Senator Chuck Grassley said proposed legislation to help American automakers would put tax dollars on the line to assist participants in controversial tax shelters which have been shut down by both the IRS and Congress.
Grassley said the tax shelter bailout within the auto bailout is related to abusive leasing transactions called SILOs, where transit agencies have sold public transportation assets like rail lines, only to lease them back from purchasers, with the result of providing tax depreciation deductions to the purchasers. Such transactions were motivated solely by collection of fees on one side and tax benefits on the other, rather than any change to the services provided by transit agencies.
Questions are being raised about Obama’s connections with Blagojevich. David Axelrod (Obama’s campaign manager) in particular has been forced to retract a statement he made two weeks ago that directly contradicts Obama’s statement today that he never spoke with Blagojevich about his replacement in the Senate.
Signs remain, however, that the continuing investigation could still involve [Obama].
It appears that Obama friend Valerie Jarrett, an incoming senior White House adviser, is the person referred to repeatedly in court documents as “Candidate 1.” That individual is described as a female who is “an adviser to the president-elect” and as the person Obama wanted appointed to the Senate seat. Court papers say that “Candidate 1” eventually removed “herself” from consideration for the Senate seat.
In a Nov. 11 phone conversation with an aide, Blagojevich talked at length about “Candidate 1” and said he knew that Obama wanted her for the open seat but “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. (Expletive) them.”
One day later, Jarrett, a Chicago businesswoman who is one of three co-chairmen of Obama’s transition team and was a high-level adviser to his presidential campaign, made it known that she was not interested in the seat.
In light of that, take a second look at Obama’s exact words:
I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening.
and at Axelrod’s retraction:
I was mistaken when I told an interviewer last month that the President-elect has spoken directly to Governor Blagojevich about the Senate vacancy. They did not then or at any time discuss the subject.
Neither statement denies that a member of Obama’s staff might have communicated his wishes to Blagojevich. Combined with the wiretap evidence, that seems likely to be what happened. It also makes Axelrod’s error smaller and more understandable.
UPDATE: Katie Granju thinks they’re just plain lying. That’s another possibility. (Via Instapundit.)
ANOTHER UPDATE: My theory looks even more likely, in light of Obama’s refusal to say whether any subordinates had been in contact with Blagojevich. Obama said it would be inappropriate to say, given that it’s an ongoing investigation, which makes no sense unless his team might be tainted by the investigation.
By the way, there would be nothing wrong with Obama’s team having spoken with the Governor of Illinois about the appointment. Indeed, it would be expected. So, if indeed they did, why are they hiding it?
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has unveiled his plan to close a $1.6 billion budget gap. Key to the plan is a $450 million bailout from the Federal government. ($900 million over two years.)
It’s becoming clear now. Municipalities go to the state for bailouts. The states go to the Federal government for bailouts. The Federal government borrows money. What could go wrong?
Snark aside, this direction leads to the death of the federal system. We’re headed toward a system where the federal government does all the taxing and distributes the money to the states. Once the “federal” government holds all the purse strings, it will be completely in charge, just as it already is in so many areas wherein the states already depend on the federal government for funding.
Illinois Governor Blagojevich has been arrested for trying to sell Illinois’s senate seat:
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald on Tuesday accused Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich of participating in a “political corruption crime spree” that was a blatant effort to sell the state’s U.S. Senate seat in the latest “pay-to-play” scheme in Illinois politics.
Fitzgerald described the alleged behavior by Blagojevich, who was arrested Tuesday morning along with his chief of staff, John Harris, as “appalling.” He said his “cynical behavior” reached “a truly new low.”
“He has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political corruption crime spree,” Fitzgerald said in a news conference to announce the charges against the governor and his chief of staff. “This is a sad day for government. It’s a very sad day for Illinois government. Governor Blagojevich has taken us to a truly new low.” . . .
The series of allegations say that Blagojevich and Harris tried to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder. Fitzgerald quoted Blagojevich recorded during court-authorized wiretaps as saying, “It’s a ‘bleeping’ valuable thing. You just don’t give it away for nothing.”
Staggering. Five of the eight elected Illinois governors since Adlai Stevenson have been indicted.
I’m sure Pittsburgh could be more mismanaged, but it’s hard to see how. The Post-Gazette reports:
The market woes that are shrinking retirement plans have started pounding municipal pension funds, especially the city of Pittsburgh’s draining pool of investments.
At the end of November, the city’s fund held $261 million, down from $385 million at the beginning of the year, with half of that loss occurring in the last two months. That leaves the fund with just 29 percent of what it should ideally hold to cover its long-term commitments, according to state standards.
“It’s not good. But we’re trying to control what we can, and then ultimately will need help from our friends in Harrisburg,” said Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, after a pension fund board meeting yesterday.
A competent city government would save more when times are good, so it can ride out the bad times. Pittsburgh, on the other hand, became insolvent when times were good, and is looking for a state bailout now that times are bad.
Indicted U.S. Rep. William Jefferson suffered what may be the final blow of his storied political career in the most improbable way Saturday, when an untested Republican opponent took advantage of Louisiana’s new federal voting rules — and an election delay caused by Hurricane Gustav — to unseat the nine-term Democrat.
With the upset victory, Anh “Joseph” Cao, a eastern New Orleans attorney who fled war-ravaged Saigon as a child, becomes the first Vietnamese-American in Congress. He will represent a district that was specifically drawn to give African-Americans an electoral advantage and one in which two of every three voters are registered Democrats. . .
Though Jefferson will pack up his Capitol Hill office, he will remain in the news: Originally scheduled to begin last week, his trial is likely to start in early 2009.
Also in the cross-hairs of federal prosecutors are Jefferson siblings Betty Jefferson, the Orleans Parish 4th District Assessor, and political consultant Mose Jefferson, who were indicted last year on charges that they conspired to loot more than $600,000 in taxpayer money from three charities.
In a separate case, Mose Jefferson was indicted on charges that he bribed the former president of the Orleans Parish School Board.
City officials have ordered 22 New York churches to stop providing beds to homeless people.
With temperatures well below freezing early Saturday, the churches must obey a city rule requiring faith-based shelters to be open at least five days a week — or not at all.
There’s bureaucracy for you: rules ahead of common sense.
Students at an Ottawa university are pulling out of a Canada-wide fundraiser that provides close to $1 million a year for cystic fibrosis research and treatment, arguing that the disease “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” — something experts say is untrue.
The Carleton University Students Association voted Monday night overwhelmingly in favour of choosing a new charity to support during its orientation week in September, in lieu of Shinerama, which raises money for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. . .
The student council motion stated that orientation week “strives to be inclusive” and “all orientees and volunteers should feel like their fundraising efforts will serve their diverse communities.”
The effort by a coalition of leftist minority parties to replace the Canadian government has failed, and has hurt them badly with the public:
Almost three-quarters of Canadians say they are “truly scared” for the future of the country and a solid majority say they would prefer another election to having the minority Conservative government replaced by a coalition led by Stephane Dion, a new Ipsos-Reid poll says.
The poll also indicates Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives would romp to a majority victory with a record 46 per cent public support if an election were held today.
The survey suggests Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean was in tune with public opinion across the country when she agreed Thursday to suspend, or prorogue Parliament until Jan. 26 at the request of Harper. Almost seven in 10 of those surveyed Tuesday and Wednesday gave prorogation a thumbs up.
The Tories also were deemed by almost six in 10 Canadians to be the best managers of the economy in these troubling times.
It gets worse for the leftist coalition:
Fully 60 per cent of those interviewed said they opposed replacing the government with Liberal-NDP coalition supported by the Bloc Quebecois, compared with 37 per cent who favoured the idea. Support for the coalition was highest in Quebec at 50 per cent, followed by 44 per cent in Atlantic Canada.
The poll indicates the prospect of the Dion-led coalition has prompted Canadians to rethink the value of an election so soon after the Oct. 14 poll. Fifty-six per cent said they would rather go to the polls than be governed by the coalition. . .
[Pollster Darrell] Bricker said a clear consensus appears to be building in Canada, albeit to a lesser degree in Quebec, that Harper is doing the right thing by trying to hang on to power.
“The idea of having Stephane Dion as the prime minister, combined with the coalition being supported by the Bloc Quebecois, is basically fatal in the minds of the public,” Bricker said. . .
The poll says more than seven in 10 Canadians, or 72 per cent of those surveyed, said they are “truly scared” for the future of the country because of what is going on in Ottawa. . .
Bricker said the Conservatives’ spike in popularity appears to reflect a backlash against the Liberals and New Democrats whose support slid to 23 per cent and 13 per cent respectively. The Greens had eight per cent support, while the Bloc polled 37 per cent in Quebec.
This was an epic miscalculation. The coalition could have toppled the government, which might well have backfired, but at least it wouldn’t have violated the usual parliamentary process. Instead, they tried to take over the government without an election, gambling that the public would agree that the economic crisis trumped the importance of process. The public did not agree. In fact, public opinion was just the opposite:
Bricker said Canadians’ unhappiness with the political upheaval now is trumping the question of who is to blame for the crisis. Those surveyed divided almost evenly between blaming the government and the opposition parties.
The Liberals have apologized for Liberal Leader Stephane Dion’s taped televised address, after it was delivered to Canadian networks almost an hour past deadline and in near-cellphone quality. . .
Dion was supposed to deliver the networks a pre-taped statement to the nation Wednesday between 6:15 p.m. and 6:30 ET. It was to air after Prime Minister Stephen Harper addressed the country at 7 p.m. ET about the political crisis on Parliament Hill.
CTV, along with other major Canadian networks, pre-empted regularly scheduled programming to deliver the addresses. Harper went to air shortly after 7 p.m. but networks were left scrambling to fill airspace when Dion’s tape was nowhere to be found.
When confronted about the disaster by one of his partners, Dion reportedly explained “We’re not used to being in opposition.”
The state worker who unwittingly ran an improper child-support check on the man known as Joe the Plumber told lawmakers yesterday that a deputy director later “dictated” how she was supposed to cover it up.
Vanessa Niekamp, an administrator for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services’ Office of Child Support and a 15-year state employee, said that when Deputy Director Doug Thompson came into her office, “He appeared very upset, his neck was bright red, and he was shaking. He closed my door.”
