Right-Wing Genius' Blog

Why Newt Gingrich Will Win the South Carolina Primary

2012-01-20T17:23:00.000-08:00

Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich held
center stage at last night’s debate in North Charleston, S.C. (David Goldman/AP)

It's not because he's surging in the polls going into the election. It's not because his performances at two conveniently-timed debates this week were phenomenally well-recevied. It's not because so many South Carolina voters who fancy themselves "conservatives" are yearning for an electable alternative to Mitt Romney. It's not because he was lionized as the target of a beyond-despicable hit by the drive-by media involving one of his ex-wives. It's not because his two daughters' increased presence on the campaign trail and in the press have quelled voters' misgivings about his personal transgressions. It's not because the revelation that Romney did not actually make history by placing first in both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary dispelled the aura of inevitability that had previously surrounded the frontrunner. It's not because of his unique ability to make a regional appeal to voters in a way that his opponents--who aren't from the Southeastern U.S.--can't. It's not because he was able to wrest control of the narrative from the news media, while Romney got knocked off course by the persistent questions about his tax returns.

No...wait...it's all of those things. Newt Gingrich, who led the Republican field by double digits in South Carolina until this month, when he saw his poll numbers crater as they had throughout the country, has come roaring back in the state that has picked the eventual Republican nominee for president in every election since 1980. The question at the front of my mind is not whether he'll win the primary tomorrow, but rather, how big will his margin be? (Actually, it's more like, "Why are you blogging when you have more important and consequential things to do?") My prediction: Gingrich will win tomorrow, and he'll win big. Probably by double digits. It will be a win so big that Romney may not be able to put him away in Florida. It won't be enough to make him the new frontrunner, but it will most likely compel Santorum to call it quits, and it's pretty hard to envision the former Pennsylvania senator throwing his support to anyone but the former Speaker.

Romney's S.C. Win in Jeopardy?

2012-01-19T20:53:00.000-08:00

Photo Courtesy Unicornbooty.com

Mitt Romney's presidential campaign was dealt a triple whammy today. It turns out he may not have won the Iowa caucuses; the latest count gave Rick Santorum a 34-vote edge, but votes from eight precincts remain uncounted. However, the Iowa story was just the first shoe to drop. Yesterday morning, I glanced at the screen of my classmate's laptop in Individual Taxation and saw that Rick Perry was dropping out of the presidential race. In a final slight at Romney, the Texas governor threw his support behind former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Also today, some new polls showed Gingrich surging in South Carolina, where voters will go to the other kind of polls in just two days to make their choice clear in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Insider Advantage released the results of a survey that found Gingrich leading Romney, 32% to 29%, in the Palmetto state, a 14-point swing from their previous South Carolina survey. Rasmussen has Gingrich ahead by two, 33 to 31 percent, a 16-point swing from where the two candidates stood just a few days ago. Public Policy Polling gives Newt his largest edge, their latest poll shows him leading Romney by six points. (Gingrich has fared better in PPP surveys; in their previous poll, conducted last week, he trailed Romney by only five points.) If you count each poll as a separate development in the campaign, then I guess it's actually a quintuple whammy for the guy who looked unstoppable less than a week ago.

It wasn't all bad news for the former Massachusetts governor today; he still leads Gingrich by seven points in a POLITICO survey of likely South Carolina voters taken by the Tarrance Group, and an NBC News/Marist poll has him leading by double digits, 34% to 24% for Gingrich. The combined effect of these polls, however, is this: Romney's lead over Gingrich in the RCP average of South Carolina polls has been cut to 1.2 percentage points; yesterday, that lead was eight points.

Gingich has momentum, but he's also got a lot of liabilities that have scared off Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire; Romney has organization, money and a commanding lead in national polls, but he no longer has a clear path to the nomination. I have six final exams to study for. Guess where my attention will be focused Saturday evening.

And Then There Were Two

2012-01-17T18:12:00.000-08:00

There’s not a lot I fear in life, mostly because everything I have reason to be afraid of can be categorized as either (1) unknown or (2) inevitable. If the former, then I’m pretty good about just not thinking about it. If the latter, then I can’t help but think about it but am usually able to convert my worry/anxiety into something constructive. Sometimes, though, I am overcome by a fear I can’t shake.

I am compelled to admit that I fretted about our men’s basketball team travelling to Kansas to take on the No. 7 Jayhawks. It was arguably the biggest challenge yet this season for the 17-0 Bears, who until last night were one of only three undefeated NCAA-I men’s basketball teams. Sure, KU’s 14-3 record wasn’t exactly daunting, but the reigning Big 12 Champions did not look like the same team that had suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands (paws?) of the unranked Davidson Wildcats last month.

Just ask Iowa State. In Lawrence on Sunday, the Jayhawks overcame a 12-point deficit in the second half to beat the Cyclones 82-73. Senior guard Tyshawn Taylor led the way with a career-high 28 points. It was Kansas’s 15th straight victory at home.

The Jayhawks have now extended their home-game winning streak to sixteen. They handed my beloved Bears their first loss of the season and now sit alone on their perch atop the Big 12. (None of their three losses were conference losses.)

Baylor's defeat means that only No. 1 Syracuse and 12th-ranked Murray State remain undefeated this season. Coach Jim Boeheim, recently the subject of some negative press following the revelation of another sex abuse scandal involving an NCAA coach, racked up his 876th career win last night with a 71-63 victory over the Pittsburgh Panthers, who had bested the Orange in the teams' previous five meetings. Syracuse's 20-0 start is unprecedented in the team's 111-year history, and Boeheim is now tied with the late, great Adolph Rupp of Kentucky for fourth place all-time in Division I. The Racers, meanwhile, managed to cope with the loss of its leading rebounder (to a broken hand) just fine, handling Tennessee Tech on Saturday for their 18th win in a row. Tomorrow night they get to host the 9-10 Morehead State Eagles, whom they defeated, 70-62, the last time the two did battle.

Can either team finish the regular season undefeated? (The last NCAA-I men's team to do so was UNLV under legendary Coach Jerry Tarkanian.) If so, then will either make it all the way to the championship, something none of their peers have accomplished since 1976, when the Indiana Hoosiers went 32-0 under temperamental head coach Bobby Knight? Frankly, I don't care all that much. What matters to me, now that the Baylor men have lost, is whether the Lady Bears can go the distance. Not only are they ranked No. 1 in the nation, no other team received any first-place votes in either the AP or USA Today/ESPN polls this week...or last week...or the week before that. Okay, I'm pretty sure they're been alone at the top for over a month now. Maybe two months. The point is, we've got two kick-ass basketball teams, and the women are 17-0 with only six games left in the regular season. Also, the men can enjoy being ranked 3rd in both major polls for a whole week, thanks to Florida State's shocking upset of then-No. 3 North Carolina this weekend.

Can the Packers Snap the 15-1 Curse?

2012-01-15T14:01:00.000-08:00

You are probably aware that the New England Patriots are the only NFL franchise to finish the regular season undefeated since the League went to a 16-game regular season in 1978, but do you know how many teams have finished the regular season with only one loss since then? So far, five. Only two went on to win Super Bowls, the last being Mike Ditka's Chicago Bears, who romped to a 46-10 victory over, of all teams, the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX. Since then, no 15-1 team has even made it to the big game. Will the Packers break that streak?

The reigning Super Bowl champs are only the third team to go 15-1 since the Bears. Their immediate predecessor was the 2004 Pittsburgh Steelers. Rookie QB and dormant sexual predator Ben Roethlisberger earned his Offensive Rookie of the Year title passing for 2,621 yards and rushing for another 144 in a season that included a particularly memorable game on Halloween night 2004, when the Steelers snapped the Patriots' 21-game winning streak. The Pats got their revenge, though, taking down the Steelers to win the AFC championship game, 41-27. (I lost a dollar betting on Pittsburgh; it was the last time I ever bet money on a football game.)

The 1998 Minnesota Vikings hold the unusual distinction of being the first team to go 15-1 and not win the Super Bowl. They were remarkable for a few other things, too. The Vikings' offense shattered the single-season scoring record with 556 points, a record broken by the aforementioned 16-0 Patriots in 2007. According to something I saw on another web site and didn’t bother to check out: "The Vikings led the league with 52 plays of 25+ yards. They had 22 offensive plays of 40+ yards; no other team had more than 16 plays of that length." That record-breaking offense carried them to to their first NFC championship game since 1987. You may recall the Vikings lost that game to the Atlanta Falcons in OT. So why did they lose, and how? More importantly, will a similar fate befall the Vikings' longtime rival in the 2012 postseason?

I'm no sports expert (so maybe I should've found a better use of my time than writing this column), but I can offer a couple simple explanations for the losses of the Steelers and Vikings in their respective conference championships. Big Ben's rookie nerves got the best of him against New England's seasoned defense and QB Tom Brady, who had already earned a couple Super Bowl rings. The '98 Vikings may have been the highest-scoring team in NFL history, but their defense was far from the best, and while it sure seems like an upset when a 16-1 team loses a home game, remember that the Falcons came to the Metrodome with a 15-2 record, not exactly a Cinderella team.

If the Packers can get past the 9-8 New York Giants, then they'll play a 14-3 team in the NFC Championship game. (The Patriots, like the '98 Falcons, were 15-2 when they beat Pittsburgh on their way to Super Bowl XXXIX.) My prediction? Green Bay will be upset, either today, next weekend or in the Super Bowl. To me, the 49ers look damn near unstoppable. I know most avid football fans are hoping for a Saints-Packers showdown next Sunday, but I must be honest: the Pack is not perfect, as Kansas City showed us.

Ripping Romney's Record

2012-01-14T21:04:00.000-08:00

The attacks themselves were nothing new; we've all heard the hits on Mitt Romney's past--the millions he made at Bain & Co., the businesses they tried to save but couldn't, the people who were thrown out of work--that have become a familiar rallying cry for political hacks trying to gin up popular opposition to what was in reality a record of leadership and job creation. What was different about this round of attacks was the source(s). The latest round of smears on Romney's private-equity exploits came not from the White House or the Obama re-election campaign, nor from MSNBC or some leftist blog. (I guess it's kind of hard to tell the difference between these different entities though.) Rather, they came from Mitt's fellow Republicans--specifically, his rivals for the GOP nomination, their campaigns, their surrogates in the media and independent groups who run ads on their behalf.

Following a pathetic showing in the Iowa caucuses, Gingrich and Perry had started grumbling about Romney's past in advance of the New Hampshire primary, but things really got heated after Romney himself dropped a catalyst into an already volatile elixir of eleventh-hour barnstorming. On the eve of the critical New Hampshire primary, Romney made an unfortunate statement that, when taken out of context, sounds really, really bad (I'm not going to come up with a colorful way to say everything.):

"I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."

Actually, it's the first seven words of that sentence that stirred up so many talking heads across the political spectrum. Mitt Romney, already under fire for not being able to save every job in every business Bain invested in while he was CEO (and, according to his detractors, thereby "firing" a bunch of workers) and anticipating a similar line of attack in the general election, said that he liked "being able to fire people."

On the surface, that remark wouldn't seem to be problematic for a presidential candidate, but because of Mitt Romney's background and the image of him as a ruthless corporate baron that his enemies are trying so hard to cultivate, his words gave pols, pundits and pettifoggers the world over something to fuss about.

"Mitt Romney likes to fire people," declared the Daily Beast, an online symposium for talentless hacks seeking a repository for their insightful prose that most of us common folk are too stupid/unsophisticated to appreciate.

Loony Larry O'Donnell told his audience that night, "I think Bain Capital is the greatest ... private equity firm in the World ever." (You can never really be sure where that guy is coming from.)

DNC Chairwoman and part-time gargoyle Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said ... well, who cares what she said? The point is, we expected the left to pounce on (and distort) Romney's words, but the most distrubing vitreol spewed from the mouths of those who seek to carry the mantle of a party that is supposed to be pro-capitalist, pro-free enterprise, meritocratic and, above all, honest. Newt Gingrich accused Romney of "looting a company, leaving behind behind broken families and broken neighborhoods and ... a factory that should be there." Rick Perry called the former Massachusetts governor a "vulture capitalist". (His campaign even turned Romney's words into a ring tone.) Even Jon Huntsman, Jr., got off his high horse and said, "Governor Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs."

