Hair Of The Dog

Hillary Clinton’s proposal to give a $5,000 bond to every newborn has received a lot of attention, and most of it critical. Today, the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board gives it a once-over, noting the silly arguments that Democrats have used to excuse Hillary’s pandering. The Tribune advises Democrats to let Hillary’s baby boon die a natural death.
At Heading Right, I take a look at the proposal that one can spend their way out of a deficit — a notion not completely restricted to Democrats, either. This case is so blatantly transparent that other Democrats might be doing Hillary a favor if they just shut up and pretend she never said anything.

The Pyongyang Summit

The leaders of the two Korean states shook hands to the cheers of thousands in Pyongyang today. The historic summit, only the second in a half-century of hostility, hopes to bridge the gulf between Koreans separated by a DMZ, and to staunch the bleeding from the catastrophic economic collapse in the North. Whether it leads to any real progress may have more to do with disarmament talks taking place elsewhere:

As hundreds of thousands of North Koreans cheered and waved pink paper flowers, leaders of the two Koreas shook hands at the start of a summit that is expected to inject large amounts of money from the booming capitalist South into the struggling Stalinist North.
The reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jung Il, dressed in the gray military-style jumpsuit he wears to meet the world’s television cameras, looked dour as he walked with the smiling South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun.
They met on a red carpet in front of a performing arts hall in the North Korean capital Pyongyang, where substantive talks in the three-day summit are expected to start on Wednesday.
The atmospherics of this summit, only the second such meeting in the more than half a century since the North and South fought an all-out war, seemed rather cooler than in the first summit in 2000.

Kim Jong-Il seemed happier at the previous summit, Blaine Harden reports, but there may be a reason for that beyond diplomatic tensions. The South Koreans paid Kim $186 million for that 2000 summit meeting, which caused a political scandal when it came to light in Seoul. This time, the government had to pledge that it would not pay for the summit, which undoubtedly explains Dear Leader’s sour expression, at least in part.
Seoul expects to make some economic deals on this trip that will benefit both countries. They want to create a free-trade zone with Pyongyang, a move that would only benefit the DPRK financially. However, Kim has to worry about the liberating effects of free trade, which relies on at least some capitalist structure. The South will want to compete on an equal basis, which will mean less slave labor. The increased contacts between the two nations will also create a much larger sense of injustice among Kim’s restive population — and it could lead to a huge exodus if the DMZ gets dismantled.
Kim wants a reunification, but on his terms. Roh, weak at home and his party almost certain to lose big in the next elections, wants normalized relations. Both men seek Holy Grails that are not only completely unrealistic but mutually incompatible. The best either can hope to do is exchange some money and have an impact on public opinion in their opponents’ back yards. The real action is taking place in the six-party disarmament talks, where Kim hopes to get the US off of his back for good. Until the nuclear issue gets resolved, this amounts to a side show, and both leaders know it.

Sauce For The Goose

Anita Hill takes to the pages of the New York Times to answer Justice Clarence Thomas’ memoirs — and becomes an inadvertent ironist. After waiting sixteen years to tell his side of the story, Hill accuses Thomas of throwing unsubstantiated allegations at her. Anyone who watched the Thomas confirmation process should fall into gales of laughter at this cri de coeur:

In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.
Justice Thomas’s characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had “given it” to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.

Well, let’s see. I recall that it was Hill who went to the Judiciary Committee with a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears in 1991. The committee had noted the lack of substantiation and had dismissed her effort until someone leaked it to the press. Her colleagues testified that they had never witnessed any of the events or any other harrassing behavior from Thomas when they came before the committee. In fact, at the time, the other women who worked for Thomas testified to his professional mien in the office.
Hill then goes on to say this:

It’s worth noting, too, that Mr. Thomas hired me not once, but twice while he was in the Reagan administration — first at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After two years of working directly for him, I left Washington and returned home to Oklahoma to begin my teaching career.