Thompson told her she must write an e-mail to the agency’s information-security officer, and then “dictated word for word” what she wrote, Niekamp said. He also reminded her that she could be fired at any time, she said.
“Within an hour, I took the rest of the day off — again using my vacation time — and went directly to the office of the inspector general. I told them everything I knew about what happened.”
So far, Ohio Governor Strickland has refused to fire anyone over the scandal. Will he continue to stand by that?
The New York Times Magazine has a long article about Google’s censors. It’s not just China; Google also censors the Internet on behalf of the governments of Turkey, France, Germany, and Thailand.
The article’s attitude toward censorship is oddly positive, viewing Google’s censorship as a theoretical problem:
“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. “One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.” Google’s claim on our trust is a fragile thing. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get. . .
“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” Wu told me.
But many would argue that the day has already come. Google’s record includes censorship not only in foreign countries for foreign goverments, but in America for political correctness. The article notes an infamous incident in which Google deleted a Michelle Malkin video and then deleted her protest:
Malkin became something of a cause célèbre among YouTube critics in 2006, when she created a two-minute movie called “First, They Came” in the wake of the violent response to the Danish anti-Muhammad cartoons. . .
Nearly seven months after she posted the video, Malkin told me she was “flabbergasted” to receive an e-mail message from YouTube saying the video had been removed for its “inappropriate content.” When Malkin asked why the video was removed, she received no response, and when she posted a video appealing to YouTube to reinstate it, that video, too, was deleted with what she calls the “false claim” that it had been removed at her request. . .
I watched the “First, They Came” video, which struck me as powerful political commentary that contains neither hate speech nor graphic violence, and I asked why it was taken down. According to a YouTube spokesman, the takedown was a routine one that hadn’t been reviewed by higher-ups. The spokesman said he couldn’t comment on particular cases, but he forwarded a link to Malkin’s current YouTube channel, noting that it contains 55 anti-jihadist videos similar to “First, They Came,” none of which have been taken down. . .
The removal of Malkin’s video may have been an innocent mistake. But it serves as a reminder that one person’s principled political protest is another person’s hate speech, and distinguishing between the two in hard cases is a lot to ask of a low-level YouTube reviewer. In addition, the publicity that attended the removal of Malkin’s video only underscores the fact that in the vast majority of cases in which material is taken down, the decision to do so is never explained or contested. The video goes down, and that’s the end of it.
Google’s defense is bizarre. First they claim that they never looked at Malkin’s video, which hardly seems possible given all the negative publicity the incident generated, and which is not a defense in any case. Then they point out all the Malkin videos they haven’t censored, as if that forgives them for the ones they did censor. And they give no explanation at all for why they would delete Malkin’s protest and claim she asked for it.
The New York Times’s attitude is also bizarre. They forgive Google’s enforcement of political correctness on the grounds that it’s really hard to tell what is and isn’t hate speech. Ordinarily, the NYT could tell you that that is an argument against censorship, or at the very least, for erring on the side of free speech. But in this case, the NYT’s main concern is that Google might start to cooperate with the US government. (Assisting Chinese repression is one thing, but the US government? Now that would be bad.)
To be clear, the First Amendment does not come into play here. Google is a private company and on their property they can censor whatever they want. But they shouldn’t then ask us to trust them.
Columbia University is working to steal its neighbors’ land, writes Damon Root for Reason. Here’s a low-light, written by one person whose land Columbia hopes to take:
Under New York state law, in order to condemn property the state first has to undertake a “neighborhood conditions study” and declare the area in question “blighted.” Earlier this summer the state released its study, which concluded that Manhattanville is indeed “blighted.” This gives the state the legal green light to condemn my four buildings and hand them over to the university.
The study’s conclusion was unsurprising. Since the commencement of acquisitions in Manhattanville by Columbia, the school has made a solid effort to create the appearance of “blight.” Once active buildings became vacant as Columbia either refused to renew leases, pressured small businesses to vacate, or made unreasonable demands that resulted in the businesses moving elsewhere. Columbia also let their holdings decay and left code violations unaddressed. . .
There is also a conflict of interest in the condemnation process. The firm the state hired to perform the “impartial” blight study — the planning, engineering and environmental consultant Allee King Rosen & Fleming, Inc. (AKRF) — had been retained by Columbia two years earlier to advocate for governmental approval of the university’s expansion, including the possible use of eminent domain.
When I go to court in a few months to contest the condemnation, I will face an overwhelmingly unfair process particular to New York, and to eminent domain trials. I will not be permitted to question any of the state or Columbia’s representatives, nor will I be allowed to have anyone take the witness stand on my behalf. My attorney will only be provided with 15 minutes to speak to the court on a matter that Columbia and the state have been working on for over four years.
The Pilgrims avoided starvation in 1621, but how did they ultimately move from hardship to plenty? Property rights:
Many people believe that after suffering through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did.
In 1620 Plymouth Plantation was founded with a system of communal property rights. Food and supplies were held in common and then distributed based on equality and need as determined by Plantation officials. People received the same rations whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents were forbidden from producing their own food. . .
Faced with potential starvation in the spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system. Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then keep all they grew for themselves, but now they alone were responsible for feeding themselves. . .
This change, Bradford wrote, had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. Giving people economic incentives changed their behavior. . .
Once the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the starvation and food shortages of the first three years. It was only after allowing greater property rights that they could feast without worrying that famine was just around the corner.
Georgia voters today will (presumably) settle one of the two remaining Senate races. Chambliss appears likely to win the re-election he missed by a hair’s breadth on election night. The RCP poll average gives him a small but consistent 5 point lead and his contract is selling at 97 on Intrade.
The Minnesota recount has things headed in Coleman’s direction. Franken’s effort to get his counties to report first, in order to put him in the lead, came up short with Coleman’s lead bottoming out in the middle one hundreds. With 91% now recounted, Coleman’s lead is now about 340, up from his pre-recount margin of 215. The Coleman contract is selling at 80.9 on Intrade.
Franken is pinning his hopes on the US Senate to reverse the outcome of the election. The closest precedent to such an action would be Louis Wyman in New Hampshire 1974. In that election, Wyman (a Republican) won the election by 2 votes after two recounts but the Senate deadlocked on whether to seat him. In the end, it was decided to hold a do-over, which his opponent won. Coleman will likely win by hundreds of votes, not two, making 1974 a dubious precedent, but they have the power to do it, so we can’t rule anything out.
UPDATE : The good news is that Chambliss did indeed win, and pretty handily (at this hour). On the other hand, Coleman has dropped to 60 on Intrade, so he’s still seen as the favorite, but not the almost prohibitive favorite he appeared earlier today. Today’s briefing from the Franken campaign is probably the reason.
Canadians are fond of saying that they don’t want “American-style democracy” and this week we’ve found out what that means. The Canadian government that just won the election a month-and-a-half ago is now on the verge of being unseated by a coalition of the opposition parties.
Particularly bizarre is the possibility that the man who just lost the last election could become Prime Minister without a new election. Many argue that such an outcome would be illegal, but even if so, we’ve learned in recent years that the rules are quite flexible. A few years ago, the Liberal government refused to call an election despite losing a confidence vote, so I guess anything is possible.
Once again we see the wisdom of the framers of the US Constitution for rejecting a parliamentary system in favor of separated powers, and for putting all the rules down on paper.
President-Elect’s national security choices during the transition process have been generally reassuring, but this one undermines all that: Samantha Power, a former foreign-policy adviser to candidate Obama, has been rehired. (Via LGF.)
Power lost her job when she publicly called Hillary Clinton (who she will now have the job of assisting) a monster, but she never should have been an adviser to a serious candidate in the first place. In 2002 she advocated a U.S. invasion of Israel.
If there is anyone that should have been left under the bus, she’s the one.
UPDATE: Hot Air has the video. By the way, it’s not just the proposed invasion (which she later repudiated) that is frightening, but her entire mindset — opposed to Israel and American Jews — that was able to spawn such a proposal.
A few thoughts on President-Elect Obama’s news conference this morning:
He was asked a very tough question about India: if America has the right to attack terrorists in Pakistan, as Obama has said, does India have that same right? The answer he gave was exactly right, that sovereign nations have the right to defend themselves but he wouldn’t comment specifically beyond that.
He was not as impressive in his answer to a question about the Clinton appointment: during the campaign he argued that Clinton had no useful experience in foreign affairs, so how can he now say she’s the best person to be Secretary of State? On this one he tried to shift the blame (in a good-natured way) to the questioner for “having fun” dredging up campaign quotes and ultimately he didn’t answer. To be fair, I suppose the question was unanswerable without admitting that at least half of campaigning is bullshit.
He was asked what happens to his pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq in 16 months in light of the SOFA. There he sort of affirmed the 16 months as a goal, but left himself the wiggle room he’ll need when it doesn’t happen. Beyond that, he made the revealing statement that the safety of the troops (not victory, by implication) was his top priority.
He was asked no questions about Iran, and he mentioned it only once and briefly in his opening remarks. Evidently no one is focusing on Iran, which is truly worrying.
Apparently there’s some buzz suggesting that Chris Matthews might run for the Senate against Arlen Specter. Gee, I wonder what party he would run as? He is a objective, non-partisan commentator after all.
Being a pragmatist, I’m willing to let them have it, if it gets them on board. Historically, Republicans support Democratic wars (Spanish-American War, WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo), but generally not vice versa (Civil War, Gulf War, Iraq). If revising the history is the price for getting Democrats to support the effort, so be it.
Those who are thinking about ways to reform the health care system would do well to consider this:
Primary care doctors in the United States feel overworked and nearly half plan to either cut back on how many patients they see or quit medicine entirely, according to a survey released on Tuesday.
And 60 percent of 12,000 general practice physicians found they would not recommend medicine as a career.
“The whole thing has spun out of control. I plan to retire early even though I still love seeing patients. The process has just become too burdensome,” the Physicians’ Foundation, which conducted the survey, quoted one of the doctors as saying. . .
The 12,000 answers are considered representative of doctors as a whole, the group said, with a margin of error of about 1 percent. It found that 78 percent of those who answered believe there is a shortage of primary care doctors.