The above-listed quotes are just a sampling of the many, many shots Mitt Romney took this past week, and the stinging disappointment I felt at seeing so-called conservatives (or "classical liberals", if you'd prefer) attack one of their own for his successful career in the private-equity business was mitigated by the outpouring of support for Romney, not just from the voters of New Hampshire, but from conservative journalists who were rightly disgusted by the Obama-style tripe being peddled by so-called Republicans who for months had been denouncing similar rhetoric by Democrats. Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin wrote that the "anti-capitalistic pandering" by Romney's Republican rivals "will likely go down as a text-book example of political stupidity." Michelle Malkin (definitely not a Romney fan, for those of you who didn’t know) blogged that "incompetent non-Romneys have morphed into Michael Moore propagandists — throwing not just Bain Capital under the bus, but wealth creators of all kinds who take risks in the private marketplace." The Wall Street Journal excoriated Gingrich and Perry "for their crude and damaging caricatures of modern business and capitalism." To be fair, Gingrich and Huntsman later walked back their comments lambasting Romney for his work at Bain Capital.

All of this would warrant concern beyond this week if anyone other than Mitt Romney stood a fighting chance of winning the GOP nomination. This is not the case, however, so we must turn our attention to the irritating chatterboxes who we will have to put up with in the general election campaign and who will continue to attack Romney, fairly or unfairly, for anything they can connect him to, no matter how manufactured the tragedy or how tenuous the link.

To the extent that Mitt's business background is a liability, it poses a grave threat largely because most Americans don't know the details of it, and hence it is ripe for distortion. From my vantage point, it appears that most of the people using Bain to attack Romney don't even understand what the company does/did. This is evident in their nonsensical, absurd and often incoherent criticisms of the firm's investment ventures in the 1980s and '90s, while Romney was C.E.O. Most of them pile on Mitt for shuttering unprofitable businesses and laying off workers while drawing a hefty salary for himself. Sometimes, though, whatever reasonable shot his detractors might be able to take at him is clouded by their visceral dislike of the man and everything he stands for. As Matt Bai wrote on his New York Times blog, "the attacks lobbed at Mr. Romney have been disparate and not terribly persuasive."

Case in point: Forbes columnist Robert Lenzner accused Romney of "firing more people than he hired." Not only is this not supported by the facts, Lenzer didn't even try to back it up. Matt Bai's fellow New York Times blogger Paul Krugman made a similarly unsubstantiated (and oversimplified) claim when he wrote that Romney "was a buyer and seller of businesses, often to the detriment of their employees." (This was still less inane than his assertion in an earlier column that “Mr. Romney and those like him ... enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.”) The aforementioned Debbie Wasserman Schultz took the attacks on Mitt and his work at Bain to a new level of crazy when she claimed that Romney “bankrupted companies deliberately.” (She also echoed a new Democratic talking point that “Mitt Romney said ... that he likes firing people,” a lie so blatant that even Andrea Mitchell called her out on it.)

I’m not sure if Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz has some mental disorder that just compels her to lie, or if she just doesn’t understand what bankruptcy is or why companies enter Chapter 11, but no matter. This is, again, just a sampling of the left-wing lunacy on display in the media coverage of Romney's past. I've noticed that a lot of Romney's critics cite a recent Wall Street Journal piece in support of their attacks, which they laughably maintain are neither anti-capitalist nor anti-business. I read the entire Journal story, which was written by Mark Maremont, and I was a little surprised at some of the information that no one--not even Romney surrogates--had trumpeted in defense of the candidate and his former employer. Here's the gist of the article: The Journal examined 77 businesses Bain invested in while Mitt Romney led the firm from 1984 until 1999 "to see how they fared during Bain's involvement and shortly afterward." A figure repeated (and distorted) by the haters was that "22% either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses." Another "8% ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost," according to the Journal, which means that 70% of Bain's ventures during the time frame of the study were successful. If our president had a 70% approval rating, then he'd be viewed as unbeatable.

Another point that those propagating the Romney-got-rich-killing-jobs-and-destroying-lives meme have omitted is something that really should be widely known but doesn't always dawn on your simple, self-styled blue-collar, working-class voter who might be swayed by this rhetoric: companies can emerge from bankruptcy. Often times, bankruptcy is not the end of a business; it's a reorganization. Seeking the protection of a bankruptcy court isn't necessarily a sign of long-term business failure. As Maremont noted:

Many of the Bain companies emerged from reorganization healthier, just as, for instance, General Motors did a few years ago. But while bankruptcy filings aren't a perfect measure of performance, they provide a way to assess a disparate array of target businesses that in many cases weren't required to make public financial filings.

Not only that, but a lot of the businesses that entered bankruptcy despite Bain's involvement went bankrupt after Romney had left the company. One such company, American Pad & Paper (a.k.a. AmPad), has been a favorite of the Left as an example of the ruthless, cutthroat capitalism that is apparently bad. After Bain's initial investment in 1992, two of AmPad's American plants were closed and hundreds of employees were laid off. Bain and its investors made a lot of money. The company went bankrupt.

If that doesn't exactly make sense to you, then it's because I've omitted several relevant facts, just like the anti-Romney prattlers have. One of the plants was shut was shut down because of a union strike, not exactly something the Romney-bashers, most of whom carry a lot of water for big labor, would want the public to know. Also, everyone who lost their job was offerred a job at one of the other facilities. Perhaps most importantly, AmPad was acquired out of bankruptcy. It is now owned by Esselte, a Connecticut-based global office supplies manufacturer, and still employs thousands of people.

As for the companies that didn't make it out of bankruptcy, a quote from one of Romney's former co-workers sheds some light on why so many of Bain's business ventures went belly-up. There are two paragraphs in the Journal article that everyone--and I mean everyone--who has heard it referenced in any context ought to read:

Marc Wolpow, a former Bain Capital executive, said the frequency of trouble did indeed stem largely from the firm's strategy early on of investing in smaller, troubled firms it hoped to turn around.
"I don't think you can hold Mitt out as a great investor per se," Mr. Wolpow said, "but he was an excellent CEO of an investment firm, and the results speak for themselves."

In other words, Mitt Romney was not a ruthless corporate shark who did whatever he could to make money, as so many pinkoes are trying to make him out to be, but he was the very thing they're trying to convince people he's not, "an excellent CEO."

Others who actually worked with Mitt Romney and got to know him have similar praiseworthy things to say about him. Before I get to my next example, I need to bring up what appears to be a good-faith but still misleading analysis of Romney's business record. Earlier this week, the Washington Post published their "fact check" of Romney's claim that Bain “invested in over 100 different businesses and net, net, taking out the ones where we lost jobs and those that we added, those businesses have now added over 100,000 jobs.” They called the 100,000 jobs figure "untenable" and gave Romney's comments three pinocchios, which indicates "significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions." While acknowledging that "Romney certainly has a good story to tell about knowing how to manage a business, spotting opportunities and understanding high finance," Glenn Kessler writes that, "if he is to continue to make claims about job creation, [then] the Romney campaign needs to provide a real accounting of how many jobs were gained or lost through Bain Capital investments while the firm managed these companies — and while Romney was chief executive. Any jobs counted after either of those data points simply do not pass the laugh test."

Among other examples, Kessler points to Staples, one of Bain's most successful ventures, which has added 89,000 jobs since Bain's initial investment. Says Kessler, "Bain may have provided management expertise or money when others would not, but a company such as Staples — one of the biggest contributors to Romney’s job figures — was largely the brainchild of entrepreneur Tom Stemberg." I'm sure Stemberg appreciated that backhanded shout-out, but I know he would dispute the implication that Romney doesn't deserve some credit for Staples's growth and success. How do I know that? Let's just say I can see the future.

I realize that, no matter how much research I do or how many sound, logical arguments I make, there are some people I just won't get through to because I have no credibility with him. So, if you're a Lefty who still thinks Mitt Romney made a fortune as the head of a heartless, avaricious corporate raider that lined its investors' pockets with the gains it reaped from slashing and burning companies, then you ought to read an opinion piece written for POLITICO by none other than Steven Rattner, the investment banker/financier and big-government booster who recently served as the Obama administration's "car czar". While making it clear that he's "all in favor of piling on Mitt Romney for any number of reasons," Rattner makes it clear that, "with modest exceptions (keep reading to learn more about these), Bain Capital was a thoroughly respectable — nay, eminent — investment manager that successfully discharged its responsibility of earning high returns for its investors by deploying capital in companies privately rather than by buying shares in the public market."

In addition to providing an accurate (and, impressively, concise) explanation of what the private-equity business is all about, Rattner's article chronicles the early history of Bain & Co. He provides specific examples of Bain's successes and failures, with objectively verifiable facts and figures detailing what investments the company made, the human cost of saving businesses that would otherwise have gone under, what "success" and "failure" meant in dollars and cents, and, perhaps most importantly, how Bain did right by its investors:

Overall, Bain Capital’s record was extraordinary, among the best in the business. According to a Bain placement document, through the end of 1999 (effectively, when Romney left), the firm had achieved annual returns of 88 percent per year.
That is not only wildly more than the single-digit returns most investors achieve by buying stocks or bonds, it is far higher than those of typical private equity or venture capital firms.

So, to recap: Bain Capital, under the leadership of Mitt Romney, sought out struggling companies that needed saving (like AmPad), promising start-ups in need of seed money (think Staples) and older, more developed businesses ripe for leveraged buyouts (e.g., Domino’s Pizza). Some of the ventures were more successful than others, and a handful went into bankruptcy (though I've yet to learn of one that did while Romney was still at the helm). It's beyond dispute that, however incalculable the actual number of jobs created or saved by Bain during Romney's tenure, the net increase of jobs at the companies Bain invested in far exceeds the job losses at all those companies. Finally, and again most importantly, "Bain Capital more than fulfilled its responsibility to a gaggle of investors, who were mostly foundations, endowments, pension funds and the like."

Romney was the CEO of Bain & Co., not of the individual enterprises that Bain invested in, managed and tried to save. But if his critics won't give him credit for any of the jobs that were created in these companies after Romney left Bain, then they can't fairly blame him for anything that happened to these businesses or their employees after 1999, either. The key word there is, of course, "fairly." There's no doubt in my mind that Mitt Romney will win the nomination and the presidency this year if his opponents play fair, which is why they won't.

Romney vs. Paul Would Make Long, Protracted Primary Fight Worth It

2012-01-12T20:00:00.000-08:00

AP File Photo

As the focus of the race for the 2012 GOP nomination turns t0 South Carolina, two apparent realities cannot be ignored: (1) Mitt Romney has the nomination all but locked up, and (2) Ron Paul must be taken seriously as a presidential contender. At least one of these will no doubt be hard to swallow for many Republican faithful, but acceptance of reality is a necessary characteristic of any true Republican in our country today. The facts are thus: Mitt Romney placed first in both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and he's leading all the national polls in the race for the GOP nomination. He also leads every poll I've seen out of South Carolina in recent days. Other than Romney, the only Republican to break 20% in both Iowa and New Hampshire so far this cycle is Ron Paul. None of this is up for debate. Now, what can we gleam from these facts?

What I've concluded is that Mitt Romney is going to be our nominee in the general election (barring his sudden death or some other unforseen act of God), and Ron Paul is not the loony-tune fringe candidate he was four years ago. If you're just going by vote totals so far, then Dr. Paul is the only candidate who should be regarded as a credible, serious challenger to Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination. Yet, he is the only one of the five alternatives who is not. Why? Many reasons, not all of which warrant mention here. I personally would not want our party to nominate someone who voted against the Patriot Act and still opposes it to this day, who declined to state that he would have authorized the Navy SEALs to kill Osama bin Laden, and who wants to get rid of the Federal Reserve. (The continued existence of the Fed is a debate worth having, but suffice it to say for now that I don't want to go back to the time when "panics" were a routine occurrence.) Nevertheless, there are substantive disagreements I have with at least one position taken by each of the candidates for president this year. I'm sure most Republicans feel the same way.

