June 2007 – Page 4 – Captain’s Quarters Archives

I’m So Glad The Media Hired Wonkette

When Ana Marie Cox went from Wonkette to Time, we hailed it as an important recognition of the power of the blogosphere. Bloggers had taken a significant step towards establishing themselves as credible journalists and pundits, and we looked forward to gaining respect from our senior colleagues in the media as a result. At least, that’s what bloggers hoped … until yesterday, when Cox decided to hit the dogs**t beat in order to conjure up a chickens**t hit piece on Mitt Romney:

The reporter intended the anecdote that opened part four of the Boston Globe’s profile of Mitt Romney to illustrate, as the story said, “emotion-free crisis management”: Father deals with minor — but gross — incident during a 1983 family vacation, and saves the day. But the details of the event are more than unseemly — they may, in fact, be illegal.
The incident: dog excrement found on the roof and windows of the Romney station wagon. How it got there: Romney strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario, which the family apparently completed, despite Seamus’s rather visceral protest.
Massachusetts’s animal cruelty laws specifically prohibit anyone from carrying an animal “in or upon a vehicle, or otherwise, in an unnecessarily cruel or inhuman manner or in a way and manner which might endanger the animal carried thereon.” An officer for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals responded to a description of the situation saying “it’s definitely something I’d want to check out.” The officer, Nadia Branca, declined to give a definitive opinion on whether Romney broke the law but did note that it’s against state law to have a dog in an open bed of a pick-up truck, and “if the dog was being carried in a way that endangers it, that would be illegal.” And while it appears that the statute of limitations has probably passed, Stacey Wolf, attorney and legislative director for the ASPCA, said “even if it turns out to not be against the law at the time, in the district, we’d hope that people would use common sense…Any manner of transporting a dog that places the animal in serious danger is something that we’d think is inappropriate…I can’t speak to the accuracy of the case, but it raises concerns about the judgment used in this particular situation.”

Wow — what a scoop! Twenty-three years ago, Romney made an error in judgment about his dog’s accommodations on a long trip. This is what passes for news at Time Magazine these days; a lengthy exposition on the statute of limitations for dog carrier violations, complete with opinions from SPCA and PETA.
I’ll grant that strapping the carrier to the roof of the vehicle was rather foolish and not particularly wise. When the dog got sick, Mitt should have pulled off the road, cleaned up, and figured out another plan for Seamus. At the least, he should have made sure that he wasn’t flinging dog feces on the cars behind him.
And while deconstructing the relative options in this 23-year-old incident might make for a mildly amusing blog post, can someone explain why this story has so much weight that Time Magazine (“in partnership with CNN”) considers it important enough to publish, even as an Internet article? Is this the result of those multiple levels of editorial control? Will Time Magazine start dropping into candidates’ back yards to inspect dog droppings, ensuring the safety and good treatment of family pets of both parties? There will be voters casting ballots in this election who weren’t even born when this incident occurred.
Besides, the woman who promoted Washingtonienne should be the last person to criticize someone leaving a trail of s**t.

Auditioning For Second Fiddle?

Bill Richardson has failed to gain much traction in the Democratic primary race, remaining mired in single digits. A majority of respondents have never heard of Richardson, the two-time Governor of New Mexico and the owner of perhaps the best resume in either primary campaign. Dana Milbank reports that Richardson has the look of a candidate who’s hoping for second best:

Running for the vice presidency is a delicate operation, but Bill Richardson seems to be getting the hang of it.
The New Mexico governor is running for president, of course, but should that fail he has already mastered the first responsibility of the running mate: Don’t overshadow the top of the ticket. This trait was in evidence yesterday when Richardson gave a lunchtime foreign policy speech in Washington at the exact moment Hillary Clinton was giving one of her own.
Leading a detailed, hour-long discussion about Iran in which words such as “fissionable” and “Abrahamic dialogue” were invoked, Richardson demonstrated why he is running a distant fifth for the Democratic presidential nomination, and why, in a CNN poll released this week, 54 percent of respondents had either never heard of him or had no opinion of him.
Clinton’s speech was in a gilded ballroom of the Willard hotel, where waiters served roasted chicken and orzo salad at tables decorated with blue hydrangeas coordinated with the candidate’s blue pantsuit. The Post’s Anne Kornblut counted more than a dozen television cameras vying for the best angle.
Richardson’s speech was at the National Guard Memorial Museum, where attendees balanced on their laps plastic boxes containing tuna sandwiches and bags of potato chips. Two television cameras had the place to themselves.