One major problem is the paperwork:
More than 90 percent said the time they devote to non-clinical paperwork has increased in the last three years and 63 percent said this has caused them to spend less time with each patient. . .
Many of the health plans proposed by members of Congress, insurers and employers’s groups, as well as Obama’s, suggest that electronic medical records would go a long way to saving time and reducing costs.
Electronic medical records seem like a good idea (if they can keep them secure — a big if), but I don’t see how they would make a significant dent in the time spent on paperwork. Doing paperwork on a computer might be a little faster than doing it on paper, but hardly dramatically so. It seems that the primary advantage of electronic medical records would be from accessibility, searchability, and legibility.
Also, the idea that extending governmental control over health care could reduce its paperwork burden is a preposterous fantasy. I know; I used to fill out the forms to show compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act.
Greg Mankiw shows quantitatively that Paul Krugman’s definition of “hack” must be “someone who disagrees with Paul Krugman.” He points out that, Krugman’s name-calling notwithstanding, both Bush and Obama appointed (objectively) top economists, with a slight edge to Bush. I disagree that this is a redefinition, though. I think it’s what Krugman has always meant.
AFTERTHOUGHT: Seriously though, after some of the names that have been bandied about for Obama appointments (e.g., Robert Kennedy, Jr!), Obama’s actual appointments thus far have been a relief. They are liberals, to be sure, but generally sane ones.
Stung by criticism over its use of private planes, bailout-seeking GM has decided to make a change, but not by curtailing its use of private planes. No, it has asked the FAA to make it impossible for the public to track its use of private planes:
General Motors Corp., criticized by U.S. lawmakers for its use of corporate jets, asked aviation regulators to block the public’s ability to track a plane it uses.
“We availed ourselves of the option as others do to have the aircraft removed” from a Federal Aviation Administration tracking service, a GM spokesman, Greg Martin, said yesterday in an interview. He declined to discuss why GM made the request.
I’ve been following the outstanding Senate races on the Intrade markets. Saxby Chambliss (who has a small lead in the polls) has had a solid advantage on Intrade since Election Day, but his price has jumped to 93.5, indicating a virtual certainty in the mind of the bettors.
It’s hard to know the true state of affairs In the Minnesota recount (I’ve been following the updates on Power Line), but it appears that Coleman has widened his lead a bit from a bottom in the middle one hundreds. The bettors, in any case, are now clearly favoring Coleman. The Coleman price has hovered a little over parity since the election, but it’s now jumped to 68.9.
One caution is that the rules of the Intrade contract seem to base the outcome on who wins the seat, not who ends up being seated, so the possibility that the Democratic Senate might set aside the Minnesota election result and seat Franken is not a factor as I read it. Would the Democrats go so far? Franken is angling for it, but I doubt it. I don’t think the Democrats would want to tarnish their victory and Obama’s by stealing an extra seat that wouldn’t get them to 60 anyway. But that might change if Franken succeeds in putting enough stink on the results to mute the outrage of a Senate reversal.
If the Freedom of Choice Act passes Congress, and that’s a big if, Obama has promised to sign it the second it hits his desk. (Here he is at a Planned Parenthood Action Fund event in 2007, vowing, “The first thing I’d do as president is, is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That’s the first thing I’d do.”) Though it’s often referred to as a mere codification of Roe, FOCA, as currently drafted, actually goes well beyond that: According to the Senate sponsor of the bill, Barbara Boxer, in a statement on her Web site, FOCA would nullify all existing laws and regulations that limit abortion in any way, up to the time of fetal viability. Laws requiring parental notification and informed consent would be tossed out.
While there is strenuous debate among legal experts on the matter, many believe the act would invalidate the freedom-of-conscience laws on the books in 46 states. These are the laws that allow Catholic hospitals and health providers that receive public funds through Medicaid and Medicare to opt out of performing abortions. Without public funds, these health centers couldn’t stay open; if forced to do abortions, they would sooner close their doors. Even the prospect of selling the institutions to other providers wouldn’t be an option, the bishops have said, because that would constitute “material cooperation with an intrinsic evil.”
The bishops are not bluffing when they say they’d turn out the lights rather than comply. . . Whatever your view on the legality and morality of abortion, there is another important question to be considered here: Could we even begin to reform our already overburdened health care system without these Catholic institutions? I don’t see how.
The tone of this article is very strange, by the way. It spends the first several paragraphs mocking Catholic bishops for their concern over Obama’s abortion agenda, before conceding that they are right. Being right should be proof against mockery, shouldn’t it?
NYT science columnist John Tierney notes that the prediction markets did much better at predicting the election than any pundit. (Via Instapundit.) It’s a good reminder that free markets aggregate information better than just about anything.
The Communist Party of St. Petersburg seems to have decided that they are in the movie review business. Last May they bashed the latest Indiana Jones movie for promoting anti-Soviet propaganda. (The Soviets were really dedicated to peace, you see; the Soviet invasions of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan being minor aberrations.) Their latest review pans the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, calling the fictional James Bond “a man who worked for decades under the orders of Thatcher and Reagan to destroy the USSR.”
The story gets even weirder. The group is particularly incensed with Ukrainian co-star Olga Kurylenko, but:
Her supposed betrayals will be forgiven, the group promised in its statement, if the actress delivers her co-star Craig to the Russian secret service. “Let him tell what other plans are being written in the Pentagon and Hollywood to discredit Russia and drive a wedge between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.”
Eric Holder’s role in the Rich pardon is looking worse and worse. The author of a history of presidential pardons writes that Holder was in the thick of it:
On Nov. 18, 2000, Mr. Quinn [Marc Rich’s lawyer] told Mr. Holder that Mr. Rich was going to go for a pardon, a step his team had been contemplating for months. After the conversation, Mr. Quinn told colleagues that Mr. Holder had advised him to “go straight to” the White House and that the “timing is good.” On Dec. 11, just over a month before Mr. Clinton was to leave office, Mr. Quinn delivered the pardon papers to the White House. “The greatest danger lies with the lawyers,” Mr. Quinn wrote in an e-mail message to an aide to Mr. Rich, referring to the prosecutors in New York. “I have worked them hard and I am hopeful that E. Holder will be helpful to us.”
Under the rules governing pardon petitions — rules that were approved by Mr. Holder’s office — the views of United States attorneys “are given considerable weight” because of the “valuable insights” they have. And yet Mr. Holder did not consult Ms. White and her colleagues about the Rich pardon petition; they did not know of it until it had been granted.
Then, on Jan. 19, 2001, Mr. Holder delivered his pardon assessment to the White House, telling Beth Nolan, the White House counsel, that he was “neutral leaning favorable” on the Rich pardon. His decision, he added, was influenced by the support of Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister.
The people in the United States attorney’s office in New York weren’t the only ones surprised by Mr. Holder’s decision. Deborah Smolover, his top deputy for pardon cases, did not find out about the pardon for Mr. Rich until the White House called to inform her of it after midnight on Jan. 20. (Mr. Green [Rich’s business partner] won a pardon, too.) After the pardon was signed, Mr. Quinn has testified, Mr. Holder called him to commend him on “a very good job.” Mr. Holder also asked Mr. Quinn to consider hiring two former aides, one of whom had already contacted Mr. Quinn on Jan. 2 “at Holder’s suggestion.”
At the very best, Holder was guilty of dereliction of duty, failing to carry out basic due diligence. But given his evidently close connections to Rich’s attorney, it looks even worse than that.
The NYT reports that President-Elect Obama is reconsidering a key campaign promise:
In light of the downturn, Mr. Obama is also said to be reconsidering a key campaign pledge: his proposal to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. According to several people familiar with the discussions, he might instead let those tax cuts expire as scheduled in 2011, effectively delaying any tax increase while he gives his stimulus plan a chance to work.
Good for him. But why would Obama delay his tax hike? It’s not fear of political opposition; he has the votes to enact any tax program he likes. The only explanation is that he thinks it would be bad policy.
He’s right of course; it would be terrible policy to hike taxes on entrepreneurs just as we’re going into a recession. I’m glad he recognizes it. It is interesting that a few short weeks ago he was making a pledge that he knew was bad policy. It’s called demagoguery. But at least he might be the better class of demagogue, the kind that does the right thing (relatively speaking) once elected.
Okay, so Holder is starting to sound pretty bad. But, before conservatives and libertarians start opposing him, we still ought to ask if we could expect anyone better. (In retrospect, Kimba Wood looks pretty good.)
David Kopel points out another skeleton in Eric Holder’s closet: he has a very poor record on gun rights and played a role in the INS’s paramilitary capture of Elian Gonzalez.
Earlier this year (no ancient history here), Holder joined an amicus brief in the Heller case, supporting DC’s total ban on handgun ownership and armed self-defense. Not only did the brief support the now-discredited collective view of the Second Amendment, but it also falsely argued that the collective view had been the consistent position of the Department of Justice for decades.
After the public-defenselessness side lost the historic case, he lamented the result, saying it “opens the door to more people having more access to guns.” That, of course, was the point.
Holder also played a role in the 2000 paramilitary raid on a Miami home to place Elian Gonzalez into custody and send him back to Cuba. Setting aside the question of whether it was right to send Gonzalez back (I’m prepared to concede that the law may have required it, but see the postscript), there was no excuse to stage a paramilitary raid on a peaceful, law-abiding home. Furthermore, the raid was carried out without even the authority of a court order! In fact, the court had refused to issue one.
Janet Reno’s justification for the paramilitary raid, Kopel relates, was that the family might own guns. Amazingly, the possibility that one might exercise one’s constitutional rights are justification for federal agents to knock down your door and storm your house with automatic weapons, without the cover of a court order.
Not only was Holder the deputy AG when this travesty took place, but he defended it in an interview thereafter. In that interview, Holder argued that they did not need a court order to carry out the raid, and was unable to explain why they had sought a court order if they did not need one. He also said that Gonzalez was not taken at gunpoint, and the federal agents acted “very sensitively”. A Cato Institute article relates their “sensitive” behavior:
At 5:14 a.m. — while attorneys for the young Cuban refugee negotiated his status with Justice Department officials — eight Immigration and Naturalization Service officers used a battering ram to knock down the front door of Elian’s great uncle, Lazaro. Wielding machine guns, the body-armor-clad agents knocked over a picture of Jesus Christ and a statue of the Virgin Mary on Easter Eve. They then kicked down another door inside the Gonzalez home.
