Blade Runner (RiShawn Biddle, 11.3.08, American Spectator)
A PRINCETON, HARVARD, AND GEORGETOWN law grad, [Indiana Governor Mitch] Daniels parlayed his father's ties to the political machine of Sen. Richard Lugar into behind-the-scenes stints with the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Reagan Administration, and the Hudson Institute. During his tenure in the Bush Administration, Daniels earned two monikers -- "The Blade" and "Mitch the Knife" -- and the ire of pork-loving congressional leaders for his aggressive spending cut proposals and efficiency efforts such as the Program Assessment Rating Tool.After winning the Indiana governorship -- and ending a 16-year string of Democratic control -- Daniels lived up to both his nickname and his reputation as he looked to cut an $800 million structural budget deficit and cut back a bloated state government of 74 agencies and 319 different boards. On his first day in office in 2005, he cribbed from Ronald Reagan's playbook by rescinding collective bargaining agreements with government employee unions. He then passed a two-year budget that cut back spending, implemented a plan to base employee raises on performance improvements, and allowed him to be more aggressive in improving government efficiency than he could ever do during his White House service.
An overhaul of the state's notoriously inefficient Bureau of Motor Vehicles later that year, which included shutting down 27 of its branches, angered legislators, who have long-used the agency as a patronage tool. They raised even more flack after Daniels began a wave of privatizations, including handing off prison cafeteria services to food services giant Aramark, contracting Medicaid operations with firms such as technology consulting giant IBM, and leasing the newly built New Castle state prison -- which the state couldn't afford to operate despite spending $135 million to build -- to the Corrections Corporation of America.
Then in 2006, Daniels struck a deal to lease the Indiana East-West Toll Road for $3.8 billion to Macquarie-Cintra, an Australian-Spanish consortium. This enraged Democrats, citizens who lived along the highway in Northern Indiana, and even some Republicans, who accused him of placing a precious state asset into foreign hands. Legislators approved it by a narrow margin. A year later, they rejected his plans to privatize the state lottery and contract with private firms to build and operate another state highway.
Despite facing re-election this year, Daniels couldn't keep himself from riling another faction of the state's political establishment. As part of a property tax reform plan, he proposed to eliminate the state's 1,008 townships, whose officials control the patronage that fuels statewide politics. Although Daniels didn't win that battle, he eventually succeeded in eliminating 964 township tax assessors; on Tuesday, voters in five counties will decide whether to eliminate 44 other such positions.
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Harvard Law Days (Frontline, 11/03/08, PBS)
Bradford Berenson Harvard Law, class of '91; associate White House counsel, 2001-'03The law school generally at that time was riven ideologically, and not just in terms of Republican/Democrat partisan politics, but there were contending schools of legal thought at the time, represented on the faculty, that really polarized both the faculty and the student body. There was a far-left group of professors who adhered to what was known as critical legal studies, and then there were a handful of conservative professors, like Charles Fried, who had served in the Reagan administration. There were intense debates over affirmative action and race issues. This is, after all, just a few years after the end of the Reagan presidency. ...
That doesn't mean that, day to day, people weren't friendly to one another, but the classroom was very politicized. The debates and discussions of the law and of cases frequently pit conservatives in our class against liberals in our class, and the discussions often got quite heated. I would say the environment at Harvard Law School back then was political in a borderline unhealthy way. It was quite intense.
... Interestingly, race was at the forefront of the agenda. There were intense debates over affirmative action that sometimes got expressed through fights over tenure decisions relating to junior faculty at the law school. There were women professors and minority professors who either had come up for tenure or were coming up for tenure, and there were big fights, on the faculty and in the law school at large, over whether they should receive tenure, whether the quality of their scholarship merited that. ...
[A]fter [Obama] became president of the Review, he was under a lot of pressure to participate and lend his voice to those debates. And he did, I think, to some degree. But I would not have described him as a campus radical or a campus political leader. He was the president of the Harvard Law Review, the leader of that organization. But, in that role, his job was to manage, in essence, a publication, and the editors who brought it forth and to do a lot of close editing of academic legal articles. …
You don't become president of the Harvard Law Review, no matter how political, or how liberal the place is, by virtue of affirmative action, or by virtue of not being at the very top of your class in terms of legal ability. Barack was at the very top of his class in terms of legal ability. He had a first-class legal mind and, in my view, was selected to be president of the Review entirely on his merits.
... I never regarded him as kind of a racial special pleader, or a person looking for race-based benefits, either for himself or others. I think as a policy matter, he supported affirmative action and believed in the arguments for it. But unlike many people on the left, he was also willing to acknowledge that it had costs, and he could at least appreciate the arguments on the other side. ...
Just in a political sense, what kind of a person were you looking for [to serve as president]? ...
The block of conservatives on the Law Review my year I think was eager to avoid having any of the most political people on the left govern the Review. I mean, the first bedrock criterion, I think for almost all of the editors, was to have somebody with an absolutely first-rate legal mind who would be able to engage competently with the nation's top legal scholars on their scholarship and on these articles, and who would provide the intellectual leadership for the Review that it always needed. That was non-negotiable for almost everybody right or left.
But there were a number of people that would have met that criterion. There were at least a large handful who probably had the intellectual and personal characteristics to be good leaders of the Review. From among those, the conservatives were eager to have somebody who would treat them fairly, who would listen to what they had to say, who would not abuse the powers of the office to favor his ideological soul mates and punish those who had different views. Somebody who would basically play it straight, I think was really what we were looking for.
Was that hard to find?
It was very hard to find. And ultimately, the conservatives on the Review supported Barack as president in the final rounds of balloting because he fit that bill far better than the other people who were running. ...
We had all worked with him over the course of a year. And we had all spent countless hours in the presence of Barack, as well as others of our colleagues who were running, in Gannett House [the Law Review offices], and so you get a pretty good sense of people over the course of a year of late nights working on the Review. You know who the rabble-rousers are. You know who the people are who are blinded by their politics. And you know who the people are who, despite their politics, can reach across and be friendly to and make friends with folks who have different views. And Barack very much fell into the latter category. ...