Milbank sounded an interesting note, considering his newspaper’s latest series of attacks on the current Vice President. After reporting a challenge from an audience member to Richardson to make his foreign-policy “sexy” on the stump, Milbank writes that for a VP candidate,”weighty is sexy”. Apparently Milbank must differ from the official Post line; their Dick Cheney series has done nothing but talk about how frightening it is to have a VP with so much influence — mainly on foreign policy.
Otherwise, Milbank essentially captures the moment perfectly. Richardson would present the Republicans with a nightmare if he won the nomination. He has 27 years of experience in both the legislative and executive branches, as well as in international diplomacy. He may be the most qualified presidential candidate, in that sense, in my lifetime — and instead, the Democrats are about to nominate someone whose highest qualification for the office is her previous residency in the White House.
Richardson would probably take the bottom of the ticket, too. After all, he has nowhere to go after he finishes his current term in office except back to Congress. He would have a high visibility, and could lend his talents to a Clinton presidency with a minimum of adjustment, having worked closely with Bill Clinton throughout the 1990s. It would lend a certain gravitas to Clinton’s candidacy that it lacks, and Richardson’s call for full-out retreat from Iraq will help her hold the anti-war activists who dislike her at the moment.
However, can anyone see Hillary allowing Richardson more than a short leash? She runs whatever she has, and the Presidency will certainly be no exception. Given the attacks on Cheney’s influence and her own somewhat lightweight experience, she’s not about to give anyone the impression that she’s being run by a cabal behind the scenes consisting of the two Bills.
If elected as VP, Richardson will likely be attending a lot of funerals and VFW events — returning to the traditional second-fiddle role of the American VP.

Who Sires The Dead Duck?

Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan, the saying goes. In the case of the immigration bill, it appears that an parents are dropping like flies, and the Democrats have begun a paternity claim naming George Bush as its father. If he can’t deliver 20 votes for cloture this morning, they say the bill’s failure will rest on his shoulders:

Just two days ago, 64 senators voted to revive the bill, with many saying they wanted to give the Senate a chance to improve the bill through amendments. But after a messy day in the chamber yesterday, with dozens of objections, arguments on the floor and five amendments defeated, at least a half-dozen senators said publicly or privately that their patience has run out.
“The way this has been handled, I’m not going to take a leap of faith,” said Sen. Richard M. Burr, North Carolina Republican, who voted to advance the bill on Tuesday but said the way Democratic leaders ran the floor yesterday left no room to “take a bad bill and make it better.” …
Democratic leaders have said they can deliver about 40 votes for the bill and called on President Bush and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to deliver at least 20 votes. Democrats said if the bill fails, Mr. Bush will get the blame.

That sounds like wishful thinking. Certainly the sense one gets from those Senators looking to divorce themselves from the bill now isn’t that they’re abandoning it because of a lack of White House pressure. The process has disgusted several of them, and the blame for that goes to Harry Reid, not George Bush.
Let’s recap, shall we? The bill came to the Senate originally through a self-appointed committee of Senators, bypassing the normal committee process where Senators can debate and amend proposals in a sane and rational manner. The “Masters of the Universe” wanted only four days of debate, but under pressure, Reid gave it eight — but refused to allow more than a handful of amendments. The bill lost on cloture by 15 votes, a clear rejection of the arrogance of Reid’s process.
So what did he do this time? He decided on an even more arrogant process, demanding that the Senate vote on a bill that had not even been provided to them. Reid used an unprecedented procedure, the “clay pigeon”, and then set up the rules so that no one could offer any further amendments. He turned the world’s greatest deliberative body into the In-N-Out Debate Society, a railroad job so complete that the only rational option to punish him for it is to shoot down cloture and embarass him publicly for it.
It looks like more Senators have come to the same conclusion. He needs 20 GOP Senators to join 40 Democrats to endorse his historically bad leadership, and I’m not sure he’ll get either number. If anyone fathered this dead duck, it’s the man who spawned the clay pigeon.

Cloture Cometh

It looks like the Senate will attempt to pass cloture on the comprehensive and incomprehensible immigration reform package tomorrow morning. Thanks to an unexpected failure to kill an amendment, the cloture vote will most likely come in the morning, perhaps as early as 10:30 am ET:

The Senate’s revived legislation to legalize millions of unlawful immigrants faces a critical test Thursday after surviving potentially fatal challenges.
Attempts from the right and left to alter key elements of the delicate bipartisan compromise failed Wednesday, including a Republican proposal to deny illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and Democratic bids to reunite legal immigrants with family members.
The Senate killed, by a 56-41 vote, an amendment by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., to provide more green cards for parents of U.S. citizens. By a 55-40 margin, it tabled a proposal by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., to give family members of citizens and legal permanent residents more credit toward green cards in a new merit-based points system.
A make-or-break procedural vote was set for Thursday, however, as the Senate plowed through amendments that supporters hoped would address waverers’ concerns.