This brings me to my thesis du jour: if the race for the Republican nomination were to quickly come down to a two-man contest between two candidates who both had a realistic path to the nomination, then a Romney-Paul showdown would be the only protracted primary battle worth having. Think about it: An existensial debate, not just over the platform of the GOP in the 21st Century, but about the issues that will no doubt be litigated in the general election: the role of government in people's lives, the role of the U.S. on the world stage, how best to prosecute the War on Terror, how soon and how deeply to cut federal spending. Wouldn't that be more exciting (and more intellectually satisfying) than this hackneyed tripe about "vulture capitalism" or Super-PACs?

As ferociously as the Paul campaign has gone after his opponents, he rightfully came to Mitt Romney's defense after the others piled on him over his record as CEO of Bain Capital. This was just the latest example of Paul's maturity as a candidate and the Bohemian approach that has always characterized his campaign style. Romney, too, has refrained from the petty politics of drive-by attacks aimed at scoring cheap political points; he hasn't addressed Newt Gingrich's various personal transgressions, Rick Santorum's borderline-homophobic remarks or Rick Perry's obvious lack of ... well, let's just say "book smarts". He did take a cheap shot (in my opinion) at Jon Huntsman for the latter's service as Ambassador to China, but this was far from the ad hominem attacks that the others have engaged in.

A fervent, extended primary fight between Ron and Romney would be good for our party and our country. Sadly, it is not to be. Right-wing Genius out!

Why the Daley Resignation Is Significant

2012-01-11T17:24:00.000-08:00

Three years ago, when President-Elect Obama was appointing his new administration, I noticed a curious absence from the list of people he was nominating to his cabinet and other high-ranking officials: William Daley.

The son and brother of former Chicago mayors had a résumé that made him as suited for a powerful position in a Democratic administration as anybody. He was Secretary of Commerce from 1997 to 2000, when he resigned to chair Al Gore’s presidential campaign. (He had previously chaired Bill Clinton' 1992 presidential campaign in Illinois.) He even co-chaired the president-elect’s transition team!

Of course, he also ran a couple of Fortune 500 companies, namely SBC Communications and JPMorgan Chase & Co. You would think this would be another asset for a prospective cabinet-level appointment, especially in an administration tasked with getting a flailing economy back on track, but having just won an election lambasting ... well, a lot of things. He was kind of all over the map. Let’s just say capitalism in general, Obama may have been weary about someone who seemed to exemplify the Wall St.-Washington liaison that he had disingenuously but convincingly decried in 2008.

Then, last year, Daley resurfaced when Obama tapped him to serve as White House Chief of Staff. His appointment was regarded by those on the Right and the Left as a smart choice. People who fancied themselves astute political analysts (not me) viewed it as a business-friendly entreaty by a president whose big-spending, job-killing, anti-free-enterprise agenda had been dealt a crushing blow at the ballot box a couple months earlier.

In October, Daley told the press that he planned “to put the president through his re-election” and then return to Chicago, so it came as a surprise to many (including me) when the administration announced that Daley was stepping down as Chief of Staff this month. Suprising, that is, if you didn’t know about what happened last November (which I didn’t).

About two months ago, Daley is handed off “some of the day-to-day management” duties at the White House to Peter Rouse, a longtime Democratic hand in Washington who had served as interim Chief of Staff between the time Rahm Emanuel left in October 2010 to run for mayor of Chicago and Daley taking office the following January. According to Will Rahn at the Daily Caller:

Congressional Democrats had criticized Daley, a former commerce secretary under President Clinton, for what some described as his imperfect understanding of the legislative branch, and his tense relationship with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. This stood in marked contrast to his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, a former Democratic congressman who is now Mayor of Chicago.
“Rahm Emanuel was not only a creature of the House, he knew many of the senators,” Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin told The Huffington Post in September. “Bill Daley does not have that depth of relationship coming in.”
One senior Democratic aide was more blunt, saying that the party’s congressional leadership had “basically come to the conclusion that he’s not up to the job and doesn’t really get how Congress works. At all.”

Apparently, Daley’s pragmatic mindset had no place in an administration that has made a firm policy of deferring to congressional Democrats, who as we all know are led by a cadre of rabid ideologues.

The most important thing to recognize when processing the news of Daley’s departure is this: the last time an incumbent president replaced his chief of staff in an election year was in 1992, when Pres. George Bush swapped Samuel K. Skinner for Jim Baker. For all the presidents Obama has compared himself to, we don’t think the fate of George Bush’s '92 reelection is one he wishes to emulate.

Last month, I blogged about the premature excitement over Obama’s approval numbers. A new rash of polls out this week show him sinking yet again, and the gap between his approval and disapproval ratings has widened. Gallup pegs his job approval at 43%, while Rasmussen Reports has it at 46%. A Reuters/Ipsos survey gives the president a 47% approval rating, and CBS News says he’s at 45%. In all four polls, more respondents disapproved of the president’s performance than approved.

Obama’s in trouble. Swapping out his Chief of Staff won’t save him. If the Republicans get their act together, then we can swap out our president for one who will know what he’s doing and who actually cares about middle-class Americans.

Anything Can Happen

2012-01-10T09:22:00.000-08:00

Let's start by acknowledging the inevitable: Mitt Romney will win the New Hampshire primary. I'll be stunned if he doesn't win by double digits. Having already placed first in the Iowa caucuses, Romney should have the nomination sewn up after a decisive win in New Hampshire, yet Pundits, pollsters and political junkies are buzzing about "the battle for second place" (as well as 3rd and 4th, if it's close). What I find especially interesting is that the air of mystery surrounding the first-in-the-nation primary this year is just as strong, if not more so, than it's been in previous years, despite Romney's incredibly strong poll position going into tonight and the paucity of doubt that he'll win by a sizeable margin. It's anyone's guess what order the runners-up will finish when all the N.H. votes are tallied. Ron Paul has consistently been polling in 2nd place since Newt Gingrich's collapse, but just like in Iowa, he seems to have plateaued. It's also worth noting that, while Santorum and Romney both outperformed their poll numbers in Iowa, Ron Paul's 21% of the vote was much closer to his position in the polls leading up to the caucuses. (A similar phenomenon occurred in 2008, where Romney and McCain both finished well ahead of their positions in the RCP average, while Paul underperformed.) For you empiricists out there, this portends and underwhelming finish for Paul in the Granite state, but he'll no doubt plod along.

The most exciting thing may be a last-minute surge by Jon Huntsman, who's arguably got the most to lose tonight (except for Mitt Romney). I pondered this possibility in a post last week, but by this weekend I was convinced that that ship had sailed. I may have spoken too soon; a spate of polls out of New Hampshire show real momentum for the even-tempered Mormon Sinophile. Rasmussen Reports has him at 15%, up from 12% in their previous New Hampshire survey. Public Policy Polling, which also had Huntsman polling at 12% the last week of December, released the results of a poll that pegged him at 16%. Perhaps most telling is the candidate's surge in the Suffolk University/7News tracking poll, in which Huntsman has doubled his share of the vote in the last week.

All of these polls have Huntsman in 3rd place, behind Romney and Paul, but a poll released over the weekend from American Research Group has him in 2nd place at 17%, followed by Ron Paul at 16%. Today the two are separated by three percentage points in the RCP average of N.H. polls, which for some reason does not include the ARG survey results; just five days ago, that gap was twelve points.

Huntsman won't win the New Hampshire primary, but there's a very real possibility that he could come in a strong 2nd. That would effectively quash Rick Santorum's momentum coming out of Iowa, and with a 10-day interim between today and the South Carolina primary, just about anything can happen.

Can Huntsman make a Santorum-style surge in New Hampshire?

2012-01-04T16:38:00.000-08:00

The biggest story to come out of last night's Iowa caucuses last night--apart from Mitt Romney's unprecedented eight-vote margin of victory--has to be Rick Santorum's amazing (and, for most, unexpected) performance. The former Pennsylvania senator had been polling in the single digits in Iowa and barely registering nationally. Then, about a month ago, his poll numbers in the Hawkeye state began creeping up, and by last week, he was nipping at the heels of Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, who were locked in a virtual dead heat atop most surveys. In no poll did Santorum register more than 18% support, however, making the 25% of the vote he pulled in last night's caucuses all the more impressive.

Never taken seriously by the media and most primary voters, Santorum long ago decided to focus almost exclusively on Iowa, and he still had to stretch his miniscule campaign treasury pretty thin (as evidenced by the pickup truck he traveled the state in). He didn't have much, but he had a message--and an m.o. (Sorry for the alliteration; I can't help it.): visit every county; talk to anyone who will listen; speak from the heart; perform the occasional exorcism. (I might not have that exactly right, but I wasn't there. This is all being relayed secondhand.) It's a strategy reminiscent of Mike Huckabee's 2008 campaign, which peaked when the former Arkansas governor won the Iowa GOP caucuses, only to flame out like a supernova.

It's also strikingly similar to another candidate's strategy this year. Jon Hunstman, Jr., the former Utah governor and veteran diplomat, is trying in New Hampshire what Santorum tried (successfully) in Iowa. He's devoted more time to the state than anyone left in this race (which, as of this morning, does not include Michele Bachmann), but he still lags way behind Romney in the polls there. (Even worse, he hasn't even gained as much support in the state as Ron Paul.)

This is not to say that all of Huntsman's time and effort in the state has been for naught. As is so often the case, the numbers tell the tale: Eight weeks ago, Huntsman and Gingrich were tied in the RCP average of polls in New Hampshire. As Gingrich began to gain steam, he pulled away, and soon moved into a firm 2nd place behind Romney in the Granite State. One month later, the former Speaker peaked at 24.3% in the RCP average. (Romney was at an even 36%.) Huntsman, meanwhile, crept up to 11.8% by Christmas, by which time Gingrich was down to 20%. Since then, however, Huntsman hasn't gained much traction; he's actually down slightly, at 10.3% as of today. (Gingrich sits at 11.3% and will probably sink even further before next Tuesday's primary.)

Today, the media's primary focus shifts from Iowa to New Hampshire, and the results of a Suffolk Tracking poll did not provide welcome news for Huntsman, who I maintain is the best candidate we've got. He registered only 7% support in the survey of 500 "likely GOP primary voters," a distant 4th behind Romney, Paul and Gingrich. That's actually his worst showing in a New Hampshire poll in nearly two months. If Huntsman is hoping to pull off a Santorum-style surprise, then he's going in the wrong direction.

Huntsman's best argument against the plutonian picture painted by the polls (There's that alliteration again! Damn!) may be that all polls taken in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses greatly underestimated Santorum's performance there, by anywhere from seven to ten percentage points. He may also want to point out that, six days before the caucuses, Santorum was at 9.8% in the RCP average of polls there, half a point lower than Huntsman's current position in the New Hampshire poll average.

It's highly unlikely that anyone other than Mitt Romney will win the 2012 New Hampshire Republican primary, but there's still a very good chance that Jon Huntsman will finish a strong second. The days ahead will be critical; if no one even comes close to Romney in the polls and he wins the primary by double digits, then he'll be in very good position going into South Carolina, with a ten-day buffer to shore up his support there.

To the anybody-but-Romney crowd, I say: you've gone through everyone else; if you don't want to vote for Mitt, then your only choices are Santorum, Huntsman or Dr. Paul. (C'mon, do you really even need to think about this?)

The Flaws in Obama's Re-Election Strategy

2012-01-02T17:52:00.000-08:00

While scanning the Sunday paper yesterday, this headline on the front page caught my eye: “Obama to target Congress in re-election campaign”. In the article, New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler reports that “Obama’s election-year strategy is an attempt to capitalize on his recent victory on a short-term extension of the payroll tax cut and on his rising poll numbers.” Now, I can't seriously dispute that the president got what he wanted in this latest mix-up over extending the payroll tax holiday, but this business about "rising poll numbers" is far murkier.

The Dems were all excited late last month when a couple of polls showed a slight up-tick in the president's approval ratings. Calmer heads, including myself, dismissed this as a fluke or a temporary crest in the numbers that warranted no anxiety, and predictably, the most recent survey results to be released show his job approval to be in the mid-forties, where it's been for much of the year. In fact, I have not seen a poll in which the president registered a 50% approval rating or higher since June.

Perhaps the surest sign that Republicans needn’t worry—at least not yet—about a sudden, election-year upswing in Obama’s poll numbers is that, despite the trend in some polls, his approval rating never surpassed his disapproval rating in the RCP average, indicating that the slight increase in his ratings were either a fluke or a very real but short-lived bump-up.

