when each objective is expected to be obtained. And, the funny thing is, I’m sure all this information exists within the administative/military hierarchy. However, knowing the way the military government works, it is likely voluminous, labyrinthine, and fragmented. Were the Administration to put together a team to accumulate all this management groundwork, then simplify and condense it down to a few pages, so the average citizen can grasp it. And then distribute it – along with the caveat that, like any good business plan, it is flexible, as conditions on the ground change, this whole controversy can be quelled.
I was going to write my own post on this this morning. But, as David Adesnik at OxBlog has already done it, I’ll just link:
Two things to notice. First, Matthews’ introduction of Murtha perpetuates the myth that a renowned hawk has suddenly turned against the war. A renowned hawk is what Murtha is, but as many, many bloggers pointed out immediately after Murtha made headlines, he’s been saying exactly the same thing about Iraq for more than a year now. This is a manufactured story.
Second of all, it is remarkably disingenuous for Murtha to talk about how his recent visit to Iraq changed his mind about the war. If you listen to the full interview, he also lists a number of other recent data points as contributing factors. In other words, Murtha himself is now peddling the myth of his sudden conversion from hawk to dove. Karl Rove would be proud.
Murtha was on Meet the Press this morning. And Russert was more balanced in his interview than Matthews. But Murtha was perpetuating the ancillary myth that there was “no progress” being made in Iraq. But, as Austin Bay blogs here, that’s hardly the reality:
After my return from Iraq I received phone calls and emails from military friends as they either came back to the US on leave or finished their tours and re-deployed “Stateside.” The typical phone call went like this: “I’m back. It’s great to be home. What’s up? How are you doing?” Then, the conversation quickly moved on to: “What’s with the press and Iraq?” The press usually meant television. On tv Iraq looked like it was going to Hell in a handbasket of flame and brutality; however, the images of carnage didn’t square with the troops’ experience.
Today on StrategyPage, my good friend Jim Dunnigan takes on the subject of “troop/press dissonance” from his typically idiosyncratic angle. I’m going to quote from “There’s more going on in Iraq than a media event” at length. (As the essay notes, there is also more going on in Iraq than a war.) Visit StrategyPage and read the second story, “Journalism versus Reality.”
Murtha further stated that he couldn’t get the straight dope from commanders on the ground in Iraq “because they were afraid of retribution.” Then he repeated the Shinseki Myth. But surely that wouldn’t be the case when those same commanders are talking “off the record” to their friend and confidant, Bay.
…Over at OSM they are linking to a reprint of David Burger’s Arson by Omission: Was the US Forest Service Fiddling While Ventura County Burned? (6 pages PDF): This simply did not get enough play in the mainstream media last year. And, as such, there simply hasn’t been enough political pressure, outside the beltway, to force any reform:
Anderson suggests one answer. In June 2002, the on-line magazine Slate published an article by Douglas Gantenbein entitled “Smokey the Businessman.” Gantenbein wrote, “In the past 10 years, wild-land firefighting has transformed from a federal government responsibility to a massive, extremely lucrative, private enterprise…. The real bucks are in private contracting.” Gantenbein made the argument, which Anderson echoes, that there is a sort of “good ol’ boys” network through which the government protects the status quo. This status quo includes private aircraft, private companies that outfit fire camps for fire crews, even private vendors who supply thousands of gallons of bottled water.
This story is a must-read, particularly for those of us here in the fire-prone West. Most of Burger’s article has to do with the 11,000 gallon Ilyushin IL-76. There are also the venerable Martin Mars seaplanes of Canada’s Flying Tankers Inc.. They are substantially smaller than the Ilyushins, at 7,200 gallons. That’s twice the capacity of the C-130A Hercules fire tankers, which make up the backbone of our fleet. But they only have two of them. There’s also the Evergreen Boeing 747, which has over twice the capacity of the Ilyushins (that got lots of press last year). But it has yet to get FAA approval. Russia has six IL-76s available at a moment’s notice.
But the USFS, NPS and BLM’s record of ineptitude is much broader than just fire management, and goes back much farther than that which is covered here. I also highly recommend reading Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park and In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests & the Myths of Nature.
Update: I almost forgot the 12,000 gallon 10 Tanker STC Douglas DC-10-10 that made such a splash in Paris this year. I don’t believe that’s passed FAA certification yet either. As well, the C-130As and the old Consolidated PB4Y-2s have been grounded for metal fatigue problems. That leaves us with only seven Lockheed P-3 Orions, two older Lockheed P-2V Neptunes, a Douglas DC-7, and a half-dozen or so Douglas C-54s run by private contractors . Just the lean nature of our fleet makes a strong argument for contracting outside the country.
