November 1, 2006
A man who bragged about becoming a provocateur now claims victimization when he fulfilled the promises he made on his website. Mike Stark, a liberal blogger and a law student, tried to rush George Allen and yelled a question about Allen purportedly spitting on his first wife. Hot Air posted the video last night, and the AP reports on his intentions: Mike Stark, a liberal blogger and first-year University of Virginia law student, approached Allen at an event in Charlottesville, loudly asking, "Why did you spit at your first wife, George?" according to witnesses. Three men, all wearing blue Allen lapel stickers, immediately grabbed Stark, dragged him backward and slung him to the carpet outside a hotel meeting room, according to video captured by WVIR-TV in Charlottesville. Allen's campaign said in a news release that Stark "aggressively went after Senator Allen ... screaming that he answer inappropriate questions." ... In...
The Bush administration found vindication yesterday when North Korea agreed to return to six-party talks without any concessions from the US. The news of Kim Jong-Il's capitulation came through China, whose influence undoubtedly led to the breakthrough: North Korea agreed Tuesday to resume nuclear disarmament talks, a first sign of easing tensions since the country’s nuclear test this month. But the talks have dragged on inconclusively for three years, and the chances for rolling back the country’s now-proven nuclear capability remained uncertain. China announced that six-nation talks would reconvene shortly after a hiatus of more than a year, and an American envoy in Beijing said they could take place in November or December. The agreement was a procedural victory for Beijing, which scrambled to reopen a diplomatic channel even as it joined the United States and other international powers in supporting United Nations sanctions on North Korea after the Oct....
U2's Bono has made a name for himself as an anti-poverty activist, traveling the world to get Western governments to reduce barriers to trade with poverty-stricken African nations and demanding large outlays of aid to these same nations. He has argued that the wealthiest nations have shared little of their largesse with those in need. Bono has actively worked with political players of all ideologies to get a bigger financial commitment to end world hunger. It's somewhat ironic, as Timothy Noah points out in Slate, that Bono and his bandmates have decided to relocate their publishing business to avoid paying taxes: A familiar paradox about leftist celebrities in the entertainment industry is that their embrace of progressivism almost never includes a wholehearted embrace of progressive taxation, i.e., the principle that the richer you get, the larger the percentage of your income you ought to pay in taxes. The latest example...
Over the last few weeks, I have pointed out that the man Nancy Pelosi wants to head the House Intelligence Committee if the Democrats win control of the House, Alcee Hastings, got impeached and removed for corruption from the federal bench by a Democratic Congress twenty years ago. For a potential Speaker who likes to talk about "draining the swamp" of Republican corruption, giving a disgraced judge the gavel to a committee critical to national security seems not just strange but dangerous in a time of war. However, Ruth Marcus tells a story in her Washington Post column today that explains Pelosi's enthusiasm for Hastings: The evidence against Hastings is circumstantial, but it's too much to explain away: a suspicious pattern of telephone calls between Hastings and Borders at key moments in the case; Borders's apparent insider knowledge of developments in the criminal case; Hastings's appearance at a Miami hotel,...
John Kerry may have some spare time to spend with the family. After his ridiculous comments on Monday and the equally ridiculous explanation on Tuesday, Iowa Congressional candidate Bruce Braley has asked Kerry to stay away from their scheduled campaign appearance this week: A Democratic Congressional candidate from Iowa is canceling a campaign event later this week with Senator John Kerry. Bruc[e] Braley says Kerry's recent comments about the Iraq war were inappropriate. Braley is running against Republican Mike Whalen in Iowa's First District congressional race. It's a contest considered to be one of the most competitive House races in the country. Will we see more of this? Kerry has scheduled events here in Minnesota for Tim Walz and a party-building event for the DFL (Minnesota's Democrats) today. Tonight he goes to Pennsylvania to campaign for Bob Casey, Jr, and the Braley campaign event was scheduled for tomorrow. Will Walz...
Iran has offered a premium to travel agents to induce Americans to visit the mullahcracy that routinely calls our country the Great Satan. Every American delivered to Iran will gain agents $20 cash: Iran will offer cash incentives to travel agencies to encourage Western tourists to visit the country, giving a premium for Americans, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. The Islamic republic's political leadership has been trying to reach out to ordinary Americans to show that a standoff over Iran's nuclear ambitions is with the Bush administration -- not U.S. citizens. The latest initiative comes as the United Nations Security Council deliberates a draft resolution that would impose sanctions on Iran for its disputed nuclear program. "Iran's tourism department will pay $20 per person to those who attract European or American tourists to the country," the agency on Tuesday quoted Mohammed Sharif Malakzadeh, deputy head of the department,...
John Kerry has issued an apology, a day after insisting he would never apologize for his joke about George Bush (if you can read his mind) or American troops (if you quote him accurately). Here's the statement in its entirety: As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop. I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended. It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don’t want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to...
November 2, 2006
The Washington Examiner runs my new Blog Board column today on the transformation of American politics by Ronald Reagan. I touched on this a few days ago and extended my thoughts for the Examiner column: After an economically and politically disastrous decade, Ronald Reagan won election and immediately began changing the paradigm. He insisted that government created more problems than it solves and that the power of free markets would always outperform government agencies in creating economic opportunity. His policies transformed the American economy and began a massive growth cycle that has continued with only occasional lulls ever since. During his time, Reagan received plenty of criticism for his view of government. Now, however, it appears that the message has finally become accepted wisdom. CNN shows that a majority of Americans believe that government tries to do too much, even now, while only 37 percent believe it does not do...
If anyone wants to know why Air America can't hack it financially, a read of Jackie Guerra's op-ed piece at ABC News will demonstrate the network's intellectual bankruptcy. Guerra, who hosts the "Workin' It" show on the network, repeats the debunked claim that minorities and the poor are overrepresented in the military: Serving our country in the military is a great service, one which we all admire and revere, but it's more than that. It's also a job. And it's a job that many Americans sign up for not only out of a sense of patriotic duty, but also because it often seems the best of few options. As a Mexican-American from Los Angeles, I find it especially meaningful that Kerry's comments came at Pasadena City College, just a few miles from the high schools of East Los Angeles, where on many campuses, military recruiters outnumber guidance counselors 5-1. At...
Iran bribed Hamas and Khaled Mashaal in order to convince them to renege on their agreement to release Gilad Shalit, the London Telegraph reports. Israel accused Teheran of paying Hamas and Mashaal 30 million pounds, and have filed an official complaint at the UN: Israel has accused Iran of scuppering attempts to win the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal captured by Palestinian militants near Gaza, by paying the militant Palestinian Islamic group Hamas £30 million not to agree to a prisoner exchange. Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, said Teheran paid Khaled Meshaal, the hard-line Hamas leader who lives as an exile in Damascus, to ruin any chance of a negotiated settlement to this summer's Gaza crisis. "The Iranians paid him £30 million in order to avert and sabotage an imminent release," the ambassador said in New York. "I informed the Security Council of news that...
The battle between Venezuela and Guatemala for the Latin American seat on the UN Security Council has finally ended. The winner is ... Panama? Venezuela and Guatemala have withdrawn their rival bids for a UN Security Council seat from Latin America, diplomats have said. They say the move opens the way for Panama to take the non-permanent seat. Nearly 50 rounds of voting failed to resolve the contest between Guatemala and Venezuela. ... "The two foreign ministers have agreed on two issues," said Ecuador's UN ambassador Diego Cordovez, who was a mediator during the talks. "Both will withdraw their candidacy to the Security Council, and second, Panama will be the country that the three of us will present to the [Latin American] group" to represent the region, Mr Cordovez said. Panama seems like a surprise. Some had speculated that Costa Rica might get the nod; Venezuela wanted Bolivia and its...
Various left-wing bloggers voiced their outrage when blogger/activist Mike Stark got leveled after trying to push his way through to George Allen at a hotel this week. CNN video showed Stark trying to get around campaign staffers to shout at Allen about spitting on his first wife, a charge Allen's former spouse denied and called "baseless". The same staffers tossed Stark to the ground when he refused to back away, prompting accusations of goonery by Allen's campaign. However, a series of photographs from the event by the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star shows that Allen's staff had good reason to worry about Stark. He assaulted one staffer in his attempt to get to Allen, something that the CNN cameras wouldn't have caught. Here's a slideshow of Stark's actions before the confrontation that everyone saw on the video (see update below). Very obviously, Stark had become violent before the altercation we saw on...
November 3, 2006
The US wants to put an American general in charge of United Nations peacekeeping efforts in the Ban Ki Moon administration, the Times of London reports. The French general currently leading the efforts will retire from the position when Kofi Annan steps down, and the Americans want to protect their investment: The US is in a strong position to get the top peacekeeping job — currently held by a Frenchman — because of its decisive support in electing Ban Ki Moon, the South Korean Foreign Minister, as the next UN Secretary-General. Mr Ban, who takes over on January 1, is setting up a transition team to select his top officials and is coming under heavy pressure from the big powers to appoint their favourites to key posts. The Bush Administration is said to want to name a general to the UN post. “What they want is somebody who knows about...
In the Upper Midwest, anyone who has pumped their own gas or has some vague knowledge of either agricultural or energy policy has heard of E85. A Google search on the term finds 3.5 million references to it on the Internet, and with gas tax policy a key issue in Minnesota, one would expect candidates for executive office here to at least recognize the term. Apparently all of this is a little too much to ask for Judi Dutcher, the empty suit selected by Democrat Mike Hatch as his running mate in his attempt to unseat Governor Tim Pawlenty: The DFL lieutenant governor candidate got more attention Thursday than her gubernatorial partner Mike Hatch after a gaffe caught on tape earlier this week. She handed Democrats a self-inflicted wound when she admitted that she'd never heard of an ethanol fuel blend called E-85. "It's like you've asked me the college...
A Saudi Arabian court has passed sentence in a brutal rape in which attackers kidnapped a woman, pulled her into their car, and gang-raped her while one of the men used a mobile phone to videotape the attack. The verdict? Guilty -- for the woman, for the crime of being alone with men to whom she was not married: A Saudi court has sentenced a gang rape victim to 90 lashes of the whip because she was alone in a car with a man to whom she was not married. The sentence was passed at the end of a trial in which the al- Qateef high criminal court convicted four Saudis convicted of the rape, sentencing them to prison terms and a total of 2,230 lashes. ... Saudi courts take marital status into account in sexual crimes. A male friend of the rape victim was also sentenced to 90 lashes...
The Washington Post reports that the US intends on screening every person who enters the country, regardless of method, in an attempt to identify potential terrorists. The new program will use the data to build terrorist profiles and will retain the data for decades: The federal government disclosed details yesterday of a border-security program to screen all people who enter and leave the United States, create a terrorism risk profile of each individual and retain that information for up to 40 years. The details, released in a notice published yesterday in the Federal Register, open a new window on the government's broad and often controversial data-collection effort directed at American and foreign travelers implemented after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. While long known to scrutinize air travelers, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to apply new technology to perform similar checks on people who enter or leave the country...
CQ reader Roger B says that the New York Times headline on its November surprise should really read, "BUSH DIDN'T LIE: Keller, Kerry, Moore, Dean Resign." I've bumped my post to just below this one so that readers can consider the effect that the revelation of the UN's inspector assessment of Saddam's nuclear program will have on the Iraq debate. Speaking of debate, I joined Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine and its Hit & Run blog and Judd Legum of Think Progress for a chat on that very topic last night, pre-NYT: asap: All right ... we're talking Iraq tonight. Apparently just like everyone else. asap: Should a timeline be set for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, or should withdrawal be contingent on the accomplishment of certain specified goals? Edward Morrissey: Withdrawal means one of two things: the mission is over and it was accomplished, or the mission...
Over the past year or so, I have provided CQ readers with a number of translations from key Iraqi Intelligence Service documents that have been translated by either the FMSO or by Joseph Shahda of the Free Republic website. I even engaged two interpreters to verify one particularly explosive memo last April, after Shahda published his own translation. That memo dealt with IIS plans to get volunteers for suicide missions to 'strike American interests". One particular criticism that appeared with each new translation was that the documents were never proven genuine, although no one could explain the logic behind the US government hiding these documents in Iraqi Arabic among an avalanche of mundanity, only to shove it onto a shelf for years until Congress authorized their release to the Internet. Now we find another verification of their authenticity, this time from the New York Times, which reports today that the...
November 4, 2006
John Kerry has made himself the gift that keeps on giving. After supposedly botching a joke about President Bush and telling a college audience that a lack of education and hard work would get them "stuck in Iraq", he took criticism from Republicans and some Demicrats for two days. He finally apologized for both screwing up the joke and the fact that no one understood his genius, and the controversy finally started to recede. However, Kerry -- who has never learned the First Rule Of Holes -- decided to keep right on digging yesterday by posting a Seattle newspaper's editorial on his campaign web site that says he was right in either interpretation: Republicans evidenced their election desperation by braying about an offhand comment that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., made at a California college rally. "Education" Kerry said "-- if you make the most of it and you study hard...