[After Obama is selected,] he does a very able job as president. Puts out what I think was a very good volume of the Review. Does a great job managing the difficult and complicated interpersonal dynamics on the Review. And manages somehow, in an extremely fractious group, to keep everybody almost happy.
Some of the people who are not as happy as others, I think much to their surprise, are some of the African American people who believe that now it's their turn.
Absolutely right, absolutely right. I think Barack took 10 times as much grief from those on the left on the Review as from those of us on the right. And the reason was, I think there was an expectation among those editors on the left that he would affirmatively use the modest powers of his position to advance the cause, whatever that was. They thought, you know, finally there's an African American president of the Harvard Law Review; it's our turn, and he should aggressively use this position, and his authority and his bully pulpit to advance the political or philosophical causes that we all believe in.
And Barack was reluctant to do that. It's not that he was out of sympathy with their views, but his first and foremost goal, it always seemed to me, was to put out a first-rate publication. And he was not going to let politics or ideology get in the way of doing that. ...
He had some discretion as president to exercise an element of choice for certain of the positions on the masthead; it wasn't wide discretion, but he had some. And I think a lot of the minority editors on the Review expected him to use that discretion to the maximum extent possible to empower them. To put them in leadership positions, to burnish their resumes, and to give them a chance to help him and help guide the Review. He didn't do that. He declined to exercise that discretion to disrupt the results of votes or of tests that were taken by various people to assess their fitness for leadership positions.
He was unwilling to undermine, based on the way I viewed it, meritocratic outcomes or democratic outcomes in order to advance a racial agenda. That earned him a lot of recrimination and criticism from some on the left, particularly some of the minority editors of the Review. ...
It confirmed the hope that I and others had had at the time of the election that he would basically be an honest broker, that he would not let ideology or politics blind him to the enduring institutional interests of the Review. It told me that he valued the success of his own presidency of the Review above scoring political points of currying favor with his political supporters.
Eight Is Enough: Your election night guide to the swing states McCain needs to win. (Jeffrey H. Anderson, 11/03/08, Weekly Standard)
As you settle in with your bowl of popcorn and drink to watch the quadrennial competition for America's highest office, you need a scorecard. You are eagerly anticipating seeing the national map light up in red and blue--a welcome reminder of our federalist design--but what should you be watching for? How will you know whether John McCain is doing well enough to have any shot of pulling off the upset?There are only ten states that were decided by 5 percent or less in each of the last two presidential elections: Ohio, Nevada, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Oregon (yes, Oregon), Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Mexico, and Florida (which was decided by 5.01 percent in 2004 if you're nitpicking). Not surprisingly, these states will be important in 2008. [...]
[I]t seems rather unlikely that Obama will fail to win any states that either Gore or Kerry succeeded in winning--let alone any that both men won. So where does that leave McCain? The good news for the Republican is that he doesn't need to win any states that Bush didn't win. The bad news is that he probably won't, and so he needs to win all of the states that Bush swept in the last two elections.
McCain needs to take Florida, Missouri, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and, most dauntingly, Ohio. He needs to go 8-0 in these states--in addition to winning all of the other states that Bush swept (which he should). If one of those eight lights up for Obama on election night, it's lights out for McCain.
It'll be lights out, that is, unless McCain can somehow win a state that Bush didn't sweep in 2000 and 2004. This is a tall order. The most likely possibility would seem to be New Mexico, New Hampshire, or Wisconsin. [...]
If McCain wins these eight states, along with the others he's expected to win more easily, but without pulling off any upsets in likely Obama territory--then that will give him 274 electoral votes, four more than needed. But there's no margin for error; each of these states is worth at least five electoral votes.
Is Obama Swiping the Tax Cut Issue?: Voters seem to think he’s the Ronald Reagan tax-cutter of the 2008 election (Larry Kudlow, 11/03/08, National Review)
Wouldn’t it be the height of irony if Barack Obama wins this election as the Ronald Reagan tax-cutter? His tax plans are severely flawed and his campaign narrative to support them is all wrong. And yet a recent Rasmussen poll shows that 31 percent of voters believe Obama is the real tax cutter, while only 11 percent choose McCain.Believe it or not, Obama seems to have swiped the tax-cut issue from the Republican party. How can this be?
Well, for almost two years Obama has talked about cutting taxes for 95 percent of the people.
The Coming Obama-Press War: It's inevitable (Jack Shafer, Nov. 3, 2008, Slate)
No matter how well he prepares, every new president faces a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't template, as James Deakin explains in his 1984 book Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House, and the Truth. These either-or constructions, Deakin writes, include:How is the president getting along with the news media? Are they treating him well or badly? Is he a master of communications or an ineffective performer on the tube? Is he accessible to reporters and candid with them? Or is he secretive, misleading the press and throwing a cloak of national security over the administration's precious bodily fluids? Why doesn't he have more press conferences? Why have his press conferences become such increasingly meaningless spectacles? Why does he manipulate the press so brazenly to achieve his purposes? Why doesn't he use the press more effectively to achieve his purposes? Why is the press so subservient to the president? Why is the press so hostile to the president?
To Deakin's list of relations-with-the-press critiques that a president inevitably faces we can add these either-ors that Obama will have to endure from the press: Is he moving too fast on the economy or too slow? Is he too deferential to Congress or too pushy? Is he coddling Iran or baiting it? Why isn't he making good on his Iraq pledge—why is he throwing the Iraq victory away? Why is he repeating Bill Clinton's mistakes? Why can't he govern from the center like Bill Clinton? Isn't it time he made good on his domestic campaign promises? What makes him think the current economy can take the shock of universal health care? He's as secrecy-obsessed as George W. Bush! He's more combative with Congress than Bush was! You call that a liberal appointment to the Supreme Court?!
Obama will abandon the habit of walking on water he picked up during the past two years because you can't build a moat around the White House the way you can a presidential campaign. [...]