Back to the president's joke of a re-election strategy. Much of Lander's article consisted of relaying the communiqué of Deputy Press Secretary and snake-oil salesman Joshua R. Earnest:

“In terms of the president’s relationship with Congress in 2012,” Mr. Earnest said at a briefing, “the president is no longer tied to Washington, D.C.” Winning a full-year extension of the cut in payroll taxes is the last “must-do” piece of legislation for the White House, he said.

Funny how the Republican-controlled House actually passed a full-year extension of the lower FICA rate, and the president poo-poohed it. Oh well, I guess Obama flip-flopped again, but no matter. The president and his minions evidently think they've got a winning strategy, and they've been busy developing the narrative they want to force on the largely ignorant and ill-informed voters who gave Obama his winning edge over John McCain in 2008:

The White House has been refining the message since July, when Mr. Obama’s attempts to forge a “grand bargain” with the House Republicans on fiscal policy collapsed and he reverted to a populist, anti-Congress strategy.

But it did not gain traction until the last few weeks, when polls began showing that nearly half of Americans approved of the job he was doing, up from percentages in the low 40s during most of the year.

House Republicans inadvertently helped him just before they recessed for the holidays when they initially refused to extend the payroll tax cut.

Mr. Earnest said the strategy had successfully planted “the image of a gridlocked, dysfunctional Congress and a president who is leaving no stone unturned to try to find solutions to the difficult financial challenges and economic challenges facing the country.”

While Congress's approval ratings have taken a hit, the president has not seen a corresponding surge in his numbers, and herein lies another problem with this "populist, anti-Congress strategy." Many American voters may be stupid (They voted for President Obama, for God's sake.), but they at least understand that they're electing a president and a Congress. For Obama, it's not a pick-me-instead-of-them situation. He'll be running against a Republican candidate in the general election, and the odds are very high that it won't be a member of Congress. (Sorry, Ron Paul supporters.)

Then of course there's the comparison that so many political yuppies have been making. Mark Landler reports:

The president’s antagonism toward Congress evokes that of President Harry S. Truman, whose come-from-behind campaign in 1948 focused on a “do-nothing Congress.”

But Republican analysts have pointed out that the national unemployment rate in November 1948 was 3.8 percent — not 8.6 percent, as it is now — and that the American economy was on the upswing.

Another critical difference, of course, is that in 1948 both houses of Congress were under GOP control. Currently Republicans hold the majority in the House of Representatives only. (You would think this fact would be so obvious that Landler wouldn’t feel the need to point it out, which he didn’t, but it’s amazing how ignorant so many voters can be.) Indeed, every major piece of legislation seeking to enact an Obama policy that has been advanced in the Senate only to be blocked or voted down has failed because of bipartisan opposition. Of course, Democrats don’t like to talk about this inconvenient truth, and some have expressed anger over the president’s indiscriminate lambasting of “Congress,” without partisan qualification:

For Mr. Obama, a heavily partisan strategy carries the risk of ... antagonizing Congressional Democrats, who were angry when administration officials, including the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley, criticized Congress without distinguishing between Democrats and Republicans.

Democratic leaders said they were satisfied that Mr. Obama was adequately making that distinction, and they said they understood why he would want to run against a Congress whose Republican leadership had blocked his legislation and declared that its primary goal was to defeat him in November.

“He has been emphatic in stating that he is running against obstructionist Republicans in the House,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“As long as the president includes the word Republican when he says he is running against Congress, more power to him.”

Israel's sickeningly sycophantic support for Obama aside, the president would do well to remember that his party must defend 23 Senate seats to the Republicans' 10 in 2012, and a negative image of Congress won't exactly do wonders for endangered incumbents like Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Jon Tester (D-MT) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). His president-vs.-Congress rhetoric, assuming it sinks in, further presents a two-edged sword for Republicans, who could argue to voters that, by Obama's own logic, a Republican president's economic recovery agenda would not meet as much resistance in Congress, especially if the GOP takes back the Senate.

In the coming months, Republicans will choose their nominee to take on President Obama, and voters in both parties will pick their candidates for the House and Senate. Once the 2012 general election begins in earnest, we may see a reversal of fortune for a president whose re-election prospects are increasingly grim and an energized, enthusiastic Republican Party poised to take over the U.S. Senate and hold on to the House of Representatives. It may be that voters suddenly change their minds and come around to a president whose policies have thus far been met by rejection, protest and dissatisfaction by a majority of the electorate. What seems more likely, however, is yet another course correction for a campaign that faces a lethargic economy, an unenviable record to defend, and an electorate fed up with Washington skulduggery and yearning for change. (Sound familiar?)

One Week To Go...

2011-12-27T21:56:00.000-08:00

Are you sick of hearing about the impending Iowa caucuses?

Me neither. One week from today, voters in the Hawkeye State will kick off the 2012 election cycle with their mystifying mêlée of...whatever. Anyway, before parsing the polls out of Iowa, I'd like to discuss an interesting development in the race for the 2012 Republican nomination.

It seems that neither Texas Gov. Rick Perry nor former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (who until recently the undisputed frontrunner in the GOP primary campaign) have been able to collect and submit the 10,000 signatures necessary to appear on the ballot in Virginia. For Perry, this is not that big a deal; he wasn't going to be the nominee anyway (thank God), and it will be pretty pathetic if he hasn't dropped out of the race by the time Va. holds its primary. But for Gingrich, not being on the ballot in Old Dominion is a pretty big embarrassment, not least because it's his home state.

Yes, the former Speaker spent twenty years representing an Atlanta-area district in Georgia, but he currently resides in the state that has already delivered us more presidents than any other (eight, to be exact). I recently made the acquaintance of one Bryan Eppstein, a legend in Texas politics. Bryan's reputation as a political shark is such that politicians here have been known to retain him, even if they have no need for his services; they just don't want him working for an opponent's campaign. He told me that Al Gore did not lose the 2000 presidential election because he lost Florida; he lost the election because he failed to carry his home state of Tennessee.

I can remember watching the returns roll in on Election Night 2000, and while the race was still up in the air, I remarked that Bush had won Tennessee. (For the record, Bill Clinton carried Tennessee twice.) I wasn't as politically astute back then as I am now, but I found it strange that the election was so close when one candidate couldn't even carry his home state.

Gingrich's failure to make it onto the Virginia primary ballot is all the more galling when you consider that he's been leading the polls there. In a protracted race for the nomination, every delegate counts, and if Newt and Mitt are still duking it out come February, then effectively conceding a state with more delegates than New Hampshire and Iowa combined before any votes are cast will go down as one of the greatest campaign blunders of all time.

The Gingrich campaign didn't do their candidate any favors with their apparent sour-grapes attitude yesterday. Campaign director Michael Krull:

Only a failed system excludes four out of the six major candidates seeking access to the ballot. Voters deserve the right to vote for any top contender, especially leading candidates.

I agree; voters should have the right to vote for any top contender, which is why Virginia, like all states, has certain requirements that candidates must meet in order for their names to appear on the ballot. Newt Gingrich failed to satisfy all the necessary requirements, so I don't think excluding him from the Virginia primary ballots evinces a "failed" system.

Back to Iowa: Gingrich's decline in the polls has not been matched by an equal surge in one candidate's numbers; instead, it appears that his loss is Mitt Romney's, Ron Paul's, Rick Santorum's and Michele Bachmann's gain. Every poll out of the state in the last two weeks has shown either romney or Paul leading; this has pundits buzzing about the prospect of the 76-year-old Congressman and cantankerous old coot winning (or even finishing a close 2nd in) the Iowa cacuses. Such a result would be in affront to the political narrative that the Iowa GOP caucuses are dominated by social conservatives. (Hence, the impressive performances of Mike Huckabee in '08, George W. Bush in 2000 and Pat Robertson in '88.) One interesting quirk in the run-up to the caucuses this year is the failure of any one candidate to lock in the evangelical vote; Michele Bachmann was the early favorite to win this group, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, and now it appears evangelical Christians are torn between Bachmann, Santorum, Perry and Gingrich. The latter two have had their moments as King of the Hill, and I highly doubt that either of them are coming back. Ditto Bachmann, but swap "Queen for a Day" for "King of the Hill." Santorum, however, has never topped the polls in any state and may just be the next candidate to surge. He's arguably devoted more time and energy to Iowa than anyone else, and his fervent appeal to church-going folk in middle America while running his campaign on a shoestring budget conjures up memories of Huckabee four years ago. (For the record, it was in December of 2007 that the former Arkansas governor surpassed Mitt Romney in the polls in Iowa, where Romney had held a steady lead for months.) My predictions: Ron Paul will soar no higher; he has reached his peak in Iowa, though his current poll position (22.7% in the RCP average) is probably pretty close to what he'll actually pull next week in the caucuses. Santorum will outperform Bachmann among evangelicals and finish well ahead of her in the final tallies. Romney looks good to win; he'll definitely be first or second. Perry and Gingrich will underwhelm but stay in the race, and Baylor will crush UW in the Alamo Bowl.

The Freedom Fighter and the Farce

2011-12-21T19:36:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday, we learned of the deaths of two world leaders. Former Czech president Václav Havel died in Vlčice at age 75, and Korean Central Television reported that Kim Jong-il had died of a massive heart attack Saturday morning.

It seems fitting to do a compare-and-contrast piece on the lives and legacies of these two men; one a Communist dictator, the other a dissident who rebelled against Communism and spent many years in jail. While one made human rights a focal point of his career and even chaired the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, the other presided over a government that Human Rights Watch called "among the world's most repressive". The similarities between the two leaders extend far beyond their status as heads of state, however. Both emerged as major players on the world political stage in the late 20th Century, and both led storied personal lives, the details of which we may never be sure of. Perhaps most noteworthy is that both men were born into powerful families.

Havel was born in Prague in 1936. His father, Václav Maria Havel, was a wealthy entrepreneur who owned various high-dollar real estate properties throughout Bohemia. Havel's mother, Božena Vavrečková, was the daughter of an ambassador and well-known journalist. The Havel family was closely connected with the Czech cultural and political scene, and it was Bozena herself who encouraged young Václav to convene his first literary circle. Kim Jong-il, meanwhile, was born Yuri Irsenovich Kim, according to Soviet records, in the small Russian village of Vyatskoye in 1941. His father, Kim Il-sung, commanded the 1st Battalion of the Soviet 88th Brigade, made up of Chinese and Korean exiles.

1948 proved a pivotal year in the lives of both men and their families (as well as millions of other people). In February, the Soviet-backed Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took over the Czechoslovakian government. Havel's family holdings were seized by the authorities. Then, on May 1, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was officially founded. Kim Il-sung was installed as prime minister September 9th.

While Kim purportedly composed six operas in two years and enjoyed staging elaborate musicals, Havel actually wrote more than 20 plays, including The Garden Party (1960), The Memorandum (1965) and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968), all of which were performed at the famous Theatre on the Balustrades ("Divadlo Na zábradlí") in Prague. "The cultural tradition prevalent in his family focussed Havel's attention on humanistic values of Czech culture which were suppressed in the fifties," according to the former president's official biography on the Prague Castle web site. He also wrote countless essays and worked as a magazine editor.

Following the Soviet invasion and crackdown in 1968, the government banned Havel's plays and sent him to work at a brewery. Not even the rank fumes of totalitarian swill could stifle his prosaic propensity, however. He was the principal author of Charta 77, a kind of dissident manifesto that gave rise to an anti-Communist movement among a section of Czechoslovak citizens.

While Havel was repeatedly being jailed and released by the Communist government, Kim Il-sung was grooming his son as the heir apparent to his all-powerful position. In the 1970s, Kim Jong-Il moved quickly through the ranks of the Korean Workers Party (Communist) hierarchy, eventually becoming a member of the Central Committee, the Military Commission, and the politburo. He assumed the title "Dear Leader" (친애하는 지도자) and was made a member of the Seventh Supreme People's Assembly (whatever that was) in February 1982.

If there was a singular event that marked the death knell of Communism as a major statist force/threat, then it was probably the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Eight days later, riot police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration in Prague. A series of popular, largely nonviolent demonstrations followed, and by November 20th the number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague had swelled from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated half-million. A two-hour, nationwide general strike was successfully held one week later. The following day, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced that it would relinquish power and dismantle the single-party state.

