Month: April 2005

Grounded Air Marshal Sues To Get Common Sense Into Security

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that a federal air marshal has been reinstated to flight status after a suspension for criticizing the nonsensical dress code that practically identifies them to terrorists. The day after Frank Tereri filed a lawsuit alleging that his right to free speech had been infringed, the FAMS suddenly completed its seven-month investigation into allegedly hostile acts by Tereri and decided that they had no basis in fact:

An air marshal who was grounded after criticizing the Federal Air Marshal Service over security issues was told last week to come back to work, a day after he and the ACLU filed a lawsuit that threatened to call wider attention to his complaints.
Frank Terreri contends a dress code requiring many agents to wear coats and ties makes them easy to spot in the mass of casually dressed passengers and undermines the marshals’ ability to protect passengers.
Officials said they grounded Terreri, president of an air marshal group, in October after he sent an e-mail to other marshals criticizing a colleague for providing People magazine with details of her operational routine. The e-mail had created a “hostile workplace” for the other marshal, officials said. They stripped Terreri of his badge and gun and confined him to desk duty for almost seven months. …
On Friday, the day after Terreri filed suit accusing the government of violating his 1st Amendment rights and endangering the public by stifling whistle-blowers, officials notified the Riverside man that he had been reinstated and should report for duty the following Monday.

What a fortunate coincidence! What do you suppose the odds are on that?
FAMS does not want these complaints to air in a public courtroom. Despite the best efforts of Michelle Malkin and others, this issue still has not hit the radar screen of most Americans. The air marshals must provide coverage to a certain percentage of flights every day, but an increasing shortage of agents makes that impossible. The Times article notes that the number has dropped further, to 1400, which means that only 700 agent teams exist for the thousands of flights in the US daily. At one time two years ago, FAMS employed over 4,000 flight agents.
What’s causing the agents to leave? Tereri’s treatment for criticizing FAMS certainly provides an answer to that question. So does a system which bases its entire strategy on secrecy, and then insists that agents take actions which readily identify themselves to anyone who cares enough to watch. Air marshals must dress in sport coats and dress shoes, although FAMS claims ties are optional. They must use separate exits to avoid passenger security points — in full view of the other passengers. At hotels, FAMS requires agents to demand discounts for which they must identify themselves as air marshals.
If your covert status on a job was the only real edge you had in staying alive on every flight you took, would you work for people clueless enough to force you to follow those rules? It’s difficult to blame Tereri for speaking out against FAMS management. It’s even more difficult to understand why Congress has not intervened to staunch the exodus of air marshals that threatens to take air security back to pre-9/11 status.

Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory, Part 12a

Senator Bill Frist appeared on the edge of victory this morning in forcing through the Bush nominees for federal appellate courts after a renewed push by GOP conservatives to get tough with the recalcitrant Democrats who have filibustered them. However, a late report from USA Today hints that Frist may have buckled under the pressure, considering an unprecedented arrangement that would allow two Democratic Senators to demand bench appointments for their cronies as a ransom for the up-or-down votes that Bush’s nominees should already have received:

In private talks with Majority Leader Bill Frist, the Senate’s top Democrat has indicated a willingness to allow confirmation of at least two of President Bush’s seven controversial appeals court nominees, but only as part of a broader compromise requiring Republicans to abandon threats to ban judicial filibusters, officials said Monday.
At the same time he offers to clear two nominees to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals for approval, officials said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., wants a third appointee to be replaced by an alternative who is preferred by Michigan’s two Democratic senators. …
Officials said as part of an overall deal, Reid has indicated he is willing to allow the confirmation of Richard Griffin and David McKeague, both of whom Bush has twice nominated for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. At the same time, the Democratic leader wants the nomination of Henry Saad scuttled. Democrats succeeded in blocking all three men from coming to a vote in 2004 in a struggle that turned on issues of senatorial prerogatives as well as ideology.