Obama the candidate thrived on the strategic ambiguity that made liberals think he was liberal, moderates think he was moderate, and conservatives think he was tolerable. But after the election, ambiguity must be replaced with action, and action is controversial—that is, the stuff of news.It won't be war until Obama fights back, as he will. Everything the press does makes the job of governing more difficult, Deakin observes, even putatively sympathetic reporting. As Obama faces that reality, he'll become less and less Obama-esque, more vengeful and cloistered, and the press will have a fresh story to pursue: the decline of Obamaism and the triumph of Washington as usual. How much will pent-up antagonism at the overcontrolling Obama campaign contribute to the abrasive reports? You have to ask?
McCain Wins Fans in India: India has thrived under Bush's pro-outsourcing policies, and many Indians hope for further prosperity with McCain (Mehul Srivastava , 11/03/08, Business Week)
[I]n the American-style shopping malls and 24/7 call centers of modern India, where McDonald's franchises sell paneer tikka wraps and American flags adorn the walls of outsourcing firms, the past eight years of a Republican Presidency have been fantastic. That approval of a Bush Presidency has overflowed into a wellspring of support for another Republican Presidency, making India one of those rare countries in the world where support for Obama's historic run has not resulted in a landslide of public opinion in his favor. Indeed, depending on which poll you look at, Indians either prefer McCain and Obama equally, or Obama by the smallest margin in the world.India's enchantment with the U.S. has grown in direct proportion to their economic intertwining: The more business Indians do with Americans, the more they seem to fall in love with them. Indeed, as the world has grown disenchanted with America during the Bush Presidency, Indians have grown to become its biggest fans.
Netanyahu, 59, is an unreconstructed hawk, raised in the cold war's shadow. Obama listened politely, but the gap was obvious. "Obama, clearly, is a product of a new age," says the Israeli.The Jewish state, on the other hand, may be on the verge of slipping into an older one. Israel's doves are struggling. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced last week that she had failed to form a government; lawmakers set elections for February. The biggest benefactor is likely to be Netanyahu, who's now even with Livni in polls. The Likud leader seems the most American of Israeli politicians. His uncompromising rhetoric would probably mesh well with a McCain administration.
Presidential Vote Equation--October 30, 2008 (Ray Fair)
The final economic values ("final" as of October 30, 2008) are 0.22 for GROWTH, 2.88 for INFLATION, and 3 for GOODNEWS. Given these values, the predicted Republican vote share (of the two-party vote) is 48.09 percent. So the prediction is 51.91 for the Democrats and 48.09 for the Republicans, for a spread of 3.82.
Obama's Attack Ad On Himself (Mary Katharine Ham, 11/03/08, Worldwide Standard)
...to go from a president who acts so consistently on core principles that no one ever has any question where he stands or how he'll deal with an issue to one who is so hollow that there is really no way of knowing what he believes or would do except that it seems like it will always be what's best for him politically at that moment.
Nikkyoso: A 'cancer' of teachers? (SETSUKO KAMIYA, 11/04/08, Japan Times)
Nariaki Nakayama of the Liberal Democratic Party resigned because of gaffes he made in front of the press only five days after being appointed transport minister in the Cabinet Prime Minister Taro Aso formed in late September.Nakayama retracted his remarks, except for the hostile ones he made toward the Japan Teachers' Union (Nikkyoso). In fact, he escalated his attacks on the union, going as far as calling it "a cancer."
Nakayama, a former education minister in Junichiro Koizumi's Cabinet, is not alone in his views, which are shared by many conservatives.
After Bush: How to repair US alliances: Bush's exit won't suddenly fix things. Both sides need to step up. (Michael Fullilove, November 4, 2008, CS Monitor)
US foreign policy has undergone a welcome shift during Bush's second term away from unilateralism and ideology and toward multilateralism and pragmatism. There can be no going back for his successor. Hopefully, McCain understands this fact as well as Obama plainly does.
Obama's Talk Show Advantage Is No Idle Chatter (Howard Kurtz, 11/03/08, Washington Post)
[D]aytime and late-night shows have been an underrated factor in this campaign, and an undeniable advantage for Obama. Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman and panelists on "The View" all confronted McCain, while Obama has basically joked and danced his way through such appearances, including a "Daily Show" stint last week in which Jon Stewart asked him about "the whole socialism/Marxist thing." If anyone doubts there is a liberal entertainment establishment, it has been vividly on display.
Hey Liberals, Don’t Worry (WILLIAM KRISTOL, 11/03/08, NY Times)
1. It would be a victory for an underdog. Liberals are supposed to like underdogs. McCain is a lonely guy standing up against an unprecedentedly well-financed, superorganized, ExxonMobil-like Obama juggernaut. A McCain upset victory would be a classic liberal happy ending.2. It would be a defeat for the establishment. Obama’s most recent high-profile Republican endorser was D.C. insider Kenneth Duberstein. Liberals should be on the side of hard-working plumbers, not big-shot lobbyists — oops, sorry, big-shot strategic advisers and consultants. And Duberstein said that Colin Powell’s endorsement was “the Good Housekeeping seal of approval on Barack Obama.” Doesn’t that comment embody everything that liberals (and many conservatives, including me) find creepy about smug establishment back-scratching and gatekeeping in America?
3. It would be a victory for the future. With President Bush’s approval rating at about 25 percent, a McCain triumph would mean Americans were making a judgment on two future alternatives, not merely voting on the basis of their resentment at the past performance of George W. Bush. It would mean voters were looking ahead, not back. Liberals should therefore welcome a McCain win as a triumph of hope over fear, of the future over the past.
4. It would be a victory for freedom. Obama supporter Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic writes that “tyrants and génocidaires would sleep less soundly during a McCain presidency.” Liberals should be opposed to tyranny and genocide. Wieseltier also acknowledges that McCain “was splendidly right about the surge, which is not a small thing; and the grudging way Obama treats the reversal in Iraq, when he treats it at all, is disgraceful.” The surge advanced not only our national security but the cause of freedom in the world. Liberals should be votaries of freedom.
5. A McCain victory would be good for liberalism. Look at recent history. Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress begat Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress produced Newt Gingrich. Who knows what would follow a President Obama and a Democratic Congress? Here’s one possibility: President Sarah Palin.
So liberals shouldn’t be too upset at the idea of McCain winning.