George Bush has hit his stride on the campaign trail, pushing hard to protect the Republican majorities in Congress. He has tried talking up the economy and the war on terror, but he also has not shied from the Iraq war. In fact, in campaign stops, he has advised voters to demand a plan from the Democrats who have criticized the war: President Bush yesterday said Republicans nationwide are running on a strong record of accomplishment as he ridiculed Democrats seeking to take control of the House and Senate, asking: "What's your plan?" "The truth is, the Democrats can't answer that question. Harsh criticism is not a plan for victory. Second-guessing is not a strategy. We have a plan for victory," the president said to cheers from 5,000 supporters packed into the Springfield Exposition Center. ... The president has honed his campaign rally speech into a laundry list of Republican...
When a lawyer attacks a reporter as a "whore", one has to wonder for whom to root in the conflict, or whether to just grab a bowl of popcorn and enjoy the show. However, when the lawyer is running for Governor and the insult comes in response to a political gaffe made by his running mate, it becomes more concerning to the state's voters, who might at some time need to criticize the candidate if he wins office: Hatch’s anger overflowed during a Thursday morning telephone interview. A Forum Communications reporter asked Hatch about Dutcher’s knowledge of ethanol and why she wasn’t available to discuss the issue. Hatch abruptly ended the interview with: “You’re nothing more than a Republican whore. Goodbye.” He then hung up. Television crews following the Duluth native Thursday reported other sharp comments when reporters pressed him for response to Dutcher’s comments. Mike Hatch has a reputation...
Tom Maguire and Mickey Kaus have raised the alert that the firewall that keeps Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Bob Herbert, and Paul Krugman from afflicting Internet users will come down for several days, putting news readers in dire jeopardy of brain damage. The shields drop on November 6th and stay down for a week: The New York Times announced today that it will invite all online visitors to experience TimesSelect content free of charge for one week. From November 6-12, every visitor to NYTimes.com will have access to TimesSelect columns, blogs, video and other online exclusives that are normally available only to TimesSelect members. TimesSelect Free Access Week is presented exclusively by Philips as part of its "Sense and Simplicity" national marketing campaign. "TimesSelect Free Access Week makes one of the Web's richest resources available to all," said Vivian Schiller, senior vice president, general manager, NYTimes.com. "From the influential opinion...
The group Move America Forward sponsored a visit to Iraq by families of servicemen who lost their lives during the war there as a demonstration of support for the mission. Twelve parents traveled through Iraq in an effort to bolster support for the war: To demonstrate their contention that things are better in Iraq than what has been portrayed in many news accounts, the delegation is intentionally traveling to Iraqi provinces that have largely been free of the violence that has erupted in Baghdad and the surrounding Sunni triangle. “Shouldn’t the American people be told about the good things happening in Iraq? Isn’t it legitimate news for example to be told of the success enjoyed by the people of northern Iraq who have established democratic institutions in communities that are almost entirely free of violence?” Morgan asked. The group includes seven Gold Star Family members including Joseph Williams (his son...
Josh Meyer reports that the US forced North Korea back to the six-party talks through a three-year effort to cut Kim Jong-Il off from the monetary supply he needs to maintain power, a long and consistent effort that succeeded because the Bush administration refused to take the advice of its critics. The White House kept shutting more and more doors until Kim had only one left to open (via QandO): For three years, the Bush administration has waged a campaign to choke off North Korea's access to the world's financial system, where U.S. officials say the nation launders money from criminal enterprises to fuel its trade in missile technology and its efforts to build a nuclear arsenal. That effort has started to pay off. U.S. pressure forced Macao this year to freeze North Korean assets in one of its banks, then foiled North Korea's panicky attempts to find friendly bankers...
Jack Carter, son of former President Jimmy Carter, has tried to unseat Republican incumbent John Ensign for the Senate seat this election, and has made a poor show of it. He currently trails Ensign by double digits -- Rasmussen has him down 12 points -- and so has started to feel the sting of desperation. That would explain his campaign's disrespectful attempt to use a Gold Star mother as a campaign prop, an effort that appalled Eleanor Dachtler (via CQ reader Alex M): Hoping to generate attention for his boss late in an underdog campaign, an aide to Democrat Jack Carter solicited the mother of an Iraq war casualty to appear alongside the Senate candidate at a rally or news conference last week. But if it was looking for a willing ally, the Carter camp evidently picked the wrong mother. Eleanor Dachtler of Las Vegas said she was insulted by...
Mitch and I will be on the air between 1-3 pm CT this afternoon for the Northern Alliance Radio Network on AM 1280 The Patriot. Today is Meet The Republican Candidates Day on the NARN, as well as our final exhortations to vote. We will be talking with several candidates during the day today, for local as well as more prominent races. CQ readers outside of the Twin Cities can listen to the show on our Internet stream at the station's web site (linked above), and you can join the conversation by calling 651-289-4488. Meanwhile, don't forget to sign up for your 30 minutes of calls to help energize Republican voters: The Republican Party has a great way for the blogging community to get involved and to help get voters to the polls. We need people to man the phones and encourage voters to cast their ballots, and now readers...
We seem to be seeing a late-breaking trend towards Republicans, according to Rasmussen. Their daily review of races show momentum shifting back towards the GOP in some key contests: Tennessee: Bob Corker pulling away from Harold Ford Missouri: Dead heat between Jim Talent and Claire McCaskill; both have had slight leads in the last few polls Virginia: James Webb has dropped his five-point lead over George Allen, and it's now a dead heat Maryland: Michael Steele has pulled into a tie with Benjamin Cardin, despite the heavy Democratic Party registration advantage Montana: Conrad Burns has come back from double-digit deficits to tie Jon Tester These races will come down to voter turnout efforts. Republicans have claimed the momentum in these races, and an enthusiastic effort to get voters to the polls will get them elected. Control of the Senate remains in our hands -- but we have to get to...
The Northern Alliance has managed to find the audio of Patty Wetterling's new last-minute desperation ad in a hermetically sealed jar on International ANSWER's doorstep, and it's a doozy. It sounds like Wetterling has decided to continue her strategy of, well, relativist honesty in the campaign to the bitter end. Take a listen to the audio from the radio show, as my radio partner Mitch introduces the ad. Follow along with the transcript: Glorious American Federation of Teachers say You must to vote for Patty Wetterling! Do not listen to running-dog capitalist lies! Bachann will raise your taxes 100% Free all sex offenders and given them YOUR teaching jobs! Glorious hero of teacher labor Nancy Pelosi orders you, from her undisclosed location, to vote for greater glory of Minnesota! Vote for Patty Wetterling! I am Patty Wetterling, and I order you to approve this commercial! Yes, this is parody. We...
I haven't remarked much on the Ted Haggard story for a couple of reasons. First, all we had so far was a series of allegations and some dispute over their truthfulness, all of which got resolved this evening when the New Life Church fired Haggard this evening. The second reason is because Haggard is such a marginal figure that the attention he's received seems like overkill. I'm not an Evangelical, so perhaps I missed something about Haggard, but he has almost completely avoided my radar screen. The New Life Church only has 14,000 members, about the same size as my local Catholic parish, and it seems absurd to think that the pastor of a moderate-sized church, even in Evangelical circles, has much political clout. I met Haggard in 2005 at Justice Sunday II, and I interviewed him briefly at the event. It impressed me so little that I didn't even...
November 5, 2006
The Iraqi tribunal has convicted Saddam Hussein and two of his co-defendants for crimes against humanity in the 1982 Dujail massacre, and have sentenced all three to death by hanging. Saddam refused to stand and face the court when the verdict was read, and had to be hauled to his feet by bailiffs: As he, his half brother and another senior official in his regime were convicted and sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal, Saddam yelled out, "Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!" Later, his lawyer said the former dictator had called on Iraqis to reject sectarian violence and refrain from revenge against U.S. forces. ... Saddam and his seven co-defendants were on trial for a wave of revenge killings carried out in the city of Dujail following a 1982 assassination attempt on the former...
The Washington Post attempts to spin its election coverage this morning by burying the big story of Republican resurgence in the polls below four paragraphs of declaring Democrats the winners at the midterms. In fact, their own polling shows voters returning to the GOP even on the generic Congressional ballot in the final days of the midterm election cycle: Two days before a bitterly fought midterm election, Democrats have moved into position to recapture the House and have laid siege to the Senate, setting the stage for a dramatic recasting of the power structure in Washington for President Bush's final two years in office, according to a Washington Post analysis of competitive races across the country. In the battle for the House, Democrats appear almost certain to pick up more than the 15 seats needed to regain the majority. Republicans virtually concede 10 seats, and a split of the 30...
I know, I know, he's not my favorite Senator by a long shot -- but Lincoln Chafee looks like he may hold onto a Senate seat most analysts thought was lost weeks ago. Ironically, in a period in which Republicans appear to have gotten their second wind, Chafee's own resurgence can be attributed to his meager GOP ties: If Sen. Lincoln Chafee wins re-election in Rhode Island on Tuesday - and a new McClatchy Newspapers-MSNBC poll indicates he might - it will be because he is one of the most rebellious Republicans in Congress. Although Chafee had been trailing Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in previous polls, the latest McClatchy poll showed him with 46 percent support, compared to 45 percent for Whitehouse. About 9 percent of voters remained undecided. While Chafee's slim lead was within the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, it was the first...
Maryland Democrats have big problems in this election. The choice to back Benjamin Cardin over Kweisi Mfume has had serious consequences on their election prospects, and they may well lose a Senate seat to the GOP because of it. Now it also looks like the Democrats may have thrown away their chance to grab the governorship as black leaders endorsed incumbent Republican Robert Ehrlich over Martin O'Malley: Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. received the endorsement yesterday of a half-dozen black ministers who could sway Democratic voters in the battlegrounds of Prince George's County and Baltimore to cross party lines in the election Tuesday. Mr. Ehrlich, a Republican, stood on a street corner in South Baltimore surrounded by the ministers and touted his record of reaching out to minorities and implementing policies for urban voters, including programs for drug treatment instead of prison time. "This is an agenda for people...
The Washington Post ombud, Deborah Howell, addresses reader complaints that their coverage of the George Allen campaign has been relentlessly negative. Her verdict -- they're right: Allen supporters think he can't catch a break; I sympathize. The macaca coverage went on too long, and a profile of Allen was relentlessly negative without balancing coverage of what made him a popular governor and senator. But it must be remembered that Allen shot himself in both feet with the "macaca" remark and his clumsy handling of the revelation of his Jewish heritage. Then he declined to talk to The Post for the profile. The profiles of both Webb and Allen were critical, but Webb's was leavened by his quotes. It was bothersome that so much weight was given to "Fifth Quarter," the 2000 family memoir by Allen's sister, Jennifer. The book described family problems and portrayed Allen as a teenage bully. She...
National Review Online has a symposium of people quoted in a press release by Vanity Fair that purported to show neoconservative abandonment of the Iraq war. VF had agreed not to release the artice before the midterm elections, but in a bit of dishonesty, repackaged quotes out of context in order to build interest in the article. Now, the sources of those mangled quotes strike back at VF. David Frum: There has been a lot of talk this season about deceptive campaign ads, but the most dishonest document I have seen is this press release from Vanity Fair, highlighted on the Drudge Report . Headlined “Now They Tell Us,” it purports to offer an “exclusive” access to “remorseful” former supporters of the Iraq war who will now “play the blame game” with “shocking frankness.” ... My most fundamental views on the war in Iraq remain as they were in 2003:...
Note: This post will ride near the top all weekend long. It's come down to the ground game. If Republicans want to ensure that the GOP continues to control Congress after the midterms, we need to get organized in the final hours. The Republican Party has a great way for the blogging community to get involved and to help get voters to the polls. We need people to man the phones and encourage voters to cast their ballots, and now readers can work from home to do it. Simply click here or on the logo above to volunteer, and the Republican Party will assign you a short list of people to call. It shouldn't cost you any more than 30 minutes to complete your calls, and you can use your free cell phone minutes on the weekend, so it won't cost you any money at all. Let me give...
I just finished making the calls for the Get On The Phone effort by the Republican Party. When my sister came into town this weekend, I had to juggle the schedule around -- I originally planned to make my calls on Saturday, but that didn't work out. Now, I have made my living in call centers for almost twenty years, but making these calls makes me a little more nervous than normal. That's been true every time I've volunteered, but every time I've always been glad I did. I get to talk with nice people and let them know we're counting on them, and they almost always react positively. Tonight was no exception. The GOP assigned me a district in Missouri, where Jim Talent is fighting off a challenge from state auditor Claire McCaskill. All that I needed to do was to remind people that the election was on Tuesday,...
The Washington Post poll wasn't the only one to pick up on a shift in momentum, as it turns out. Gaius Arbo at Blue Crab Boulevard points readers to the latest from Pew Research, which now shows the generic Congressional ballot within the margin of error: A nationwide Pew Research Center survey finds voting intentions shifting in the direction of Republican congressional candidates in the final days of the 2006 midterm campaign. The new survey finds a growing percentage of likely voters saying they will vote for GOP candidates. However, the Democrats still hold a 48% to 40% lead among registered voters, and a modest lead of 47%-43% among likely voters. The narrowing of the Democratic lead raises questions about whether the party will win a large enough share of the popular vote to recapture control of the House of Representatives. The relationship between a party's share of the popular...