This wavering demonstrates beyond a doubt that Frist cannot lead the Republicans as a majority party. Remember that this issue led the entire Senatorial campaign last year, and in 2002 before that, as their highest domestic priority. Conservatives and libertarians have broadly agreed that out-of-control judicial activism presents a danger to freedom and representative democracy, although they see the threat somewhat differently. The election of an increased Republican majority in the Senate directly resulted from that alliance — a mandate to confirm justices with a stronger commitment towards constructionism.
Instead of restoring majority control to judicial nominations as mandated by the voters in two successive elections, however, it looks like Frist may surrender and validate supermajority thresholds for seating federal judges. Not only that, but Frist may go even further in his capitulation. Now the Democrats insist that Senators have the power to nominate judicial appointees in direct contravention of the Constitution. Frist may agree to let two Democrats from Michigan pick judges from their own provincial preferences, eliminating a presidential prerogative and fundamentally changing the balance of power even more significantly than the obstructionist filibusters ever did.
Hopefully, this idea dies the quick death it deserves. If the GOP leadership sells out its majority and undermine the Constitutional privileges of the executive, then we do not deserve to run the Senate. The NRSC will never see another dime from me, nor will any Republican who supports this kind of capitulation.

Where’s Alan Funt?

No one expected that John Bolton would get an easy hearing for his confirmation for UN ambassador, especially given the get-tough attitude that George Bush wants to take with Kofi Annan and the entire corrupt executive at Turtle Bay. However, those challenging Bolton’s confirmation have turned this into a parody of the attitudes that presumably permeate the American Left — a cacaphony of complaints about how destructive yelling and scolding can be to one’s self-esteem, played out on a stage where only the biggest egos get the microphones:

In a new allegation against President Bush’s nominee for United Nations ambassador, a woman who worked under John Bolton in the early 1980s has complained that he tried to fire her after they clashed over US policy on infant formula in developing nations.
Lynne D. Finney, now a therapist in Utah, wrote to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Friday, saying Bolton mistreated her when they worked in the General Counsel’s Office at the US Agency for International Development. Her accusation is the latest salvo in a pitched battle over Bolton’s nomination. …
Yesterday, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a Democrat on the committee, distributed Finney’s letter to reporters. An aide to Boxer said Democrats will push to include Finney’s allegations in the list of claims to be probed.

According to this letter, Finney refused to back up national policy on the use of baby formula in developing countries, and Bolton lost his temper. He yelled at her, and told her he’d get her fired, although apparently she stayed on the job. Did this happen last week? Last month? Last year?
No — it happened twenty-two years ago.
You know, it was just seventeen months ago that Ted Kennedy roared into a microphone that Janice Rogers Brown was a “Neanderthal” unworthy of consideration for the federal appellate bench. How about addressing that before getting to what people said ten and twenty years ago?
Quite frankly, I don’t care if Bolton got snappy with subordinates twenty-two years ago — and considering the absolute morass of corruption at the UN, impatience almost sounds like a prerequisite rather than a hindrance. Democrats still have not read the memo that starts This nation is at war, preferring to live in the fantasy world of political correctness that they have constructed where smiles and handshakes get everyone what they want. The only possible way this could get sillier is if the Republicans start to buy into this.
Over a thirty-year career, everyone who ever accomplished anything will leave behind peers, subordinates, and even bosses with hurt feelings and axes ready to grind. The fact that the Democrats have dug twenty-three years into history in order to find one should create laughter about their own lack of perspective and incompetence, not doubts about Bolton’s qualifications. This may be the silliest confirmation process yet staged by Boxer and her gang of idiots.

The Coming Dean Debacle

The selection of Howard Dean as DNC party chairman has clearly become a liability for Democrats looking to recapture the center, as Donald Lambro writes in today’s Washington Times. Democratic pollsters have discovered a significant ‘parents gap’ in last year’s presidential election, as Bush topped Kerry by almost 20 points among moms and dads. Not only did these mainstream voters find more alignment with Bush, but the active sellout of the Democrats to the Hollywood entertainment elite producing ever more violent and inappropriate fare for children have turned large numbers of them away:

An analysis by a Democratic think tank argues that Democrats are suffering from a severe “parent gap” among married people with children, who say the entertainment industry is lowering the moral standards of the country.
The study, published last week by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the policy arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, admonishes Democrats to pay more attention to parental concerns about “morally corrosive forces in the culture,” and warns that the party will not fare better with this pivotal voting bloc until they do.
In the 2004 election, married parents supported President Bush over Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts by nearly 20 percentage points. Mr. Bush frequently talked about the importance of faith and morals in his campaign and the role that parents played in raising their children. Mr. Kerry and his party, much of whose campaign funding and political support came from liberals in the entertainment industry, rarely touched the issue.
“Democrats will not do better with married parents until they recognize one simple truth: Parents have a beef with popular culture. As they see it, the culture is getting ever more violent, materialistic, and misogynistic, and they are losing their ability to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages,” said the study’s author, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University and a senior fellow at PPI.