It’s worth noting that Hill followed Thomas to the EEOC despite having purportedly been harrassed by Thomas at Education. Why did she do that, if Thomas made her workplace miserable? She could have stayed at the DoE when Thomas left and been rid of his supposedly creepy behavior. As she takes great pains to point out, she had plenty of other career opportunities without Thomas’ assistance.
And why didn’t Hill — who takes great pains to review her CV in this essay — ever file a complaint against Thomas at the time of the harrassment? She waited almost ten years to say anything, despite being a Yale grad who could and did make her own way in the world. She worked at the EEOC, after all, and would have had knowledge of how to address the kind of debilitating harrassment that Thomas supposedly directed at her. Yet she said nothing at all about Thomas’ behavior until it became convenient for those Democrats looking to derail Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Coming forward after ten years does not build credibility. Hill, as a lawyer, should understand that evidentiary evaluation. Old, unsubstantiated allegations only have credibility among those who use them for political purposes. Contrast Hill’s reception to that of Paula Jones and her allegations of indecent exposure and sexual harrassment against Bill Clinton. Unlike Hill, Jones made her complaint contemporaneously, and pursued legal action through the channels that Hill espouses in this column after the incident got publicized. All of the same people who lined up behind Hill against Thomas didn’t just ignore Jones, but called her every name in the book, including “trailer trash”. Hill, who thinks that she helped lead an evolution in how harrassment gets treated, somehow neglects to mention Jones as part of that evolution.
Now she wants to cry that Thomas has attacked her in his memoirs, and without what she sees as substantiation. Sixteen years still hasn’t taught Hill much, apparently including the “sauce for the goose” proverb.

Maybe This Time He Means It?

Pervez Musharraf, facing a parliamentary revolt after winning his legal petitions to run for the presidency on Saturday, named his replacement as army chief of staff today. Musharraf has made promises to step down in the past, but never has gone quite so far as to name his successor:

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has named his successor to take over as army chief, the military says.
The appointee is former head of intelligence Lt Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kiani, military spokesman Maj Gen Waheed Arshad told the BBC.
Gen Musharraf will resign as head of the army if he wins presidential elections on Saturday, his lawyers say.

The choice of Kiani will reassure Musharraf’s Western allies. Kiani has a reputation as a hard-core Musharraf loyalist, which will hopefully keep military policy stable in the transition to civilian government. Kiana has run the army’s intelligence service, which gives him even more credibility for the war on terror. He is known as a pro-Western influence on the army, and personally ran the operation that captured Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the al-Qaeda leader who had tried to have Musharraf assassinated at least twice.
Even if the Western allies feel more comfortable with Kiani, the Pakistani opposition still rejects Musharraf’s run for the presidency. Eighty MPs walked out in a protest this week after the courts cleared Musharraf to contest the election. Since the Parliament and regional governments elect the president, it makes it even easier for Musharraf to win office. Whether Pakistanis see him as a legitimate elected president remains to be seen.
It makes this power transfer more certain, however, and Musharraf would have five years in which to make the case for his status as a democrat. He could help himself by allowing Benazir Bhutto to return to Pakistan and create a coalition of moderates against the Islamists in the northwest. He will need that kind of alliance to keep the radicals at bay, and even Kiani apparently agrees — he reportedly participated in the talks between Musharraf and Bhutto that aimed at restoring her status in Pakistani politics.

France Keeps Pressure On Iran

The government of Nicolas Sarkozy intends to keep pressure on Iran to abandon their nuclear program, and wants to see the rest of the world follow suit. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told a European broadcaster that Western credibility required the pursuit of tougher sanctions, as the UN continued to dither:

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Tuesday the West must continue to work on sanctions if it is to be taken seriously by Iran, even as talks continue to resolve a stand-off over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Kouchner told Europe 1 radio that the situation in Iran was dangerous and that a nuclear-armed Iran would make the situation in the Middle East even more complicated.
“While the European dialogue continues…we have to work on sanctions so as to be taken seriously,” Kouchner said.