Jeff Sessions has taken to calling Harry Reid and the backers of the compromise “Masters of the Universe” for their high-handed tactics in shoving this bill through the Senate in an unprecedented fashion. Members didn’t even get the bill until around 2 pm ET today; John Cornyn literally had it handed to him as he complained on the floor about its absence. Now they have to decide whether they want to close off debate on a 400-page bill that they’ve had for less than 24 hours to review.
Ironically, their efficiency in keeping amendments off of the bill may wind up killing its chances. A number of Senators voted for the initial cloture necessary to bring this bill off the table on Tuesday with the thought that they could amend the bill significantly enough to make it palatable. However, the moderates saw their amendments fall by the wayside — Kay Bailey Hutchison, Norm Coleman, Jim Webb, Kit Bond, and others. Only five votes for the previous cloture need to change to No for this cloture in order to tube the bill again, and as National Review has documented, it looks close now.
Bloomberg reports that the bill is in real peril:

The fate of U.S. immigration legislation was cast into doubt when at least six senators who helped revive the proposed overhaul said they either oppose or are leaning against a move to permit a vote on final passage. …
Republicans Richard Burr of North Carolina and Christopher Bond of Missouri and Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska said they oppose permitting a vote on final passage. Virginia Democrat Jim Webb and Republicans John Ensign of Nevada and Pete Domenici of New Mexico said they were leaning that way.

I’ll be covering the cloture motion live tomorrow morning, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Michelle Malkin will be all over it. In the meantime, you can sign Senator Inhofe’s Secure Borders Now petition at this site, if you want to send a message to the waverers. And if you want to see Senator Inhofe’s argument for yourself — well, here it is:

Stay tuned. My prediction? Cloture fails, 57-42.

CQ Radio Scoop: Fred Thompson Statement

In an exclusive scoop at BlogTalkRadio, Fred Thompson will make a statement at 3:30 pm CT today through an additional show for CQ Radio. Be sure to listen live, or catch the podcast that will follow.
If you want to embed the player on your own site for this show, go to the extended entry and copy the code there. Just replace the () characters with the open-close brackets normally used for HTML scripts!

UPDATE: Here’s the link to my show, where I played the statement twice — and if you want to stream it separately, you can do that here.

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CQ Radio: Matt Lewis, NZ Bear … Plus A Surprise Guest?

Today on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), we’ll throw the show open to our callers. What do you want to discuss? The forum will be wide open, and we’ll debate anything you like. Want to talk about clay pigeon sausage? Energy policy? The Fairness Doctrine?
UPDATE: We may get Matt Lewis of Townhall during the hour, talking about his provocative column today regarding the four lessons of the Bush administration.
Call 646-652-4889 to join the conversation!
The live player will start automatically if you click on the link to the extended entry. You can also listen from the player on the sidebar.

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Watching The Sausage Being Made From Clay Pigeons

I’m watching C-SPAN 2 at the moment, a fascinating exercise in official boredom. Today, however, the lunacy outweighs the ennui. As Michelle Malkin notes, the clay pigeon had to fly back to its coop this afternoon after a rushed reading by Senate staffers found a plethora of mistakes and at least one serious omission. That leaves the Senate debating a bill that no one has read, and that no one has put in its final form, which means that everyone on the floor has blathered about nothing at all. It’s almost as ironic as Seinfeld — and we’re paying for it.
Brian Darling appeared on CQ Radio yesterday to talk about the outrageous back-room maneuvering this bill has taken already. Today he e-mails Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner to revise and extend those remarks:

Someone once said not to watch how sausage or legislation are made. Today especially I prefer to be at the sausage factory.
As if the Senate floor situation could get any worse, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s staff is now rewriting the Clay Pigeon amendment behind closed doors. It is the intent of the Majority Leader to bring this new unread Amendment up without the Republicans seeing the language. Yesterday Senator Reid did not have his massive 373 page amendment ready when he started debate on it and mistakes were made in the initial drafting. This fact was not discovered until Republicans objected to waiving the reading of the bill, and the Senate Clerk had nothing to read. Shockingly, Reid scrambled around, put the floor in morning business for a few hours, and then allowed Kennedy’s staff make final changes to the amendment. The language was finally made available around 5:30 pm and Reid “graciously” gave Republicans the night to go through it before moving to it this morning.
This morning Republicans announced that Reid’s amendment did not include the Sessions EITC provision in the touchback section, despite the fact that all previously passed amendments were supposed to be incorporated in the bill and the Clay Pigeon amendment. This oversight is the only mistake so far found, yet there may be other mistakes and intentional omissions in the 373 page amendment. This morning Reid put the floor back in morning business and sent his staff off to rewrite the mega amendment once again. Today, “the most deliberative body in the world,” is left to debate legislation that they do not have a copy of…

Thus far, the finest deliberative body has voted on two amendments, one from Kay Bailey Hutchison and the other from James Webb. The former has been tabled, which in the US means it’s dead, and the latter appears well on its way there. Hutchison voted against cloture yesterday, but Webb voted to bring the bill to the floor.
Webb lost on his amendment, 79-18. Will that move him to a Nay on the next cloture vote?