Remember the moment in New York when John Kerry declared that the potty-mouthed antics of Whoopi Goldberg and her friends constituted the “heart and soul” of America? At the time, it hardly made a blip in Kerry’s polling, and probably by that time most parents had already decided to support Bush instead for the reasons given. However, that moment cemented Kerry and the Democrats as fatally out of touch with mainstream Americans. Neither Democrats nor Hollywood has yet to get the message.
Howard Dean’s installation as DNC chair proves that much. Dean represents the radical left of the party, wrapped up in a tie and rolled-up shirtsleeves but extremists nonetheless. Democrats wanted to harness the energy and power of the International ANSWER/MOveOn contingent by embracing them through Dean rather than pushing them towards the Greens. However, as the Democrat polling shows, all Dean does is attract more obstacles for reaching out to centrists:

In an attempt to reach out to evangelical Christians in the Republican red states, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has been talking much more about values and “the culture,” and sprinkling his attacks on Republicans with phrases from the Bible.
“We need to kick the money changers out of the temple and restore moral values to America,” he said last week in Florida.
But an online survey of 11,568 Dean supporters released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center found that such religious or culturally conservative appeals may not play well with liberal Democrats.
Among the Pew findings, 38 percent of Dean supporters polled said they had no religious affiliation, compared with 11 percent of all Americans; 91 percent supported same-sex “marriage,” compared with 38 percent of all Democrats; and 80 percent said they were liberals, compared with 27 percent of all Democrats.

For a man who notoriously gave up his religious affiliation over a bike path, spouting Bible verses will not likely convince any of the faithful that the Democrats have suddenly opened their arms to religious voters. Opposition of key Senate Democrats to judicial nominees with “deeply held personal beliefs” speaks much louder to churchgoing Americans than a couple of Biblical non-sequiturs from Dean. Dean’s pandering on religion won’t win him any support, but according to the results above, it could severely cut into his personal approval base if he does it often and publicly enough.
The Democrats have wound up with the worst of both worlds with Howard Dean. He’s too radical to appeal to the voters in the center with any credibility at all, and if he gives more than a token effort to do so, he’ll lose the people who put him in power at all. We tried to warn them … but they just wouldn’t listen to us.

See What A Vote Can Do?

On a day when Senator Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP has the votes to force a rule change on filibustering judicial nominations, the Democrats have suddenly discovered the notion of compromise. Joe Biden announced today, shortly after McConnell’s announcement, that the Democrats will float a proposal to allow all but two of the seven nominees receive an up-or-down vote in the Senate:

U.S. Senate Republicans have the votes to ban any more Democratic procedural roadblocks against President Bush’s judicial nominees, a top Republican said on Sunday.
A spokesman for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada promptly questioned the claim, while another Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, floated a possible compromise to avert a fight that could bring the Senate to a near halt. …
Biden, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” said, “I think we should compromise and say to them that we’re willing to — of the seven judges — we’ll let a number of them go through, the two most extreme not go through and put off this vote” to end the filibuster.

Isn’t it amazing what a backbone can accomplish? Now that the Senate GOP caucus finally started acting as a majority party, the Democrats now understand that Harry Reid backed them into a corner. If they filibuster Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown, the Republicans will force the rule change down their throat. Despite the bluster coming from Reid, if the GOP has the votes, they eventually will use them. That leaves the Democrats with two highly unpalatable choices, thanks to Reid’s threats: they either shut down the Senate during wartime and stop legislation that mainly benefit their constituencies, or look like idiots and do nothing at all.
Biden may not be the brightest member of the Democratic caucus, but he’s wiser than Reid. He understands that if the Republicans have two choices — no opportunity for their nominees to get votes for two years or a few weeks of bad press — even Bill Frist will eventually pick Door Number Two. The only way out will be a compromise, which allows the Democrats to look magnanimous and still hold the filibuster as a trump card.
Needless to say, Frist would be an idiot to bite at this. For one thing, agreeing to such an arrangement amounts to a validation of both the unprecedented use of the filibuster and the notion that the judicial nominees are “extremists”. It also solves nothing — it just postpones the fight until a Supreme Court seat opens up. The compromise amounts to nothing except a tactical retreat for Democrats to avoid a huge loss. If Frist accepts such an offer, it will signal that he has no intention of providing leadership to the Republican contingent.
Stay tuned.