At the center of this so-called Velvet Revolution was Václav Havel, who along with other members of the Charter 77 dissident movement founded Civic Forum (not to be confused with the online symposium for Honda Civic owners/drivers). After Pres. Gustáv Husák resigned on December 10, Havel was elected president.

According to at least one Havel biographer, it was at this pivotal time that Havel's Machiavellian side emerged. Alexander Dubček, the one-time leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia whose attempted liberalization was crushed in 1968, looked to be the likely choice to take over as president during this transitional period, but Havel deftly ushered him aside and was reelected in 1990, when what was then Czechoslovakia held its first free elections. Dubček had to settle for being Speaker of the Federal Assembly. Compare this to Kim's early days on the KWP Central Committee; he reportedly wrested the post of party organization secretary from his uncle in September 1973 and used his position as head of the Organisation & Guidance Department to purge the KWP of those not sufficiently loyal to his father. He became Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army in 1991.

Havel lost the presidency in 1992, shortly before his country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The following January, he was elected the first President of the Czech Republic. That same year, Kim Jong-il assumed the role of Chairman of the National Defence Commission in North Korea. After his father's death in 1994, Kim succeeded him as supreme leader of the God-forsaken Communist state. In 1997, he officially took over as both Chairman of the Military Commission and General Secretary of the WPK.

As president of the Czech Republic, Havel led his country into the OECD and NATO and laid the groundwork for its 2004 accession to the European Union. He left office in 2003, the same year that North Korea began participating in six-party talks sponsored by China that went absolutely nowhere. At the very least, Kim Jong-il can tout his country's acquisition of "the bomb" as an achievement during his tenure.

The contrast is striking: one man led a government that propogated fantastic tales of its leader's musical talent, athletic prowess and influence in the fashion world, the other actually lived an incredible life, accomplishing feats that lesser men could not have.

Havel and Kim were both powerful men during their lifetimes, and now they are no more. But, while one leaves behind a legacy of leadership marked by courage in the face of oppression by a brutal Communist regime and shepherding his country through a peaceful transition from a Soviet-dominated police state to a democratic republic, the other will be remembered as an evil dictator, a nepotist clown who presided over the mass starvation of his own people and whose actions led to the further ostracization of his already isolated state. While Havel rebelled against the intimidating power of the Soviet Union that had supported Czechoslovakia's Communist government for over 40 years, Kim Jong-il spent his time as supreme leader trying to model his state after the former U.S.S.R. in a futile attempt to attain that unattainable goal, a socialist paradise. North Korea was only a paradise for the Kim family. Havel, meanwhile, is experiencing true paradise right now, in the eternal kingdom of the Almighty.

Christopher Hitchens: A Man of Faith...in Himself

2011-12-18T21:05:00.000-08:00

When I heard that Christopher Hitchens, the short, pudgy, British athiest, had died, I immediately wondered, What happened to his soul?

The self-described “anti-theist” wallowed in obscurity for much of his career but gained international renown for his 2007 best-seller God is Not Great. I'll refrain from making specific comments on the book because I have not read it and probably never will, but I want to call attention to something Hitchens said while promoting his magnum opus back then.

After the death of Rev. Jerry Falwell, Hitchens appeared on CNN. When Anderson Cooper asked him if he thought Falwell had gone to heaven (qualifying it by acknowledging that he didn't know whether his guest believed in an afterlife), Hitchens responded, "No, and I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to."

There's so much wrong with that statement that I don't quite know where to begin. Hitchens went on to make numerous incedniary remarks about Falwell throughout the interview, calling him "evil", "a little toad" and an "ugly little charlatan", among other things, but that first remark really stood out to me and other Christians who saw/heard it. It encapsulated Hitchens's view of Judeo-Christian beliefs in general and specific religious leaders. Granted, Hitchens had a special disdain for Falwell and those like him, the so-called "televangelists" who appeared to serve mammon over God, but his contempt for organized religion and people of faith went far beyond feelings that many of us share about the more reprehensible among us who, in addition to using Christianity as a profit-making tool, poison society with irrational, bigoted messages of intolerance.

Hitchens believed it was possible to lead a moral, ethical life without God (who he always referred to as "god"). He discounted the myriad ways in which people's faith had motivated them to do good, even great, things for mankind. To his credit, he was an equal-opportunity offender, writing frankly about the atrocities perpetrated by radical Islamists in the name of "Allah", which many so-called journalists who shared his beliefs (or lack thereof) refused to do. He also didn't shy away from intellectual discussions or fervent arguments with those who challenged him. I can recall watching him spar with the likes of Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham on FOX News. This is not to say he couldn't be condescending; he was so confident in what he believed that, even when he was facing off against someone he respected, he exuded arrogance and hauteur. His ovoid visage, sallow skin and English accent made him almost like a caricature of the stereotypical obnoxious, left-wing faux-intellectual, but I return to my original question: what became of his spirit after his body expired? Is he burning in Hell? For that matter, I wonder, since he so adamantly believed there was no God, no heaven or Hell, no afterlife, whence did he think his soul came from? I suppose I might find the answer to that last question in some of his writings, but being a full-time law student, I haven't much time to read for pleasure. (Then again, I have no guarantee that reading Hitch's polemic prose would be pleasurable.)

THE END(?)

2011-12-16T21:29:00.000-08:00

As you may have heard, our military engagement in Iraq officially ended yesterday. The last U.S. convoy will leave Iraq tomorrow, making good on the status-of-forces agreement signed by President Bush and approved by the Iraqi Parliament more than three years ago, in which the U.S. agreed to withdraw all our military forces from Iraq by December 31, 2011. Doubts persist, however, about the Iraqis' ability to defend themselves against foreign aggression and internal threats. Many Iraqis have expressed concerns that sectarian strife will return and throw their fragile democracy into chaos. Here at home, some have called our withdrawal "precipitous," and military leaders worry that it is a bit premature for the still-maturing Iraqi security forces, who face continuing struggles to develop the logistics, air operations, surveillance and intelligence-sharing capabilities they will need in what has long been a difficult region. Top U.S. military commanders had recommended leaving a residual force of about 15,000 troops to train and support Iraq's fledgling forces, but the Obama administration was unable to reach a deal with Iraqi political leaders whereby our troops would be granted legal immunity, a practical necessity (and, in my humble opinion, a relatively small price to exact from an Iraqi government that really owes its existence to us).

Still, despite these legitimate reservations about the premature evacuation and concerns about what lies ahead, it's difficult to say our troops are not coming home as victors, and it's worth reflecting on those days when the outlook for Iraq and the War on Terror in general was much more bleak.

Nearly five years ago, Pres. George W. Bush went on national television to announce a critical shift in strategy in a war that had become increasingly costly, unpopular and difficult to prosecute. In selling the country on the counter-insurgency strategy (a.k.a. the “Surge”), then-President Bush didn’t mince words about the sobering reality of what the months and years ahead would bring:

“The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are without conscience, and they will make the year ahead bloody and violent,” he said. “Even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue -- and we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties.”

While averring his unequivocal belief that "our new strategy will bring us closer to success," the President made clear that victory in Iraq “will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.”

No kidding. What began with “shock and awe” ended rather unceremoniously, marked by the lowering of Old Glory at Baghdad Airport. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta officially called our military mission to an end, saying that, while “the cost was high, in blood and treasure for the United States and also for the Iraqi people ... those lives have not been lost in vain. They gave birth to an independent, free and sovereign Iraq.”

They did, and we must not forget that. But we must also not forget that this in not the end of a war; the War on Terror continues; it is just now being fought on one less front.

Before I conclude, I want to return to that night in January 2007, when the war-weary commander-in-chief of a war-weary military addressed a war-weary nation to announce an escalation of U.S. forces in Iraq.

Most Democrats predictably voiced their opposition to this ultimately successful change in strategy, even those who had called for deployment of more troops to stabilize Iraq. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, a lawyer who had spent much of his professional life as a member of Congress but never served in the military, delivered his party's official response to the president's speech. I can remember watching both speeches, and it was obvious that Durbin had not changed/altered his prepared remarks after hearing what President Bush actually said. The Illinois Democrat predictibaly asserted that "the president's plan moves the American commitment in Iraq in the wrong direction."

He said that it was "time for the Iraqis to stand and defend their own nation," adding:

The government of Iraq must now prove that it will make the hard political decisions which will bring an end to this bloody civil war, disband the militias and death squads, create an environment of safety and opportunity for every Iraqi, and begin to restore the basics of electricity and water and health care that define the quality of life.

No word from Durbin or other Democrats on how they intended to facilitate the Iraqis in doing this, nor did the No. 2 Democrat in the U.S. Senate explain why it was not our duty to help the Iraqi government out.

That same night, Durbin's fellow U.S. Sen. from Illinois said:

I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.

So confident was Barack Obama in his position that he sponsored a bill that would have prevented the deployment of any more troops to Iraq and initiated a "phased redeployment" beginning on May 1, 2007, with a goal of total redeployment of combat forces by March 31, 2008. The bill died in committee.

In the months that followed, as it became increasingly clear that the surge was having the desired effect, many on the Left stubbornly insisted that it was not working. Realizing that they were losing credibility on this issue, Democrats trotted out more respectable figures to recite their talking points. In September, after President Bush delivered another address to the country, this time speaking on the progress that had been made in Iraq and the work left to be done, Sen. John Reed (D-RI), a Vietnam veteran and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, followed him with a response that was long on politics and short on substance. He actually had the gall to declare that "too often, the President’s Iraq policies have worsened America’s security," without providing anything--anything at all--to support such a ridiculous claim. (Then-Senator Obama also offerred up his keen foreign policy insight, but his remarks from that night have curiously been scrubbed from his web site.) As I read over the transcript of Reed's speech today, one line stood out to me: "An endless and unlimited military presence in Iraq is not an option." Such a statement could have easily been dismissed as absurd at the time by pointing out our permanent military presence in Germany and South Korea, where no serious person would argue our troops are in constant danger, but it seems even more inane now that we've withdrawn all our forces from Iraq, just a little more than four years later.

Despite the Democrats' efforts to make foreign policy heavyweights like Reed the unofficial spokesmen for their opposition to victory in Iraq, they couldn't stop some of their more loquacious gadflies from voicing their considered opinions on the subject. In a November 11 appearance on Meet the Press, Obama, now in full campaign mode, said very clearly, “not only have we not seen improvements, but we're actually worsening, potentially, a situation there.”

What I did find amusing was the visible split that developed between Democrats who began to grudgingly acknowledge the success of the Surge and those who continued to stick to their guns. In a debate at St. Anselm College on January 5, 2008, Obama claimed that he “had no doubt ... that given how wonderfully our troops perform, if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in the violence.” Apparently, he even said as much "at the time when [he] opposed the surge."

Someone must have brought him back in line, however, because later that month, after President Bush delivered his final State of the Union address, his would-be successor was quoted as saying, “Tonight we heard President Bush say that the Surge in Iraq is working, when we know that's just not true.” In time, he would come to acknowledge that the counterinsurgency strategy in the Iraq war had been a success, if only by proxy.

I wouldn't have taken such pains to revisit George W. Bush's immense political courage in calling for the Surge and defending it against relentless criticism and attacks that bordered on treason if it weren't for the atrocious behavior of so many on the Left who insist on showering the current president with praise and exaltation while giving no credit where credit is due, viz., Obama's predecessor.

To his credit, President Obama has not overtly claimed credit for bringing Operation Enduring Freedom to a peaceful conclusion, nor should he. However, his surrogates in the media have not been so discrete. In an interview with Mike Huckabee set to air as part of the former Arkansas governor's FOX News show this weekend, Democratic apparatchik Jehmu Greene told the former presidential candidate, "As--you know--he said that he was going to end the War, and as a president, he has. ... I have a question for you, Governor. Given that he has, like, lived up to every single promise he made with Iraq, is he not the greatest commander-in-chief in modern history of presidents, not just the 21st Century, but the 20th Century?" (The audience rightly booed her, and Huckabee politely reminded her that Obama "inherited a War that had turned because of a surge that he opposed.")