November 6, 2006
I know it's election season and everyone wants to concentrate on the political stories, but I want to offer my best wishes for a speedy return to the sidelines for Joe Paterno, the legendary head coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions. JoePa broke his leg on a freak play where his own played collided with him, and he may need surgery: The 79-year-old Penn State coach broke his left leg and damaged a knee ligament when two players ran into him during the Nittany Lions' loss to Wisconsin, and team officials said Sunday that surgery was being considered. Paterno's son and quarterbacks coach, Jay, said he spoke with his father Sunday and there was "no thought whatsoever of not coming back this year. ... It's not even in the discussion. There's nothing more to read into this in terms of his career." Paterno fractured the top of his tibia,...
The Palestinian factions at dagger point have reached an accord, the Jerusalem Post reports, that will replace the current government. Ismail Haniyeh has apparently agreed to step down as Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, although no one knows who will replace him: Hamas and Fatah have reached an agreement on the establishment of a unity government in the Palestinian Authority, senior Palestinian sources told the Palestinian news agency Ma'an reported late Sunday night. According to Army Radio, the sources said that current PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh will not head the unity government, but have not yet revealed who will. Haniyeh and PA President Mahmoud Abbas are expected to meet in the next few days. Will this actually happen? It's been rumored for weeks now. Abbas got tired of waiting a couple of weeks back and started threatening to form a technocracy of appointed apolitical experts with or without...
The networks insist that they will not release exit polling data until the polls actually close in this election, the Washington Times reports. They recall only too well the disaster that ensued when incomplete -- and as it turned out, inaccurate -- exit polling hit the wires, creating an expectation of a John Kerry landslide that never materialized. That promise will not keep the networks from playing a bit of partisan hardball with their analysts, however (h/t: Newsbeat1): The 2006 elections have garnered more broadcast coverage than the last midterm elections, much of it billing them as bringing political change, and although the networks have vowed that they will not make any premature calls tomorrow night, virtuous reserve may not stem partisan flirtations. ... Election-night coverage will feature big names and multiple components. ABC, NBC and CBS will offer hourly updates and one-hour specials at 10 p.m. ABC will use...
Minnesotans go to the polls tomorrow with some tough decisions to make, and two articles should remind them of the stakes. Joel Mowbray writes about MN-05 Congressional candidate Keith Ellison in his Front Page article, "CAIR's Congressman": Barring a cataclysmic event, Minnesotans tomorrow will elect the first-ever Muslim to the U.S. Congress, and odds are the media serenade won’t be far behind. What remains to be seen, though, is how many journalists will be willing to strike a discordant note by questioning Keith Ellison on his Nation of Islam past or his open embrace of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group founded by two self-identified supporters of Islamic terrorism. Defenders of the Democratic frontrunner thus far have dodged most legitimate questions, instead choosing to smear critics as Islamophobic bigots. The tactic has worked, enabling Ellison to win comfortably the September 12 Democratic primary—and soon the general election. But...
We have heard a lot from the Democrats in this election season about supporting the troops by withdrawing them from Iraq. Terms like "phased redeployment" and "event horizon" have been thrown around by critics of the war. However, the people that will have to execute those maneuvers do not have much enthusiasm for them, the Washington Post reports: For the U.S. troops fighting in Iraq, the war is alternately violent and hopeful, sometimes very hot and sometimes very cold. It is dusty and muddy, calm and chaotic, deafeningly loud and eerily quiet. The one thing the war is not, however, is finished, dozens of soldiers across the country said in interviews. And leaving Iraq now would have devastating consequences, they said. With a potentially historic U.S. midterm election on Tuesday and the war in Iraq a major issue at the polls, many soldiers said the United States should not abandon...
We've less than thirteen hours before the polls open, and we still need plenty of volunteers to help get out the vote. For instance, in my write-in campaign to become the Mayor of Eagan, we have people at campaign headquarters right now, helping to spread the message. My son has pledged to make a phone call after he finishes working out of the licks for the expert level of Guitar Hero, which I'm assuming means within the next half hour. I just got done walking around my local gas station, and I'm encouraged by the response there as well. The pump accepted my credit card, and the attendant even said hello over the loudspeaker. Momentum is building, and I think I'll even reach that heretofore unexpected level of twenty write-in votes! However, we need more of an effort for the rest of the Republicans. After this weekend, CQ readers have...
Experienced blog-readers know that NZ Bear at the Truth Laid Bear always manages to develop state of the art blogging tools for the TTLB community. He's done it again with the midterm elections, designing a page that will allow election observers to keep track of the national races. It looks excellent, and while I'm working at the CNN event tomorrow evening, I'm going to keep it open in a tab for quick reference. Check it out and keep the link handy....
Bump -- Welcome Rush Limbaugh listeners! Please see update below. Pew Research has published its crosstabs for the poll that shows the Republicans tightening up the race, which I linked last night. The internals deliver even more bad news to the Democrats, as significant leads in several demographic categories have been cut drastically or wiped out entirely. The last Pew Research poll was taken in early October. In a month, the Democrats have lost non-minorities altogether. The gap among all whites went from +5 Democrats to +5 GOP, a ten-point swing. White females had supported Democrats by a 15-point margin and a majority (55-40), but now give the GOP a 2-point lead. The Democrats have also lost the middle class, a big problem in this election. Households earning between $50K-$75K and $30K-$50K have both slipped to the GOP. The former switched from a 14-point margin for the Democrats to an...
November 7, 2006
The Times of London shows tremendous interest in the American midterm elections in its edition today, with a number of articles analyzing the potential effects of the midterms. One area that Bronwen Maddox expects to feel a big impact is free trade. Maddox writes that a Republican loss of Congress will spell the end to free-trade agreements with Europe and the world: IF THE Democrats win back the House of Representatives today, that is the end of the enthusiasm in the US for free-trade deals — to its own cost, to that of developing countries and, most certainly, to Europe. ... The first casualty would be President Bush’s “fast-track” negotiating power, which gives him congressional authorisation to conclude trade deals. It runs out next summer and a Democratic House would almost certainly not renew it. With that goes any chance of the US helping to revive the Doha round of...
The Supreme Court will hear arguments tomorrow on the constitutionality of restricting late-term abortions, and as the New York Times reports, this will provide a moment of clarity for the Roberts court. Congress passed the measure in defiance of the court's ruling on a Nebraska state law, and the court -- with its two new members chosen for their judicial restraint -- will have to determine whether Congressional prerogative trumps emanations from penumbras: THE arguments the Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday on the constitutionality of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act promise much more than a resumption of a familiar debate over a method of terminating a pregnancy. In defining the permissible limits on access to abortion, only six years after declaring a similar restriction unconstitutional in a case from Nebraska, the court must go a long way toward defining its stance toward precedent, its relationship to Congress, and...
Adam Nagourney tries to lower expectations a bit in today's New York Times, dashing cold water on some of the more enthusiastic predictions for today's elections. He also notes that those inflated expectations may lead to a big let-down in the ranks of Democrats -- and a round of recriminations as well: In most midterm elections, an out-of-power party picking up, say, 14 seats in the House and five seats in the Senate could call it a pretty good night. But for Democrats in 2006, that showing would mean coming up one seat shy of taking control of both the Senate and the House. And it would probably be branded a loss — in the case of the House, a big one. For a combination of reasons — increasingly bullish prognostications by independent handicappers, galloping optimism by Democratic leaders and bloggers, and polls that promise a Democratic blowout — expectations...
Der Spiegel reviews German coverage of the midterm elections in today's edition, and unsurprisingly, notes that the Democrats have a big rooting section -- Europe. The intelligentsia on the Continent, or at least in Germany, yearn for Democratic control of Congress: Never underestimate the "legendary effectiveness of Karl Rove", worries the left-wing Die Tageszeitung, still shell-shocked from George W. Bush's re-election in 2004. "If (the Democrats) can't manage to win at least the House of Representatives this time, then nothing can help them." ... What the Democrats might do with control of Congress is something on the mind of center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, as well -- and the paper cautions the party to wield its power thoughtfully. Two years from now, when the Americans go to the polls again and look at what Democrats have done with their mandate, their typical refrain of "we wanted to but couldn't" will not...
Bump to top, and welcome Instapundit readers! Michael Kinsley, no friend to the GOP, decided to take a look at the suddenly-scarce Nancy Pelosi's plan for governance if and when the Democrats take control of Congress. Kinsley expected a platform of reasonable competence, one he could promote -- apparently in the final hours of the midterm cycle. Instead, he found it to be a rehash of the worst Democratic stereoptypes, full of euphemisms for surrender and a slew of spending initiatives to break the federal budget: What will a Democratic House of Representatives under Speaker Nancy Pelosi be like? The Republicans have been painting an unattractive portrait of Democrats roasting young children on a spit in the Capitol rotunda and whatnot. Hoping for a more encouraging view, I picked up "A New Direction for America," a 31-page manifesto released to little acclaim by House Democrats in June. By all means,...
We've covered the issues. We've profiled the candidates. We've debated the implications of a shift in power in Congress. The time for talking has expired, and the time for action has arrived. We need to get conservatives to the polls today. Pick up the phone and ask your friends if they need a ride to the precinct. Invite your neighbors to carpool with you to the polling station. Do what you can to get as many voters to the polls today. I'll be off the air until this afternoon, when I get a chance to set up for the CNN blogger event. I'll post my predictions at that time, as the Examiner and NRO both asked me over the last couple of days to put them to paper. In the meantime, don't worry about predictions and polls, and concentrate on helping to get out the vote. Here in Minnesota, I...
As CQ readers know, I will be in DC tonight at the CNN blogger bash, hanging out with an impressive array of fellow citizen journalists. I found out yesterday that the list includes Scott Johnson of Power Line, one of the true gentlemen of the blogosphere. I also get to hang out with Mary Katherine Ham, La Shawn Barber, Lorie Byrd, and a host of other fine conservatives at Tryst, the DC coffeehouse that CNN selected as the site. CNN coverage starts at 7 pm ET, and the plan is to have the national coverage check in with the bloggers as the night progresses. They will also televise us continuously on their Pipeline channel, the Internet video service. If you want to avoid the anchor-desk commentary and hear exclusively from the bloggers, that's the place to go. (See update) That won't be the end of my activity, either. I will...
I hate to say I Told You So, but ... well ... Preliminary exit poll results indicate that nearly six in 10 voters today disapprove of the way President Bush is handling his job. About four in 10 approve. That's down from 53 percent approval in 2004, and 67 percent just before the 2002 midterm elections. About four in 10 "strongly" disapprove of the president's work, more than double the number of strong approvers. Intensity of sentiment for and against, by contrast, was about equal in 2004: Thirty-three percent strongly approved of the president's performance, and 35 percent strongly disapproved. And in 2002, strong approvers dominated, quite a contrast from today. I said earlier this week that the networks couldn't resist using the exit poll data for longer than an hour after they got it in confidence. As it turns out, I had the timing exactly correct. And what did...
I'll be following house races on this blog post. According to my two predictions published today by the Examiner and National Review Online, I'm expecting tough news on this front: House: This has been a tough race to call for the lower chamber. The Democrats tried to nationalize the election, and they had a lot of success early in the cycle, but they’ve lost their grip on the generic congressional ballot in all of the late polling. Unfortunately, they need only 15 seats, or 3.4 percent of the districts, to switch in order to wrest control from the GOP. Our friends at Real Clear Politics have a chart which shows the disparity between Republican and Democratic seats at risk, and that will make the difference. The House will go from 232-202-1 to 222-213, giving Nancy Pelosi a narrow advantage. We're going to keep a close eye on this, especially in...
And on this post, I'll be tracking the Senate contests from around the nation. I earlier predicted a net loss for the GOP of two seats at the Examiner and NRO: Senate: Right now, the GOP has a 55-44-1 advantage. I see the Democrats picking up two seats, with a possibility of a third. Rick Santorum and Mike DeWine will almost certainly lose, and Santorum’s loss will really hurt the GOP. I expect either Jim Talent or George Allen to get edged out, but it’s such a toss-up that I’m going to figure that they’ll win at least one. Michael Steele will win Paul Sarbanes’s open Maryland seat, adding one back in for the GOP. Corker, Burns, Chafee all win, and on Wednesday we will all wonder why anyone counted Jon Kyl as anything but a solid Republican hold. In the end, the split will be 53-45-2 (Sanders and Lieberman)....
I arrived here at Tryst a about a half-hour ago or so, and it's quite the zoo. Scott Johnson and I shared a cab over from the hotel, and we almost missed the place -- although we couldn't figure out why, since CNN has two huge vans in front of the coffee shop. Right now, we have people staring at us through the windows, probably wondering (a) what the heck is going on, and (b) where they're going to go for their coffee fix. I figured that we would have a quiet atmosphere, sort of lounge-like, and that we would be mostly focused on our computers. Instead, this is a madhouse, but a fun one. I'm ensconced near the buffet table (naturally), in a comfortable couch. Surrounding me is Nick Gillespie from Reason, John and Joe from Americablog, and Robert Bluey from Human Events Online. I've met La Shawn Barber,...
I'm opening up a separate thread for the Minnesota races, in order to keep all of that commentary together. Minnesotans had some tough choices to make, and so far it looks like they've followed the predictions. The only surprise so far is that Hatch has opened an eight-point lead on Pawlenty, but we're also seeing 43% of all MN-05 precincts reporting with the other districts in single digits -- so this lead is likely illusory. Bachmann leads Wetterling by just two points in MN-06 .... let's hope she stretches that out a bit as more precincts report. 10:14 ET - Hatch is stil up by nine points. However, at this point, Hennepin County has reported 60% of its precincts, which makes this a very distorted result. Hatch is up 14 points in Hennepin, which may not be enough to beat the rest of the state. 59% of Ramsey also has...