The Test (Steve Coll, November 10, 2008 , The New Yorker)
The next Presidency has within its reach at least two generation-spanning causes: the need to jump-start a new energy economy, and, in so doing, help to contain climate change; and the need to enact a plan to provide quality health care to all Americans, and, in so doing, complete the project of social insurance that Roosevelt described in 1935. Each of these projects is urgent, but it is health-care reform that speaks more directly to the economic and human dimensions of the present downturn.The accumulating failures in the country’s health-care system are a cause of profound weakness in the American economy; unaddressed, this weakness will exacerbate the coming recession and crimp its aftermath. A large number of the country’s housing foreclosures in recent years appear to be related to medical problems and health-care expenses. American businesses often can’t afford to hire as many employees as they would like because of rising health-insurance costs; employees often can’t afford to quit to chase their better-mousetrap dreams because they can’t risk going without coverage. Add to this the system’s moral failings: about twenty-two thousand people die in this country annually because they lack health insurance. That is more than the number of Americans who are murdered in a year.
Presidents who help right a wrong of this character are generally immortalized in granite, but to succeed they require a transformation-minded Congress, too. The next Congress will likely be without the active leadership of its great lion of social reform, Ted Kennedy. There is only one senator with the wonky expertise, work habits, and political stature to fill Kennedy’s place: Hillary Clinton. The psychology she would bring to this inheritance would surely be complex, but no health-care-reform bill will pass without her. Lyndon Johnson, also a person of complex psychology, understood this politics of legacy well. At the Medicare signing ceremony, he invited Jimmy Roosevelt, F.D.R.’s eldest son, and the aging Harry Truman, who had pushed hard for health-care reform, to share the glory. Johnson, in his remarks, linked them (and himself, of course) to the Social Security Act and its “illustrious place in history,” and he carefully recited an “honor roll” of fifteen congressional leaders who contributed to the bill’s passage. It was, Johnson said, a “time for triumph.” It is, even more so, today.”
The Triumph of Ignorance: Why morons succeed in US politics. (George Monbiot, October 28, 2008, The Guardian)
Like most people on this side of the Atlantic I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan’s response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter - stumbling a little, using long words - carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said “there you go again”(2). His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.
It wasn’t always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton - were among the greatest thinkers of their age.
All you need to know about why we elect the Stupid rather than the Bright is that the none of the latter can subscribe to the Founding tenet of America: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Why would we elect subversives?
Barack Obama may have made a hash of choosing a church, but he'd have no shot at the presidency if he were an intellectual instead.
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McCain's Shameful Slur: The Republicans' appalling attack on Rashid Khalidi (Christopher Hitchens, Nov. 3, 2008, Slate)
My main point, though, is not to call attention to the bullying and demagogy of McCain's attack. It is to observe how completely it undermines any claim on his part to foreign-policy experience. Khalidi has been known to me for some time and can easily be read and consulted by anyone with the remotest curiosity about the Israeli-Arab dispute. He is highly renowned, well beyond the borders of his own discipline, for his measure and care and scruple in weighing the issue. If he is seriously to be compared to a "neo-Nazi," then the Republican nominee has put the United States in the unbelievable position of slandering the most courageously "moderate" of the Palestinian Arabs as a brownshirt and a fascist. What then has been the point of every negotiation on a two-state solution since President George H.W. Bush convened the peace conference in Madrid in 1991? Nazis, after all, are to be crushed, not accommodated. One would have to think hard before coming up with a more crazy and irresponsible statement on any subject. Once again, it seems that McCain utterly lost his bearings.I put the word moderate in quotation marks above because I dislike employing it in its usual form. Rashid Khalidi's family is a famous one in Jerusalem, long respected by Arab and Christian and Jew and Druze and Armenian, and holding a celebrated house and position in the city since approximately the time of the Crusades. I have had the honor of being invited to this very house. If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so. I would go further and say that if Barack Obama was looking for a Palestinian friend, he could not have chosen any better. But perhaps John McCain has decided that he doesn't need any Palestinian friends and neither do we. Perhaps he thinks it's all right to refer to refugees and victims of occupation, who have been promised self-determination and statehood at the podium of the United Nations and the U.S. Congress by George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, as if they were Hitlerites. How shameful. How disgusting. How ignorant.
ON JUNE 11, 1979, the New York Times ran an article explaining that the PLO was worried that the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt would undermine Palestinians. The article quoted Khalidi opposing the deal for that very reason, and identified him as somebody "close to Al Fatah," an arm of the PLO.It read:
One view shared by the Palestinian leadership and the rank and file, down to armed youths who guard doorways and intersections, is that the goal of an independent state will be foreclosed if the Camp David accords succeed. "We are in a make-or-break-it period," asserted Rashid Khalidi, a professor of political science who is close to Al Fatah. "If we don't turn the tide, if what (Egyptian President Anwar) Sadat is doing is not decisively repudiated, if the idea that Sadat had brought peace is allowed to stick without regard to Palestinian rights, then we are done in. Israel doesn't need to sign with us. They already control the land."
Also noteworthy about the quote was Khalidi's use of the term "we" in reference to the Palestinian leadership, which turns out to be more of a habit than an isolated occurrence.
For instance, a January 6, 1981 Christian Science Monitor article that refers to Khalidi as "a Palestinian with good access to the PLO leadership," reads:
Dr. Khalidi also argued that the PLO's standing among Arabs in the Israeli-occupied areas has grown significantly. "Quite apart from the politics of it, we have built up tremendous links with the Palestinians 'on the inside' in different ways. We can render them services, often through our compatriots in the West, that King Hussein, for example, could never match. We've never been stronger there, and the trend is continuing," he said.
Ironically, the same article quotes him as saying that hardliners within the PLO "perceive the new administration as basically hostile -- possibly more hostile than the Carter administration." Yes, on Planet Khalidi, even Jimmy Carter could be seen as being overtly hostile to the Palestinians.
But the evidence for the connections between Khalidi and the PLO are much more explicit than that. Thomas Friedman, in a June 8, 1982 New York Times piece about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, referred to Khalidi as "a director of the Palestinian press agency, Wafa." To be clear, Wafa is controlled by the PLO --and you don't have to take my word for it. Even Khalidi himself, on page 7 of his 1986 book Under Siege: P.L.O. Decisionmaking During the 1982 War, describes it as "the P.L.O.'s news agency."