So far, the West doesn’t appear to be listening. The UN Security Council agreed on Friday to postpone any application of new sanctions until at least November to allow more diplomacy with Teheran. The EU insisted that another round of talks should be tried to see whether existing sanctions had forced any change in the Iranian position.
Kouchner has a clearer sense of the situation. Diplomacy could certainly continue on a parallel track. The hesitation only encourages the mullahcracy, showing that their opponents have no unanimity, no resolve to see the sanctions through to the end. The EU has talked with Iran for years in order to dissuade them from pursuing nuclear weapons, and talks have done nothing but allow Iran to build massive cascades of uranium centrifuges that could produce enough material for bombs in less than two years.
Does that mean the bombing should start in the next couple of months? Count me among those who think a bombing attack on Iran would be disastrous, especially for the long-term relations between the Iranian people and the West. The option exists, but there are other options as well. Why haven’t we mounted a massive information campaign against the mullahcracy? Where’s our Radio Free Iran? We have other options on the table against the Iranian theocrats, but we seem to lack the resolve to use those, as well. Those tools helped expose the rot within the communist bloc a generation ago and encouraged the massive and mostly peaceful uprising against the oppressive governments of eastern Europe.
We need a similar effort here. Sanctions are a part of it, but also a coordinated information campaign, along with material support for democracy activists within Iran. A massive effort in these areas could topple the mullahcracy, but it needs time to work — and the more we dither, the more likely it will be that we will have to use our military to end the nuclear program instead of empowering the Iranian people to do it themselves. That will be an opportunity lost that we will regret for decades.

A Slow Start?

The Los Angeles Times takes a look at Fred Thompson’s fundraising in the third quarter — a period of time in which he was an official candidate for 24 days — and declares him “behind”. Instead of looking at a fundraising rate that seems fairly impressive, Dan Morain makes the trenchant analysis that the candidate who just joined the race last month finds himself behind other candidates who have raised money for their third straight quarter:

In an indication that his presidential campaign is off to a slow start financially, Republican Fred Thompson raised $8 million in the third quarter of 2007, which included his first month as a declared candidate.
Combined with the money he raised while he considered joining the race, Thompson has gathered $11.5 million for the year, putting him a distant fourth in the GOP money race behind Mitt Romney, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sen. John McCain.
“It is not a number that is going to make Republican activists say, ‘Wow,’ ” said Claremont McKenna College political scientist John J. Pitney Jr. “It is a defensible number, but not an impressive one.”
Since Thompson formally entered the race a month ago, he has raised $5 million, or about $200,000 a day.

It would be difficult to find a more asinine analysis of fundraising. Fred Thompson’s fundraising since his announcement came to $200K per day. Extrapolated over a full quarter (90 days), that comes to $18 million — a fundraising rate that would certainly be very impressive indeed. He also added 70,000 donors, a very substantial indication of a broad reach in the electorate.
Will any other GOP candidate, having been in for a full quarter, reach that number in Q3? It’s doubtful. In fact, the only candidates to approach that number in any quarter were Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, and in Q2 Mitt had to loan himself six million dollars to surpass it. Mitt has had the best fundraising numbers altogether, but we have yet to see the Q3 figures.
It looks like everyone else has slowed down. Barack Obama’s fundraising total came in at a health $20 million, but that’s a decline from $32.5 million in Q2. He found another 93,000 donors, bringing him over 350,000 — but his Q3 numbers are only 20% more than Thompson’s, and Obama had the full quarter. Senior aides to Hillary Clinton predicted her totals to run in the same general area as Obama.
Meanwhile, John McCain raised $5 million in Q3, but Ron Paul reportedly raised $3 million in the same period. McCain’s totals show that his reorganization worked, but it still represents a figure lower than John Edwards, who had to commit to public financing to keep his campaign afloat. Paul’s numbers show that he has continued to refine his on-line draw, and at this stage, analysts can’t dismiss the support that he receives. It hasn’t translated to polling, but it shows that he won’t get pushed off the debate stage any time soon.