I just received a release from the Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good with some potentially disturbing news. They claim that large numbers of Catholics switched their votes from the GOP to the Democrats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia. The swing in each state was as follows: SUMMARY OF CATHOLIC VOTE SWING: OH - 47 points PA – 22 points VA - 15 points That would explain Santorum's loss in Pennsylvania. It would be interesting to see more in-depth analysis of these exit polls to determine why they changed their votes this year....
November 8, 2006
I'm back at the hotel after the CNN blogger bash, and I'd like to wrap up with a few final thoughts. I don't think anyone can honestly look at the results tonight and say that we saw anything less than a trip to the woodshed for the Republicans. We may hold the Senate by the barest of margins, but the House is gone in a substantial manner. Some will make comparisons between this six-year election and those past (1986, 1974, 1958) and claim a moral victory in containing the losses, but that simply won't fly. This is a big loss, and it will hurt the GOP and the Bush administration. Even if we do hold the Senate, we will have to find compromise candidates for the federal bench, and also look forward to more taxes and regulation. Free trade is a goner. The prosecution of the war on terror will...
National Review Online had the first of the post-mortems up this morning, featuring input from several political writers on the cause and meaning of the midterm results. It's an interesting mix of analyses; Republican disunity, Democratic play-acting get some play. Kate O'Beirne and I tend to believe that this reflects Republican performance more than anything else, and Kate believes it started from the White House down: During the “Iraq War Mid-terms,” Republicans were going to lose seats this year but could have limited the damage. I predict that in the future they will police their ranks and lean on the crooks and cheats in their midst to step aside. If it is true that “corruption” was a top concern for voters, Republicans could have insulated themselves some by delivering on ethics reform. Maybe they will learn that there are worse things than giving up their perks - like giving up...
Tim Pawlenty managed to play Midterm Survivor and keep himself from getting voted off the island last night, eking out a very narrow win over the DFL's Mike Hatch for Governor. With just about every precinct now reporting, Pawlenty won re-election over the state's Attorney General by 13,900 votes. However, the state GOP has little else to celebrate, as it lost significant ground in both chambers of the state legislature: Gov. Tim Pawlenty eked out a narrow reelection victory over DFL Attorney General Mike Hatch early this morning in a climactic finale to one of the closest, hardest-fought gubernatorial contests in memory. Pawlenty was leading by about one percentage point when the Star Tribune declared him the winner about 2 a.m. As one of the few statewide Republican victors in a Democratic state in the midst of an overwhelming Democratic tide, Pawlenty may have enhanced his national image as an...
Kofi Anna's office decided to deliver one last broadside to the Bush administration before skulking out of office after running the most corrupt Secretariat ever. The UN spokesperson released several tidbits from press coverage of the midterm elections, celebrating the end of Republican dominance in an election that had little to do with the UN: Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives and defeated at least four Republican senators yesterday, riding a wave of voter discontent with President Bush and the war in Iraq. But the fate of the Senate remained in doubt this morning, as races for Republican-held seats in Montana and Virginia remained too close to call as Election Day turned into the day after. (NYT online) Virginia is facing a likely recount. (BBC) Democratic gains in Congress were seen around the world Wednesday as a rejection of the U.S. war in Iraq that led some observers...
Just before boarding my flight, I had a chance to participate in a blog conference call with Rep. Jack Kingston about the effects of the midterm loss. Kingston, who came to Congress in 1992, is one of the few Republicans to have operated in the minority. Here are my unedited notes from the call, which I had to leave early. He appreciates what’s going on in the blogs. He thinks that we have learned a lesson which we shouldn’t have had to do the hard way. You have to deliver on the name brand, which is clean government, competence, and fiscal responsibility. In 1994, we got elected on the Contract with America, and showed the American people that we would follow up on those promises. We got a little too used to holding the gavel. We started using spending to shore up weak districts, and that horse-trading led to even...
One day after voters spanked Republicans in the midterm elections, George Bush turned a two-year commitment to Donald Rumsfeld into a "heckuva job, Rummy," before the last ballots have even been counted. Rumsfeld resigned his post as Secretary of Defense after almost six years on the job, and Bush will nominate Robert Gates to replace him: Donald Rumsfeld will resign as Defense Secretary in a stunning consequence of yesterday's midterm election results which demonstrated American dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq. President Bush has chosen Robert Gates, president of Texas A&M and former CIA director, to replace him. Gates represents a change in direction for the Pentagon . He has a reputation for a pragmatic approach to foreign policy. In George H. W. Bush's administration, Gates served as deputy to National Security Council director Brent Scowcroft, who has been a sharp critic of the current President Bush's Iraq policy. His...
Virginia has finished counting its ballots, and the final count makes James Webb the winner of the Senate race this evening, retiring incumbent George Allen, who at one time appeared to be a front-runner for the 2008 Presidential nomination. The decision gives the Democrats 51 seats and control of the Senate, putting Harry Reid in charge of the upper chamber: Democrats wrested control of the Senate from Republicans Wednesday with an upset victory in Virginia, giving the party complete domination of Capitol Hill for the first time since 1994. Jim Webb's squeaker win over incumbent Sen. George Allen gave Democrats their 51st seat in the Senate, an astonishing turnabout at the hands of voters unhappy with Republican scandal and unabated violence in Iraq. Allen was the sixth Republican incumbent senator defeated in Tuesday's elections. The Senate had teetered at 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans for most of Wednesday, with Virginia hanging...
I'll be appearing on Rob Breckinreidge's show, The World Tonight, on CHQR in Calgary at 9:05 pm CT tonight. I plan to use the appearance to formally concede in my campaign to win the mayor's race in Eagan through write-in votes. Exit polling is still spotty -- well, we can't find the guy I paid to annoy people coming out of the polling station -- but so far, the campaign apparently foundered on the basics. Two major factors combined to deny me office: Eaganites who don't know who I am, and Eaganites who do. Of course, there was that whole Fresca thing, too. I may have to think about switching to Squirt. Actually, Rob wants to talk about the midterm election results, so be sure to tune in to catch my take on the GOP loss. If you're not in Calgary, listen in on their Internet stream!...
November 9, 2006
Now that the Democrats have won control of both chambers of Congress, their real challenge has begun -- big-tent governing. The Democrats took control by nominating center-right candidates to replace Republicans, and now they will have to find ways in which to unify their caucus to get their issues advanced. As the departing Republican leadership can tell them, it's not as easy as it looks: They wear cowboy boots, chew tobacco, love hunting, hate abortion, want less government spending — and some voted for Ronald Reagan. Now they are headed to Congress as Democrats. Although the Democrats’ victory was above all an overwhelming repudiation of the conflict in Iraq, it was also built on the back of moderate, often conservative candidates recruited to compete in traditionally Republican territory. When Congress returns in January, both the House and Senate will see something of an ideological shift, with an influx of freshmen...
One of the apparent defeats from the midterm results came in response to the Republican effort to field black candidates for significant offices. Those candidates lost in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and it shows that the GOP has to work more to make inroads into a community with a lot of distrust for them: Memo to Republican chief Ken Mehlman regarding recruiting black candidates: Try again. Republicans had hoped to brand 2006 as the year of the black Republican. But with high-profile failures in Maryland’s Senate race and in governor contests in Ohio and Pennsylvania, prospects for GOP gains among black voters turned up short this year and gave scant hope for 2008. Michael Steele, Maryland’s lieutenant governor, lost by almost 10 percentage points to Rep. Ben Cardin. Ken Blackwell, a conservative darling who would have been Ohio’s first black governor, lost by almost 24 percentage points; Lynn Swann lost...
George Bush announced yesterday that he would focus on areas of consensus with the new Democratic majority, and one of those areas would naturally be comprehensive immigration reform. The Republicans in the House blocked Bush's plans for the normalization of more than twelve million illegal aliens within the US in this session of Congress, although the Senate approved it. Now with Democratic majorities in place in both chambers, the border fence approved, and anti-amnesty forces marginalized, Bush can complete his efforts: President Bush yesterday said he will team up with Democrats to pass an immigration bill with a guest-worker program that his own party blocked this year, and his Republican opponents predicted a bloody intraparty fight but said they cannot stop such a bill from passing. "We will fight it, we will lose. It will go to the Senate, it will pass. The president will sign it. And it will...
So what's next for George Bush after having his party stripped of Congressional control? The final two years of a two-term presidency normally get devoted to The Legacy, as Oval Office occupants start to look longingly at the history books and wonder how their own presidencies will be recorded in them. No President wants The Legacy to be gridlock and can-kicking, and so Bush has made moves towards the Democrats in a manner similar to what Arnold Schwarzenegger did in California after a series of ill-conceived referenda: If Bush was willing to dismiss Rumsfeld, which the president said only a week ago that he had no intention of doing, it was in part because he and his party have so much at risk. Tuesday's elections proved to be a reaction not only against the war and the corruption scandals that have scarred Congress but also against the kind of base-driven...
La Shawn Barber makes the case for cancellation of all political vacations and an immediate start to the 2008 campaign in her Examiner editorial today. She writes that conservatism won even while the Republicans lost, and that conservatives have to continue the fight: Republican politicians may have been ousted, but conservative policies prevailed, particularly the ban on so-called same sex marriage. Something similar happened during the 2004 presidential election. In response to a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling declaring the state’s ban on homosexual “marriage” unconstitutional, all 11 states with measures protecting marriage passed those measures, including states that [former presidential candidate] Sen. John Kerry won. Despite clearly supporting certain conservative ideals, voting Americans rejected the men behind the policies. ... Our system of government has its problems, but it’s still the best around. Democrats wanted their chance to govern, now they have it. Campaigning for 2008 begins —now. It's...
Mike Pence and John Shadegg, two strong fiscal conservatives, have picked up some support in their newly-launched campaign for House leadership. John Hawkins and Robert Bluey -- my blogging partner at the CNN event -- both report that Tom Tancredo and Steve King have decided to back Pence, at least, as House Minority Leader. The move comes as a bit of a surprise, at least concerning Tancredo, who criticized Pence earlier on his support for a moderate normalization program similar to that in the Senate. King sent out a press release, which stated in part: Republicans have lost seats in Congress because we needed more fiscal discipline, lacked clarity on the Global War on Terror, and were not aggressive enough on our fiscal and social agenda. We now need an articulate and committed Minority Leader who can be the most effective spokesman for our agenda. Mike Pence is the best...
November 10, 2006
American troops concerned with the loss of Donald Rumsfeld spoke to Martin Fletcher of the Times of London, worried that the new Secretary of Defense would pull them out of Iraq before they could complete the mission: Half of America and the upper echelons of the US military may be cheering Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation from the post of Defence Secretary, but there was no rejoicing yesterday among those most directly affected by his decisions: the frontline soldiers in Iraq. Troops expressed little pleasure at the departure of the man responsible for their protracted deployment to a hostile country where 2,839 of their comrades have died. Indeed, some members of the 101st Airborne Division and other troops approached by The Times as they prepared to fly home from Baghdad airport yesterday expressed concern that Robert Gates, Mr Rumsfeld’s successor, and the Democrat-controlled Congress, might seek to wind down their mission before...
I find it very helpful to read international publications to see how outsiders perceive America and our politics. Especially in foreign policy, it helps to keep from developing a parochial perspective. After all, one of the major goals of any foreign policy is to convince other nations to follow our leadership. With Robert Gates replacing Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, it's worth checking to see if the foreign press have come to the same conclusion as we have. At least in London, they have: Two years ago they were the pariahs of neoconservative Washington, a group of soft-spined old timers who refused to see that the only way to defeat America’s enemies was with the lethal might of the US military. But within hours of Donald Rumsfeld’s enforced resignation on Wednesday, and in the clearest of signs that President Bush has turned to his father to dig him out of...
Ehud Olmert made it clear that he wants to sit down with Mahmoud Abbas and start serious negotiations. He told an interviewer that he would meet with the Palestinian Authority president at any time or place for talks, and that Abbas didn't know how far Olmert would go to achieve peace: Three days ahead of his trip to Washington D.C., Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged on Thursday night to make substantive offers to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. "I am ready day and night, I am ready anytime, any place, without preconditions to sit down and talk. He [Abbas] will be surprised how far we are prepared to go," Olmert said in a public interview with Sky's Adam Boulton at the Conference for Export and International Cooperation in Tel Aviv. "I can offer him a lot," he added, but did not elaborate. The two leaders have not met officially since...
Now that the Democrats have won their Congressional majorities, they now have to govern for the first time in 12 years. They made a lot of campaign promises, especially regarding Iraq, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus wants to make sure those get honored. To that end, they have turned to a new guru on war -- one who led Democrats to a massive defeat via his own defeatism in 1972: George McGovern, the former senator and Democratic presidential candidate, said Thursday that he will meet with more than 60 members of Congress next week to recommend a strategy to remove U.S. troops from Iraq by June. If Democrats don't take steps to end the war in Iraq soon, they won't be in power very long, McGovern told reporters before a speech at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "I think the Democratic leadership is wise enough to know that if they're going...