That's not the most telling part of Under Siege. In the book's preface, Khalidi reserves his first paragraph of thanks for the research assistance provided by the PLO in general, and Arafat specifically. "Permission to utilize the P.L.O. Archives for the first time was generously given by the Chairman of the P.L.O. Executive Committee, Yasser 'Arafat," Khalidi wrote. "To him, and to the dedicated individuals working in the Office of the Chairman, the P.L.O. Archives, and the Palestine News Agency (WAFA), who extended every possible assistance to me on three trips to Tunis, I owe deep thanks."
Illinois citizens need not fear a Constitutional Convention (Bruno Behrend, 11/03/08, Illinois Citizens Coalition)
On November 4th, Illinois citizens will have the opportunity to vote on the most important issue facing the state. It is the referendum on the Constitutional Convention question. If Illinois citizens are interested in fixing their state, they should vote “Yes.”The constitutional convention process is 100% citizen-driven, and therefore promises to change the dynamics of Illinois politics. Citizens call the convention. Citizens elect 2 delegates from each Senate district, and while the delegates will write up any proposed changes, it is the citizens who have the final say through the ratification vote. That’s right, it is the citizens who ratify, not the politicians!
Once citizens understand this important feature of the convention process, they will be far less likely to fall for the opponents’ weak and misleading arguments against a “Yes” vote.
What are those weak and misleading arguments? Let’s start with the biggest whopper – that public employees might lose their pensions. One of the most serious flaws in the Illinois Constitution (and it has a lot of them) is that it guarantees the payment of pensions without guaranteeing the funding of pensions. This has lead to a political class that has provided government workers with unfunded benefits that will be left to future taxpayers to shoulder. This is the reason Illinois has $106 billion in unfunded liabilities and unpaid bills.
While a convention will almost certainly fix that flaw, Illinois citizens need to know that no one’s benefits can be cut one thin dime. Anyone who tells you different is lying. To be sure, mandating the funding of pension benefits as well as the payment will end the abuses engaged in by our political class.
Ironically, public employees should know that the most serious threat to their benefits comes from governments using bankruptcy laws to shed pension obligations. This is already happening in some municipalities in California. While it is unlikely that a state would declare bankruptcy, recent events in the financial markets should give one pause to reflect. The fact is that a “no” vote more risky for public employees than a “yes” vote.
Another weak argument used by the opponents of a convention is that “extremists” will derail the process. This is an outright silly argument, as the delegates are elected from all 59 senate districts. Even if citizens from one district or another elect a “single issue” delegate, that person is one of 118 people. There is no way to “derail” a convention. Many issues will be debated, but again, the voters must approve changes.
Some opponents argue that, “Springfield already has too much its plate.” This argument exposes their weakest attribute – that it is all about them! A convention isn’t about what “Springfield has on its “plate.” A convention is on the citizen’s “plate.” Springfield, special interests, the two parties have all shown us that they are not up to the task of governing Illinois. It is the citizens’ turn to change the way this state works, and a convention offers a nearly risk-free opportunity to do just that. Vote “Yes” in November.
Bruno Behrend is the Co-founder of the Illinois Citizens Coalition and Co-author of Illinois Deserves Better, the ironclad case for an Illinois Constitutional Convention
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In Summary: A Comparison of the Candidates’ Tax Plans (Ben Harris, 03 Nov 2008, Tax Policy Center)
With the election a day away, today seems to be the appropriate time to summarize the differences in the candidates’ plans. The main differences are two: first, McCain proposes much larger tax cuts than Obama; and second, Obama’s plan tends to favor low- and middle-income taxpayers while McCain’s plan is more beneficial to those with higher incomes.Senator McCain would permanently extend all of the income tax cuts enacted by President Bush. Senator Obama extends almost all of the income tax cuts except those that apply to high-income households: he would raise the top two income tax rates, currently 33 and 35 percent, to their Clinton-era levels of 36 and 39.6 percent; restrict the value of exemptions and deductions for high-income households; and raise the top tax rate on dividends and capital gains to 20 percent from 15 percent. Both candidates would limit but not repeal the alternative minimum tax (AMT), and both candidates support the Auto IRA—a plan that would automatically enroll workers in retirement saving accounts.
(1) Tax cuts
(2) Personal accounts in SS
(3) No Child Left Behind
(4) The Faith-Based Initiative
(5) Missile Defense
(6) An Energy bill
He also added on promises, due to electoral pressure in the primaries and the general, to sign CFR and a prescription drug benefit. As a result of 9-11 he liberated Afghanistan and Iraq by force of arms.
As he prepares to leave office, the two wars can be said to be not quite concluded, though America's vital role has been fulfilled, and while he did enact a Comprehensive Pension Reform, he failed to get the SS personalization. Everything else he ran on he delivered.
Comes the 2008 election and the endless chatter about "Change." So, what exactly would either a President Obama or a President McCain change?
--crickets--
That's right. You can watch every ad the two campaigns have run and read their stump speeches from header to footnote and you'll find almost no negative mention of any of the major reforms of the Bush years, nevermind any proposal for significant change.
Heck, John McCain even voted against the Bush tax cuts but would now keep them. And while Democrats forced the President to effect the FBI via executive orders rather than by legislation, their nominee wants to extend the program, not undo it.
To a quite extraordinary degree, given all the vitriol and hysteria directed at our last two presidents, this election boils down to two guys who just offer a less partisan and more "competent" continuation of precisely the same politics.
Diageo/Hotline Tracking Poll: The Final Early Line (AMY WALTER, 11/03/08, Hotline)
Our final tracking poll finds a whopping 27% of LV's reporting that they've already voted. Among this group, Obama leads McCain 51%-46%.-- In what could be a small bright spot for congressional GOPers, the Dem lead on the generic congressional ballot question is down to 5 pts. A week ago (10/27) Dems held an 8-pt lead.