According to Elian’s cousin, Marisleysis Gonzalez, federal agents held her at gun point while one screamed, “Give me the f – – – ing boy or we’ll shoot you.” An NBC cameraman said federal gunmen kicked him in the stomach, hit his sound man with a rifle butt and yelled, “Don’t move or we’ll shoot.”
Of course, as for whether Elian was taken at gunpoint, we need not take Ms. Gonzalez’s for it, there’s Alan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo:
POSTSCRIPT: I wrote that I’m prepared to concede that the law may have required that Gonzalez be sent back to Cuba, but it is far from obvious. According to Andrew Napolitano (a legal analyst and former judge), the INS’s action was in direct violation of an order from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling that Elian Gonzalez’s guardian could not be changed until it had heard his application for asylum. If so, the raid was not only dangerous and unjustified, but illegal as well.
Ohio’s Inspector General has concluded that there was no legitimate reason for the investigation of Joe the Plumber:
Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland is standing by an agency director who OK’d improper computer checks for confidential information on “Joe the Plumber” and used state e-mails for political fundraising.
Strickland announced today that Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Department of Job and Family Services, will be placed on unpaid leave for one month in response to an inspector general’s investigation.
The investigation found Jones-Kelley had no legitimate reasons to check on Toledo-area resident Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who was popularized as “Joe the Plumber” by Republican presidential candidate John McCain. It also confirmed she improperly used her state e-mail account to raise campaign money for President-elect Barack Obama.
Some Republican leaders, who cited the report’s findings to call on Democrat Strickland to fire Jones-Kelley, were stunned that she will remain on the job.
The Inspector General’s conclusion isn’t at all surprising, given everything we already know. I am honestly shocked, however, that Gov. Strickland is standing by Jones-Kelley. He could have avoided being swept up in this scandal, but he’s a part of it now. He is now the Governor that condones using sensitive state databases for political opposition research. He is also the Governor that condones using state resources for political fundraising. Why would he do that?
Reporting from Washington — Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned at signs that Barack Obama’s national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on other important foreign policy issues.
The activists are uneasy not only about signs that both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates could be in the Obama Cabinet, but at reports suggesting that several other short-list candidates for top security posts backed the decision to go to war. . .
The activists — key members of the coalition that propelled Obama to the White House — fear he is drifting from the antiwar moorings of his once-longshot presidential candidacy. Obama has eased the rigid timetable he had set for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and he appears to be leaning toward the center in his candidates to fill key national security posts.
The president-elect has told some Democrats that he expects to take heat from parts of his political base but will not be deterred by it.
With the Monegan affair behind her, Sarah Palin’s critics are looking for new material, and their latest “scandal” is taking shape: she conducted interviews from her office. I am not making this up; this is an actual ethics complaint. Apparently, some feel that politicians should leave government property before speaking to the press, at least whenever they might be asked about political matters.
Debate on Eric Holder, President-Elect Obama’s choice for Attorney General, is centering on his acquiescence to President Clinton’s last-minute pardons for fugitive financier Marc Rich and others. That’s as it should be. Eric Holder does not look like he will be a very good Attorney General (here’s National Review’s take), but Obama gets to pick his cabinet. We can’t be under any illusions that he would pick another Mukasey. A competent and ethical liberal is the best we can hope for. The clear consensus is that Holder is at least two of the three. (Here’s Orin Kerr, for example.)
But the stain (as the Washington Post puts it) on Holder’s ethics from the Rich pardon is important. Not only did he sorta, kinda approve the pardon, saying he was “neutral, leaning toward favorable” on it, but he also (as Jennifer Rubin points out) had a major conflict of interest in the case. The New York Times reported in 2002:
Mr. Holder, the [House] report says, played a major role, steering Mr. Rich’s lawyers toward Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel. Mr. Rich hired Mr. Quinn, whose Washington contacts and ability to lobby the president made the difference, according to the report. It says that Mr. Holder’s support for the pardon and his failure to alert prosecutors of a pending pardon were just as crucial. . .
The panel criticized Mr. Holder’s conduct as unconscionable and cited several problems. It cited his admission last year that he had hoped Mr. Quinn would support his becoming attorney general in a Gore administration.
(It must be noted that the House report to which the NYT refers was partisan in tone, but I don’t believe any of these facts are in dispute.)
This makes it should as though Holder was willing to stand back from a miscarriage of justice (and even add equivocating support to it) in order to curry favor with lobbyists who could further his career, which would be truly troubling from the nation’s top law-enforcement official.
POSTSCRIPT: Holder’s aggressive stance on drugs is also troubling to libertarians, but probably won’t even arise as a topic at his hearing. (Via Instapundit.)
It’s always depressing to see the results when someone polls the public on matters of fact, as one invariably finds that the public is clueless. Still, Zogby’s scientific poll (pdf) of Obama voters (commissioned by How Obama Got Elected, an anti-Obama web site) is somewhat interesting, not because Obama voters got the answers wrong (which one tends to expect), but how they got them wrong.
It’s interesting because anti-McCain information (and pseudo-information) penetrated effectively even when they were not featured in advertising, but the anti-Obama information penetrated only when it was featured in McCain advertising. For instance, questions about Sarah Palin’s family and wardrobe were answered fairly accurately, but almost no one knew that Obama said his policies would cause energy rates to skyrocket. (In fact, more thought McCain said that than Obama.) They were able to answer that Obama says government should redistribute wealth, which appeared prominently in McCain advertising.
In short, the media seems to have done its job as it sees it (that is, to boost Obama) very well.
As it did last April, the New York Times again urges that Congress approve the Colombian free trade pact. (Via Instapundit.) As I’ve pointed out before, Colombia already has trade preferences so even protectionism can’t “justify” opposition to the pact. Its primary result would be to open Colombia to US exports.
They do miss the point a bit with this argument though:
If the lame-duck Congress does not approve the trade pact this year, prospects would dim considerably since it would lose the cover of the rule (formerly known as fast track) that provides for an up-or-down, no-amendment vote.
Congress already changed the rules to avoid a required vote on the pact last April, so I see no reason to think they feel constrained by the rules.
Minnesota’s canvassing board has rebuffed an eleventh hour effort by Al Franken to avert its certification of Norm Coleman as the winner in Minnesota’s Senate race. Coleman won by 215 votes, down significantly from his election-night margin of 725 for reasons that have never been fully explained.
The mandatory recount begins tomorrow. Since Minnesota uses optical scan ballots, there oughtn’t be a significant shift in the results from the actual counting, but you can’t rule out the possibility of chicanery. There are also some outstanding lawsuits.
When the financial rescue bill was proposed, we were told it was $700 billion to buy troubled assets. We’ve since learned that the $700 billion was for just about any damn thing the treasury feels like. (I may owe Tim Murphy an apology.) First it was for banks ($159 billion so far), which sort of made sense, but then there was talk of a bailout for automakers.
Bailing out GM would serve no purpose in regard to the stated aims of the rescue bill (to get credit flowing again), and it’s hard to think of another company more richly deserving of bankruptcy than GM. Nevertheless, I assumed it was going to happen. Now, however, the AP is reporting that prospects of a GM bailout are fading. I sure hope so.
The Intrade contract seems to concur. It’s trading around 33, well down from the 80 or so it was at on Friday.
POSTSCRIPT: This Heritage Foundation article on the 1979 Chrysler bailout is germane as we consider an automaker bailout. If we do it a second time, there’s no way it will take another 30 years for the next.
Ohio Inspector General Tom Charles said his office is now looking at a half-dozen agencies that accessed state records on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.
The Beacon Journal has learned that, in addition to the Department of Job and Family Services, two other state offices — the Ohio Department of Taxation and Ohio Attorney General Nancy Rogers — conducted database searches of Joe the Plumber. . .
In the third debate between Obama and Republican John McCain on Oct. 15, the candidates referred to Joe the Plumber more than 20 times.The next day, the taxation department conducted two separate searches of a database of liens for unpaid taxes that were certified to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office for collection.
The search was done for the express purpose of releasing the information to the media:
The department’s first search of the day was unsuccessful because of incorrect information about the individual, Kohlstrand said. Ohio Attorney General Nancy Rogers’ office then contacted taxation because it was having difficulty accessing the database, Kohlstrand said. After the two agencies talked, taxation completed a successful search.
Kohlstrand said that the AG’s office wanted access to the records so they could turn over to the national media lien information that was a public record in Lucas County. He said the national media did not have reporters in Toledo, so the attorney general’s office was helping them out with public records.
On the day following the two searches, the taxation department conducted a search of another in-house database that tracks cases and correspondence between taxpayers and the department before the liens being certified and turned over to the attorney general for collection. . . [Rick] Anthony said the database searches on both days were conducted to ensure that the information in Lucas County was being properly reported by the media.
That’s a new one. They had to investigate him, you see, to ensure that the media reports were accurate. And to save them the trouble of going to Toledo.
POSTSCRIPT: Nancy Rogers, incidentally, was appointed by Democratic Governor Ted Strickland.
POST-POSTSCRIPT: The Beacon Journal says six, but I’m only aware of five: the Attorney General, the Department of Taxation, the Department of Job and Family Services, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and the Toledo Police. What’s the sixth?
Democrats ran on “paygo” in 2006, promising to offset any new spending increases or tax cuts with comparable tax increases or spending cuts. Once in charge on Capitol Hill they quickly made exceptions, waiving paygo no fewer than 12 times to accommodate some $398 billion in new deficit spending — not that the press corps bothered to notice. That didn’t stop Majority Leader Steny Hoyer from announcing in May that “We’re absolutely committed to paygo. Speaker [Nancy Pelosi] is committed to paygo. I’m very committed to paygo. Our caucus is committed to paygo.”
But that was with a Republican president. With Obama coming into office, matters are different:
Late last week the leader of the House Blue Dog Coalition, Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper, announced that with Barack Obama about to enter the White House, “I’m not sure the old rules are relevant anymore.” Why not? Because, Mr. Cooper said, “It would be unfair to the new President to put him in a budget straitjacket.”