Dr. Pat Santy, a psychiatrist out of Ann Arbor, MI, gives us some insite into the minds of the Bush-haters:
What makes Bush Hatred completely insane however, is the almost delusional degree of unremitting certitude of Bush’s evil; while simultaneously believing that the TRUE perpetrators of evil in the world are somehow good and decent human beings with the world’s intersts at heart.
This psychological defense mechanism is referred to as “displacement“.
One way you can usually tell that an individual is using displacement is that the emotion being displaced (e.g., anger) is all out of proportion to the reality of the situation. The purpose of displacement is to avoid having to cope with the actual reality. Instead, by using displacement, an individual is able to still experience his or her anger, but it is directed at a less threatening target than the real cause. In this way, the individual does not have to be responsible for the consequences of his/her anger and feels more safe–even thought that is not the case.
This explains the remarkable and sometimes lunatic appeasement of Islamofascists by so many governments and around the world, while they trash the US and particularly Bush. It explains why there is more emphasis on protecting the “rights” of terrorists, rather than holding them accountable for their actions (thier actions, by the way are also Bush’s fault, according to those in the throes of BDS). Our soldiers in Iraq are being killed because of Bush–not because of terrorist intent and behavior. Terrorist activity itself is blamed on Bush no matter where it occurs.
It isn’t even a stretch of the imagination for some to blame 9/11 on Bush. This is the insane “logic” of most psychological defense mechanisms. They temporarily spare you from the painful reality around you and give you the illusion that you are still in control.
An extended, but not-too-technical post – and a very good read.
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
Update: Here’s a prime example of a dilusional Bush-hater:
I’m an anti-Bush guy, and I know Mary Mapes a little. She’s a neighbor. But I hope you’ll stick with me even if you’re at the other end of the spectrum. Listen, some of my favorite neighbors are pro-Bush, and they’re surprisingly decent people.
One of many intriguing points in Mapes’ book—a thing I shouldn’t have had to be reminded of—is that the documents she and Dan Rather based their story on were never exposed as fakes.
Hat Tip: LGF
A very well-written, and must-read, article at Tigerhawk:
Dissenters often (but not always) claim that they “support the troops.” Fairly or not, one often gets the impression that many of them do not really like soldiers and claim that they support them only as a political tactic, to avoid the backlash that followed the anti-war protests during Vietnam. Be that as it may, since our soldiers are fighting for the expressed purpose of preventing the enemy from achieving its victory conditions, it seems to me obvious that one cannot both advocate withdrawal and “support the troops,” at least in this superficial sense. “Supporting the troops” means nothing if it does not mean supporting their principal and motivating endeavor, which is to kill the enemy or otherwise deprive it of its capacity to fight. Advocates of early withdrawal do not “support the troops,” at least as long as most of the troops in question believe in their mission, which seems to be the case even today. Moreover, certain forms of dissent quite explicitly undermine the troops. For example, activists who seek to obstruct military recruitment raise the chances that any given soldier will have a longer tour in the Iraq theater. Preventing the replacement of a soldier is precisely the opposite of “supporting the troops”.
In any case, for a few people on the right the simple fact that anti-war dissent can help the enemy and undermine our soldiers is enough to destroy its legitimacy (it is actually very difficult to find examples of this point of view among influential serious people, but the left keeps claiming that the right says this, so let’s give the left the benefit of the doubt). They are wrong. The American system of government depends on open and public debate about policy. If some of that debate has the unintended consequence of giving hope to the enemy or demoralizing our soldiers, that is an acceptable price to pay. Our soldiers understand that the free society they defend exercises its freedom by arguing over the propriety and conduct of limited wars. They also understand that reasonable Americans can disagree about limited wars without being “unpatriotic,” even if their arguments inflict collateral damage on the war effort.
Read the whole thing
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
Intelligent, articulate, solidly conservative, and quite camera-friendly – Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R – Tenn. 7th Dist.) is one to watch. This is not to say that I endorse her – only that I see her as an up-and-comer in the Dumbo-party.
Such is the title of this Slate article by Prof. David Kairys, of Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, who has been instrumental in several anti-gun cases. Well, you know it’s going to be barking moonbat crap, from sentence #1, where he holds out the universal evil “Halliburton” talisman. But Eugene Volokh, after reading the article, asks just where does Kairys present ANY evidence of the gun industry “buying” influence in Washington? And, citing the title, and the last two sentences: “Doubtless [other industries] will make some steep campaign donations to get [immunity from lawsuits]. And why not, since the rule of law appears to be suddenly up for sale?” wonders how Slate can present this as a news article, and not an opinion piece?