The Washington Times reports this morning that Michael Steele will have his choice of high-profile jobs after losing a tough race to Benjamin Cardin for Maryland's open Senate seat. With Ken Mehlman's announcement of his resignation as Republican National Committee chair, many have openly speculated that Steele will get the nod as his replacement. However, Karl Rove wants Steele in Bush's Cabinet, possibly to lead HUD: Also last night, Republican officials told The Times that Mr. Steele, who lost his bid for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, has been sought out to succeed Mr. Mehlman as national party chairman. Those Republican officials said Mr. Steele had not made a decision whether to take the post, as of last night. Other Republican Party officials said some Republican National Committee (RNC) members, including state party chairmen, have mounted a move to have Mr. Steele succeed Mr. Mehlman. But they said that President...
Republicans can be forgiven for not showing much enthusiasm for a poll this week, but in this case, we can guarantee that a Republican will win. This is the latest in a series of blogospheric straw polls on the 2008 Presidential nomiation, and obviously the first one since the midterm meltdown last Tuesday. GOP Bloggers has again staged this for the conservative bloggers and their readers to give their support to their favorite Republican candidates. I'll run this on top for the rest of the day, and we'll see how CQ readers feel about the national candidates after the Congressional switch. Be sure to leave your comments here as well....
Polls have usefulness as a thermometer of sorts; they measure the political temperature at any one moment, but it's tricky to use them to predict the temperature in the future, especially two years out. That's true of the so-called scientific polling, and more so of the self-selected sampling that occurs with these Internet straw polls. However, they do provoke interesting discussions about our political assumptions and attitudes. Take today's poll, just below us. GOP Bloggers registered 10,263 responses across the blogosphere in the last 24 hours -- and over 3600 came from CQ readers. The CQ results show some surprising strength for Rudy Giuliani, who garnered 30% of first-choice selections, followed by Newt Gingrich at 25% and Mitt Romney at 24%. Those three potential candidates were the only ones who scored positive on acceptablity, with Romney oddly winning that category with 62%, compared to 59% for Rudy and 44% for...
My good friend John Hinderaker links to a CBS report about the latest entertainment coming from al-Qaeda this evening, as do some of our mutual friends in the conservative blogosphere, that hails the Democratic midterm victory as a "reasonable" move. Abu Hamza al-Muhajir had plenty to say in the new videotape released from an undisclosed location in Iraq, but the wonder is that anyone pays any attention to it. Here's the portion in question: The terror group also welcomed the U.S. Republican electoral defeat that led to the departure of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and vowed to continue its fight until the White House is blown up. In the tape, al-Muhajir praised the outcome of Tuesday's elections in which Democrats swept to power in the House and the Senate, in large part due to U.S. voter dissatisfaction over the handling of the war in Iraq. "The American people have...
November 11, 2006
Scott Lindlaw at the AP provides an analysis of what Nancy Pelosi's speakership will mean to the San Francisco area and to California as a whole once she takes the gavel. Lindlaw notes the financial benefits other areas have received when their Representative becomes Speaker of the House, and notes that Pelosi has hardly made pork a stranger in the past: Tip O'Neill secured down payments for Boston's Big Dig. Sam Rayburn sent gushers of cash back to Texas, along with tax breaks that helped its oil industry. Hospitals, schools and nonprofits in Dennis Hastert's hometown of Aurora, Ill., have seen millions roll in during his reign. Now Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco is poised to follow them as speaker of the House — a perch predecessors used to channel big cash to pet projects back home. "There's a long tradition where not only can you bring back your...
Hamas' Ismail Haniyeh has announced his intention to resign from office if an agreement can be forged which will allow international aid to flow back to the Palestinian Authority. However, he has not repudiated the positions which caused the aid to stop, and claims that the new government will not budge from those principles either: Hamas committed today to folding its eight-month government if that would restore the international assistance that was cut off after it won national elections earlier this year. In a shrewd and dramatic speech, the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyah, said he would likely resign in the next “two or three weeks” to make way for a national unity government more acceptable to international donors than Hamas, the organization responsible for the deadliest attacks against Israel. ... It was a public acknowledgment that Hamas had failed to run the Palestinian Authority on its own terms in...
Yesterday, I responded to John at Power Line about holding Democrats accountable for terrorist propaganda statements of delight at the midterm elections. In an update, after kindly linking back to me, John asks this question: But isn't a reasonable starting point for that engagement the fact that the terrorists are delighted that the Dems have won, and are convinced that the Dems' policies, as the terrorists understand them, will benefit the jihadis? Don't the Democrats have some obligation to face up to the fact that the prospect of our disengagement from Iraq--and if that isn't their "new direction," then what in God's name is?--is viewed with glee by the enemy? My response is lengthy again, so I decided to make it a separate post. This is one point where John and I differ. I don't take Abu Hamza at his word, nor Zarqawi before him. Al-Qaeda has made plenty of...
I want to wish all of our brave and courageous men in uniform, past and present, a happy Veteran's Day. These men and women served our nation to protect the freedoms we enjoy, and in many cases to bring liberty where oppression and tyranny existed. It goes without saying that we owe our own freedoms and liberties to these fine, courageous Americans, who dedicated themselves and their lives to our great nation. Last night, the First Mate and I watched an edition of Shootout! on the History Channel. This series reviews famous firefights from various battles, analyzing them and profiling the men who survived them. Last night, they featured the Battle of the Bulge and several engagements between American and German troops, and one man's story struck me as particularly emblematic of the fortitude of simple American citizens fighting for their country. Meet Melvin Earl Biddle, one of only 150...
I got an e-mail from a fellow blogger I greatly respect (who will remain anonymous), expressing his despondency after the losses in the midterm elections. Watching the Democrats grab control of both chambers of Congress deeply affects him, as he has spent so much of himself trying to assist the Republican cause for the past few years. Now, he can't see his way clear to any cause for optimism, and he asked for my advice -- and since I think more than a few of the CQ community may feel the same way, I figured I'd post my thoughts on the subject. I'm neither depressed nor giddy at the thought of working from the opposition, at least on legislative matters. Some conservatives tried to temper the loss with large doses of optimism, claiming to feel "liberated" at the prospect of being unchained in some manner from the GOP yoke. Criticism...
Mitch and I will be on the air between 1-3 pm CT this afternoon for the Northern Alliance Radio Network on AM 1280 The Patriot. We'll be discussing many topics, but probably we will focus on the fallout from the midterm elections. How do Republicans proceed now that we are in the minority, and how can we engage the Democrats in the war on terror? CQ readers outside of the Twin Cities can listen to the show on our Internet stream at the station's web site (linked above), and you can join the conversation by calling 651-289-4488. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the election and their meaning. UPDATE AND BUMP: Since today is Veteran's Day, let's do something to help disabled veterans right now. Support Soldier's Angels and their latest Project Valour-IT effort to provide them free laptops:...
November 12, 2006
In the aftermath of the midterm election loss, which stripped power from Republicans in both chambers of Congress, supporters wondered what went wrong and how to recover from the blow. Why did voters reject the GOP after twelve years in power, and how do Republicans convince them to return to power in 2008? Mitch and I discussed this at length on our show yesterday, and we had all four inbound lines lit for almost the entire two hours. One common thread among all of the calls was that the Republicans had forgotten why voters gave them a majority in the first place. The 1994 revolution brought a mandate for reform. Voters had tired of a Congress that passed laws that they refused to apply to themselves, of a federal government that kept growing, and a perception of the legislature as corrupted by a murky appropriations process and lobbyists ready to...
Russ Feingold has announced that he will stick with his current office of Senator from Wisconsin and forego a run for President in 2008. He told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that he didn't have the fire in the belly necessary for a grueling national campaign: Sen. Russ Feingold will not seek his party's presidential nomination in 2008, the Wisconsin Democrat told the Journal Sentinel on Saturday. "I never got to that point where I'd rather be running around the country, running for president, than being a senator from Wisconsin," Feingold said in a phone interview from Madison. Feingold, 53, conceded that he faced long odds of winning the nomination. "It would have required the craziest combination of things in the history of American politics to make it work," he said. But Feingold said waging an underdog campaign appealed to him. What didn't appeal to him, he said, was "the way in...
Newsweek reports on the first electoral disappointment for Karl Rove in four cycles and tries to dissect why he wound up so incorrect in his forecasts. Rove, who had famously insisted that news organizations had inferior polling data late in the campaign, saw his predictions of marginal losses explode in an election-day meltdown that those same polls had predicted for weeks: How did the man they call Bush's brain get it so wrong? Rove's miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn't just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his "metrics" were far superior to plain old polls. Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and...
Joe Lieberman fired a warning shot across the bow of the Democrats in his Meet the Press appearance this morning. When asked whether he would consider following Jim Jeffords' example and switch parties, Lieberman pointedly left his options open: Sen. Joe Lieberman on Sunday repeated his pledge to caucus with Senate Democrats when the 110th Congress convenes in January, but refused to slam the door on possibly moving to the Republican side of the aisle. Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" if he might follow the example of Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who left the Republicans in 2001 and became an independent, ending Republican control of the U.S. Senate, Lieberman refused to discount the possibility. "I'm not ruling it out but I hope I don't get to that point," he said. "And I must say -- and with all respect to the Republicans who supported me in Connecticut --...
November 13, 2006
The Washington Times' Rowan Scarborough, who has had good contacts within the Bush administration, reports today that the new nominee to replace Donald Rumsfeld will have the same goals in Iraq and the war on terror, but bring a new management style to improve the chances of success. The White House views Robert Gates not as a dramatic shift but as a course correction: Defense Secretary-designate Robert M. Gates is not expected to rein in the aggressive global war on al Qaeda started by predecessor Donald H. Rumsfeld or reverse the transformation of the Army, but instead focus on how to win in Iraq and get American troops home, current and former Pentagon officials say. "He definitely is not seen as someone wimping out on the global war," said a Pentagon adviser. "How he does it, and what tools, and who he entrusts with them, that's a whole different issue."...
Nancy Pelosi surprised political analysts by injecting herself into an intraparty fight over the House leadership position. Despite Steny Hoyer's efforts to win the midterms as Minority Leader, Pelosi endorsed John Murtha to replace him in the majority. Her first effort as Speaker-elect gives a preview of Pelosi's leadership style and the importance of personal relationships over political pragmatism: House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) yesterday as the next House majority leader, thereby stepping into a contentious intraparty fight between Murtha and her current deputy, Maryland's Steny H. Hoyer. The unexpected move signaled the sizable value Pelosi gives to personal loyalty and personality preferences. Hoyer competed with her in 2001 for the post of House minority whip, while Murtha managed her winning campaign. Pelosi has also all but decided she will not name the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.)...
It looks like Fatah and Hamas may have made progress in their talks to form a coalition government in an effort to end the crippling sanctions that followed Hamas' electoral victory this year. They have gone far enough to discuss leadership positions in the revamped Palestinian Authority, and the name discussed for Ismail Haniyeh's replacement may sound familiar to West Virginians: A U.S.-educated professor with ties to both Hamas and the rival Fatah Party is the leading candidate for Palestinian prime minister in the emerging unity government, officials said Monday. The militant Hamas group and Fatah have agreed that Mohammed Shabir, 60, formerly the head of Gaza's Islamic University, should head the new government, Moussa Abu Marzouk, a top official at Hamas' Syrian headquarters, told The Associated Press. Fatah and Hamas have been discussing the idea of a coalition government for months, but have been unable to reach a deal....
... is electing the same leadership after an embarrassing failure and expecting a different result. Robert Novak explores this weird psychosis that will apparently afflict the Republican House caucus this week, as it prepares to return John Boehner and Roy Blunt to their current leadership positions, now in the minority: The depleted House Republican caucus, a minority in the next Congress, convenes at 8 a.m. in the Capitol Friday on the brink of committing an act of supreme irrationality. The House members blame their leadership for tasting the bitter dregs of defeat. Yet, the consensus so far is that, in secret ballot, they will re-elect some or all of those leaders. In private conversation, Republican members of Congress blame Majority Leader John Boehner and Majority Whip Roy Blunt in no small part for their midterm election debacle. Yet, either Boehner, Blunt or both are expected to be returned to their...
CBS News has an interview on their website with Marine Corps Commandant General Mike Hagee, which it promotes with the headline, "Top Marine: No Plan For Post-Saddam Iraq". The article that fronts this interview makes the claim that Hagee admits that the Pentagon had no plan at all for security in the post-invasion period: As Commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force during the lead-up to the war, Hagee was in charge of planning for the Marines' original push to Baghdad. So I asked him about one of the enduring mysteries of the invasion — why there was no real plan for running the country once Saddam Hussein fell from power. Unfortunately, Hagee's comments only deepen the mystery. He says he was deeply concerned about who would take charge of major Iraqi cities, like Najaf, as the Marines pushed through them on their way to Baghdad. Hagee says he asked...