Good riddance. At its best, “paygo” was bad policy, because it over-estimated the impact of tax cuts while under-estimating the cost of spending. And it had no impact at all on “off-budget” expenditures. Moreover, it was rarely at its best. As the WSJ notes, Democrats waived it whenever it got in the way of their priorities. Its primary purpose was as a bulwark against tax cuts.
The Alaskan Senate seat has been in limbo for a week, as Alaska proceeds with its interminable process, but they have finally begun counting the remaining votes, and there are indications that the result is not good for Stevens. Apparently, early votes may be breaking significantly more Democratic than election day votes.
If so, and if the election day results hold up in the Minnesota recount and Georgia runoff, Michael Barone’s prediction will turn out to have been perfect. Power Line has been following Minnesota’s process.
UPDATE: Sure enough, Begich is now in the lead, and with the remaining votes seeming to break for him, one has to assume that he will win the seat.
THE Rudd Government is under pressure from all fronts, even Labor colleagues, to overturn a decision denying German doctor Bernhard Moeller permanent residency in Australia because his son Lukas has Down syndrome.
The Immigration Department this week rejected Dr Moeller’s application for permanent residency, saying the potential cost to the taxpayer of 13-year-old Lukas’s condition was too great.
Politicians, disability groups and the small Victorian town of Horsham, where Dr Moeller is the only specialist physician, were outraged by the decision and have called on Immigration Minister Chris Evans to intervene on the family’s behalf.
Despite widespread predictions of record turnout in this year’s presidential election, roughly the same portion of eligible voters cast ballots in 2008 as in 2004.
Between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004, according to a voting analysis by American University political scientist Curtis Gans, an authority on voter turnout.
Okay, I know my suggestion (appoint McCain Secretary of Defense) isn’t going to happen, but Peter Berkowitz has some more plausible suggestions for how Obama can show he’s serious. Some of these could happen, but #3, #5, or #7 would shock me.
President Obama’s treatment of Patrick Fitzgerald will be a good first test of his integrity. The Chicago Tribune (which endorsed Obama) editorializes:
Since his arrival from New York in 2001, U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald has demonstrated the energy and integrity that, in time, could liberate Illinoisans from indentured servitude to criminals in government.
President-elect Barack Obama has said he’ll keep Fitzgerald in the job, and we trust he’ll keep his word. But Fitzgerald, who serves at the president’s pleasure, has powerful enemies. They know that as his list of cooperating witnesses lengthens—convicted fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko may be joining that club—so does his list of potential targets. Those with reason to fear Fitzgerald’s breath on their necks would love to see him dumped—or promoted high into Justice Department oblivion—when Obama takes office. . .
Obama can show his commitment to cleaning up this city and state by affirming that he meant what he said during the campaign: He wants Fitzgerald to stay. The sooner Obama silences speculation about the possible replacement of Fitzgerald, the better for both men: Obama will show that he’s a man of his word. And witnesses to corruption will know they aren’t cooperating with prosecutors who might soon have a new boss.
A key figure in the (presumptively) illegal search of government records on Joe the Plumber and the ensuing cover-up has been suspended:
Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and former head of that department in Montgomery County, has been placed on paid administrative leave by Gov. Ted Strickland.
Strickland said on Friday, Nov. 7, that he took the action “due to the possibility, as yet unconfirmed, that a state computer or state e-mail account was used to assist in political fund raising.”
“I have asked Inspector General Tom Charles to include this matter in his current, ongoing investigation,” Strickland said in a press release. . . Charles already was investigating reports that a department computer was used to gather personal information about “Joe the Plumber” — Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher of suburban Toledo.
Note that Jones-Kelley was not suspended for her illegal snooping, but for other (apparently unrelated) misconduct: using state resources for fundraising. The article doesn’t say who the (alleged) fundraising was for, but it’s not hard to guess; Jones-Kelley contributed the maximum to Barack Obama.
The Obama-Biden plan provides affordable, accessible health care for all Americans, builds on the existing health care system, and uses existing providers, doctors and plans to implement the plan. Under the Obama-Biden plan, patients will be able to make health care decisions with their doctors, instead of being blocked by insurance company bureaucrats.
Under the plan, if you like your current health insurance, nothing changes, except your costs will go down by as much as $2,500 per year.
Look at this in the aggregate: we’re going to increase health care spending (by removing any restraint from insurance companies), and at the same time everyone’s costs go down. Nice trick. The difference must be made up somewhere. So who gets stuck with the bill?
Certainly doctors aren’t going to work for free. It can’t be the insurance companies; they would pass on the cost, and that’s exactly what Obama is promising won’t happen. The government? There’s no way the government will be shelling out for whatever doctors and patients decide, no questions asked. (Plus, I hear the government is a little short on money right now.)
No, if they’re serious about this, they have to intend some government oversight. In other words, they’re replacing the insurance company bureaucrat with a government bureaucrat.
POSTSCRIPT: Since pages at change.gov have a tendency to, uh, change, here’s an archive.
Earlier today, on the official Presidential transition web site:
Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.
Within hours of hitting the blogosphere, the plan was changed to this:
Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free.
Well, I’m glad someone over there realized it was a bad idea. So who’s writing this stuff? Will Obama blame wayward staffers again? At some point he has to start taking responsibility for his administration.
UPDATE: LGF points out that they missed something when they airbrushed the page:
Require 100 Hours of Service in College: Obama and Biden will establish a new American Opportunity Tax Credit that is worth $4,000 a year in exchange for 100 hours of public service a year.
Barack Obama, who ran on a platform of change and a message of bipartisanship, has tapped a Washington insider with a reputation for hardball politics to run his White House staff.
The president-elect’s selection of Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel is a significant departure from the soft-spoken, low-key aides that Obama surrounded himself with during his campaign. . . Emanuel served as a political and policy aide in the Clinton White House. . .
“No one I know is better at getting things done than Rahm Emanuel,” Obama said in a statement announcing the selection.
Indeed, Emanuel has forged a reputation as a partisan fighter.
Nicknamed “Rahmbo,” he once mailed a dead fish to a Democratic pollster who got on his bad side during a long-ago congressional race. Outraged over what he regarded as disloyal Democrats during Clinton’s first presidential campaign, he stunned dinner companions by rattling off names of the offenders, each time stabbing the restaurant table with a dinner knife and shouting, “Dead.”
UPDATE: The AP has a story with the dead-fish incident, the dinner-knife incident, and more.
Hot off the press, the first apparent evidence of fraud. Last night at around 7:30, a precinct in Mountain Iron, St. Louis County, mysteriously updated its vote total to add 100 new votes–all 100 for Barack Obama and Al Franken.
Mountain Iron uses optical scanning, so the Coleman campaign asked for a copy of the tape documenting the ballots cast on election night. St. Louis County responded by providing a tape that includes the newly-added 100 votes, and is dated November 2–the Sunday before the election. St. Louis County reportedly denies being able to produce the genuine tape from election night, even though Minnesota law, as I understand it, requires that tape to be signed by the election judges and publicly displayed.
UPDATE: Power Line (the link above) now has a partial explanation for the Mountain Iron discrepancy, but it has yet to be verified, and the genuine tape still hasn’t been produced. They need to produce the tape; it’s as simple as that.
During election season, there’s a lot of talk about “keys to the election,” all the factors that supposedly influence the outcome of the presidential election: the economy, Iraq, the candidates’ charisma, the campaigns’ organization, fundraising, media bias, etc. But Yale economist Ray Fair would argue that there is exactly one key to the election, which is the economy.
More precisely, he shows that you can predict the outcome of presidential elections using an equation, the Fair model, that is based on economic variables and a few other predictors (e.g., incumbency and party). Notably absent from the equation is anything referring to current events, or to the candidates themselves. According to Fair, you can predict the outcome of the election as soon as you can predict the economic variables, long before you even know who the candidates are.
The equation has successfully predicted the popular vote of each presidential election since 1996, and retroactively predicts nearly every election back to 1892. (An earlier version of the model, developed in 1978, was revised after it failed to predict the outcome of the 1992 election.) In 2000 it essentially predicted a tie, with a microscopic margin dwarfed by the margin of error.
For the 2008 election, it predicted that Obama would win 51.9% of the two-party popular vote, with a standard error of 2.5%. The actual outcome was 53% for Obama, meaning that he slightly outperformed the prediction, but was well within its margin of error. The striking fact is that Fair made similar predictions as far back as November 2006, long before we had any inkling who the candidates and what the issues would be.
Given this, it is hard to escape the impression that most presidential elections are largely a charade, a lengthy process toward a pre-ordained outcome. All the “keys to the election,” including the candidates themselves and all the issues, amounted to just a 1.1% deviation from the prediction. An optimally Republican-favoring campaign season, one that swung the result by the entire standard error, would have eked out a 50.4% victory in the popular vote. (Recalling 2000, such a narrow edge might have been insufficient for an electoral college victory.) In any case, this year was hardly optimally Republican.
I find these results somewhat dispiriting, because it makes no sense for voters to make their decision solely on economic variables. The President has relatively little power to affect the economy, compared to his much greater power and importance in foreign affairs. And frankly, foreign affairs are much more important, particularly today. But alas, according to the Fair model, foreign affairs hardly figure in to the election at all.
Another takeaway from Fair’s results is the silliness of the idea of an electoral “mandate” for the President. Since you can predict the election’s outcome without knowing the candidates, much less any promises the candidates have made, the election can hardly be viewed as a judgement on those promises.
According to the exit polls, President-Elect Obama did well across a wide range of issues, but one area where he was weak was national security. If Obama truly wants to unite the nation as he said in his victory speech, and wants to set minds at ease on national security, I have a suggestion: appoint John McCain as Secretary of Defense.
This would be a win for nearly everyone. With the war in Iraq winding down, McCain’s and Obama’s positions on Iraq are no longer so very far apart, which makes it feasible. Obama would win enormous credit for bipartisanship, and would get an excellent Secretary of Defense. He probably has to appoint a Republican to his cabinet anyway, and the other names bandied about (Hagel, Lugar) offer him no obvious political advantage.
