Finally, a C-PAC speaker to agree with

I've quoted so many Beavis and Butthead type comments from the Conservative PAC meeting last weekend. Now finally one of their speakers has said something they should listen to:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee . . . pointed to the Bush administration’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“You know what kind of conservatives we need most? Competent conservatives,” Huckabee said in a speech Thursday. “It’s when we lose our competence, that Americans lose their confidence.”

“We’re no longer Reagan’s shining city on a hill; we are the ruined city by the sea,” he added.

I don't think we have to worry about a sudden outbreak of competence, but I'm not counting Huckabee out as a contender in 2012. He already has a base from 2008, Romney just didn't catch on before, and Palin and Jindal seem to be losing their luster.

Ralph

Arguing about spending

There's an argument over whether governmental spending is the way to get out of the economic recession we're in. Democrats say yes, Republicans say tax cuts are better.

President Roosevelt's New Deal spending is credited by many as effective in starting the recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930's, while others say it was the massive spending for World War II that ended the depression.

Some economists have pointed out that, although the economy didn't really turn around until the 1940's and the war, the initial New Deal spending was making a big difference until FDR reacted to criticism and pulled back; then the recovery slowed again and didn't come about until the huge outlays for defense spending.

A letter in today's New York Times got me thinking about this. What seems to be true in both arguments is that spending that creates jobs is the answer, whether it's for roads and bridges or for bombers and tanks.

So the Republicans' "not until WWII" argument against Obama's current spending proposals doesn't make sense. There were no tax cuts in the 1940's to spur the economy; it was the spending -- and lots of it.

Atlanta's Don George, the NYT's letter writer, agrees: "I say, then, let's spend as if we were in World War II and our very survival depended on it. President Obama's budget appears to do exactly that."

Ralph

Taking off the gloves

President Obama has been criticized by some progressives who are disappointed that he has too easily compromised, trying to forge bipartisan support, and has fought for less than he might have been able to get through Congress.

We should all be happy with his radio address today, as reported by Charles Babington on HuffingtonPost:

President Barack Obama challenged the nation's vested interests to a legislative duel Saturday, saying he will fight to change health care, energy and education in dramatic ways that will upset the status quo.

"The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long," Obama said in his weekly radio and video address. "But I don't. I work for the American people."

He said his ambitious budget plan, unveiled Thursday, will help millions of Americans, but only if Congress overcomes resistance from deep-pocket lobbies.

"I know these steps won't sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they're gearing up for a fight," Obama said, using tough-guy language reminiscent of his predecessor, George W. Bush. "My message to them is this: So am I."

Some analysts say Obama's proposals are almost radical. But he said all of them were included in his campaign promises. "It is the change the American people voted for in November," he said.

This is true. That is what we voted for him to do and where he wants to take the country. But there are powerful and moneyed forces that will oppose change. It's taking a while to realize that we might actually get results, but it will take solid support from liberal/progressive voters to help him bring it about. He can't do it alone.

Ralph

Send in the clowns

Paul Krugman ended his column criticizing Bobby Jindal's response to Obama's address to Congress by saying: "The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead."

Now it turns out that one of the anecdotes that Jindal used to illustrate the threat of government interference was made up. Jindal had implied that, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, he had been present in the office of a sherrif who was being told on the phone by a beaurocrat from FEMA that he could not allow private citizens with boats to help rescue stranded people because they didn't have insurance and permits. At that time, Jindal was a Congressman from Louisiana.

As reported on Politico:

But now, a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone "days later." The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

This is no minor difference. Jindal's presence in Lee's office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story's intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn't there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.

There's a larger point here, though. The central anecdote of the GOP's prime-time response to President Obama's speech, intended to illustrate the threat of excessive government regulation, turns out to have been made up.

More evidence of the intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement: The Conservative Political Action Conference has just held it's meeting in Washington. Some highlights: Gov. Sarah Palin chose not to attend, although a big topic of discussion was the way the media had "assassinated" her.

[I suggest playing the re-runs of her interviews with Charlie Gibson and with Katie Couric, both of whom seemed flummoxed by her appalling lack of world knowledge but chose not to go in for the kill. . Is "self-assassination" a word?]

Among other speakers at the C-PAC meeting were those paragons of wisdom, Rush Limbaugh and "Joe the Plumber;" and then there was the 13 year old boy who has written a book to remind Republicans of the definition of "conservatism." He got a standing ovation after his speech.