Project Success

Thank you for all checking back while I worked on my project for my day job this weekend. I had actually planned on blogging a bit in the early mornings and late evenings, but starting on Thursday night until today, my days have lasted more than fifteen hours of constant trouble-shooting and preparation for the project. Unfortunately, that left me little time for reading news sources and none at all for writing. I haven’t even had an opportunity to catch up on all of the excellent comments entered on the site.
Without getting terribly specific about my work, which I like to keep as separate as possible from my blogging, I run a 24×7 call center in the Twin Cities area. Thanks to the terrific executive team for which I work, our business has grown tremedously over the years, and we finally outgrew our offices. Last year we decided to relocate, but we could not find appropriate space until four months ago — and we had to move my the end of this month.
Call centers involve a tremendous amount of technology, including computers, telecommunications, and especially when the business can tolerate no down time at all, these technologies present … interesting challenges. I think I can give you an idea of how my weekend went when I say that this is one of the most interesting few days I’ve had on the job. However, after several days of nerve-fraying obstacles and nail-biting tension, the main part of the project went off quite successfully.
Unfortunately, this has left me utterly exhausted — and we still have a lot of physical work to do to complete the move. I plan on spending tonight catching up on reading and getting the first good night of sleep I’ve had in a week, and then get back to my regular blogging schedule tomorrow morning.
Earlier today, Bill Ardolino asked me to appear on his Citizen Journalist radio show on Thursday afternoon. I’m looking forward to chatting about Canada, blogging, and the tension between the GOP libertarians and conservatives. I hope you can all join us!

Long Weekends

Just a quick note to CQ readers: I am working all weekend on a major project at work, the culmination of four months of planning. I’m actually staying at a nearby hotel rather than traveling home, so blogging may be limited. In the meantime, don’t forget that the Northern Alliance Radio Network will air as usual on Saturday between noon and 3 pm CDT, this time unfortunately without me. Please forgive me if I can’t get to your e-mails right away, but I promise to read them all eventually.
Thank you, and have a great weekend!

Belarus President Runs To Putin

After Condoleezza Rice announced that she would meet with dissidents from Belarus to encourage an end to Europe’s last dictatorship, the longtime ruler of the former Soviet republic did his best to prove Rice correct by running to the Kremlin for support:

The presidents of Russia and Belarus are meeting in Moscow a day after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for political change in Minsk.
Ms Rice’s comments and her decision to meet Belarussian dissidents during a Nato summit in Lithuania prompted strong criticism.
Belarus and Russia accused her of meddling in the country’s affairs.
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, arriving in Moscow, quipped that Ms Rice’s comments left him “indifferent”.
“But it is heartening that she is aware this country, Belarus, does exist and that she knows its location,” he added.

Lukashenko makes a joke, no? But notice where he makes his joke: Moscow. I’d say that Lukashenko took a look around Belarus and suddenly saw Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine, with the latter about to join a defensive military alliance with the other two that would surround him on three sides, and all three now democratized. A steady diet of Rice for his opposition might fortify it to follow in the same direction.
Perhaps he went to Moscow for Putin’s help, or perhaps he went to check on Askar Akayev for advice. Either way, he’s clearly heard the message from Rice and the US.