Perhaps Ms. Greene was just being provocative, but I doubt the same could be said of Vice President Bident when he told CNN’s Larry King last year that Iraq "could be one of the great achievements of this administration." I suppose that getting elected and taking office after someone else has done the heavy lifting and taken all the political flak necessary to bring about a victory in Iraq is an "achievement" per se, but I doubt that's what Biden was referring to. (I might also be willing to cut the VP a little slack had he not said in 2007, “This whole notion that the surge is working is fantasy.")

The unwarranted adulation of Obama/slights to Bush is not limited to Iraq. After Navy SEAL Team Six iced Osama bin Laden in Pakistan without losing any of their own, President Obama had the decency to call his predecessor before going on national TV to announce what was a historic moment. George W. Bush, in turn, graciously refrained from rushing to claim credit or even speaking publicly on the demise of the Earth's most loathsome creature, save for acknowledging what a great thing it was for America and the World to be rid of him. Unfortunately, the Left did not follow suit. I could list examples of anti-Bush Obamapologists dissing the former commander-in-chief while exalting their messiah for smiting bin Laden, but the media was so replete with such behavior seven months ago that I don't frankly see the need to. Conjure up your own memories to supplement this commentary: I'll acknowledge that President Obama had a decision to make when he received actionable intelligence as to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. He had options, and the course of action he chose was the best one. I don't even object to people giving him some credit for finding and killing Osama bin Laden. What I take umbrage at is giving him more credit than former President Bush. Remember, all the intelligence that enabled the CIA to ascertain the location of Osama bin Laden was collected during the Bush administration. The Obama administration and the U.S. Navy used the tools provided by the Bush administration to carry out this ultimately successful mission. Is that so hard to admit?

For some people, it is, but I digress. The "War in Iraq" (a term I never liked, as I didn't see our operations in Iraq as a separate war) is over. We won. Those brave men and women who were fortunate enough to make it home alive are not only heroes; they are victors. Millions of people--not just here and in Iraq, but across the globe--are better off because of them and their fellow soldiers who our allies sent over to fight alongside them. As we revel in this tremendous victory, the forgotten cries of defeatism from the not-too-distant past echo in the distance:

"Victory is no longer an option in Iraq, if it ever was."

--Editorial in the New York Times, March 29, 2007

"I believe ... that this war is lost, and that the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday."

--Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, April 19, 2007

"The reality is [that] despite heroic efforts by U.S. troops, the Bush surge is not working."

--Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), September 7, 2007

“We are sending our troops where they’re not wanted, with no end in sight, into the middle of a civil war, into the middle of the mother of all mistakes.”

--Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), September 11, 2007

"Tonight, ... the President failed to provide either a plan to successfully end the war or a convincing rationale to continue it."

--Sen. John "Jack" Reed (D-RI), September 12, 2007

"We are going in the wrong direction in Iraq."

--Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), February 7, 2008

Are they the least bit happy now? Will they ever be?

Not Your Typical Saturday

2011-12-10T20:22:00.001-08:00

This was an emotionally draining day.

This afternoon we laid my grandmother to rest. She went to be with Jesus last Sunday, and I traveled to Arlington yesterday for the visitation and funeral. My mother wanted me to speak at the service. A series of her friends and relatives spoke; I opened and closed. It was my first formal eulogy. I was very pleased with the turnout; that little chapel was packed. It was also the first time I was a pallbearer. After the service, we held a reception at this nice place in southwest Arlington called the Ventana Grille. Nearly all of the relatives who came to the funeral showed up, which really meant a lot, especially since some of them had to drive all the way back to Houston that evening. I myself had to drive back to Waco, where I learned that Robert Griffin III had won the Heisman Trophy. Now that was exciting. No Baylor footballer had ever won the Heisman before. Naturally, I and the rest of the Baylor Nation were very excited.

There's a tie-in here: my maternal grandfather and his brother attended Baylor back in the '40s. I didn't learn this until I had started college, but I think that my grandparents came down here while I was an undergrad. I was glad to have the chance to walk around the campus with my grandfather, especially since after he succumbed to Alzheimer's disease and died in 2008. His deterioration and death were a terrible blow to my Grammy, who was already dealing with serious health problems of her own. They had been married for over 55 years. She was never the same after Papa died. That was three and a half years ago. Now they are together again.

It's always appropriate to grieve after the loss of a loved one, but in the case of both my maternal grandparents, the worst tragedy was watching them decline and not being able to do anything about it. While I mourn the loss of my Grammy, we are all happy that she has been reborn and will spend eternity with her sweetheart in the kingdom of God.

Gingrich Gains in Polls, While Romney Gains Endorsements

2011-12-06T21:38:00.000-08:00

I spent three days working on this post before discovering Care2 (a web site I had never heard of before) reporter Robin Marty had scooped me. Think that would cause me to scrap an entire blog post? Not hardly. See, Marty's piece focused on newspaper endorsements, but I've noticed that Romney has been racking up a significant number of endorsements from several high-profile figures in the GOP. No, not Dan Quayle, but that's a good one to have too.

Let's start with the site of the first-in-the-nation primary, New Hampshire. While Newt may have the backing of the state's leading newspaper, Romney has the state's newest political star in his corner. Last month he trotted out the endorsement of Kelly Ayotte, the freshman U.S. Senator and former state attorney general who gained national renown in conservative circles after successfully defending her state's restrictions on abortion before the U.S. Supreme Court five years ago. At 43, Ayotte has plenty of time to make a lasting name for herself in Congress, and her support may provide Romney with a liason to TEA Partiers who have so far been cool to him.

In another early primary state, Florida, Romney can now boast the support of three prominent Latino Republican lawmakers: Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (the first Cuban-American elected to Congress), Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and Mario's brother, former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart. All three hail from Havana and should prove invaluable to Romney as he courts Florida voters. The candidate also has the backing of former Florida Senator, RNC Chairman and H.U.D. Secretary Mel Martinez, who chairs his campaign’s National Advisory Council. Of course, the state's most popular pols–U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush–have yet to make their choices known this cycle.

Even if endorsements don't sway many votes, they're still immensely helpful for two other purposes: organization and fundraising. Few will dispute that both of these are areas in which Romney has the advantage over the latest frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Speaking of which, there's no denying Newt's surge in the polls. Two months ago, he was at 9.2% in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, fourth behind Romney, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. Now he's at 31%, higher than any of his primary rivals at their peak (except Rick Perry, who spiked at 31.8% in the RCP average the second week of September). He also currently leads by double digits in Iowa, South Carolina, Florida and a host of other primary states. Will his leads hold up? I'm willing to take bets, but doing so would violate my parole. Good night, everybody!

The Case for RG3

2011-12-05T18:41:00.000-08:00

The five finalists for the 2011 Heisman Trophy were announced Monday. Not surprisingly, Baylor’s junior QB Robert Griffin III was among those selected.

It would certainly be a coup for my alma mater, whose football team has slowly gained national renown in recent years, after nearly a decade of ridicule, scorn and derision from other schools who questioned why we were still in the Big 12. Under the leadership of Coach Art Briles, the Bears have risen from a 3-9 team that lost every conference game in 2007 (the year before Briles took over) to a 9-3 team that is now headed to its second consecutive bowl game. (Yes, it's the Alamo Bowl, but still.) After Baylor's 48-24 rout of Texas on Saturday night, the characteristically humble and down-to-earth star of our football team told ESPN's Samantha Steele, “I could be wrong, but I think Baylor won its first Heisman tonight.”

Griffin was right: He could be wrong. I'll leave it to more learned sprots analysts to speculate on each finalist's odds of winning the trophy. Right now I just want to offer an argument why Griffin is the best choice of the five.

I'll start with the only other QB in the running. No doubt Andrew Luck is an impressive player. Anyone who's seen him in action should acknowledge that. I'm not going to try and compare the finesse displayed by him and RG3 on the field this season; you would need to see them perform to get the full picture. So let's compare their stats. Luck has passed for 3,170 yards and 35 touchdowns while completing 70% of his attempts this season.

Pretty good stuff. RG3, however, finished the regular season with 3,998 passing yards, 36 touchdowns and a 72.4% completion rate. He was intercepted six times to Luck's nine, and, while Luck ranks fifth nationally in passing efficiency, Griffin leads the nation in passing efficiency. He has also rushed for 644 yards and nine touchdowns. By almost every measure, Griffin has outperformed Luck on the field this year.

As to the two running backs still in contention, Trent Richardson of Alabama and Montee Ball of Wisconsin, I won't endeavor to declare one of them superior to the other; I'll only say that neither deserves the Heisman as much as RG3. Statistically, Ball has a more impressive record than Richardson this year: He leads the nation in rushing yards (1,759) and touchdowns (32 Rushing, 6 Receiving). Unfortunately, I'm out of time and have other things to do. Let's just say the Honey Badger is amazing, and it would be interesting for a cb to win a trophy that usually goes to offensive stars, but it's just not his time yet. I'll probably update this post later in the week.

Seven Polls Mitt Romney Ought to Trumpet

2011-11-29T19:29:00.000-08:00

As Mitt Romney tries to fend off a surging Newt Gingrich, he may want to step up his electability pitch to Republican primary voters, and there are plenty of poll numbers out in recent weeks that can help him do that.
Earlier this month, there was much ballyhoo about a McClatchy/Marist survey that showed Obama beating Romney in a head-to-head match-up, 48 to 44 percent. The same poll gave the president just a two-point edge on Gingrich, whom he led 47%-45%. This appears to be an outlier, however: that same day, a FOX News poll was released that showed the president losing to Romney, 42 to 44 percent, while beating Gingrich, 46 to 41 percent. Pew Research, meanwhile, came out with its latest numbers showing Obama routing Gingrich, 54 to 42 percent, but just barely edging Romney, 49%-47%.
Want more? Okay, Quinnipiac University has the Mormon & the moron statistically tied, with the latter holding a 45%-44% lead. The same survey had Gingrich trailing Obama by 9. A CNN/Opinion Research poll finds Romney trouncing the prez, 51% to 47%, while Gingrich loses to him by an even wider margin (53% to 45%).
These are all national polls, of course, and as we all know, it’s the electoral vote that counts. But the polling in individual states makes Romney look even better. Take New Hampshire, for example. Polls have consistently shown Romney beating Obama in the Granite State, but what’s really jarring is how poorly Newt is performing there. One survey has him trailing Obama by 12 percentage points. In Romney's native Michigan, the former Massachusetts governor tops Obama 46%-41%, while Gingrich trails him by the same margin, 45%-40%, according to a Detroit Free Press poll conducted by Lansing-based EPIC-MRA. Rasmussen finds Romney ahead of Obama in Florida, 46%-42%, while Gingrich loses to him, 45 to 43 percent. Perhaps the numbers most worth taking a look at come from Public Policy Polling. (Yes, that’s James Carville’s outfit, but get a load of this.) PPP has Obama and Romney dead even in Pennsylvania, a state Republicans haven’t won in a presidential election since 1988. Each takes 45% of the vote, but in a head-to-head matchup with Gingrich, Obama bests him, 49 to 43 percent. Even more alarming are the results from Arizona, where Romney holds a healthy 7-point lead over the president, but where Gingrich is tied with him at 45%. This is big, folks; only one GOP presidential candidate in the last 60 years has lost Arizona, and while it would be easy to dismiss this poll as a fluke, all of these results taken together should give us all pause.

Did a Blow to the Head Knock RG3 Out...of Contention for the Heisman Trophy?

2011-11-28T16:25:00.000-08:00

My fellow Baylor Bears and I were privy to another exciting game this weekend (actually three, but I'm talking football here). Our 66-42 rout of Texas Tech was significant for many reasons. For one, it capped the Red Raiders' first losing season since 1992, and we knocked them out of Bowl contention. Probably the most exciting play of the game came late in the third quarter, when Joe Williams, our stocky, 5'10" sophomore cornerback, picked off Tech QB Seth Doege and ran the ball back 90 yards for Baylor’s seventh touchdown of the game.
What the Texas Farm Bureau Insurance Shootout (which apparently is what this game was called) will probably most be remembered for is Robert Griffin III's head injury and subsequent absence from the second half. As Stephen Hawkins of the AP put it:

Griffin had scrambled from one side of the field to the other and slid inside the 5 with a first down when defensive back Cornelius Douglas came in hard with an elbow that knocked Griffin’s head back to the turf. The quarterback remained flat on his back for a couple of moments before coming out of the game for a play. He then returned for his second touchdown run to make it 31-21.