The MC of the C-PAC Presidential Banquet was the Republican we love to ridicule, Representative Michelle Bachmann, who once called Barack Obama "very anti-American." She also made the headlines today, in her role as MC, by saying to the African-American Chairman of the Republican National Committee: "Michael Steele! You be da man! You be da man."

[Forgive the dialect. Michelle is from Minnesota. She probably just got confused and thought that would be funny rather than racist. It's something Beavis and Butthead would have done.]

Then there was the howler by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who claims that conservatives are more "interesting" and "fun" than liberals. McConnell, who looks to me like he's already been embalmed, declared: "who wants to hang out with guys like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich when you can be with Rush Limbaugh?"

But Bush's former UN Ambassador John Bolton, he of the giant mustache, took the cake. He made a joke about Iran posing a threat of nuclear attack on an American city, say, er, Chicago.

And as reported by MSNBC:

The audience erupted in cheers and laughter at the idea of Obama’s home city being obliterated.

There you have it: the opposition party, casting about for some claim to legitimacy after the failures of the last eight years. Acting like Beavis and Butthead just isn't going to do it, I'm afraid.

Ralph

Obama's daring budget

Obama has now revealed the board outlines of his proposed budget. It is honest, in that it does not use bushstyle accounting tricks to keep his war costs out of the budget. It is boldly progressive in its social spending and tax policy. Further, he accompanies this huge deficit budget with fiscally responsible committment to halving the deficit by the end of his first term.

If he can get anything like the main thrust of these goals passed in Congress, this will be the most progressive budget since LBJ in the 60s.

Predictably, conservatives will howl and resist, calling it socialism. So be it. I hope Obama and the Democratic congressmen will not cave in. They have the power of the public behind them, and they must use that clout to push this through. Obama has already shown his willingness to go directly to the people through local appearances, televised speeches, and use of the internet to conduct a campaign to pressure the politicians. The weak link, in my opinion, will be the leaders in Congress who sometimes seem too ready to compromise, when they actually have the power to win.

Charles Krauthammer, one of my least favorite conservative pundits, writes about the budget in today's AJC in tones that almost sound admiring, that is until you remember his premise that European style Social Democratic government is really socialism and therefore evil incarnate. He points out that this budget will increase spending, as a percentage of GDP, to the levels in the Euopean Union.

Krauthammer also points out Obama's goals, as he sees them: he wants to be to universal health care what Lyndon Johnson was to Medicare; he wants to extend universal education to the college level, just as we did for high school education during the Industrial Revolution; and he wants to be to green energy what John Kennedy was to putting a man on the moon.

For K, I supposed those are criticisms. For me, they are goals that should make us very proud and inspire us to work to make them happen. Obama is challenging us to our better possibilities -- so different from bush telling us to go shopping in the aftermath of 9/11.

Ralph

Odds and ends

1. Not only is Obama pumping trillions of dollars into solving the economic crisis, moving toward medical care reform this year, and promising to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first four year term -- but he is also presenting an honest budget that doesn't use accounting tricks to conceal the cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he leaps buildings in a single bound.

2. Robert Gates (undoubtedly with Obama's approval) announced the overturning of the Bush/Rumsfeld order banning any media coverage of coffins returning from Iraq. Gates announced that the decision will be left up to the families. It wasn't clear whether he meant on an individual basis or whether they're going to try to reach some consensus from families. Either way, it's one more instance of their sweeping out the stables.

3. Roland Burris has presented at least three different stories about his contact with Gov. Blagoyevich and his staff regarding the appointment and fund raising. Now it's revealed that his son, Roland Burris II, was given a job by the governor last year. Enough, already. Just go home and let the people of Illinois elect a senator.

4. Norm Coleman, who seems determined not to give up contesting his defeat so long as it keeps Al Franken from being seated, even though it disenfranchises the Illinois people for months and months, has lost another round in court. So now he's promoting the idea of a do-over election. More "enough already." Just give it up, Norm.

5. Laura Bush, busy getting settled in her new home in Dallas, said she completely forgot to watch President Obama's speech to Congress Tuesday night. Well, at least that prevented her from being asked to compare it to her husband's performances.