API Conference Call On Energy IQ (Update: Take The Quiz!)

I joined a conference call conducted by the American Petroleum Institute (API) on an “energy IQ” survey they recently conducted, and their overall energy policy. The API represents the energy providers in the US; they effectively help shape the public debate over energy policy on behalf of their members.
In this call, the API argues that the policymakers and opinion leaders don’t have a firm grasp on the facts on energy, and more worrisome, neither do the consumers. They used Harris to survey consumers to find the gaps in knowledge that create misunderstandings and unreasonable expectations. This was an Internet study of 1,333 adults in the US, weighted for region, age, ethnicity, and economic strata.
Two conclusions emerged, according to the pollsters. First, most Americans “know very little about where energy comes from,” and even less of distribution issues. In fact, they seemed unwilling to hazard guesses, opting for “not sure” in larger proportion than expected. Last, when they got answers wrong, they got them wrong to the largest extent, indicating not just ignorance but flat-out misinformed.
Only one in 10 correctly identified Canada as our largest importer. Most overestimated the imports from the Middle East by a factor of 3-4 times reality. People also overestimate the profits of energy companies; 42% guessed that the oil companies 12-16% profit margin, instead of the correct 9.5% profit margin. They seriously underestimated the amount of reinvestment into their companies.
Most of the details aren’t all that significant. After all, oil is a fungible market, and it makes only a little difference where our supply originates. A shutdown of any source, even one we do not utilize, would create havoc in the global market and spike oil prices. The API acknowledges this, but want to show how misconceptions can affect energy policy — and I suspect that they’re most concerned about tax policy most of all.
The API made a comment about how energy independence would be an unrealistic expectation “for several decades to come”. One reason is the energy infrastructure in the US. How do you distribute the new forms of energy? Ethanol can’t use pipelines, for instance, and mass transportation eats into its efficiency. It will take decades to actually build the coal-liquefication facilities, and so on. The API supports nuclear energy, and it can tie right into the existing grid, but construction and storage still puts this years out.
UPDATE: Here’s the survey by Harris. Take the quiz yourself and post your answers in the comments — or check your energy IQ against the answer sheet at Energy Tomorrow. The questions are in the extended entry!

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Mike Pence, Fairness Doctrine Live Blog

Rep. Mike Pence met with a number of bloggers this morning about the effort just starting to develop to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. He’s offering legislation to oppose that in the House by stripping the FCC of any ability to dictate content. His bill will be filed at the end of this week, and he will team with Jeff Flake and Hensarling to offer an amendment to the FCC’s appropriation that forbids any use of funds to enforce the Fairness Doctrine, if revived.
Pence says it represents an “existential threat” to the conservative movement, and believes that the aim isn’t for “fairness” but for the silencing of conservatives. The problem is that the threat is that government retains this ability, either by legislation or executive order. We have to very aggressively explain that the high legal and administrative costs of the FD would simply choose not to carry any political talk radio at all.
Pence points out that the FCC actually has the authority on its own to reinstate the FD, without any action from Congress or the Presidency. They have chosen not to do so, but if the FCC wants to, they could reinstate it tomorrow. The judiciary may have a say in this eventually, but Pence’s bill would strip the FCC of that ability altogether. That doesn’t mean that Congress can’t pass future legislation to do it, but it would have to do so openly.
The American public likes fairness, but we defend freedom. We don’t want government determining what political speech can be conducted where and when, and we don’t need them interfering in a free market. We need to defend freedom rather than making government the arbiter of the content of political speech.

The Veep Digs Deeper

Dick Cheney seems determined to do more damage to himself than the latest Washington Post profiles could ever do. While that series has revealed Cheney’s influence, it hasn’t even come close to demonstrating any wrongdoing on his part. Unfortunately, his latest response on the OVP’s refusal to comply with an executive order on the handling of classified material will provide more material for Cheney’s critics — and for no obvious benefit.
At Heading Right, I review this latest argument for non-compliance and wonder why Cheney’s bothering. Even while Ruth Marcus rightly calls this the $400 haircut of administration controversies, the benefits of refusing audits have never been explained by Cheney’s office, which relies on a series of legal arguments rather than explain why they don’t want to have the National Archives audit their performance in handling classified materials. Can it be yet another example of what happens when people forget the First Rule of Holes?