John McCain would get to demonstrate that he puts his country ahead of politics, and would get a job for which he is obviously passionate. At his age, he probably doesn’t have that much longer to serve in the Senate anyway, and he could probably serve at least eight years as SecDef. (If Obama were defeated for re-election, his successor would likely keep McCain on.)
The American people would see the man they trust most to lead the military placed in charge of it. Our foreign allies would be reassured that there would be no sudden reversals of policy. The right would be pleased to see McCain out of the Senate where (campaign ads notwithstanding) he was hardly a loyal supporter of his party. Libertarians would be even more delighted to see him go. And the left is so happy to have Obama that most of them will go along with anything.
Arizona’s governor, Janet Napolitano, is a Democrat, so a deal would have to be struck to keep McCain’s seat in Republican hands. But Napolitano is a member of Obama’s transition team and a Cabinet candidate herself, so she would be very unlikely to obstruct such a deal. (If Napolitano were to join Obama’s cabinet, she would be succeeded by a Republican, which suggests one easy way to arrange the deal would be simply to confirm her first.)
In short, everyone wins but the anti-war left. Which makes it perfect.
If Stevens holds on to win re-election, as it appears he will, and then is expelled by the Senate, what happens? Election Law explains it’s much as you might expect: Governor Palin will appoint a temporary replacement and then a special election will be called. However, a new Alaska law passed by voter initiative requires the special election be called sooner than you might expect, after just a few months.
When will Stevens be expelled? Harry Reid has indicated that he will not wait for Stevens’s appeal to be heard, but he needs a 2/3 majority, and it’s not clear whether Republicans agree. Personally, I hope they do. A criminal conviction should be more than enough.
It’s also been suggested that Stevens’s re-election after his conviction provides a presumption against expulsion. I don’t buy that at all. Surely plenty of Alaskans voted for Stevens anticipating that he would be forced from office and Palin would appoint a Republican successor. (That’s how I would have voted.) So under these circumstances, his narrow re-election can hardly be taken as an endorsement that he should remain in office.
UPDATE: Actually, it’s a bit more complicated. Apparently, it’s not entirely clear whether the Governor can appoint a temporary successor. It might be that the seat remains open until the special election.
Ed Morrissey reports that the recount in Minnesota’s Senate race shouldn’t be very ugly, for two reasons. First, Minnesota uses optical scan ballots, which are immediately checked and returned to the voter to try again if they cannot be read clearly. Consequently, there’s shouldn’t be very many unclear ballots at all. Second, Minnesota law gives clear standards for a hand count, unlike Florida 2000 where individual counties were making it up as they went along. Barring a Washington 2004 scenario (where hundreds of new ballots were “found” during the recount), the recount should go smoothly and is unlikely to change the result.
So why doesn’t everyone use optical scan ballots? They have nearly all the advantages of electronic voting machines with none of the drawbacks. What’s the attraction of electronic voting machines? I can’t remember where I saw this theory, but I think it’s spot on: People like them for the same reason they once preferred canned vegetables, they’re more “modern”!
IRRELEVANT ASIDE: Come to think of it, that’s kind of the same reason people like object-oriented programming too.
Chambliss (R-Georgia) appears to have microscopically missed achieving a majority, so it appears that race is headed to a runoff. Coleman (R-Minnesota) is leading Franken by about 1000 votes with 9 precincts left to report; it is surely headed to a recount. Stevens (R-Alaska) appears to have survived, despite being the Republican least deserving of a win yesterday. He leads by over 3000 in a small state, but we’ll probably see a recount there as well. All three are strong favorites on Intrade at this point.
Oregon, for some reason, is unable to count vote in a timely fashion. Despite having the entire night to work, only 75% percent of precincts are reporting. Smith (R) is leading by 2 points, but that doesn’t mean much. Intrade has nary a hint either.
If we assume Republicans hold Georgia, Minnesota, and Alaska, but lose Oregon, that leaves a 57-43 balance in the Senate.
UPDATE: With all precincts now reporting in Minnesota, Coleman has won by 726 votes, until the recount. (And late-arriving absentees?) Also, Georgia still has 4% of precincts to report so we don’t have a runoff just yet.
UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez says Alaska has 40,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted. Oy. She also says that Chambliss is back over 50% with 99% of precincts reporting. (I can’t confirm this on Georgia’s web site.)
UPDATE: Intrade is calling Oregon virtual certainty for Merkley (D). However, it’s also strongly favoring an outcome of 51-55 Democratic Senate seats, which doesn’t make any sense, since the Democrats have already locked up 56 and Oregon would make 57. What’s going on?
According to an obscure statement from Obama’s campaign that’s now come to light, Obama does not support reimposing the fairness doctrine. Good news for free speech? Maybe not. Mark Levin notes that Obama does support government control of radio content, but prefers a more subtle way to attack talk radio.
The political investigation run by Democrats hedged, being unwilling to exonerate Palin fully, but the independent investigation did just that:
Gov. Sarah Palin violated no ethics laws when she fired her public safety commissioner, the state personnel board concluded in a report released Monday.
“There is no probable cause to believe that the governor, or any other state official, violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in connection with these matters,” the report says.
“Gov. Palin is pleased that the independent investigator for the Personnel Board has concluded that she acted properly in the reassignment of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan,” her attorney, Thomas Van Flein, said in a statement.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) is fine with Russia invading Georgia.
Nadler says:
We have not been willing to put our priorities properly. We have not been willing to say … “Hey Russia, we won’t expand NATO into the Ukraine and Georgia, right next to your borders, if you cooperate with us on Iran.” …
I think Iran and Israel are a hell of a lot more important than expanding NATO to Russia’s borders. Why should we? What do we need it for?
Someone in the crowd says: “Because they invaded Georgia.”
Nadler retorts: “So let ’em invade Georgia. It’s right next to them. Would we tolerate a foreign–a Russian army in Mexico? Which is more important to us Georgia or Israel, frankly?”
Nadler is the Democratic chariman of the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties subcommittee. Thankfully, I’m unaware of him having any particular influence in foreign policy.
What Nadler apparently fails to remember is that Russia is our former enemy, that would very much like to challenge us again. Nadler’s moral equivalence notwithstanding, extending NATO is a key element in the West’s strategy to consolidate its gains.
An argument that might be defensible would be one of realpolitik: not that Georgia and Ukraine are of no significance to us, but that we should regretfully cut them loose in exchange for Russia’s assistance with a more serious threat. To do so would incur a significant realpolitik cost, by showing the world that we are unreliable ally, but one might argue (I suppose) that it would be worth it. But at the very least, we should require some concrete action in exchange, rather than vague diplomatic platitudes. But that is clearly not what Nadler is contemplating. Rather, he is suggesting that cutting Georgia and Ukraine loose are our diplomatic opening to Russia!
ASIDE: As a historical note, we need not speculate about our reaction to a foreign army in Mexico.
Criticized for their human rights records, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft plan to adopt voluntary guidelines that will govern their business practices in nations like China that restrict free speech, according to people who participated in drafting the rules.
The code of conduct, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle before its scheduled release next week, spells out that the technology titans should, for instance, carefully scrutinize demands by authorities for information about users and requests that online material be censored.
By agreeing to the rules, the companies hope to counter unflattering publicity in recent years over their cooperation with China’s efforts to crack down on dissidents and block Web sites considered to be subversive. It also might be a way to fend off U.S. legislation that could hamstring their business in some potentially profitable markets.
But critics complained that some of the rules fail to go far enough. Loopholes make it possible for companies to continue some of their most egregious behavior, they said.
Ooooh! Careful scrutiny before cooperating with censors and oppressors!
These companies have already made their priorities clear. This “code of conduct” is nothing more than a PR effort to repair their tarnished reputation and stave off legislation. Does anyone think it will stop them from doing anything that China (and Australia) requires? I hope no one is taken in by it.
The Herald Sun reports that Australia is preparing to implement nationwide internet filtering (that is, censorship):
AUSTRALIA will join China in implementing mandatory censoring of the internet under plans put forward by the Federal Government. . . The government has declared it will not let internet users opt out of the proposed national internet filter.
The plan was first created as a way to combat child pronography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.
Communications minister Stephen Conroy revealed the mandatory censorship to the Senate estimates committee as the Global Network Initiative, bringing together leading companies, human rights organisations, academics and investors, committed the technology firms to “protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users”. . .
The net nanny proposal was originally going to allow Australians who wanted uncensored access to the web the option of contacting their internet service provider to be excluded from the service.
Just a few days ago, I listened to Kaithy Shaidle on PJM political predict that nationwide net filtering wasn’t far away in Canada. Lord help me, I thought she was exaggerating. Continental Europe is one thing, but we’re not there yet in the English-speaking world, right? Wrong.
Anyway, anyone who thinks that it would be used only for child pornography for long has not been paying attention. It won’t be limited to that even on the day it’s activated.
It’s worth mentioning that the current Australian government is leftist. Let’s not hear any more prattle about liberal concern for free speech. (Am I generalizing too much from one incident in a foreign country? I wish.)
UPDATE: A reader writes to tell me that this started during the preceding Conservative government. That’s not much of a defense in any case, but is it true? After a couple of minutes of googling, it looks like the answer is “sort of.” Electronic Frontiers Australia has a web page denouncing the proposal. Nowhere does it point to an origin for this proposal outside of the Labor party. In fact, it specifically points to its origin in a press release from Labor, while they were still in opposition.
But, EFA also has a lot to say about other internet censorship laws passed by the preceding Conservative government. Nothing as sweeping or draconian as this, to be sure, but still bad. So you can pick your story. If you’re anti-Labor, you can say that Labor plans to make Australia’s censorship far, far worse. If you’re pro-Labor, you can say that (unlike the Conservatives) they haven’t actually done anything yet, and maybe they won’t. Let’s hope the latter story pans out.
Murtha won’t take questions from the press unless they are about the “real issues,” which do not include why Murtha has repeatedly insulted his constituents.
FIRE has a retrospective on the University of Delaware’s 2007 re-education program. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear that it was actually dissolved.