6. I guess she probably didn't watch Bobby Jindal's response either. Almost universally panned as a disaster, both for the party and for his own political ambitions, the most positive thing I've heard from Republicans is that he had an difficult task. My favorite quote: "It was a good night for Sarah Palin."

Ralph

Obama's speech

In his de facto State of the Union address to Congress last night, Obama rose to the heights we know he is capable of, being passionate and inspiring and reassuring and, at the same time, focused and specific and responsible.

Observers have commented on the partisan divide among the lawmakers in the hall in their responses; I think the pundits were looking for something to say. From the camera angles on ABC-TV it seemed, in the standing-ovation moments, Republicans were mostly standing, with the notable exception of comments about the stimulus bill.

Equally important were the reactions of the American people. In instant polls and tracking reactions, the response was overwhelmingly positive and showed support across party lines. A CNN poll showed viewers' reaction: positive 68%, somewhat positive 24%, not positive 8%. That's an incredible 92% who viewed it as at least somewhat positive.

And then there was presidential-aspirant Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana who gave the Republican response. Here's David Brooks' reaction to that. And remember that Brooks is basically a conservative, although more thoughtful and less reactionary than most conservatives. When asked by PBS host Jim Lehrer how Jindal did, he replied:

BROOKS: Not so well. You know, I think Bobby Jindal is a very promising politician, and I opposed the stimulus package - I thought it was poorly drafted - but to come up at this moment in history with a stale, "government is the problem...we can't trust the government"...it's just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic, now. They may not like the way the Congress passed the stimulus bill. The idea that government is going to have no role in this...in a moment where only the Federal government is big enough to do stuff...to just ignore all that and say government's the problem...corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending - it's just a form of nihilism. It's just not where the country is, it's not where the future of the country is. There's an intra-Republican debate: some people say the Republican party lost its way because it got too moderate, some people say they got too weird or too conservative. He thinks they got too moderate, and he's making that case. I think it's insane. I think it's a disaster for the party. I just think it's unfortunate right now.

If that's the best they can come up with by their hottest presidential candidate on the horizon, then perhaps the blogger is right who said that the Republican party is dead and Obama's speech last night was its death knell. Here's what progressive economist Paul Krugman wrote about Jindal's response:

So what did Bobby Jindal choose to ridicule in this response to Obama last night? Volcano monitoring, of course.

And leaving aside the chutzpah of casting the failure of his own party’s governance as proof that government can’t work, does he really think that the response to natural disasters like Katrina is best undertaken by uncoordinated private action? Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens.

The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

But, hey, like Al Gore used to say: when your opponent is in the process of shooting himself in the foot, don't get in the way.

Ralph

"This is going to be big."

In watching some of the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings on the Bush Justice Department last fall, I was impressed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) as an intelligent, clear thinker with a sharp lawyer's talent for probing a witness to get at the truth. He will be spearheading the Senate Judiciary Committee's efforts to establish a commission to investigate the Bush administration's policies on torture.

As reported by Slate.com:

As a member of both the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, Whitehouse is privy to information about interrogations he can't yet share. Still, regarding a potential torture commission, he told Salon, "I am convinced it is going to happen." In fact, his fervor on the issue was palpable. When asked if there is a lot the public still does not know about these issues during the Bush administration, his eyes grew large and he nodded slowly. "Stay on this," he said. "This is going to be big."
. . . .

According to Whitehouse, current politics dictate that Congress should take the lead on establishing a torture commission. "When you look at the economic meltdown that [Obama] was left by the Bush administration, you can see why he would want to reassure the American public that he is out there looking at these problems and trying to solve them and not focusing on the sins of the past," he said.

Whitehouse, however, predicted that Obama would not object to a torture commission moving forward in Congress. Besides, he said, "When push comes to shove, we are the legislative branch of government. We have oversight responsibilities. And we don't need the executive branch's approval to look into these things just as a constitutional matter." . . .

Last week, retired Maj. Gen. Tony Taguba, known for conducting an honest investigation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, discussed his support for such a commission . . . During that interview, Taguba stated that any review must include close analysis of claims from Bush administration officials that abusive interrogations worked.

. . .

Whitehouse agreed, and depicted as ironic the fact that . . . "the career, tough, serious military interrogators said that this just was not effective," he said. "But it is important to prove the point, because they [the administration] keep saying, 'We saved lives. We interrupted plans. We did this, that and the other.'" Whitehouse added, "Well, when you drill down, there is never a fact there. It turns into fog and evasion."