The Republican National Committee selected its new chairman to replace Ken Mehlman. Instead of Michael Steele, who made his interest clear, the GOP selected Senator Mel Martinez -- a choice that has underwhelmed conservatives: Sen. Mel Martinez, the first-term lawmaker who previously served in President Bush's Cabinet, will assume the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, GOP officials said Monday. Martinez, 60, will replace current chairman Ken Mehlman, who will leave the post in January at the end of his two-year term, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting a formal announcement. Martinez will remain in the Senate. Mike Duncan, the RNC's current general counsel and a former party treasurer, will run the day-to-day operations at the party's Capitol Hill headquarters. Martinez was tapped in 2001 as President Bush's secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He resigned in 2003 to run for the open Senate...
The US got embarrassed last year when four captured al-Qaeda terrorists escaped from a military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. The leader, Abu Nasir al-Qahtani, has been rumored to have appeared all over Southwestern Asia. Tonight the BBC reports that American forces have recaptured Qahtani, near Khost: US and Afghan forces say they have captured a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure in eastern Afghanistan. The man - named as Abu Nasir al-Qahtani by unidentified US officials and a Pakistani newspaper - is said to have been captured in the city of Khost. US military officials said last week that a known al-Qaeda operative had been arrested in Khost. Mr Qahtani escaped last year from the US prison at Bagram in Afghanistan with three other suspected militants. The American military captured five other terrorists along with Qahtani in Khost, the BBC reports. US forces will not publicly confirm the identities of their detainees, but...
November 14, 2006
Investigators have puzzled over a strange new phenomenon -- the increasing disintegration of Euro notes. A chemical analysis of the bills suggests sulfuric salts have combined with human perspiration, and German authorities believe they know the source of the chemical: Criminal investigators are following a new lead that could resolve the recent mystery of the disintegrating euro bills. And it may lead directly into the crystal meth lab. Complaints of the mysteriously dissolving euro notes began accumulating in late October. An initial investigation revealed that "the destroyed bank notes came in contact with sulfuric acid, which led to the observed disintegration," the mass-circulation Bild newspaper reported on November 2. It is believed that the bills were somehow coated with a sulfur salt, which would have formed a potent acid in combination with perspiration from a person's hands, causing the bills to decompose. But where did the sulfuric acid come from?...
While Tony Blair signaled a new interest in dialogue with Iran, the mullahcracy has conducted negotiations with al-Qaeda to promote pro-Iranian leadership, the London Telegraph reports. In truth, neither development represents much of a change in policy: With the British and American governments looking for an exit strategy from Iraq, the Prime Minister admitted that they needed Iran's co-operation to prevent the country descending into civil war and to secure an overall Middle East peace settlement. But the revelation that Iran is working hard to establish a closer relationship with bin Laden's fanatics, who provoked the war against terrorism with the attacks on September 11 2001, is likely to undermine severely Downing Street's attempts to effect a rapprochement. Iran is also suspected of arming insurgent groups in southern Iraq – many of which have links to al-Qa'eda – that have been responsible for many of the roadside bomb attacks against...
Nancy Pelosi has won few plaudits for her first major decision as presumptive Speaker of the 110th Session of Congress. Throwing her support to John Murtha over Steny Hoyer has caused an eruption of criticism and indignation from within her own political coalition, who wonder how a party leader could campaign against corruption and then support one of the biggest porkers in Congress for a leadership position. Rather than attract support for passing over Hoyer, Pelosi has inspired public opposition to her decision -- the latest from Charles Rangel, her choice to chair the Ways and Means Committee: Some of Mr. Hoyer's backers in New York are asking why the likely new speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, has endorsed Mr. Murtha rather than the Maryland congressman, who is the minority whip and the second-ranking Democrat. Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem, who called Mr. Murtha "a...
In all my years, I have never understood the supposed charm of the Mile High Club. In modern jets, the seats are far too cramped, and the bathrooms are worse. The flight experience produces physical reactions closer to a hangover than sexual arousal, and anyone who thinks that mutual sexual gratification can take place under such circumstances probably spends too much time reading Penthouse Forum than this blog. However, apparently the dream remains alive: A California couple are facing federal charges after they refused to stop "overt sexual activity" during a flight to Raleigh, authorities said. Carl Warren Persing of Lakewood, Calif., and Dawn Elizabeth Sewell of Huntington Beach, Calif., are accused of interfering with flight crew members during a Sept. 15 Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles with a stop in Phoenix. ... According to court documents, flight attendants saw Persing and Sewell kissing, embracing and "acting in a...
Republicans have to make some changes in order to rebuild trust with the American electorate. We have to understand who we are, what makes us Republicans, and how best to build a platform that will focus on those qualities and make them relevant for the largest possible number of voters. We need to agree on a set of First Principles that unite us and allow us to defend liberty, property, and our nation. Under rational circumstances, we would have that debate and then select the leadership that would allow us to champion those policies. However, the Republican House leadership has decided to go backwards by selecting leadership first, on Friday, November 17th. Even stranger, the GOP has the same leadership that allowed the party to fritter away its majority in the lead for re-election to leadership. John Boehner and Roy Blunt have been loyal Republican Congressmen. However, as the Club...
Earlier today, I wrote about Rep. Dan Lungren being a good option for Republican Conference Chairman. Commenters and e-mailers then sent conflicting information about Lungren's track record on abortion and gun control. Unfortunately, I was at the office and then at the hospital (long story, but nothing wrong) and could not do much more than advise readers to be careful. Now, however, Lungren has issued a statement to bloggers about his record, and some research has developed a more specific picture of his positions on these two important issues: As someone who supports the sanctity of human life and a definition of marriage which has served as a foundation for our society, it is my belief that the transformation of the judiciary into a third policymaking branch presents unparalleled challenges to the notion of the Separation of Powers. If unchecked this trend threatens to turn the political branches into little...
We have two exciting developments in the blogosphere this evening. First, the folks at Wizbang! have launched the 2006 version of The Weblog Awards. Blog readers made CQ the Best Conservative Blog in 2004, and I was honored with a nomination for Best Blog in 2005. Be sure to check out all of the categories and make your own nominations in the comments of each thread. Voting begins shortly, and I'll keep an eye on how that goes as well. In the second development, another mainstream columnist has joined the ranks of bloggers. This time, we welcome Jules Crittendon, one of the strongest conservative voices in the mainstream media. Glad to have you with us, Jules. Just don't forget to maintain the proper dress code while blogging .... pajamas....
The Jack Abramoff probe may turn on the same Democrats who tried exploiting the scandal for electoral advantage this year. ABC reports that federal prosecutors have taken statements from the disgraced lobbyist that implicate, in Abramoff's words, "six to eight seriously corrupt Democratic senators": Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff is scheduled to report to federal prison tomorrow, over the objections of federal prosecutors who say they still need his help to pursue leads on officials he allegedly bribed. Sources close to the investigation say Abramoff has provided information on his dealings with and campaign contributions and gifts to "dozens of members of Congress and staff," including what Abramoff has reportedly described as "six to eight seriously corrupt Democratic senators." The sources say Abramoff was about to provide information about Bush administration officials, including Karl Rove, "accepting things of value" from Abramoff. The Rove mention seems a little odd. After all, Rove...
November 15, 2006
The IAEA found traces of plutonium and enriched uranium in Iran, it stated yesterday, and also noted that the Iranians have not cooperated with nuclear inspectors. And in other breaking news, the sun will rise in the East this morning: New traces of plutonium and enriched uranium — potential material for atomic warheads — have been found in a nuclear waste facility in Iran, a revelation that came Tuesday as the Iranian president boasted his country's nuclear fuel program will soon be completed. Tuesday's IAEA report, prepared for next week's meeting of the agency's 35-nation board, did little to dispel concerns. Beyond detailing the new plutonium and enriched uranium findings at a nuclear waste facility, it also faulted Tehran for lack of cooperation. "The agency will remain unable to make further progress in its efforts to verify the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran" without more cooperation...
When UCLA started researching Southern California polluters by industry, one would have expected the usual suspects to rise to the top of the list. Certainly, the oil refineries rank as the worst aggregate polluter in the greater Los Angeles area, as most would guess; I grew up near them, and it's no great shock. However, can anyone guess which SoCal industry managed to beat aerospace manufacturing, hotels, and semiconductor manufacturers for second place? The Guardian has a surprise for Californios and movie lovers: The city of Los Angeles is principally famous for two things: glittering movies and suffocating smog. Now researchers have found that the two are not unconnected. A study by the University of California Los Angeles shows the film and television industry to be the second largest polluter in the Los Angeles area. Only the region's oil refineries pump more pollutants into the air, it says. While Hollywood...
Tim Pawlenty has decided that his second term as Governor in Minnesota will feature bipartisanship and accommodation with the new DFL-controlled legislature. In the first move of his new term, Pawlenty embraced universal health coverage for children underwritten by the state and demanded changes in the medical industry, while incongruently decrying government "meddling" in health care: In a sweeping policy departure that aligns with a top agenda item of the newly elected DFL legislative majorities, Gov. Tim Pawlenty called Tuesday for extending health care access to up to 90,000 uninsured children as a step toward coverage for all Minnesotans. "We all, I think, can chart a path toward universal coverage," he said in a luncheon speech to a health reform conference in Minneapolis. "We're going to have to move in stages. ... We should start with covering all kids." Pawlenty also peppered his remarks with broad criticism of the nation's...
After leading the charge to retreat from Iraq and declare victory with our backup lights lit, the New York Times now discovers that most military experts -- including critics of the Busg administration's handling of post-war Iraq -- believe a drawdown will touch off a civil war, not avoid one. While Carl Levin and Jack Reed try to fine-tune a Senate resolution so that retreat doesn't sound like retreat, Anthony Zinni and John Batiste point out that lowering the security forces in Baghdad will make violence increase, not decrease: One of the most resonant arguments in the debate over Iraq holds that the United States can move forward by pulling its troops back, as part of a phased withdrawal. If American troops begin to leave and the remaining forces assume a more limited role, the argument holds, it will galvanize the Iraqi government to assume more responsibility for securing and...
Captain's Quarters has no hesitation in endorsing Lamar Alexander for the position of Minority Whip in the next session of the Senate. While I have regard for Senator Alexander, this decision has far more to do with his competition than with the Tennessean himself. Opposing Alexander is none other than Trent Lott from Mississippi. Lott had been Majority Leader until an unfortunate remark at Strom Thurmond's birthday party caused a political firestorm. That's not the problem with his candidacy for Whip; he's been punished for his carelessness in hailing Thurmond's Dixiecrat presidential run. My opposition comes from Lott's attitude towards pork, and especially his attitude about the people who oppose pork spending. One of the major legislative reforms that came out of the last session of Congress was the Coburn-Obama spending database. Bill Frist managed to expertly get that through in the last days of the legislative calendar. However, that...
Guess who's the most popular belle at the Democratic ball in DC? None other than Joe Lieberman, who had to run as an independent after party activists defeated him in the primaries with neophyte Ned Lamont. After having to endorse Lieberman's opponent, and in some cases campaigning against their long-time colleague, Democrats now line up to shake his hand ... or kiss it: “It was all very warm, lots of hugs, high-fives, that kind of stuff,” said Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon marveled, “One senator after another kept coming up and shaking his hand.” And Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas noted, “I gave him a hug and a kiss.” Mr. Lieberman received a standing ovation at a caucus luncheon after Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is poised to become the majority leader, declared, “We’re all family.” I'm tempted to ask where exactly Lincoln kissed...
Charles Rangel on Monday: "My kind of politics is, if you do your job, you are supposed to be rewarded ... I think Steny [Hoyer] has done his job. I cannot think of any reason why this [John Murtha's challenge] is happening." Charles Rangel on Tuesday: Pelosi called incoming Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) yesterday morning just hours after he had told the New York Sun, “I think Steny has done his job. I cannot think of any reason why this is happening,” prompting the paper to run the headline “Rangel Backs Hoyer for Leader.” “I don’t know what article she had seen, but she had thought it was an endorsement of Steny,” Rangel said. Rangel told her it was not an endorsement but reiterated his earlier statement that “nobody had given me any reason not to support Steny.” Golly, what will Charles Rangel say today? Let's...
Well, it's certainly been a fine day for ethics in government. Trent Lott returned to Republican leadership by 25-24 vote of the now-minority GOP caucus: Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, ousted from the top Senate Republican leadership job four years ago because of remarks considered racially insensitive, won election to the No. 2 post Wednesday for the minority GOP in the next Congress. But Lott deferred to newly elected party leader Mitch McConnell when asked whether he feels vindicated by the 25-24 secret ballot. "The spotlight belongs on him," Lott said of his Kentucky colleague, unanimously chosen to succeed Sen. Bill Frist as the top-ranking Senate GOP leader. But Lott's comeback-kid victory was generating the most buzz in the Capitol hallways. Lott, who was pressured to step down from the Senate's top spot more than four years ago, returned to the center of power by nosing out Sen. Lamar Alexander, who...
November 16, 2006
I lived in the Los Angeles area in 1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman got butchered to death at Simpson's Brentwood home. I watched OJ as he drove his white Ford Bronco all over the area, and I lived through the subequent trial, acquittal, lawsuit, and conviction. When the larger community split along racial lines on OJ's guilt or innocence, I lived through that as well. All I can say is that a lot of those people will have to eat their words after OJ's new book gets published, but the thought of it brings no satisfaction. Any time OJ makes the news, it demeans anyone connected to the case and the coverage, and this time it comes courtesy of Regan Books: O.J. Simpson created an uproar Wednesday with plans for a TV interview and book titled "If I Did It" — an account the publisher pronounced "his...