-- McCain has also opened up a lead over Obama on the question of which candidate is more prepared to lead the country. A week ago (10/27), the candidates were tied at 45%. Today, McCain leads by 6 pts. (49-43%). Among indies, he is ahead 50-37%.
Study: Why the Investor Class Annoys Democrats (James Pethokoukis, 11/03/08, US News)
[Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, John Duca and Jason Saving] found that "higher stock ownership rates are linked to an upward shift in the Republican share of the House popular vote since the late 1980s, consistent with theories that property interests affect voting. Findings suggest that the major parties' shares of the House popular vote will fluctuate around 50 percent until other factors trigger a political realignment."Me: Again, this study points to the political rationale for Democrats' imposing higher capital gains taxes, preventing the personalization/privatization of Social Security, and taxing retirement vehicles like 401(k) plans.
If Obama Loses, Who Gets Blamed?: His loss would be disastrous for the media and political establishment (John Dickerson, Nov. 2, 2008, Slate)
If Barack Obama wins the election, it will be historic. And if he loses, it will be pretty historic, too: It would mark the biggest collective error in the history of the media and political establishment.An Obama loss would mean the majority of pundits, reporters, and analysts were wrong. Pollsters would have to find a new line of work, since Obama has been ahead in all 159 polls taken in the last six weeks. The massive crowds that have regularly turned out to see Obama would turn out to have meant nothing. This collective failure of elites would provide such a blast of schadenfreude that Republicans like Rush Limbaugh would be struck speechless (another historic first).
This situation lends a feeling of unreality to the proceedings as we begin to measure the time until Election Day in hours. It is the elephant on the campaign plane. No one is letting on.
Unruly children to be punished with 'innovative' foot massages (Chris Irvine, 03 Nov 2008, Daily Telegraph)
Badly behaved schoolchildren are set to face alternative punishment in the form of foot and head messages as a means of controlling bad behaviour.A London-run company called Bud-Umbrella will work in 60 primary and 14 secondary schools, offering the alternative therapy to improve unruly children's behaviour.
Obama Says He Is Against Same-Sex Marriage But Also Against Ending Its Practice In Calif. (Teddy Davis, Sunlen Miller, Tahman Bradley, and Rigel Anderson, 11/02/08, ABC News)
Barack Obama's nuanced position on same-sex marriage is on full display in an MTV interview which is set to air on Monday.Obama told MTV he believes marriage is "between a man and a woman" and that he is "not in favor of gay marriage."
At the same time, Obama reiterated his opposition to Proposition 8, the California ballot measure which would eliminate a right to same-sex marriage that the state's Supreme Court recently recognized.
What Happens to Public Financing, When Obama Thrived Without It? (MICHAEL LUO, 11/03/08, NY Times)
Democrats, in particular, who have traditionally supported limits on campaign spending, are grappling with whether they can embrace Mr. Obama’s example without being seen as hypocritical. They are keenly aware that they have developed through the Internet a commanding fund-raising advantage over Republicans, much like the direct mail money machine that conservatives used to lord over them.“I think there is going to be tremendous reluctance on our side to yield any of that advantage,” said Tad Devine, a senior strategist for Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004.
Bob Kerrey, a Democratic former senator from Nebraska who serves as an honorary chairman of a group that fights for public financing of federal races, wrote an opinion article in The New York Post last week in which he confessed to newfound ambivalence on the issue in light of Mr. Obama’s success among small donors and the energy he had seen in the election this year.
Mr. Kerrey said in an interview that part of his change of heart might indeed be because the existing system was benefiting Democrats, and he said he believed that many others in his party were wrestling with the issue anew because of the changed calculus. But he added that Mr. Obama’s army of small donors had altered the terms of the debate, causing him to believe that he had been wrong about the need for such limitations.
“I think the reformers’ arguments have been substantially undercut by the facts on the ground,” Mr. Kerrey said.
Who was to blame for the credit crisis? (Sean O'Grady, 3 November 2008, Independent)
It took about 40 years for a reasonably consensual explan-ation of the Great Depression that could be rattled off in three minutes to emerge. Even with the perspective of today, that traumatic episode in economic history continues to generate some debate. (There are people out there who believe that Franklin Roosevelt caused the Great Depression, in case you were wondering). [...]It may not take quite so long for us to get some sort of a grip on this crisis, or at least to develop an intellectual framework with which to analyse it. What is emerging is three schools of thought, or culprits if you like. These can be termed the "macroeconomic school"; the "regulatory school"; and the "banking school". The first, in effect, blames no-one and abstracts away minor consideration of institut-ional arrangements and political personalities to focus on the big picture. The scenario is quite simple, really. It starts from the well observed premise that much of the money that flowed into the western economies over the past decade came from China. ("China" here being shorthand for all the fast-growing, export-driven economies of the world, especially east Asia, and thus encompassing Malaysia, Korea, Indonesia and the like). That, in turn, originated in their large trade surpluses with us. In effect, we consumed more than we earned, and the Chinese lent us the money to carry on doing so.
And what did we do with the money? We created an asset bubble, an inflation in one particular type of investment. It happened, in the US and the UK, to be housing, but it need not have been. The money could have gone into any kind of asset, as it has before. Before the Great Crash of 1929, it was shares, as it was before the dotcom crash of 2000. The belief that the value of shares would only ever go up, that there was a "new paradigm" because of fantastic new technologies, fuelled these booms. In eighteenth century Europe, it was the South Sea Company's untold – and unreal – riches on the other side of the globe, the original speculative bubble.
In the 2000s, it was dream homes in Florida and semis in the English home counties that were the subject of a frenzy. It could have been classic cars, or antiques, or fine wines. It doesn't matter, except in the important sense that housing has a social aspect. Capitalism usually creates bubbles where there is a lot of cash swilling around, and no politician has ever, ahem, been able to abolish boom and bust. We will always have crashes, and it is foolish to suppose that we can prevent this sort of thing happening again.
Mr. O'Grady, in turn, misapprehends the current slowdown, as witness the absurd notion that the difference between a house and a tulip bulb is social rather than a matter of capital.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against tulips--they're perfectly well-designed flowers. But the fact is that were every tulip in the world to disappear tomorrow it just wouldn't disrupt our lives one bit. On the other hand, were every house in the world to disappear we'd build one heck of a lot of new houses, no?