Whitehouse obviously knows more than he's able to say at this point. If he says "This is going to be big," I assume there's a lot there that needs to be uncovered. Stay on it, indeed !!

Ralph

Truth or prosecutions?

Senator Patrick Leahy has proposed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the Bush administration, similar to the one Bishop Desmond Tutu led in South Africa that was so successful in healing the country's wounds after apartheid. The idea behind such a T&R Commission is to get at the truth, not to prosecute.

It makes the assumption that, in order to move forward, it is essential to establish the truth of what happened and that the truth will be more forthcoming if individuals know that they will not be held criminally liable for their testimony. Otherwise, everybody takes the 5th amendment, and we don't get the truth.

It's a trade-off: truth in exchange for no prosecutions, but there's a near universal consensus that it worked to heal the South African nation and move it forward into the future.

It would be a trade-off for us too. Would healing the nation's bushwhacked trauma be better accomplished by bringing the villains to court or be simply establishing for all to see what they actually did, along with some understanding of why, of what they thought they had to do?

President Obama keeps emphasizing he wants to look to the future rather than focusing on the past. It's not clear whether he would actively oppose investigations or a truth commission or whether he just prefers not to have it be the focus of his administration with all else there is to do. I suspect it was also part of his goal of bipartisan cooperation, knowing that any investigation of either type will be bitterly opposed by Republicans. So, let Congress set it up and leave him out of it.

Now a group of liberal activists has released a statement calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor

We urge Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a non-partisan independent Special Counsel to immediately commence a prosecutorial investigation into the most serious alleged crimes of former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the attorneys formerly employed by the Department of Justice whose memos sought to justify torture, and other former top officials of the Bush Administration.

Our laws, and treaties that under Article VI of our Constitution are the supreme law of the land, require the prosecution of crimes that strong evidence suggests these individuals have committed. Both the former president and the former vice president have confessed to authorizing a torture procedure that is illegal under our law and treaty obligations. The former president has confessed to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. . . .

Among the 40 signers are: Center for Constitutional Rights, National Lawyers Guild, American Freedom Action Fund, Voters for Peace, Progressive Democrats of America, The Progressive. These may be fine activist groups, but they are not the mainstream liberal and progressive organizations that are widely known.

As much as I would like to see Karl Rove and Dick Cheney go to jail and George Bush be publicly humiliated by a trial, nevertheless, my better judgment leads me to support the idea that establishing the truth of what happened and setting our government back on track, is more important than criminal prosecution of individuals.

If it were a matter of graft or fraud, I'd say prosecute. But no one has suggested that the top administrations officials did it for personal gain. Of course they violated the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. But it was a matter of judgment and of misplaced priorities, not personal gain. So I finally come down on the side of getting the truth.

Besides, there's the practical matter that it is very difficult to get a conviction of this kind against a public official who will say what he did was necessary to protect the nation in a time of war. And, going the route of criminal prosecution will close off any hope of getting "true confessions" without getting a conviction anyway.

Ralph

Temporary nationalization

With all the talk of nationalizing some of the failing banks coming from both Republicans and respected economists (as well as the no longer so respected Alan Greenspan), maybe the word will lose its toxic flavor, or maybe they'll come up with a new word.

Here's what Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says:

Still, isn’t nationalization un-American?

No, it’s as American as apple pie.Lately the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has been seizing banks it deems insolvent at the rate of about two a week. When the F.D.I.C. seizes a bank, it takes over the bank’s bad assets, pays off some of its debt, and resells the cleaned-up institution to private investors. And that’s exactly what advocates of temporary nationalization want to see happen, not just to the small banks the F.D.I.C. has been seizing, but to major banks that are similarly insolvent.
. . .

And once again, long-term government ownership isn’t the goal: like the small banks seized by the F.D.I.C. every week, major banks would be returned to private control as soon as possible. The finance blog Calculated Risk suggests that instead of calling the process nationalization, we should call it “preprivatization.”

The Obama administration, says Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, believes “that a privately held banking system is the correct way to go.” So do we all. But what we have now isn’t private enterprise, it’s lemon socialism: banks get the upside but taxpayers bear the risks. And it’s perpetuating zombie banks, blocking economic recovery.