An Evening With Justice Thomas

Earlier this evening, I attended a two-hour dinner event at the Heritage Foundation with Justice Clarence Thomas, his wife Virginia, and a small number of other bloggers and New Media members. It confirmed for me that the media has never gotten a grasp of the man under the robes, possibly because they have not spent even the small amount of time with him that we did tonight and that Steve Kroft did with his 60 Minutes interview — and they have missed a real story from that failure. And while the nominal reason for the evening was his book launch — and we each received autographed copies — it turned into a wide-ranging conversation that had little to do with the book.
The evening started with Justice Thomas greeting us, taking pictures and chatting us up a bit. He asked me what I wrote about at Captain’s Quarters, and I replied, “Just about anything — politics, culture, foreign policy, and Notre Dame football,” at which he let loose his unique gust of laughter. “Notre Dame football?” he asked incredulously. “You’d better stick with foreign policy this year!” (Obviously, his wisdom came through immediately.) The twenty or so people who attended the dinner all had a similar experience; Justice Thomas made a great effort to put us at ease, which he did all night long.
He told us that he had deliberately wanted to spend the first day of his book launch with New Media journalists, noting specifically that he felt good about avoiding the Supreme Court press on the occasion. Thomas explained that he wished we’d been around in 1991, that we could have made sure that the facts of the case came to light. We could have worked around the mainstream media narrative, he told us, and stated several times that he was very impressed with the work we did.
The book represents his effort to reach people through his life story, Thomas explained. He has now reached a point in his life where he wants to let go of some tasks, such as travel and outreach efforts which have taken up most of his spare time from the Court. He has tired of the grind and wants to spend more time with his family. He loves his work on the Court, however, and sees himself remaining on the court for the rest of his life. In fact, Bill Kristol teased him about running for President, and I believe his exact words were, “Oh, hell no.”
Thomas had that kind of blunt speaking style, but without any rancor or bitterness. He came across as a man who had nothing left to prove and no criticisms to answer. In fact, Thomas mentioned that he has never had any unpleasantness in his personal appearances. A couple of times at universities, faculty members have walked out on him — “it’s always the faculty and never the students,” he emphasized — and said, “Whoop-de-doo! Cowards run. It’s what they do.”
He got perhaps his biggest laugh when answering one of my questions. I had asked him if he agreed that some justices have “grown” on the bench, without being specific, although Kristol encouraged him to get very specific. Thomas demurred on the specificity, but took some time to give a thoughtful answer. He agreed that the phenomenon exists, and that he sees it as a pressure of incentives and disincentives. Some justices worried about how law schools and other elites will perceive them, and begin to develop opinions with an eye to prestigious invitations and awards — and the punishing lack of same if they do not evolve towards the accepted wisdom of academics. “I wouldn’t get an invitation from Columbia University unless I was a Middle East dictator with nuclear weapons,” he gave as an example, again with his trademark booming laugh.
My lasting impression of Clarence Thomas is this: he is his own man, and he is beholden to no one. With that, he has the confidence and self-satisfaction that allows him to be engaging, gracious, honest, and open. That the media and a good part of the nation could have missed this amazing and impressive man should anger and sadden the American populace. I will not ever forget the dichotomy between the public image of Clarence Thomas and the real human being I met tonight.
UPDATE: Other bloggers have started posting about the meeting. Kate O’Beirne has a post up at The Corner, and my friend Paul Mirengoff has his remarks at Power Line. Be sure to read these — we have all keyed on different aspects of the evening.