Dodgers Roar To Life

After an off-season marked by odd moves, stranger negotiations, and the dismantling of what appeared to be a pretty good 2004 team, Dodger fans could be forgiven for anticipating a meltdown in the first few games as the new squad found its way around the clubhouse and the field together. After having won its first playoff game since 1988, we figured we might well have to wait another couple of years for the next one after that.
However, Paul DiPodesta has delivered a real team to Dodger Stadium — one that has gone on a historic rip for the first two weeks of the season, much to the delight of Dodger Blue fans:

And so they have rolled, through nutty deficits and nerve-rattling errors, with five different first basemen and a couple of different Jose Valentins and only one solid, steady, smiling Milton Bradley.
And so they have rolled, nameless shirts and faceless players, through the increasingly outstretched arms of stunned fans along the prettiest first mile in Los Angeles Dodger history.
“I know, people are saying, it’s early, it doesn’t matter,” said Phillips. “But you get this kind of start, this kind of lead on people, you bet it matters.”
Especially in this town, under this ownership, in this season, the Dodger players providing the stability that the front office could not, overcoming a winter of communication problems, filling the headlines with the only baseball language that matters.
Wins, 12 in their first 15 games.
Drama, with five wins in their final at-bat in only the first two weeks.
Hope, with their best starting pitcher scheduled to show up for the first time on Sunday.

I love living in Minnesota, but I can’t pretend I don’t miss the excitement of the baseball season in Los Angeles, and this year will prove most difficult if the Dodgers keep winning like this. So far, they’ve managed all this without their starting ace and their celebrated closer (Eric Gagne). Imagine what they will be like when both return to full health, and if the team can maintain this chemistry. They already lead the West by three games after two weeks and at 12-3 have an opportunity to build up a lot of momentum before summer.
I know it’s early … but Dodger fans are used to consoling themselves with that thought, not attempt to stop hyperventilating.

Commitee Approves Owens, Brown; Filibuster Fight (Almost) Ready

The GOP finally addressed the issue of judicial nominations yesterday by getting two of President Bush’s nominees out of commitee and onto the Senate schedule for full confirmation. Democrats, who filibustered both Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown in the last session of Congress, plan on doing so again — and will force the Republicans to change the filibuster rule after more than three months of dawdling:

Moving the Senate closer to a historic confrontation, the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee yesterday endorsed two of President Bush’s most controversial nominees to federal appellate court, and Democrats vowed once again to use the filibuster to block their confirmation.
The committee, voting 10 to 8 along party lines, endorsed Janice Rogers Brown of California for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and Priscilla Richman Owen of Texas for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Both were nominated, endorsed by the Judiciary Committee and ultimately blocked by the Democrats in Bush’s first term, along with eight other appeals court nominees.

The big question, of course, is whether Frist can still round up 50 votes for his rule change. That’s what he needs to get future nominations to get through the Senate, especially the inevitable Supreme Court nominations that everyone expects to start once the nomination process is secured. At least Rehnquist will assuredly retire at the end of this SCOTUS session, as ill as he’s been, and other justices have hinted that they’d like to leave if their replacements can be made without a complete political meltdown.
Three months ago, Frist had these votes locked up, fresh off a resounding win in November 2004 and the eight-seat swing to the GOP it produced in the Senate. The Senate Democrats had started the session badly, enhancing their reputation as radical loonies as they embarassed themselves by challenging Ohio’s electors for no good reason except to bitch about losing the election and to complain about supposed voting irregularities in cities and precincts controlled by Democrats. After the ever-courageous Mark Dayton made a rare public appearance in DC to blow all precedents of courtesy and call Condoleezza Rice a liar during a Senate debate on her nomination, the American electorate understood that Democrats planned on simple-minded obstructionism for its own sake and for a few cheap headlines.
A funny thing happened on the way to restoring the Constitutional process, however; the GOP sat on the ball, a tactic well known by Minnesota Vikings fans, and one that practically guarantees a loss. This allowed the media to get back into the game, pushing the GOP around the field by constantly referring to their efforts as “radical”, “extremist”, and their nominees as “out of the mainstream” — even though Brown, for one, overwhelmingly won re-election to her Supreme Court post in California, hardly a bastion of conservative electors. Now the more moderate Republicans in the caucus have lost their intestinal fortitude for standing up for due process and the reputations of their nominees, or at least they had up to now.
Unfortunately, this vote will not take place now. The GOP had to schedule more pressing business before the recess in the first week of May. The emergency? The new highway bill. You all recall when we fought to expand the GOP majority in the Senate to get that highway bill passed, right? That legislation inspired all of us to donate money that could have gone to family vacations and to assist others in our community to the NRSC instead in 2002 and 2004 … right?
That’s what Frist and the GOP leadership expects you to believe now, apparently.