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Todd Zywicki cites Jesse Jackson’s discovery of the “Constitution in Exile”:
We have repeatedly marveled here at the discovery by some of a secret plot by conservatives and libertarians to reimpose the so-called “Constitution in Exile.” So secret, apparently, that advocates of the theory won’t even use the label in public (of course, they don’t seem to use it in private either…). Jesse Jackson is the latest to have unmasked the nefarious plot:
Now, on the far right of American politics, comes a new reaction proclaiming that the real Constitution has been “in exile” since the 1930s. They want to roll back not only the privacy doctrine on which women’s right to choose rests, but the Warren Court’s rulings and those of the Roosevelt Court also. They would return the nation to the era of the Gilded Age, when unions were outlawed as a restraint on trade, when corporate regulation was struck down as exceeding congressional power and when states’ rights were exalted.Alito is in that line.
Courtesy of Ann Althouse, who provides a pithy assessment of Professor Jackson’s legal analysis as well.My question is more pedestrian–where in the world did Jesse Jackson latch on to the phrase “Constitution in Exile”? If it has filtered down to popular use in this manner, this is a meme that seems to have a remarkable degree of strength.
Ann found the article so vile, that she edited it out of her post. It is basically your standard barking moonbat anti-Alito diatribe – cherry-picking decisions to support the basic argument that Alito is bad because the Christian fundamentalist right likes him.
But Jackson’s idiocy is further evidenced by his citation of the so-called “Roosevelt Court”, as a bastion of civil rights. In reality, the Hughes and Stone Courts had a very mixed bag, with respect to civil rights. With the big black mark being Korematsu (1944), where the Court upheld the internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. And indeed, the decay of State’s Rights can be taken at least back to the White Court.
Further, Roosevelt himself – a noted anti-Semite – was not a boon to African-Americans either, as noted in this Reason Online review of Jim Powell’s “FDR’s Folly“, by Damon W. Root:
[T]he Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 authorized the secretary of agriculture to inflate prices by reducing farm acreage. This meant white farm owners were paid to let their land sit idle, often resulting in the eviction of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, a significant number of whom were African American. Powell reports that reduced acreage particularly affected sharecroppers, whose estimated annual cash income fell from $735 in 1929 to $216 in 1933. The Department of Agriculture, moreover, paid farmers to destroy crops and slaughter livestock. This occurred while millions of Americans went hungry. “This was just the sort of thing,” Powell notes, “that John Steinbeck protested against in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath.”
Southern states, home to the nation’s poorest citizens yet full of dependable Democratic voters, received less New Deal spending than comparatively richer Western states, whose voters perhaps required additional persuasion to support Democratic candidates. Powell cites one study showing that states with a higher percentage of black residents and a lower per capita income received fewer New Deal dollars than richer, whiter states. Thus blacks were directly injured by New Deal policies, then ignored when it came time to dispense New Deal dollars.
It was New Deal labor laws that had the most pernicious impact on African Americans. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), in effect from June 1933 until a unanimous Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in May 1935 (in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States), was considered the hallmark of the New Deal. In addition to creating the Works Progress Administration, the NIRA authorized the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which organized cartels, fixed wages and prices, and, under section 7(a), established the practice of collective bargaining, whereby a union selected by a majority of employees exclusively represented all employees.
While such compulsory unionism is routinely celebrated as a milestone for the American worker, many African Americans saw things differently. The NAACP’s publication The Crisis, for example, decried the monopoly powers granted to racist unions by the NRA, noting in 1934 that “union labor strategy seems to be to obtain the right to bargain with the employees as the sole representative of labor, and then close the union to black workers.” Members of the black press had something of a field day attacking the NRA, rechristening it the “Negro Removal Act,” “Negroes Robbed Again,” “Negro Run Around,” and “No Roosevelt Again.”
NRA codes harmed other poor groups as well. By setting the price of food and goods above market levels, the agency’s price controls made it that much more expensive for the nation’s poor and unemployed to provide for themselves and their families. Struggling entrepreneurs also suffered. Jacob Maged, a 49-year-old immigrant dry cleaner, spent three months in jail in 1934 for charging 35 cents to press a suit, rather than the NRA-mandated 40 cents.
To meet the inflated payrolls required by New Deal minimum wage codes, employers eliminated unskilled and marginal positions, precisely the sort of jobs filled by African Americans and other disadvantaged groups. According to a Labor Department report, between 30,000 and 50,000 workers, primarily African Americans in the South, lost their jobs within just two weeks of the activation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), which set a uniform minimum wage. Not surprisingly, both unions and industrialists in the North favored the minimum wage, since it undercut their competitors in the South.
In 1935 the National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act, after its sponsor, Democratic New York Sen. Robert Wagner) revived section 7(a) of the recently defunct NRA and granted monopoly bargaining power to unions selected by a majority of employees. Neither company-sponsored unions nor unions representing a minority of workers were permitted. The act’s original draft contained a clause forbidding discrimination against African Americans by federally recognized unions, but the clause was removed at the behest of the American Federation of Labor, a notoriously racist outfit at the time.