Now consider that, prior to the downturn, the population of the UK was set to increase by 4.4 million by 2016. And America is set to add 100 million by 2050. The appetite of these new Anglo-Americans for classic cars, hoity-toity wines and tulips remains to be determined, but this much we know: they're all going to require housing and we have an insufficient stock of said.
This, therefore, can be no more than a brief correction in housing prices unless we are so foolish (not to mention anti-human and un-Christian) as to take steps to arrest current demographic trends. We could seek to deepen the economic soft patch, in order to make out countries less attractive to immigrants. The 20s and 30s taught us how to do that: try to balance the budget; raise taxes; bar immigrants; protect trade; etc... The 40s and 70s added tools to our arsenal: mass deportations of "undesirable races;" genocide; abortion/contraception; etc... If we tried hard enough we could turn ourselves into East Germany and the wolves would roam the yards of our unoccupied houses.
But, as it happens, we're in the midst of a presidential election here in the States where both candidates promise (though you can feel free to doubt one or the other on certain aspects of their pledges): tax cuts; trade agreements; budget deficits in perpetuity; immigration amnesty; and even Barack Obama offers at least intermittent rhetorical opposition to abortion.
In short, the only way to permanently lower the value of housing capital is to decrease human capital, as Japan is doing. Because we are bent on increasing the latter instead, we can't help but increase/maintain the former.
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The excessive focus on mammography: Looking harder to find more may not be the best practice. (H. Gilbert Welch, November 3, 2008, LA Times)
But here's some good news about the bad news: The harm of over-diagnosis is not a fixed attribute of screening mammography. Instead, it is related to how hard we look for breast cancer. Some women harbor small, innocuous breast cancers that will never cause symptoms or death (just as some men harbor small, innocuous prostate cancers). The harder we look, the more likely we are to find these cancers.To understand the problem, use Google Earth to count the number of lakes in Utah. When viewing the entire continent, you'll only see one -- Great Salt Lake. Now zoom in a bit. You'll find two more -- Utah Lake next to Provo and Bear Lake on the Idaho border -- but they're smaller. Now look even harder. Multiple lakes will suddenly appear high in the Uinta Mountains and the Wasatch Range. But they are smaller still.
The harder you look, the more lakes you find -- but they become smaller and less important.
"Look harder, find more" has been the prevailing paradigm in breast cancer screening from the outset. News reports focus on which approach finds more cancer. Conventional versus digital mammograms? Digital is better because it finds more cancer. Mammograms versus MRI? MRI is better because it finds more cancer. But the problem of over-diagnosis means that finding more cancer is not better -- it's the wrong way to measure progress. Real progress would be to find only the cancers that matter.
Screening proponents fear that women can't deal with the nuance. that mammography helps some and hurts others -- or any messages that might discourage women from having a mammogram every year. But leaving women in the dark exacerbates the problem of over-diagnosis.
How? Women who don't know about over-diagnosis don't question the "look harder, find more" paradigm -- and then all the forces line up to make the problem worse. Radiologists look harder at mammograms, pathologists look harder at biopsy specimens -- both only afraid of missing cancer, not over-diagnosis. Medical journals will continue to conclude (as will the news media that cover them) that the best test is always one that sees more, not less.
Women should be aware that looking harder may not be in their interest. And that doctors who recommend less-aggressive mammography (less frequently, waiting until you are age 50, or stopping it when you are older) or are less quick to biopsy may not be bad doctors but good ones. And women should demand (and participate in) research that looks less hard, finds less cancer -- but finds the cancers that matter.
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The US Economic Crisis -- Three Growth Scenarios:
The US financial crisis is a symptom, not a cause, of global problems. (Michael Mandel, 11/03/08, Der Spiegel)
The global boom of the past 10 years has been driven by three flows. First, multinational companies shipped technological knowledge and business know-how to countries such as China, India, and elsewhere in order to set up supply chains there. This "dark matter" is not picked up anywhere on the economic data, but it was absolutely essential for juicing up global growth. In return for this flow of knowledge, the industrialized world -- and especially the US -- got back a river of cheap goods and services. Finally, to pay for these imports, the US borrowed a steady stream of money from the rest of the world -- roughly $5 trillion worth since 2000.But here's the question no one really worried about: How did this money get into the country? The federal government borrowed about $1.5 trillion directly from overseas. But most of the borrowing -- perhaps $3.5 trillion to $4 trillion worth -- flowed through Wall Street in the form of corporate bonds, equities, and exotic securities. Wall Street firms were the major intermediary between the rest of the world and US consumers. For example, firms would package subprime mortgages into a complex security and then sell big chunks to overseas buyers.
This flow of money, an essential part of the global boom, explains why Wall Street was so prosperous in recent years --and why it failed so suddenly. Bankers, hedge fund managers, and other Wall Street types would take their piece of the foreign money as it came into the US. They grew rich that way. But when it became clear that US consumers could no longer afford to carry the loans, the financial flows froze up, threatening the global boom.
Thus, the financial crisis is a symptom, not a cause. At root, this is a crisis of the entire global economy as it has developed over the past 10 years. [...]
The third scenario's innovative growth calls for the trade deficit to shrink because the U.S. produces more innovative goods and services at home and exports them. In the 1990s, in fact, economists projected that exports of high-tech products would rise in step with the expansion of trade. The problems in recent years have come because exports fell short of forecasts, not because imports rose too high. No one anticipated that production of advanced electronics and pharmaceuticals -- the crown jewels of American innovation -- would be so quickly moved offshore, undercutting US exports.
The innovative growth scenario benefits both the US and the rest of the world, because it gives the US something to sell. In order for it to happen, the enormous sums of research money already spent in areas such as biotech and nanotech have to start paying off in a big way. That means a breakthrough on the order of the semiconductor revolution -- say, bioengineered bacteria that munch cellulose and efficiently turn out ethanol. In addition, at least part of the associated production has to be kept in the US, rather than shipped overseas.
This third scenario won't be easy to achieve. But that's the one we should be aiming for. It gives us the best chance of a happy ending.