What we want is a system in which banks own the downs as well as the ups. And the road to that system runs through nationalization.

It's beginning to seem the only logical thing to do at this point. It seems that the Obama administration is resisting this move, but it's not clear whether they oppose the actual process or are afraid of the political implications of being tarnished by opponents for "socialism."

Obama needs to step above political worries on this and do the right thing, like he has done on many other matters. So far, he's still winning the battles. Let's get on with this one.

Ralph

Empathy for Republicans??

Mickey Nardo has given me a somewhat different perspective on what I've been calling the Republican "clowns," who are so oppositional, so outrageous in their partisan claims, so wedded to a failed ideology, and so much fun to ridicule.

Mickey quoted his wife's saying never go to the grocery store when you're hungry. He explains:

I think even the republicans are starving. They've been suppressed for eight years too, so they're trying to throw off the yoke of servitude and become republicans again. From our point of view, they seem crazy. We see them as having caused our woes, along with their rich constituents. From our point of view, they were the biggest spenders in history, the most irresponsible legislators of all times. And maybe they were. But they were as suppressed as we were. Now they're getting back into their inner republican.

And that prompted me to a smidgen of empathy for them in their current plight, realizing that they've been shamed by Bush's failures and by having gone along with him to the detriment of their own reputations. Now they're going overboard in trying to restore any sense of honor and integrity to a political philosophy in tatters. But they need some better advice than the Rovian "kill the enemy" strategy. They could start by listening to the governor of California.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's inteview with George Stephanopolis this morning changed my view of him somewhat. Having just settled a huge budget crisis in California by decreasing spending and increasing taxes -- hammered out with a bipartisan legislature -- he was making a strong case for moving beyond the sectarian battles, as we're seeing in Washington.

Pushed by Stephanopolis as to why he remains a Republican despite his disagreement with the party on so many issues: the stimulus package, abortion, stem cell research, gay rights, etc. He replied that the only way to govern wisely is to "listen to the people." Polls in California indicated strong support both for reducing spending and for cutting taxes, so that's what they did. He says it doesn't matter whether you're Democrat or Republican, an elected official has to do what will work for the people.

He advocates reducing party power and partisan competition to the extent that he is now trying to get California to adopt non-partisan primary elections, like so many cities do with mayoral elections. Have an open primary; the general electon will then be a runoff between the top two vote-getters; and if they are of the same party, so be it. He believes this will allow a focus more on the issues and the benefit to the people, rather than saying what will appeal to your own party constituency in the primary and then having to move to the center in a general election.

I must say that, when he first entered politics, I thought Ah-nold was something of a joke, and I wondered how a member of the Kennedy clan could have married him. Now, I am much more impressed by him and his genuine embrace of non-partisan governing.

I still wonder why he remains a member of the Republican party though. He said it's because he still believes in Republican principles, which he didn't enumerate.

Ralph

"Hate the bill, love the money" revisited

Several days ago I sounded off on Republican governors who were "threatening" to refuse the money to their states from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I was pretty snarky in my denunciation of Republican hypocrisy -- both the congressmen who were trashing the bill while taking credit for their state's benefits and the governors who were posturing against it.

Today on NPR, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, who is also Chair of the Democratic Governors Association, made some excellent points in challenge to the governors who are saying they may not accept the money:

1. The issue of states accepting federal money was settled long ago. Money to states for highway construction, health care, and for Medicaid, etc. is a long-established tradition. These governors have already been accepting federal money, and the stimulus money will represent as little as a 5% increase in the federal money those governors have already taken if they have served a term in office.

2. As to resisting the "strings" that may be attached, federal money has always come with requirements for accountability in how it is spent. This is nothing new. Today's tight economic climate and Obama's determination to have transparency may make enforcement more stringent, but the requirements are not new.

3. The Recovery and Reinvestment Act has language written into the bill that allows state legislatures to vote to accept the money, even if the governor doesn't, and it's likely that many will do so.

4. If they don't want to accept certain categories of the money, they don't have to in order to accept the whole package. Just don't spend that portion. It will go back into the overall national fund: "spend it or lose it."

And then there was California's Governor Schwarzenneger on This Week saying to those governors who don't want to take the money: "Send it to me. California will take the money if you don't want it."

My guess is that, in the end, they will all take whatever federal money comes their way. It will be fun to see how they rationalize it with their current posturing.

Ralph