Predictably, FDR failed to spend any of his considerable political capital to retain the clause. Empowered by the Wagner Act, American unions brazenly continued their decades-long discrimination against African Americans, the effects of which are still visible in racial disparities within unionized trades such as construction.
So Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal increased poverty and joblessness among African Americans, empowered discriminatory labor unions, and, when the Supreme Court overturned Lochner v. New York, removed an effective legal tool to challenge segregation laws and other racist state actions. McMahon’s ambitious attempt to salvage FDR’s record on race is clever, but his focus on the long-term and secondary effects of Roosevelt’s judicial nominees and policies fails to convince in the face of the direct negative outcomes the New Deal produced for many American blacks.
Democratic talking heads would like us to believe that yesterday’s elections indicate some sort of trend. The NYPost’s John Podhoretz doesn’t see it:
To sum up: Incumbent party victories in two states and one city. A Republican state rejected Democratic initiatives. A Democratic state rejected Republican initiatives.
Don’t let the Democratic spin doctors fool you. Election Day 2005 has nothing to tell us about where the electorate is going in the wake of Bush’s terrible year.
This from Mickey Kaus at Slate:
Time‘s Joe Klein reports on a White House attempt to “destroy” Brent Scowcroft, quoting “a prominent Republican,” who tells Klein that the White House sent out talking points “about how to attack Brent Scowcroft” after Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent New Yorker profile.
“I was so disgusted that I deleted the damn e-mail before I read it,” the Republican said. “But that’s all this White House has now: the politics of personal destruction.” [Emph. added]
Hmm. Weekly Standard notes that if Klein’s source hadn’t deleted the e-mail he would have noticed that it was a completely civil and substantive attempt to rebut the substance of Scowcroft’s arguments. Real Clear Politics reprints the sober, almost academic email, which ends with a vicious, inflammatory, “Let the debate proceed.”
Please don’t take that as a play-on-words, as I believe that, considering his condition, Charles Krauthammer can’t stand up. But he sure can deliver. His bit of sarcasm on today’s FNC Special Report with Brit Hume (on again in about eight hours – check your local listings), about the Angry Left’s pathetic attempts to show that Bush is trying to divert attention from “Libbygate”, is a total ROTF deal.
This morning the news channels are buzzing from right to left with the news that Harriet Miers has withdrawn her name from nomination to the Supreme Court. This is probably no surprise to the President, as the furor over her nomination has been boiling since day one of her nomination. In fact, I don’t think it is a surprise to anyone, on the right or on the left.
We will now see a completely new fight in the Senate as regards any nominee that President Bush sends up. The real drawback to Ms. Miers’ nomination was not that she is a conservative, or that she was not qualified, although that smoke screen was released early in the process. Most of the left’s criticism was that she was too conservative, but the howls of foul came from the conservatives on the hill. While both sides of the aisle were crying over her lack of conservative or liberal views, both sides were mostly concerned over her lack of a paper trail, or record of her views.
Here we go again. The President will have to make another choice, and there is the rub. The conservatives are hoping his next nominee will be to the right with a clear record as such, and the liberals will be praying (!) for a centrist or even a liberal candidate. (Don’t hold your breath Teddy!) I’m not a stealth anything, most people know that I’m a conservative. I believe that the constitution should be interpreted, not modified by the supreme court. If the left loses the white house and both houses of Congress, they should not live under the false assumption that they deserve any power in the courts.
Roe v. Wade. That seems to be the main litmus test of any court nominee, regardless of the level of judiciary. But anyone who thinks that one judge could singlehandedly overturn the ruling is living in wonderland. It just ain’t gonna happen that way. I personally am against abortion, it is murder of the baby no matter how you look at it. It was a wrong move to begin with, but it has become so ingrained in our society that it is going to take a long time and a lot of education to get that one ruling deleted.
OK, let the games begin!
On NBC’s Meet the Press today, when talking about the Wilson/Plame affair, Sen. Charles Schumer (D – NY) said about special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald: “He is a prosecutor’s prosecutor – and I will abide by his decision.”
WTF – you idiot: You are a SENATOR. Unless this comes down to a matter of impeachment (highly unlikely), it doesn’t matter whether you “abide” by any actions of Fitzgerald or not. And even than, your statement of prejudice, before hearing the case, would be quite damning.
More proof that you are little more than a pea-brained Jackass Party hack.
Update: Eek!!! I just realized I started this post with a proclamation that Schumer couldn’t possibly be that stupid, and ended it with a statement that he must be that stupid! Make of it what you will.