What's missing from Hawkins's summary but probably obvious to anyone familiar with the rules of the game is that Douglas's blow was a late (and ergo illegal) hit. Had this occurred in the NFL, he would've been fined and probably ejected from the game. Instead, his team was penalized, and he was allowed to play the rest of the game.

In fairness, it's not clear whether Douglas intended to hit RG3. Often times, these guys already have their bodies or body parts in motion when the clock stops. The bigger story may be the stellar performance of backup Baylor QB Nick Florence, who was 9 of 12 for 151 yards, including a pair of long touchdowns. Here on the Baylor campus, however, there's much chatter about how this might effect Griffin's Heisman chances.
Last week, after his record-shatterring performance in Baylor's unprecedented defeat of OU, RG3 was the talk of the town. Y! Sports' Eddie George and Pat Forde both listed him as their No. 1 pick to win the Heisman Trophy. I even joined in the media hype. Now, people are wondering if he'll even play in our season finale vs. Texas. He insists he will, but I'm getting tired and would like to wrap up this post. Good night.

Republicans Should Call the President's Bluff

2011-11-25T14:08:00.000-08:00

Recently, the president has reprised his half-hearted call for Congress to extend the payroll tax cut enacted as part of the fiscal compromise passed last December. You may recall that the president had billed this temporary reduction in the FICA tax (to 4.2% from 6.2%) as a "payroll tax holiday" from the moment he signed it into law. There is no record of anyone who authored/sponsored the legislation in Congress intended this to be a permanent tax cut. This makes the president's call for Congress to extend the lower rate, lest they allow a tax increase to happen, disingenuous at best.

Congressional Republicans should not take the bait and engage President Obama in a serious debate, something the president has demonstrated no interest in having. Rather, they ought to pass a bill extending the payroll tax holiday for one year and also reducing spending by some significant amount (I'm talking hundreds of billions of dollars below the baseline.) during the same time period. That way, if the Democrat-controlled Senate balks and votes down the package, the GOP can legitimately blame the Democrats for the eventual reversion of the FICA tax rate to its pre-2011 level come January. If the Dems try to play games and pass legislation extending the current rate but with no spending cuts, then the House should simply take that bill, add a bunch of spending cuts to it, pass the amended bill, and then it would go to a Conference committee, by which time Congress will have already adjourned for its Christmas/New Year's recess. Obama will once again come off as a weak and feckless leader, something Republican candidates hoping to take him on next year should be sure to capitalize on just in time for primary season.

Not a Good Day to be an Oklahoman

2011-11-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

If you follow NCAA Football, then you should be aware that yesterday was full of upsets. Oklahoma's two largest universities were on the losing end of two of them. Oklahoma State, ranked 2nd in the nation, was handed its first loss of the season by unranked Iowa State. More importantly, No. 5 Oklahoma rolled into Waco prepared to take on my beloved No. 22 Baylor Bears. Baylor had played OU 20 times prior to last night and lost every time. I can recall one particularly memorable game that went into double overtime back in 2005. I was a freshman at the time; the game was played in Norman, and it wasn't even supposed to be close. Now we have beaten the Sooners. Our mercurial WR Terrence Williams caught a touchdown pass from RG3 (Robert Griffin III, for those of you unfamiliar with the next Heisman Trophy winner) with eight seconds remaining in the fourth quarter. As if that weren't awesome enough, WR Trey Franks (a Texas native) fumbled the ball on the ensuing kickoff. His Baylor counterpart, WR Clay Fuller, recovered the fumble to avoid another OT showdown agaisnt the Sooners. Could there be a more exciting finish to game that got off to such a slow, error-riddled start?

As to the other upset in the Big 12 this weekend, I didn't watch the OSU-ISU game, but there is something I want to share that ties in with it. My paternal grandmother (who appeared in one of my first YouTube videos ever) went to OSU back when it was Oklahoma A & M. She's a big Cowboys fan. She called me repeatedly last night. (Unbeknownst to her, I was at a social event known as "Law Prom" and couldn't be disturbed.) When she finally got ahold of me this morning, she was still excited. She didn't even care about her alma mater's bruising loss. Perhaps there's some lesson in there for disheartened sooners/Cowboys fans. I'm not sure what it is, but maybe other OSU alums can take some solace in their teams 10-1 record and look forward to their upcoming showdown with the team we just sent crying back to Norman.

I Don't Understand What Happened to This Post.

2011-11-17T13:58:00.000-08:00

GOP's 2012 Motley Crew Dwarfs Dems' '08 Lineup

2011-11-02T20:03:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that a lot of prospective Republican primary voters were initially cool to the field of candidates seeking the party's 2012 presidential nod. This was evident not only in the large chunk of "undecided" voters in poll after poll but also the constant turnover at the top of the field. Now, more and more voters appear to be settling on a candidate, if only tentatively. My personal favorite, Jon Huntsman, Jr., won't win the nomination, but that won't stop me from trying to wrangle a date with one of his daughters. (For the record, Huntsman was my first choice before he even entered the fray.) If I had to make a prediction, then obviously Mitt Romney is the heavy favorite to win the nomination; Newt Gingrich probably has the second-best chance. What I never really understood, though, is why so many people kept saying the GOP had a weak field of candidates. I'm not sure what that assessment was based on.

In 2008, the Republicans had an embarrassment of riches when it came to our choice of candidates; there was "America's Mayor," Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, who rescued the 2002 Winter Olympics and accomplished more than any Democrat ever had in the way of health care reform, and the eventual nominee, John McCain, who in addition to being a solid conservative with an incomparable record of legislative achievement, is truly one of our greatest living heroes. The Democrats, on the other hand, had an embarrassment, but that didn't stop their incredibly flawed nominee from winning the presidency. (Obama's victory was even more impressive when you consider that he wasn't even the strongest contender in a weak field.) The 2008 Democratic primary campaign was notable in many regards, not least for producing perhaps the most monolithic top tier of primary contenders in either party in recent memory. Think of it: three U.S. Senators, all of them lawyers, none with any real leadership experience, and two of whom had never held public office prior to being elected to the U.S. Senate. This is not to say that Senators or lawyers do not make good commanders-in-chief--J.F.K. and Richard Nixon were both better-than-average presidents--but America could do a lot better than the three tools who led the Democratic field in '08, so you can understand my reaction to Jonathan Capehart's latest column, in which he described the current GOP campaign as "a mystifying mosh pit of unsatisfying characters." That actually wasn't so objectionable, but then he went on to declare, "Four years ago, Democrats ... had an impressive field of candidates to choose from." He added, "The Republican race for the nomination is the exact opposite." I knew I had to call him out on that.

Before I tear Capehart apart (for the second time this month), I should mention that I actually agree with a lot of what he wrote about the Republican race for the nomination this time around. Witness:

Terrible debate performances aided in knocking Perry from the top spot. But his attempts to reclaim the magic of August, when he entered the race, have been shameful. He dabbled in birtherism and then disavowed it. His dance with insanity stomped all the announcement of his flat-tax announcement, which was meant to relaunch him and his campaign. Hints from Perry’s campaign that the Texas governor might skip future debates were lame. Then Perry unintentionally did his best Charlie
Sheen imitation at an event in New Hampshire on Friday.
And yet he sits atop a stockpile of campaign cash that he is already deploying in the form of television ads in Iowa.
If Republicans follow their tradition of giving the nomination to the fella who was rejected the last time around, then Romney's a shoo-in. Unfortunately for him, he has to watch the GOP electorate romance everyone but him — Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio . . . did I leave anyone out? — before his entreaties are accepted.
The open flirtation with anyone but Romney must be galling to the successful former Massachusetts governor. And yet he keeps giving primary voters reasons to distrust him.

That's where Capehart stopped being reasonable--and I stopped agreeing with him. He contuines:

Romney has been all over the map on abortion, gay rights and health care. But he has now added flip-flopping stances on climate change and Ohio’s law restricting collective bargaining to the roster.

First off, Romney never flip-flopped on the aforementioned Ohio law (as I prove here). Second,s hi supposed "flip-flop" on "climate change" apparently consisted solely of a recent statement the candidate made in a speech at the Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh, viz., "My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet." (Romney had previously expressed an unequivocal belief "that climate change is occurring and "that human activity is a contributing factor.") Personally, I don't consider that a flip-flop. If you believe something but aren't sure of it, then you don't "know" anything. Also, Romney said "we" in the Pittsburgh speech, whereas his earlier comments clearly expressed his personal view. These may seem like semantics, but if this is what the trolls on the Left are going to characterize as "flip-flopping", then they can't fairly accuse me of nit-picking.

As for Romney's alleged stance-shifting on other issues, I also disagree that he's "been all over the map". He changed his mind on the abortion issue. Lots of people do (including yours truly). There's no getting around that, but it shouldn't be a politcial negative. (Voters didn't seem to have as big a problem with Ronald Reagan and George Bush's similar conversions on the issue.) As for gay rights, I think it's a matter of opinion as to whether or not Romney's been "all over the map" on that. In the first place, it depends on what you consider "gay rights." In my view, because no one has the right to marry someone of the same sex, being opposed to same-sex marriage is not an anti-gay rights position, and it certainly isn't "anti-gay." Other than his firm opposition to same-sex marriage, I'm not sure what else Mitt Romney's detractors claim evince a flip-flop from his avowed support for gay rights. As for health care, what?!? "Romney has been all over the map on health care."? Really, Jon? Have you not noticed that Romney's single biggest political liability in his quest for the Republican nomination is the health care reform law he crafted, championed and signed into law as governor? Have you really not noticed that, despite repeated entreaties from conservatives, he has consistently refused to disavow it? In fact, he has defended it relentlessly. You're crazy, Jon, or you're just stupid. (Perhaps both.)

If it seems like I got off on a tangent in the previous few paragraphs, then it's because I felt the need to delve into this absurd "flip-flopping" charge that has dogged the on-again/off-again GOP frontrunner because it provides an excellent example of how uttelry nonsensical much of the criticism of the 2012 GOP presidential field has been. The absence of Chris Christie, Paul Ryan and Mitch Daniels is palpable, for sure, but we've still got an illustrious cast of characters that towers above the train of fools the Dems had to pick from in '08. I've already sung the praises of Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, so let's take a look at some of the others:

In addition to having the most impressive record of any Speaker of the House in the past half-century, Newt Gingrich has that rare (and, in politicans, almost non-existent) quality of brilliance restrained by humility. He is so smart that, unlike many people with a comparable intellect, he knows how to speak so as not to pander to people without also sounding like a pompous ass. (Paul Ryan is the only other modern-day politician I can think of who has demonstrated this highly impressive talent.)

When Americans look at and listen to Herman Cain, they see/hear a man truly worthy of making history as our country's first black president. Unlike Obama, who embodies virtually everything people say they hate about politicians, Cain has never held elected office. Unlike Obama, he has run several businesses and served his country in the United States Navy (as a ballistics specialist, no less). True, both Cain and Obama deal in sound bites, and at times both are guilty of inappropriate flippance. Nevertheless, Cain's improbable path to the presidency (if only theoretical) is a far more compelling story than that of a "community organizer" who grew up in a tropical paradise, went to the best schools and seemed to put his law degree to the use of everything but the practice of law.

Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are both men of firm convictions. I vehemently disagree with each of them on some things; on others I think each man is 100% right. Both men can bost achievements that the current president cannot. Santorum worked hard as a legislator and managed to get a significant number of bills passed, most notably the Personal Responsibility & Work Opportunity Act (better known as the landmark Welfare Reform Act) of 1996. Paul has attracted a passionate throng of supporters who, in contrast to the legions of Obamaniacs out there, can actually explain what their candidate stands for and believes in.

Since I've previously criticized Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, I won't try to now tout them as first-rate candidates, though I'll reiterate my position that either of them would make a better president than Barack Obama, as would Gary Johnson or Buddy Roemer. Hopefully, though, my point is well-taken that the GOP's options for 2012 are much, much better than the Democrats' choices in 2008.

The Right-Wing Genius in Washington, D.C.

2011-10-27T04:55:00.000-07:00

The GOP Calls Buffett's Bluff!

2011-10-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

Republicans Unveil Their ‘Buffett Rule’ Allowing Americans To Pay More To Uncle Sam Fox News

GOP's Special Election Momentum Halted in W. Va.