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Irrational Pessimism (Brian Wesbury, 11.3.08, American Spectator)
Since 9/11, a pall of pessimism has covered the U.S. Polls show that between 60 and 85 percent of Americans have believed that the U.S. is in a recession or would go into one the following year. But from September 2001 through August 2008, those polls were wrong.Nonetheless, the failure of Lehman Brothers, with its ripple affect on money market accounts and confidence in the U.S. banking system, finally made this prognostication a reality. The U.S. entered a real recession in September. Rather than a prolonged recession, however, or one that is worsening, we're seeing a temporary "V" shaped recession caused by a sharp, fear-driven slowdown in the turnover of money, or velocity.
Obama camp turns to superstitions (CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN, 11/3/08, Politico)
Obama likes to say he’s superstitious, but he let himself speak Sunday night what many in his campaign ranks try not to think—let alone say out loud—for fear of jinxing it: He might be headed for victory.“The past couple of days I’ve just been feeling good,” Obama told 80,000 people who gathered to see him and Bruce Springsteen in a downpour. “You start thinking maybe we might be able to win an election on November 4.”
Democrats have believed this before. The Obama campaign is infused with aides who remember Al Gore and worked for John Kerry, whose hopes were raised four years ago when early exit polls on Election Day showed him ahead in a contest he ultimately lost. They know all too well how the winds can suddenly gust in a different direction.
It wasn’t lost on Obama supporters that Springsteen appeared with Kerry on election eve in Cleveland, and that didn’t turn out well for them. The McCain campaign e-mailed reporters a reminder of this factoid under the subject line, “Glory Days?”
“I’m glad they let me come back,” Springsteen said Sunday, drawing twice the crowd he did in 2004. “They didn’t think I might jinx them or something.”
Deciding whom to vote for (Patrick O'Hannigan, 1103/08, The Paragraph Farmer))
So then, abortion: When you have to pick your battles, you should at least pick good ones. Vocal support for the stunningly misnamed "Freedom of Choice" act and one-hundred-percent ratings from NARAL are automatic disqualifiers for the Oval Office in my book. Fortunately, only one candidate for president is saddled with such baggage, not to mention "mystery votes" against multiple versions of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, and a running mate who compounds confusion about the tenets of his own faith with garrulous confidence that hairsplitting over trimesters in a pregnancy is good law (Somebody should tell Joe Biden that Roe and its companion case, both classic examples of judicial overreach, do not restrict abortion. Moreover, even the Supreme Court no longer thinks in trimester terms, what with advances in ultrasound technology having put the lie to the "it's just a clump of cells" argument.)Fr. Richard John Neuhaus understands the rationale for single-issue voting, as he made clear while showing why the Democratic candidate for president (about whom there are still many unresolved questions) does not begin to grasp how the uniquely American hope of a novus order seclorum depends on freedom of religion.
The obvious objection from Obama supporters has little force. Obama taught constitutional law. Big deal. What his supporters seldom acknowledge is that it's possible to teach constitutional law without believing a word of it, and without recognizing the mutually supportive relationship between our founding documents. That's a serious defect in understanding for someone who wants to preside over the only country in the world that has founding documents.
Anyone of good will who accepts that abortion is undesirable must then avoid what theologians call "formal cooperation with evil"-- and one does not avoid evil policy by serenading executives who endorse it with the Marine Band playing "Hail to the Chief."
I do not mean to say that the Republican ticket has a spotless pro-life record. Senator McCain is entirely too accommodating of embryonic stem cell research, for example. He also missed a chance to back Rep. Ron Paul's "Sanctity of Life" Act (H.R. 2597), when his public support would have been welcome.
But pro-lifers conflicted about choosing Republican over Democrat for the odd reason that the Republicans aren't pro-life enough are trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and homey don't play that way, not least because he's noticed that the Republican VP nominee is also the bright and feisty mother of a child with Down Syndrome.
Christians in my own church and elsewhere have been urged to pray for a pro-life outcome "no matter which candidate wins." Heartfelt advice like that goes a long way toward preserving tax-exempt status in a litigious society, but let's not kid ourselves: a pro-life outcome with the Republican ticket is a good bet, while a pro-life outcome in the aftermath of an Obama/Biden victory requires a miracle of the kind that slapped Saul upside the head on the road to Damascus.
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What if Wright played a bigger role in campaign? (JONATHAN MARTIN, 11/3/08, Politico)
It’s all hindsight now, a day before voters go to the polls and months after McCain effectively decided the recently retired pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ would be off-limits.But it is sure to be one of the most hotly debated questions among Republicans and political observers in the weeks ahead should McCain not come from behind to win on Tuesday.
Conversations with a number of veteran GOP consultants indicate that using Wright may have helped McCain with one set of voters — but would have hurt with others and not ultimately proved decisive in a contest subsumed by larger external forces such as the economic crisis and the unpopularity of President Bush and the Republican Party.
“This was a race that was about the economy and about change,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime GOP adman who worked for Bush’s campaigns. “It really wasn’t about anything else, and all the king’s men couldn’t make it about anything else.”
Language ties unravel (The Ottawa Citizen, November 03, 2008)
Rwanda has announced that it is changing its language of instruction. No longer will students learn in French; now they'll learn in English instead.It's likely the decision is, at least in part, politically motivated. It represents a break, not only with the country's history of Belgian rule, but with France, a country that many Rwandans associate with the old Hutu regime and the 1994 "genocidaires."
But the official reason is utility. "Introducing English is just being realistic," said senator Aloisea Inyumba. "English is the language of business."
Syria stops insurgents on Iraq border (Phil Sands, November 02. 2008, The National)
Syria has been helping US and Iraqi troops catch extremists trying to cross the border, a US military intelligence official said in an interview with The National.In addition to arresting insurgents on their side of the frontier, Syrian security services have passed information to US forces that is being used to target insurgents inside Iraq, according to Major Adam Boyd, the head intelligence officer with the third armoured cavalry regiment. His unit is responsible for Mosul, the Jazeera desert and policing a 380km stretch of the Iraqi-Syrian border in Nineveh province.