Heading Right Radio: Clarence Thomas’ Book

BlogTalkRadio.com
Heading Right Radio airs in prime time tonight at 9 pm ET. I will have just left a private dinner function with Justice Clarence Thomas, and I will talk about the experience and his new book, My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir. I hope to have at least one or two more of the invitees join me on the show, and of course I’ll be taking your calls. Be sure to adjust your listening schedules for the special prime-time installment!
Call 646-652-4889 to join the conversation! And don’t forget to join our chat room!
Did you know that you can listen to Heading Right Radio through your TiVo service? Click here for the instructions. Also, you can subscribe to Heading Right Radio through iTunes now by clicking this link:
Add to iTunes

Iraqi Civilian Deaths Plunge, Too

The BBC reports that the good news in Iraq isn’t just limited to American troops. The number of violent civilian deaths have dropped dramatically in September to less than half of August, by far the best month of the year:

The number of Iraqi civilians killed per month in bombings and shootings has fallen to the lowest level this year, the Iraqi government says.
In September, 884 civilians were killed by violence, less than half the figure for August, the government said. The BBC’s Jon Brain in Baghdad says the figures suggest the so-called surge involving 30,000 extra US troops is having some success. …
Additional figures released by the government indicated that the death toll had fallen by 38% compared with last year’s Ramadan, according to the Muslim calendar.

The number of Iraqi troops and police killed also dropped. In August, 87 security force members were killed in the line of duty, and September’s total dropped to 78. It isn’t quite as a dramatic as the decline in American combat deaths for the year, but that may reflect the increasing leadership taken by Iraqi forces in secuity operations.
The metrics have now shifted dramatically in Iraq. All violent deaths have dropped sharply, showing that the aggressive tactics and strategy of General David Petraeus have met with success. The terrorists have splintered and the tribal leaders in western Iraq have mostly aligned themselves with the US and the Iraqi Army. Those who claimed that Petraeus would misrepresent the truth in Iraq have nothing left of their argument.
We need to keep the pressure on the terrorists and on the Iraqi government. We need to discredit al-Qaeda’s affiliates as too weak to push American forces out of Iraq or anywhere else. The Iraqi government has to find ways to engage the Sunni minority and direct their dissent into productive political channels. Maliki has slowly begun to do this with his rejection of Moqtada al-Sadr and his outreach to Sunni leaders in Tikrit and other areas in the western provinces.
What we cannot do is abandon all of the progress we have finally begun to make in Iraq. We have the opportunity to leave a stable, democractic Iraq who will partner with us to fight terrorism and extremism in the Middle East. That would represent a huge victory in our long-term war against terrorists and the states which sponsor them, and letting that slip through our fingers will only mean more American troops fighting in that region in the future — and more attacks on American soil as well.

Winning The Ponzi Endorsement

Hillary Clinton seems to attract all the right money from all the wrong people. Right on the heels of Norman Hsu, the New York Post reports that another Ponzi-scheme operator has pumped almost $30,000 in contributions to her campaign (via Michelle Malkin):

A purported pyramid-scheme operator who was run out of Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor has reinvented himself as the head of an upstate group accused of being a “cult” – and his devotees have pumped thousands into Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential run.
Executives and top associates of the Albany-based NXIVM group – along with their family members – donated $29,900 to Clinton’s presidential campaign, according to federal records.
On March 14 and April 13, records show, more than a dozen contributions poured into Clinton’s coffers from NXIVM, an executive and group-awareness training organization led by Brooklyn-born Keith Raniere, 47. …
In his previous incarnation, the Svengali-like Raniere ran a $30 million multilevel marketing business that imploded after federal agencies and regulators in 23 states alleged it was an illegal pyramid scheme.

Among the donors were Seagrams heiresses Clare and Sara Bronfman, whose father called NXIVM a “cult”. If so, their idol appears to be Hillary Clinton. She’s certainly the beneficiary. It’s the second Ponzi scheme operator shown to be handling the bundling for the Clinton campaign, further demonstrating their failure to vet their contributors or their complete disinterest in doing so.
While some media operators are inexplicably focusing on Hillary’s annoying laugh, others have performed more meaningful journalism on Hillary’s bid for the presidency and the shell-game con men funding it. A focus on meaningful information on the leading Democratic candidate for the nomination and the sources of her funding would be appreciated.