Fresh on the heels of the New York Times interviews with retired generals opposing the cut-amd-run/phased deployment strategies of the Democrats, the Guardian (UK) reports that the White House will propose a concentrated effort to stamp out the sectarian violence in Baghdad. The new plan calls for an additional 20,000 American troops for the Iraqi capital and a renewed mandate for aggressive action against the militias and death squads: President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers, according to sources familiar with the administration's internal deliberations. ... Point one of the strategy calls for an increase rather than a decrease in overall US force levels inside Iraq, possibly by as many as 20,000...
... against Nancy Pelosi, that is? According to Robert Novak, the impending Speakership of Nancy Pelosi has a number of them gravely concerned, and for the same reason that I pointed out on Monday. With her unexpected endorsement of John Murtha's challenge to Steny Hoyer and her demotion of Jane Harman on the Intelligence committee, Pelosi has made clear that her rule will find its basis on personal whim rather than any concern over the philosophical direction of the party: The damage to her was irrevocable when she wrote her colleagues Sunday urging them to pick Murtha over Rep. Steny Hoyer. Close associates of Hoyer say her letter stunned him, and he was not alone. While Pelosi had made it clear that she would vote for Murtha, the public endorsement was unexpected. Although Pelosi's apologists had stressed that this was not a public campaign, but a pro forma endorsement, she...
The EU wants to start charging airline passengers for the pollution caused by their transportation. The draft legislation would affect all carriers coming in and out of Europe, effectively taxing American airlines without any opportunity to debate the fees: AIRLINE passengers would pay up to £27 extra for a return ticket to cover the environmental damage caused by their flights, under European Commission proposals to address climate change. Draft legislation to be published next month would require all flights arriving or departing from European Union airports to buy permits to cover their carbon dioxide emissions. .... This will infuriate the United States and many other countries because it would affect all flights into and out of Europe, regardless of their origin or destination. US airlines would have to buy permits to cover their emissions on their European routes. The Association of European Airlines (AEA) said that the proposal could provoke...
Nine of the 28 seats gained by Democrats in the midterm elections came from the success of "Blue Dogs", conservative Democrats who convinced voters in previously Republican districts to trust them with reform. The Los Angeles Times now counts 44 of the faction in the House Democratic Caucus, and reports that they have begun to bark for their conservative policies: They helped propel the Democrats to victory in last week's election, and now the "Blue Dogs" want their reward: a decidedly conservative fiscal policy that begins with a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. The coalition of moderate and conservative House Democrats on Wednesday introduced nine members who were newly elected to Congress, bringing its numerical strength to 44. That's more than enough, if all 44 join with the Republican minority in January, to block the initiatives of the more liberal House leadership headed by Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco)....
After the midterm elections, many of us hoped that the Republican Party would return to conservative First Principles in an attempt to recapture the energy that propelled them to majority status in 1994. Refocusing on the bedrock principles of limited government, fiscal discipline, strong national defense, and ethical governance would allow the GOP to reconnect to voters that grew to mistrust the Republicans after the last six years of big-government bloat and pork-barrel politicking. Unfortunately, the leadership elections show that Republicans have not listened to their constituents, both present and former. Both House and Senate caucuses have chosen to support an old guard that led them back into the wilderness last week. At least in one case, John Boehner, some Republicans can justify that decision by noting that Boehner was in the wrong place at the wrong time, since he only served as Majority Leader since January, when Tom DeLay...
Earlier today, I posted my thoughts about the potential candidacy of John McCain for the presidency and the conflict between his track record and his rhetoric on conservatism and the way forward after the midterms. In response, his staff sent me an advance copy of the speech McCain will deliver tonight to GOPAC, part of his opening efforts of the 2008 presidential campaign. The entire speech will be in the extended entry. It's a good speech, and I think McCain correctly diagnoses the problems facing the GOP, not from the midterms but the problems that caused the midterms. He succinctly makes the point in this passage: Americans had elected us to change government, and they rejected us because they believed government had changed us. ... Hypocrisy, my friends, is the most obvious of political sins. And the people will punish it. We were elected to reduce the size of government...
Continue reading "'Government Changed Us'" »
The new Senate Minority Leader spent a little time between votes chatting with a few bloggers, including myself, this afternoon. I took my lunch on the conference call, which Senator McConnell's staff arranged to address questions and concerns about the change in leadership in the Senate as well as their strategy for the next session of Congress. McConnell spoke mostly extemperaneously. He made a couple of points in a short statement at the beginning of the call, mostly reminding people of the challenges and benefits of being in the Senate minority. "49 is not irrelevant," he pointed out, noting that it only takes 41 to block undesirable legislation. As we have experienced in the majority, the filibuster threat allows the minority to have a lot of influence in shaping legislation. McConnell organized the last old-fashioned filibuster in 1994, "going to the mattresses" in an overnight session to block an egregious...
November 17, 2006
It sounds like a story right out of the movie Armageddon, but without the bad dialogue and the mind-numbingly bad love story between Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler. NASA wants to start building spaceships and training crews to attack killer asteroids from outer space: The US space agency is drawing up plans to land an astronaut on an asteroid hurtling through space at more than 30,000 mph. It wants to know whether humans could master techniques needed to deflect such a doomsday object when it is eventually identified. The proposals are at an early stage, and a spacecraft needed just to send an astronaut that far into space exists only on the drawing board, but they are deadly serious. A smallish asteroid called Apophis has already been identified as a possible threat to Earth in 2036. Chris McKay of the Nasa Johnson Space Centre in Houston told the website Space.com:...
The German magazine Stern, covered in Der Speigel, reports that former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder attempted a "palace coup" against Angela Merkel when her party won a narrow victory in the last German elections. The former German head of state, now working for Russia's Gazprom, tried to finagle a betrayal by Merkel's own party in order to allow him to return as Chancellor: Schröder is claimed to have approached the chairman of Bavaria's Christian Social Union, Edmund Stoiber, with a clandestine proposal to oust would-be chancellor Merkel, the head of the CSU's larger sister party, the Christian Democratic Union. The weekly news magazine Stern reported on Thursday that Schröder approached Stoiber at a televised debate between Germany's party leaders on the eve of the election, saying only that they "needed to talk." Shortly afterwards, Stoiber received a phone call from a middleman who apparently was not involved in politics. Citing anonymous...
The Senate easily ratified what had been a controversial pact with India that allows nuclear cooperation between the two democracies for the first time. Republicans stopped a series of amendments that would have watered down the agreement, considered a historical tie between two nations that have rarely seen eye to eye on anything: The Senate gave overwhelming approval late Thursday to President Bush’s deal for nuclear cooperation with India, a vote that expressed that a goal of nurturing India as an ally outweighed concerns over the risks of spreading nuclear know-how and bomb-making materials. By a vote of 85 to 12, senators agreed to a program that would allow the United States to send nuclear fuel and technology to India, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The agreement, negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India in March, calls for the United States to...
The American press hasn't covered this story until now, but British intelligence has detained a former Iranian diplomat on terrorism charges at the request of the US. Newsweek reports that Nosratollah Tajik allegedly attempted to procure night-vision goggles for Hezbollah: The arrest of a former Iranian diplomat in Britain is the latest reminder of complications that could arise if the Bush administration turns to Iran to help solve the escalating violence in Iraq. In a development that so far has received no press coverage in the United States, Nosratollah Tajik, who served as Iranian ambassador to Jordan and has been previously linked to terror attacks in Israel, was arrested by British authorities last month at the request of U.S. Justice Department, a spokesman for Scotland Yard said this week. Two U.S. law-enforcement officials, who asked not to be identified talking about nonpublic matters, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that a sealed indictment...
Nancy Pelosi managed to lose a major battle and a good portion of her prestige as Speaker before she even ascends to the position. Yesterday her caucus rebuffed her attempt to purge her longtime partner in caucus leadership, Steny Hoyer, based on personal animosities going back to the 2001 caucus leadership race -- which she won. Now the new Speaker may have to reconsider her other notorious exile threat, Jane Harman: House Democrats chose Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland as their new majority leader on Thursday, rejecting the choice of the incoming speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and straining the unity of the new majority party. In an indication that rank-and-file members would be willing to break from Ms. Pelosi, Democrats chose Mr. Hoyer over Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania by a decisive vote of 149 to 86. Mr. Hoyer overcame a concerted push by Ms. Pelosi on behalf of...
Over the last week, I have written several posts on the meaning of the midterm debacle for the Republicans, and how their approach to leadership selection underscores their inability to understand it. While Democrats attracted centrists and independents who stopped trusting the GOP to deliver on their promise of fiscal responsibility and clean government -- promises which won them control of Congress in 1994 -- the GOP has continued to promote the same leadership that led them to the midterm debacle. In some cases, that may make tactical sense, but the symbolism of these choices communicates an unwillingness to change from past strategies that led them to embrace big government, bloated budgets, and pork-barrel politics, all of which inevitably brings corruption and defeat. The ascension of Trent Lott as Minority Whip seems especially significant in this regard. Many tried to excuse this by saying that the GOP needs infighters, or...
I'll be traveling to Southern California for the week of Thanksgiving. I've been packing and preparing for the flight tomorrow, and posting has been ... non-existent tonight. It will be light tomorrow as well, although I'll probably do a little in the morning. We leave for the airport at midmorning, and we land in the early afternoon. I'll be bringing the laptop and will be blogging during the week, but at a little slower pace than normal. I'm hoping to relax and visit some old stomping grounds, as well as old friends and our families. I'll post some pictures along the way as well....
November 18, 2006
Members of the Quartet, the association of nations attempting to resolve the Palestinian problem, have objected to an apparently new plan by the Bush administration to arm Fatah so it can compete with Hamas. America's partners want to support a national unity government to lift the sanctions and do whatever they can to avoid a civil war in the territories. Unfortunately, no one has the right idea about how to proceed towards a two-state peace plan: AMERICAN proposals to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian security forces with additional guns and fighters have alarmed other Western nations, who argue that it is tantamount to supporting one faction in a potential civil war. Fearing the strength of Hamas in Gaza, some US officials have urged that the moderate President Abbas should be given “deterrent capability” so that his Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority forces can confront the Islamist group if talks on a national unity...
The Netherlands has introduced a bill that would ban the wearing of burqas in public places, including schools, courts, and transportation. The law aims at a pretty small target, the BBC reports, as only a handful of the one million Dutch Muslims wear the complete covering garment: The Dutch cabinet has backed a proposal by the country's immigration minister to ban Muslim women from wearing the burqa in public places. The burqa, a full body covering that also obscures the face, would be banned by law in the street, and in trains, schools, buses and the law courts. The cabinet said burqas disturb public order, citizens and safety. ... An estimated 6% of 16 million people living in the Netherlands are Muslims. But there are thought to be fewer than 100 women who choose to wear the burqa, a traditional Islamic form of dress. Actually, there's some debate about how...
BMW unveiled its new hydrogen-gasoline hybrid automobile, the Hydrogen 7, and the reviews thus far are less than stellar. If you want to drive an internal-combustion vehicle that only gets 17 miles to the gallon and have its fuel go bad in less than ten days, then the H-7 is the car for you: And so, in creating the Hydrogen 7, BMW is announcing a future of putatively clean, full-throttle driving. The new car caters to the pleasing fantasy of customers spoiled by high-horsepower engines: That they can conform to ecological standards without making any sacrifices, burning "clean" fuel to their heart's content. Advertizing images display the Hydrogen 7 against a backdrop of wind turbines and solar panels. But the image is one of deceit. Because the hydrogen dispensed at the new filling station is generated primarily from petroleum and natural gas, the new car puts about as much strain...
Reuters reports that the closing storm season in the Atlantic missed expectations of increasingly violent weather -- by a wide margin. Read the story carefully to find out what Reuters failed to include in its story: Before this year's Atlantic hurricane season started, Gray and his protege, Philip Klotzbach, predicted that it would be well above average. Instead, it has been slightly below average as the Nov. 30 end of the season draws near -- and a mere whimper compared with the destruction caused by monster hurricanes such as Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005. ... The Colorado State team was not alone in predicting that 2006 would be more active than an average year, in which the Atlantic can be expected to spawn 10 tropical storms, of which six will strengthen into hurricanes. No one foresaw what happened in 2005, when 28 storms swarmed out of the Atlantic, and...
Just without me, that's all. Our broadcasting day starts at 11 am CT and goes to 5 pm CT, with the three shows of the Northern Alliance. Mitch will soldier on without me from 1-3 pm, and rumor has it that he will have James Lileks on at some point -- so be sure to tune in on AM 1280 The Patriot. If you're not in the Twin Cities, listen to the show via the Internet stream at the station's web site. Join the conversation at 651-289-4488. Tell Mitch I say hello ......
November 19, 2006
Tony Blair has been warned by the Saudis to force British investigators to drop a probe into a multimillion-pound slush fund or face the loss of diplomatic relations. The Saudi royal family has also threatened to stop all interagency intelligence cooperation on al-Qaeda and other counterterrorism efforts (via King Banaian): SAUDI ARABIA is threatening to suspend diplomatic ties with Britain unless Downing Street intervenes to block an investigation into a £60m “slush fund” allegedly set up for some members of its royal family. A senior Saudi diplomat in London has delivered an ultimatum to Tony Blair that unless the inquiry into an allegedly corrupt defence deal is dropped, diplomatic links between Britain and Saudi Arabia will be severed, a defence source has disclosed. The Saudis, key allies in the Middle East, have also threatened to cut intelligence co-operation with Britain over Al-Qaeda. The contretemps started over a corruption probe at...