Anyone who thinks Obama will cut taxes is a sucker. As with Bill Clinton before him, it’s a promise he has no intention of keeping. But you don’t have to take my word for it; just listen to Obama’s campaign and its ever-sliding threshold for the tax cut:
There’s a myth that the GOP is the party of big business. In fact, the GOP is the party of entrepreneurs, while the Democrats are the party of entrenched business interests. (More pithily: Democrats are the party of the already rich, Republicans are the party of those who want to become rich.) Shannon Love succinctly explains why.
The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is in full cover-up mode over its illegal search into records pertaining to Joe the Plumber, but the cover-up is unraveling:
Vanessa Niekamp said that when she was asked to run a child-support check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16, she thought it routine. A supervisor told her the man had contacted the state agency about his case.
Niekamp didn’t know she just had checked on “Joe the Plumber,” who was elevated the night before to presidential politics prominence as Republican John McCain’s example in a debate of an average American.
The senior manager would not learn about “Joe” for another week, when she said her boss informed her and directed her to write an e-mail stating her computer check was a legitimate inquiry.
The reason Niekamp said she was given for checking if there was a child-support case on Wurzelbacher does not match the reason given by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Director Helen Jones-Kelley said her agency checks people who are “thrust into the public spotlight,” amid suggestions they may have come into money, to see if they owe support or are receiving undeserved public assistance.
Niekamp told The Dispatch she is unfamiliar with the practice of checking on the newly famous. “I’ve never done that before, I don’t know of anybody in my office who does that and I don’t remember anyone ever doing that,” she said today. . .
On Oct. 23, Niekamp said Doug Thompson, deputy director for child support, told her she had checked on “Joe the Plumber.” Thompson “literally demanded” that she write an e-mail to the agency’s chief privacy officer stating she checked the case for child-support purposes, she said. . .
The e-mail that Niekamp said she wrote was not among records provided today to The Dispatch in response to a public-records request. Nor did the agency, as required by state law, say it withheld any records.
There are two main developments here. First, Jones-Kelley’s story — that they always check on people who become famous — is a lie. This is no surprise, as no one believed her tale. (Indeed, it would have been far scarier if she had been telling the truth, that Ohio as a matter of policy investigates all newly famous people.)
Second, they are actively trying to cover up what they did, first by forcing Niekamp to write an email to cover for the illegal search, and then by hiding that email from the press. As they say; it’s not the crime but the cover-up.
When the story first broke, Ohio’s Democratic governor denied that the records were accessed for political purposes. Now he refuses to comment.
Barack Obama’s senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for his presidency if he wins next week’s election, amid concerns that many of his euphoric supporters are harbouring unrealistic hopes of what he can achieve.
The sudden financial crisis and the prospect of a deep and painful recession have increased the urgency inside the Obama team to bring people down to earth, after a campaign in which his soaring rhetoric and promises of “hope” and “change” are now confronted with the reality of a stricken economy.
One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, “so there’s not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair”.
Unrealistic expectations? Where could those have come from?
Note that the expectation-lowering is scheduled for immediately after the election. The Times suggests that Obama may already be starting to lower expectations, but I see just the opposite, an ever-growing list of crazy promises.
Journalists from three major newspapers that endorsed John McCain have been booted from Barack Obama’s campaign plane for the final leg of the presidential race.
The Washington Times reported Friday that it was notified of the Obama campaign’s decision Thursday evening — even though the paper has covered Obama from the start.
Executive Editor John Solomon told FOXNews.com that the Obama campaign said it didn’t have enough seats on the plane, but “I don’t think the explanation makes sense to us.”
“We’ve been traveling since 2007 with him. … We’re a relevant newspaper — every day we break news,” Solomon said. “And to suddenly be kicked off the plane for people who haven’t covered it as aggressively or thoroughly as we are … it sort of feels unfair.”
He said the newspaper protested but was turned down again by the campaign.
“I can only hope that the candidate who describes himself as wanting to unite the nation doesn’t have some sort of litmus test for who he decides gets to cover the campaign,” Solomon said, noting that the Obama campaign’s decision came just two days after the paper endorsed McCain.
The New York Post and Dallas Morning News also have been kicked off Obama’s plane.
I’ve noted before that Obama is remarkably thin-skinned. He’s gotten a free ride from almost the entire media, but he wants it to be unanimous. For the few major papers that endorse his opponent, there are consequences.
AFTERTHOUGHT: Just for fun: imagine the furor if President Bush had booted newspapers that endorsed John Kerry.
Slate shows that Obama could easily disclose his small-donor list if he wanted to do so. They produce a searchable database (from dummy information, obviously) in a couple of hours using Microsoft Excel and one commodity PC. This puts the lie to the campaign’s claim that it’s infeasible for them to do so.
Slate suggests that they ought to do so, writing:
Politically, there would be several advantages in releasing the names. Obama has campaigned (effectively) on a platform of making government more transparent, citing his efforts to do so in Chicago and Washington as signature achievements. He has also disclosed the bundlers who raise large amounts of money for his campaign. Finally, making the list public would rebut McCain’s broad and unsubstantiated claims that the list (and the huge sums of money it represents) is shot through with fraud.
(They write this without a hint of irony.) Slate is right, it would be to his advantage to release the list, if indeed he has nothing to hide. Too bad Slate cannot see the implications of their own experiment.
ABC’s Jake Tapper likens Obama to Santa Claus, with his “astoundingly lengthy” list of promises given in a single campaign appearance. I think he reminds me more of Homer Simpson.
The very bigness of [Obama’s] ideas is the problem: he seems blind to the concept his numbers don’t add up.
Obama has already proposed a new stimulus package of $188 billion over two years. His tax cuts will cost $85 billion a year. His “army of new teachers”: $18 billion. Renewable energy: $15 billion. CBS News and various independent experts estimate Obama’s total first year spending could exceed $280 billion.
Still Obama repeated his claim he can find the money to pay for every proposal.
“I’ve offered spending cuts above and beyond their cost,” he has said.
The fact is the savings Obama has identified do not cover his spending. According to a CBS News estimate, he’s around $90 billion short.
Well, the tax cuts won’t survive to inauguration day. That would put him only $5 short, by CBS’s estimate.
The real bad news is the numbers are far worse than this. They’re based on the idea that government action won’t change individual behavior (except when it’s supposed to). Stifling the economy with high taxes and regulation will lead to slower economic activity and lower tax revenues. His tax hikes won’t raise the projected revenue and his revenue-neutral regulation won’t be. His tax cuts might cost less than projected, but that’s moot since they’ll never happen.
The head of the [Luzerne] county bureau of elections hasn’t encountered any suspected voter registration fraud, but allegations in other parts of Pennsylvania have sparked a lawsuit and a verbal exchange between a state official and the Republican Party.
The Pennsylvania Republican Party filed a lawsuit to assure the vote count is accurate – a move that Gov. Ed Rendell’s press secretary described as a “Jim Crow attitude.”
Playing the race card is probably just his reflex response, but if we take him seriously, he seems to be saying that preventing voter fraud hurts blacks. So isn’t he saying that blacks are likely to commit voter fraud? Doesn’t that make him the racist? (Answer: Of course not, he’s a Democrat.)
An Ohio official at the center of the controversy over the searches on Joe the Plumber into Ohio government databases revises her story:
A state agency has revealed that its checks of computer systems for potential information on “Joe the Plumber” were more extensive than it first acknowledged.
Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, disclosed today that computer inquiries on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher were not restricted to a child-support system.
The agency also checked Wurzelbacher in its computer systems to determine whether he was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes, she wrote.
The London Times has located Obama’s beloved aunt, living in poverty in South Boston:
Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.
A second relative believed to be the long-lost “Uncle Omar” described in the book was beaten by armed robbers with a “sawed-off rifle” while working in a corner shop in the Dorchester area of the city. He was later evicted from his one-bedroom flat for failing to pay $2,324.20 (£1,488) arrears, according to the Boston Housing Court.
The most damning part of the Obama aunt story is that once his campaign found her living in squalor they told her to not talk to the press until after the election, but they didn’t try to help her.
She did as she was asked, too. I guess she likes him more than he likes her.
AFTERTHOUGHT: How sad is it that it falls to British newspapers to do the job of investigating our leading presidential candidate?
This is an amazing race. The incumbent president has approval ratings somewhere between Robert Mugabe and the ebola virus. The economy is supposedly on the brink of global Armageddon. McCain has only $80 million to spend, while Obama’s burning through $600 mil as fast as he can, and he doesn’t really need to spend a dime given the wall-to-wall media adoration. And tonight Chris Matthews’ doctors announced that his leg tingle has metastasized leaving his entire body like a vibrating cellphone whose ringtone is locked on “I’m In Love, I’m In Love, I’m In Love, I’m In Love, I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy.”
And yet an old cranky broke loser is within two or three points of the King of the World. Strange.
Shortly after the third debate, there were several suspicious searches in Ohio government databases for records pertaining to Joe the Plumber. If not conducted for some legitimate reason, which the timing makes extremely unlikely, this would be an illegal invasion of privacy.
One of the culprits is now known: she is Helen Jones-Kelley, the director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Service. Ace notes that she is a $2300 contributor (the maximum) to the Obama campaign. She claims that she did not conduct the check for political reasons, but her explanation is even worse:
Helen Jones-Kelly, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, confirmed today that she OK’d the check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher following the Oct. 15 presidential debate.
She said there were no political reasons for the check on the sudden presidential campaign fixture though the Support Enforcement Tracking System.
Amid questions from the media and others about “Joe the Plumber,” Jones-Kelley said she approved a check to determine if he was current on any ordered child-support payments.
Such information was not and cannot be publicly shared, she said. It is unclear if Wurzelbacher is involved in a child-support case. Reports state that he lives alone with a 13-year-old son.
“Our practice is when someone is thrust quickly into the public spotlight, we often take a look” at them, Jones-Kelley said, citing a case where a lottery winner was found to owe past-due child support. “Our practice is to basically look at what is coming our way.”
Jones-Kelley is claiming that the mere fact that someone has become famous is grounds for a government investigation! She’s probably lying, but if she’s not, there’s something seriously wrong at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. I’d actually prefer it if this were purely political.
ASIDE: Note the journalistic weasel-speak: “It is unclear if Wurzelbacher is involved in a child-support case.” Translation: we don’t know, but we want to insinuate that he might be.