Jon Henke, one of my earliest friends in the blogosphere, spent the last three months trying to rescue a flailing George Allen campaign in Virginia, landing himself in the middle of one of the biggest mud-flinging campaigns of the election season. Having had that kind of experience, Jon had a unique vantage point from which to see the interaction between political parties, voters, and the blogosphere. He's written his post-mortem, in which he congratulates the liberal blogs for their impact: Perhaps the biggest success of the Leftosphere happened here in Virginia, as Jim Webb took a long-shot campaign and, with a significant boost from the netroots, capitalized on the general anti-Republican zeitgeist and the missteps of George Allen to pull out a win. Make no mistake, without the netroots, Webb would not have won. He may not even have been close. It was a long-cultivated activism/outreach/media-hounding New Media campaign that...
So we landed here yesterday afternoon, and the first fun thing I did was surprise the First Mate with a convertible for our rental car. I've never driven a convertible before, and I decided to rent one last week. We drove along the coast on our way up meet the family, and it was pretty darned sweet. We're about to head back down to the beach for some cruising and some shopping, and we'll take some pictures along the way. The Internet connection has been very dicey here, but we're going to improve that later today. More later ... UPDATE: Here's a picture of the FM and I at Huntington Beach, hanging out in the Chrylser Sebring convertible. It's a terrific ride and handles well, and we enjoyed driving back and forth from Fullerton to Surf City and then to Downtown Disney, where we all did some shopping. Now that's...
November 20, 2006
The Democrats spent the last six years sniping from the sidelines without publicizing much of their own agenda. They made the valid point that any agenda they would propose would not get to the floor of the House or Senate under Republican control, and they concluded that they had no responsibility to formulate one -- at least not publicly. For three straight electoral cycles, they ran as the anti-GOP, and they finally succeeded in the last election in wresting control of Congress. Ubfortunately, that forces the Democrats to actually pursue a political agenda -- and from what they've shown the voters, that should result in a very short time at the helm. First, Charles Rangel decided to revive the draft again, an idea he floated three years ago to the delight of Republicans: The incoming Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means panel says he will introduce a bill...
It seems that the Democrats have hit on a theme for their agenda, now that they have control of both chambers of Congress. Voters will recognize this theme, as Democrats have used it for decades as a lever for power -- market distortion. In yet another example of why Democrats represent a difference from Republicans, Chuck Schumer laid out a government-interference model for economics that will disincentivize industry and create inflationary pressures without any corresponding increase in productivity: Senator Schumer, who concentrated his party's firepower on Iraq during an election in which he masterminded a narrow victory in the Senate, laid out the Democratic Party's less talked about domestic agenda yesterday. "It's high time that Congress address issues that matter to the average family," Mr. Schumer, who was recently elected no. 3 in the Senate and will oversee the party's policy and strategy, said yesterday in New York. Although Mr....
In the aftermath of the midterm elections, the Republican caucuses in Congress rushed into leadership elections without taking any time to analyze the failures that led them to lose control in both chambers. Instead, they hurriedly reaffirmed their existing leadership, which sent the strange message that they believed themselves on the right track. Even worse, the one change they made sent a message that the GOP would go backwards in their efforts to rebuild trust with the American electorate. In my Washington Examiner column this morning, I reflect on the message that Trent Lott's elevation sends to voters in 2008: Rather than digest the message and the data from the election, the GOP ran pell-mell to re-elect the same leadership that lost the midterms. John Boehner and Roy Blunt are capable representatives, but they provided the leadership that continued to abuse earmarks for political gain, and ran the Republican House...
Citizens Against Government Waste has named John Thune its Porker of the Month. Thune earned this distinction by getting a $2.3 billion loan for Dakota, Minnesota, & Eastern Railroad, a former client of his during his lobbying days, and Congress has barely even debated the outlay: The loan guarantee from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) would allow the Dakota, Minnesota, and Eastern Railroad (DM&E) to expand and improve a rail line that is used primarily to transport coal from Wyoming to Minnesota. In apparent anticipation of the loan, Sen. Thune was instrumental in increasing the FRA’s loan guarantee authority from $3.5 billion to $35 billion in the 2005 Safe, Accountable, Flexible, and Efficient Transportation Equity Act. DM&E paid Thune $220,000 in 2003 and 2004 to lobby for the loan before his election to the Senate. According to BearingPoint (a strategic consulting firm), the loan would require an annual payment of...
November 21, 2006
Calling himself a "full scale Ronald Reagan conservative," Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas tossed his hat into the ring for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Brownback, who has a consistent record of conservative positions, hopes to emerge as the strongest conservative in the race against a field that appears to tilt significantly towards Rockefeller Republicanism: Sen. Sam Brownback, who is considering a White House bid in 2008, said Monday the Republican field has room for a "full-scale Ronald Reagan conservative" and pledged to make a final decision next month. The Kansas senator said he was not discouraged from running by the Democrats' strong gains in this month's midterm elections, including majority control of the House and Senate. "It does not make it less likely," he said in an interview. "I really believe that the basic conservative ideas and ideals were not repudiated. Our execution was." ... Brownback, who was elected...
Once again, a politician opposed to Syrian hegemony in Lebanon has been assassinated, and again the victim hails from a family with a long history of supporting Lebanese independence. Pierre Gemayel, whose brother Bashir was also assassinated in 1982, died in a suburban hospital after a shooting: Prominent anti-Syrian Christian politician Pierre Gemayel was assassinated in a suburb of Beirut on Tuesday, his Phalange Party Voice of Lebanon radio station reported. The shooting will certainly heighten the political tension in Lebanon, where the leading Muslim Shiite party Hezbollah has threatened to topple the government if it does not get a bigger say in Cabinet decision-making. Gemayel was rushed to a nearby hospital, according to the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. and the Voice of Lebanon, the Phalange Party mouthpiece reported. The party later announced that he was dead. Gemayel, the minister of industry and son of former President Amin Gemayel, was a...
The Democrats intend on making a show out of a series of reforms in the opening days of their new Congressional majorities. Rather than offer a comprehensive packages of reform initiatives, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will break them out into separate House rules -- which will allow them to dominate the reform agenda for days and weeks: Despite divisions among Democrats over how far to go in revising ethics rules, House leaders plan a major rollout of an ethics reform bill early next year to demonstrate concern about an issue that helped defeat the Republicans in the midterm elections. But they will do it with a twist: Instead of forwarding one big bill, Democrats will put together an ethics package on the House floor piece by piece, allowing incoming freshmen to take charge of high-profile issues and lengthening the time spent on the debate. The approach will ensure that...
An article in the Asia Times makes the rather unusual argument that the West has already won the clash of civilizations with Iran and the radical Islamists -- because they have begun selling their women. Spengler argues that nations signal their collapse when they turn their females into sexual commodities (via Instapundit): Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women. The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale,...
The 2008 presidential primaries had long been considered a coronation process for Hillary Clinton. Certainly, other names have surfaced as contenders for the throne, but most of them have been revealed as pretenders instead. John Kerry and Al Gore garner laughs and shudders, while Barack Obama just got to Washington two years ago. John Edwards has disappeared from view after his attempt to leverage half of his first term in any political office to become the Vice President -- except for that incident where his staffer went to the Evil Empire (Wal-Mart) to buy his kids a new game system. Part of the consideration of Hillary's inevitability came from the massive war chest she amassed for her re-election bid to New York's Senate seat in the midterms. Facing no real competition, analysts presumed she would retain most of it for the 2008 primaries, giving her a huge head start and...
Quite a while back (two years ago), I wrote that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v Texas would open a Pandora's box about all sorts of cultural norms currently supported by statute throughout the United States. At the time, Jonathan Turley had written about the impending sentencing of Tom Green for polygamy, and opposed it on the basis of personal choice. I wrote: I don't see anything particularly wrong with gay marriage, as long as a majority of voters approve it. I also think that the Texas sodomy laws were about as stupid as you could have found in any penal code. ... However, the Court used a sledgehammer when a flyswatter would have prevailed, and the consequences of their decision has led -- logically -- to the appeal of all anti-polygamy statutes. If in fact the Court applies the same thinking to polygamy as it did to the...
I've had a number of requests from CQ readers and fellow bloggers here in the Southern California area to find a time to get together. With the family obligations, it's going to make it difficult to find time, especially since the First Mate has three dialysis runs this week. However, that does allow us a window of opportunity, if people can make it out to Orange County on Friday. Since the FM will be dialyzing between 10-1:30, we could get together for a lunch at the El Torito restaurant in Fullerton, perhaps starting at 11:30 am. If you have any interest in this, leave a comment or drop an e-mail with the subject "CQ Lunch". Let's see what we can put together. UPDATE: Okay, we're definitely going to do this. I'll need RSVPs by Thursday so I know what to tell the restaurant. I'm looking forward to it! UPDATE II:...
November 22, 2006
Police in Atlanta shot and killed a 92-year-old woman in a raid yesterday, apparently looking for illegal drug activity. The details are murky, but police claim that the woman shot three plainclothes detectives approaching the house to serve a search warrant, probably after an informant fingered the location: Three Atlanta police officers were shot and wounded and an elderly woman killed at a house in northwest Atlanta Tuesday night. The woman, identified by relatives as 92-year old Kathryn Johnson, opened fire on the officers from the narcotics division at a house at 933 Neal Street, according to officials. Authorities say they received a tip of drug activity taking place at the home and officers were headed to the house with a search warrant. ... "They kicked her door down talking about drugs, there's no drugs in that house. And they realize now, they've got the wrong house," Dozier said. "I'm...
A new study by the University of Wisconsin reports that Midwestern voters got more exposure to political advertisements than election coverage in the broadcast media. Local and regional news services turned themselves into tip sheets rather than reporting on the policy issues at stake in the election: A study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's NewsLab found that in the month before the Nov. 7 elections, television stations in seven Midwest markets aired an average of 4 minutes and 24 seconds of political ads and 1 minute and 43 seconds of election news during a typical 30-minute broadcast. The study analyzed early and late evening newscasts on 28 stations in five states. The markets were Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, and Wisconsin's Madison and Milwaukee. Most regions featured competitive gubernatorial, Senate or House races that resulted in significant spending on political advertising. Ken Goldstein, a political scientist who directed...
According to ticket brokers, this weekend's matchup between USC and Notre Dame (hereafter known as the Dark Forces and the Holy Warriors, respectively) has broken records for demand. Only two other games have created this kind of demand in the last six years, and it may not be over yet: So, you're not a big-time USC athletics donor and you still need tickets to Saturday's USC-Notre Dame game at the Coliseum for less than the down payment on a luxury SUV? Steve Lopes has three words for you: "There aren't any." Lopes, the USC senior associate athletic director who oversees ticket operations, said the school has only a handful of tickets left — and they are reserved for athletics donors with last-minute needs. Fighting Irish fans don't have it any better. Notre Dame officials say this game is the most-requested road game in school history. Josh Berlo, director of ticket...
Tom Tancredo reminds people today why he will forever remain a fringe element in American politics. Tancredo told World News Daily that George Bush -- widely seen (unfairly) as a unilateralist -- is in reality an internationalist who wants to eliminate national borders altogether (via Hot Air): "People have to understand what we're talking about here. The president of the United States is an internationalist," said Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo. "He is going to do what he can to create a place where the idea of America is just that – it's an idea. It's not an actual place defined by borders. I mean this is where this guy is really going." Tancredo lashed out at the White House's lack of action in securing U.S. borders, and said efforts to merge the U.S. with both Mexico and Canada is not a fantasy. "I know this is dramatic – or maybe...
I'll be visiting Hugh Hewitt today at his studio, and I might appear on the air, depending on what Hugh has planned. In any case, be sure to tune in to Hugh's show today and every day between 3-6 pm PT. He's the national radio host most engaged with the blogosphere, and one of the nicest people you'll ever want to meet. UPDATE: Just got home from Hugh's studio in Orange County, and I hope you all had a chance to listen to the show. Hugh had both the FM and I on for the first two hours, along with Michael Totten and Walid Phares on the phone. He gets the best guests and best information; Michael had plenty of context for the events in Lebanon. I'll write more about it after dinner. UPDATE II: One of the qualities that Hugh's listeners comprehend almost immediately, but that his critics almost...
November 23, 2006
I've always been a mild fan of the James Bond films. I think this comes from the state of the series when I got old enough to see them in the cinema; Sean Connery had given way to Roger Moore by then, and the series had grown cartoonish and self-effacing. Only later did I watch Connery master the role, and then see Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan tackle it in a serious manner, and I discovered the fun of Bond. Nevertheless, the fatal flaw of all the films came from their formulaic focus on sexy women and technogadgets rather than a believable plot or characters made out of more than cardboard. In Casino Royale, however, the producers have hit the Reset button, almost literally. Daniel Craig makes his first appearance as Bond, replacing the excellent Pierce Brosnan, and the producers said they wanted to rethink the Bond approach with this...