For what it’s worth, Ohio’s Democratic Governor Ted Strickland would rather have you believe that the Ohio government routinely invades people’s privacy for no reason at all, than that they do it for political purposes:
Democrat Gov. Ted Strickland is satisfied that there are no political overtures to the check on Wurzelbacher, a spokesman said.
“Based on what we know to this point, we don’t have any reason to believe the information was improperly accessed or disclosed by a state employee,” said Keith Dailey, Strickland’s press secretary.
Toledo Police have confirmed that a TPD records clerk is accused of performing an illegal search of information related to ‘Joe the Plumber.’
Julie McConnell, has been charged with Gross Misconduct for allegedly making an improper inquiry into a state database in search of information pertaining to Samuel Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16.
Toledo Mayor Carty Finkbeiner admitted yesterday that a member of the media made the request of the Toledo Police Department for Joe ‘the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher’s records, NewsTalk 1370 WSPD is reporting. The comments were made in response to questions during an unrelated press conference.
Finkbeiner did not say which news outlet, nor which reporter, made the request. He also did not identify the individual who ran the report.
That’s two of the four searches discovered by the Columbus Dispatch. The culprits behind searches at the Attorney General’s office and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles have not yet been identified.
For years the media elite has told us that our foreign policy must give deference to our allies, particularly the French. Our actions must pass the “global test.” A unilateral foreign policy is very bad.
If Obama is elected, I suspect that the conventional wisdom will quickly change. Here’s why:
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is very critical of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama’s positions on Iran, according to reports that have reached Israel’s government.
Sarkozy has made his criticisms only in closed forums in France. But according to a senior Israeli government source, the reports reaching Israel indicate that Sarkozy views the Democratic candidate’s stance on Iran as “utterly immature” and comprised of “formulations empty of all content.” . . .
Until now, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany have tried to maintain a united front on Iran. But according to the senior Israeli source, Sarkozy fears that Obama might “arrogantly” ignore the other members of this front and open a direct dialogue with Iran without preconditions.
When and if a liberal U.S. government disagrees with the world, the media will suddenly rediscover American exceptionalism. Unilateralism will suddenly become proper, even necessary. And it will all happen without a hint of irony.
Elizabeth Edwards criticizes McCain’s health care proposals, because they leave decisions up to individuals. This is a bad thing (!), because individuals frequently “make stupid economics decisions.”
Two recent campaign advertisements seriously misrepresent the views of my client, The Heritage Foundation. They suggest, quite falsely, that The Heritage Foundation and one of its analysts support your tax plan.
The print ad on your Website as well as your ad entitled “Try This” reference a quote from policy analyst Rea Hederman. In fact, Mr. Hederman never said what is quoted there. Rather, the words you quote are from a New York Sun reporter who interviewed Mr. Hederman and summarized his views erroneously.
That the reporter’s summary is erroneous is evident from the actual quotes from Mr. Hederman presented in the article, which make it quite clear that Mr. Hederman believes your tax plan would be bad not only for the country, but for the middle class. By omitting the direct quotes from Heritage that are contained in the article and attributing to Heritage a conflicting statement not made by its analyst, the advertisement appears to be an intentional attempt to mislead.
Surely there can be no doubt within your campaign as to how Heritage truly views your tax plan.
Isn’t there a rule about keeping your lies plausible? One might just as well claim the New York Times endorsed John McCain.
Pajamas Media: Was this merely an academic matter to them, or were they serious about killing 25 million Americans that would not bend to their political will?
Larry Grathwohl: I suppose you could consider this a purely academic discussion in that the Weathermen never had the opportunity to implement their political ends. However, I can assure you that this was not the case. There was an absolute belief that they, along with the international revolutionary movement, would cause the collapse of the United States and that they would be in charge. Nixon was of great concern and how his end would be conducted. This may sound absurd in today’s context, but the Weatherman believed they would succeed.
Pajamas Media: Did they ever devise a cover story to explain to the rest of America how roughly one in ten disappeared?
Larry Grathwohl: When I suggested that this might be a difficult proposition they looked at me like I had three heads. They would be in charge! They would be in control! Who would oppose them? Lambs to the slaughter I guess.
Pajamas Media: Were any of those Weathermen involved in concocting this plan particularly excited or enthusiastic about the death camps, or was it merely a means to an end?
Larry Grathwohl: Of course they were enthusiastic as it was representative of the success of “the revolution.”
Obama’s principal collaboration with Ayers was on education policy in Chicago. Grathwohl also commented on Ayers’s educational views, and on his connection with Obama:
Pajamas Media: Would you let your children attend a college or university class taught by Ayers or his wife, Bernadine Dohrn? What would you tell parents who have had their children exposed to Ayers’ academic programs, like the Small Schools Workshop?
Larry Grathwohl: As for Billy’s ideas on education, isn’t it apparent? Reading, writing, and arithmetic aren’t important! Radicalism is what’s important. Fits right in with the Billy Ayers view of creating mindless soldiers to follow his commands — where best to lay the foundations of a revolution than with the young?
Pajamas Media: Do you think there is there any way that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama could not have known that Bill Ayers was a domestic terrorist? Is there any reason that the American people should accept Barack Obama’s newest excuse about his relationship with Bill Ayers, where Obama claimed that he thought Ayers was “reformed”?
Larry Grathwohl: If we are to believe Mr. Obama, he just didn’t know Billy was as radical as he apparently is. Really? Just like he didn’t know the Rev. Wright was as radical as he is? Obama is a politician and he wants me to believe that he never discussed politics with the Rev Wright or Billy Ayers?
Obama has defended his relationship with Ayers, saying that he was only 8 when Ayers’s criminal activities took place, but Grathwohl says that Ayers’s radicalism is hardly a thing of the past:
Pajamas Media: Bill Ayers came out of hiding around 1980, became an college professor, and has served on numerous boards and foundations. Do you think he’s changed in his radicalism?
Larry Grathwohl: Has Billy changed? I hardly think so.
Pajamas Media: If conditions permitted, do you think Ayers would still engage in violence to further a political agenda?
Larry Grathwohl: He has acknowledged his support of anti-American groups and stated he felt that the Weathermen hadn’t done enough.
Pajamas Media: Do you consider Bill Ayers an attempted mass murderer?
Larry Grathwohl: I’m not certain Billy is a mass [murderer]; his ego just wants him to be in charge. Note that Billy never does anything that involves risk. He has no problem allowing his women to do the evil task, Diane Oughton and even Bernardine, but never him. As for what he might do, hasn’t he said he doesn’t rule out the possibility of future bombings? [Ayers said he didn’t “want to discount the possibility” in this New York Times article from September 11, 2001. — Ed.]
By the way, isn’t this an obvious interview to conduct? But it had to fall to Pajamas Media to do it, because the mainstream media’s investigative reporters are busy interviewing John McCain’s daughter’s friends and such.
So says a paper (pdf) from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis:
The financial crisis has also been associated with four widely held claims about the nature of the crisis and the associated spillovers to the rest of the economy. The financial press and policymakers have made the following four claims about the nature of the crisis.
1. Bank lending to nonfinancial corporations and individuals has declined sharply.
2. Interbank lending is essentially nonexistent.
3. Commercial paper issuance by nonfinancial corporations has declined sharply, and rates have risen to unprecedented levels.
4. Banks play a large role in channeling funds from savers to borrowers.
Here we examine these claims using data from the Federal Reserve Board. Our argument that all four claims are false is based on data up until October 8, 2008.
Joe Biden on Monday compared Barack Obama to Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. . .
Biden . . . stressed that his Obama is a genuine force for change. As proof, Democratic vice presidential candidate pointed to the kind of attacks that have historically been directed at new leaders with new ideas.
“The defenders of the status quo have always tried to tear down those who would change our nation for the better,” Biden said. “They said Thomas Jefferson wasn’t … a real Christian. That was the essence of the campaign against him. Well, does that sound familiar?” he said.
“Ladies and gentlemen, they said Abraham Lincoln … wanted to take away individual rights. Ladies and gentlemen, they said Franklin Roosevelt would destroy the American system of life. Sound familiar? And ladies and gentlemen, they said that John F. Kennedy was, quote, ‘a dangerous choice in difficult times.’ … Sound familiar?”
A few thoughts:
Actually, every presidential candidate faces these sorts of attacks. It’s called politics. The question is whether the attacks are fair.
New ideas? Does Obama actually have any new ideas? I’ve not heard a single one that isn’t just an old liberal retread.
Jefferson was attacked for not being a Christian (which, for the record, was true), but more seriously was attacked for being too enamored of the French revolution. The French revolution, of course, led to the reign of terror, and eventually to the re-institution of the monarchy, which is not something one would have wanted to see repeated in America. History has vindicated Jefferson, but going in there was legitimate reason for concern on the latter issue.
What, no love for Reagan? I thought Reagan was a bipartisanfigure now. New ideas? Check! Vicious attacks? Check!
Obama says that the “tragedy” of the civil rights movement was its failure to redistribute wealth:
A 7-year-old radio interview in which Barack Obama discussed the failure of the Supreme Court to rule on redistributing wealth in its civil rights rulings has given fresh ammunition to critics who say the Democratic presidential candidate has a socialist agenda.
The interview — conducted by Chicago Public Radio in 2001, while Obama was an Illinois state senator and a law professor at the University of Chicago — delves into whether the civil rights movement should have gone further than it did, so that when “dispossessed peoples” appealed to the high court on the right to sit at the lunch counter, they should have also appealed for the right to have someone else pay for the meal.
Even more frighteningly, he also said the Warren Court “wasn’t that radical,” because it focused on limitations of what the government can do, rather than inventing affirmative obligations of the government to do things, such as redistribute wealth. In so doing, he said:
[The Supreme Court] didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted.
(Emphasis mine.) Apparently, Obama thinks the Constitution ought to be interpreted to require the government to redistribute wealth.
Ironically, Biden chose today to say that comparing Obama to Karl Marx is off the mark.
Murtha’s “racist” and “redneck” insults may prove to cost him re-election. Michelle Malkin reports that a new poll, not yet released, has John Murtha now trailing in his bid for his re-election, 48-35.
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