2011-10-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

Brad Davis/Associated Press

After sufferring a double defeat in two special elections last month, Democrats were reeling at the prospect of being on the losing end of another huge special election upset. In West Virginia, a state so weird that it holds a special election for governor (1) in October and (2) to fill a seat that will be up for election again next November, even though the lieutenant governor has already succeeded to the office, the Dems were in panic mode once again after watching their candidate's double-digit lead disappear over the past few weeks. So naturally, political hangers-on in both parties were on pins and needles in advance of the first (and only close) gubernatorial race of 2011. As the returns rolled in last night, Democrats could breathe a sigh of relief once it became clear that Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) held an insurmountable lead over his Republican opponent, businessman Bill Maloney. With 96 percent of precincts reporting, Tomblin had 50% of the vote compared to Maloney's 47%.

Low voter turnout may have helped Tomblin. It appears that less than 400,000 people voted in this election. By comparison, 530,000 West Virginians cast ballots in last year's special election to finish out the term of the late U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd (D), and over 700,000 went to the polls to vote in the last presidential election. What is clear, though, is that Democrats now have broken the GOP's special election winning streak with a victory in big statewide race. Republicans, meanwhile, should be proud that they made a close race out of something that really shouldn't have been and probably weakened Tomblin for next year's election, when he will likely run for a full term.

A Tale of Two Executions

2011-09-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

Two men were executed yesterday. (Maybe more people were; this article won't discuss them.) You probably heard about one of them, a man named Troy Anthony Davis. In 1991, Davis was convicted of killing Savannah Police officer Mark MacPhail, who was moonlighting as a security guard at the time. According to the testimony of multiple witnesses, Davis pistol-whipped a homeless man in a Burger King parking lot and then shot MacPhail when he tried to break up the fight. As MacPhail laid bleeding to death in the parking lot, Davis reportedly walked over to him and shot him several more times before fleeing the scene. (One witness even testified that Davis "had a little smile on his face" when he shot MacPhail.) A Chatham County jury convicted Davis of murder, obstruction of a law enforcement officer, two counts of aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. He was sentenced to death for the murder.

Davis had become a cause célèbre in recent years, and not just on the Left. True, most of Davis's high-profile supporters were well-known liberals opposed to capital punishment, including Rev. Al Sharpton and his cohort Rev. Jesse Jackson, former Pres. Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and some guy named Mike Farrell. Even the Pope personally appealed to the Governor of Georgia for clemency. But several well-known death penalty proponents–most notably former Congressman Bob Barr, former federal judge and FBI Director Bill Sessions, and former Texas Gov. Mark White–also joined the fray. (Sessions and White hold special clout with yours truly because both are Baylor lawyers who also earned their undergraduate degrees from the University.)

Speaking of Texas, I want to talk a bit about the other execution I referenced in the opening line of this column. Remember James Byrd, Jr., that black man who was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death in Jasper, Texas, back in 1998? Ever wonder what happened to the three men who were arrested, indicted and tried for Byrd's murder? Well, all three were convicted of capital murder. (Byrd's murder took place in the course of a kidnapping, making it a capital offense under the Texas Penal Code.) Two were sentenced to death. One of them, a white supremacist named Lawrence Russell Brewer, was executed by lethal injection last night in Huntsville. Did you hear about that?

I wanted to bring up these two executions for a number of reasons, but mostly because it presented the opportunity to do a small compare-and-contrast piece that touches on a slew of intriguing issues: capital punishment, due process, the writ of habeas corpus and, of course, race. That's right, race. Let me ask you something: if I were to say, about one of the aforementioned cases, “Race is everything in this case,” then which case would you guess I was referring to? The obvious answer would be the grisly killing of James Byrd, which few would argue was racially motivated. Yet a few years ago, Georgia Congressman and former civil rights activist John Lewis uttered those exact words in reference to the Davis case. The editors of the Nation (an actual magazine, I'm told) were even less subtle: "Davis is a black man convicted of killing a white police officer," they declared in a piece that will appear in the next issue, "and in Southern and Northern states alike, this fact alone will trump all others."

Never mind that seven of the twelve jurors who convicted Troy Davis and sentenced him to die were black, or that most of the eyewitnesses who implicated him in the shooting death of Officer MacPhail were black. Nope, it must be racism! Okay, okay, I'm being a tad facetious. No serious, intelligent person believes Davis was executed because of his race. Indeed, race was curiously absent from the arguments made on Davis's behalf by Reverends Sharpton and Jackson, two notorious race hustlers. Their appeal, like those made by most of Davis's high-profile advocates, centered on "serious doubts" about his guilt/innocence.

One line frequently repeated by Davis's supporters was that seven of the nine witnesses against him had recanted. That's misleading, to put it mildly. First of all, as Ann Coulter points out, "the state presented 34 witnesses against Davis -- not nine -- which should give you some idea of how punctilious the media are about their facts in death penalty cases." What's more, I don't know that seven of the witnesses against Davis actually recanted; some have merely rehashed doubts and second thoughts they had already voiced on the stand at Davis's trial 20 years ago. Darrell Collins, for example, signed an affidavit in 2002 saying police pressured him into pointing the finger at Davis. Not only did he make that same assertion on the witness stand, but according to CBS News, the "jury heard Collins back off a statement he'd given to police implicating Davis in the shooting." Another witness, Jeffery Sapp, testified at trial that Davis confessed to him just hours after shooting MacPhail. Years later, Sapp signed an affidavit saying he'd fabricated the entire confession. However, the jury knew that when they rendered their verdict. On direct-examination, Sapp acknowledged he made up part of a prior statement to police when he said Davis told him he shot the officer a second time to make sure he "finished the job." Then, under cross-examination, he admitted that he did not believe Davis when he confessed to shooting the officer. He also testified that his false statements were made for revenge due to a recent feud between him and Mr. Davis.

But wait, it gets better. Ann Coulter reports:

Among the witnesses who did not recant a word of their testimony against Davis were three members of the Air Force, who saw the shooting from their van in the Burger King drive-in lane. The airman who saw events clearly enough to positively identify Davis as the shooter explained on cross-examination, "You don't forget someone that stands over and shoots someone."

There were a couple witnesses who did genuinely recant. During the trial, Dorothy Ferrell had identified Davis as the shooter. At trial, with Davis in the courtroom, she testified that she saw him from across the street and was "real sure, positive sure, that that is him." In December 2000, she signed a handwritten statement saying she was telling police what they wanted to hear because she was on parole for a shoplifting conviction and feared returning to prison. "I don't know which of the guys did the shooting, because I didn't see that part," Ferrell wrote. Larry Young was the man assaulted in the Burger King parking lot. At trial, his testimony was used to establish that his assailant was Mr. Davis and not another man, Sylvester Coles, who Davis's defense had tried to point to as the real shooter. In his recantation affidavit, Young claimed that the police refused to allow him medical treatment and that his testimony was coerced. Like Ms. Ferrell, Mr. Young claims he testified by simply stating what the police wanted him to say.

To understand why these recantations were not enough to get Davis a new trial or at least a stay of execution, you need to know the details of the appeals process in this case. First off, Troy Davis did receive a stay of execution; in fact, he received several. The third was granted by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008. After hearing oral arguments, they rejected Davis's appeal but graciously extended the stay for 30 days to allow Davis the opportunity to file a habeas corpus petition with the U.S. Supreme Court. This is where the case gets really fascinating for legal scholars like me: On August 17, 2009, the Supreme Court of the United States did something it had not done in nearly half a century: it sent a prisoner's petition for a writ of habeas corpus back to the federal District Court "for hearing and determination." To understand the significance of this, witness Justice Antonin Scalia's earnest dissent from the Court's opinion:

Today this Court takes the extraordinary step-one not taken in nearly 50 years-of instructing a district court to adjudicate a state prisoner's petition for an original writ of habeas corpus. The Court proceeds down this path even though every judicial and executive body that has examined petitioner's stale claim of innocence has been unpersuaded, and (to make matters worst) even though it would be impossible for the District Court to grant any relief. Far from demonstrating, as this Court's Rule 20.4(a) requires, “exceptional circumstances” that “warrant the exercise of the Court's discretionary powers,” petitioner's claim is a sure loser. Transferring his petition to the District Court is a confusing exercise that can serve no purpose except to delay the State's execution of its lawful criminal judgment. I respectfully dissent.

In re Davis, 130 S. Ct. 1 (2009) (Scalia, J., dissenting). Justice Stevens addressed his brother's arguments in a concurrence:

Justice SCALIA's dissent is wrong in two respects. First, he assumes as a matter of fact that petitioner Davis is guilty of the murder of Officer MacPhail. He does this even though seven of the State's key witnesses have recanted their trial testimony; several individuals have implicated the State's principal witness as the shooter; and “no court,” state or federal, “has ever conducted a hearing to assess the reliability of the score of [postconviction] affidavits that, if reliable, would satisfy the threshold showing for a truly persuasive demonstration of actual innocence,” 565 F.3d 810, 827 (C.A.11 2009) (Barkett, J., dissenting) (internal quotation marks omitted). The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing. Simply put, the case is sufficiently “exceptional” to warrant utilization of this Court's Rule 20.4(a), 28 U.S.C. § 2241(b), and our original habeas jurisdiction.

Id. (STEVENS, J., concurring). Bottom line: the Court overrode usual limits on death-penalty appeals, granted a stay of execution and ordered a federal court in Georgia to weigh Davis’ evidence of innocence. Left-leaning Washington Post writer Charles Lane provides an excellent account on what happened from there:

Chief Judge William T. Moore of the U.S. District Court in Savannah, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, convened the hearing in June 2010 -- whereupon Davis’ case crumbled. Much of his “new” evidence had already been heard by the original trial jury. Some of his witnesses fared badly on cross-examination, while prosecution testimony stood up.

Davis’ lawyers declined to put two of Davis’ purported recanting witnesses on the stand, though they were available – one even waited outside the courtroom. Judge Moore quite logically found these omissions “suspicious.”

Davis’ lawyers did not call the “real” shooter; nor did Davis, with his life on the line, testify. Perhaps this reflected his experience at trial, where he told his story to the jury, and the jury did not believe it.

In August 2010, Moore issued a 174-page ruling, in which he picked apart Davis’ factual claims one by one, concluding, “The vast majority of the evidence at trial remains intact.”

Nearly 30 years ago, then-Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that the "argument ... that capital punishment is cruel and unusual is dwarfed by the cruelty of ten years on death row inflicted upon [a] guilty defendant by lawyers seeking to turn the administration of justice into the sporting contest that Roscoe Pound denounced three-quarters of a century ago." Troy Davis spent 20 years on death row. He was zealously defended by adept counsel, at trial and on appeal. Finally, after a nauseatingly interminable series of appeals, on March 28 of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously denied Troy Davis’s last petition for writ of habeas corpus.

Before I close this out, there is one more thing about these executions that I wanted to discuss. Despite the atrocious tragedy visited upon them, Byrd's immediate family actually opposed Brewer's execution. Hundreds of people, including Byrd's widow and three children, held a vigil at a church on Tuesday.

Betty Boatner, one of Byrd's sisters, told reporters they were "praying for his family as well as our family, and for the citizens of Jasper." she said her family had "already made peace with it a long time ago."

Byrd's only son, who was in military training when his father was dragged to death, echoed that sentiment.

"Life in prison would have been fine," Ross Byrd, now 32, told Reuters. "I know he can't hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn't what we want."

I cannot find the words to adequately express how moved I am by this family's incredible strength. I believe they are sincere, and I hope that the families of other victims of violent crimes are able to reach out to Byrd's relatives and that for help in coping with their loss and the understandable emotional toll it takes. (It almost made me forget about how a bunch of political hacks exploited this heinous crime in an attack ad featuring Byrd's daughter Renee during the 2000 election.)

Not all of Byrd's relatives opposed the execution, however.

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Adrift in a Sea of Left-Wing Crazy Talk

2011-09-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

Today, I made a stupid mistake. I visited RealClearPolitics.com. It was the first time I had done this in a while, and I'm deeply ashamed of myself. This is not to say I regret it; RealClearPolitics is a great site and an excellent fix for political junkies, newsmongers and dataphiles. (I made that last word up.) Yet, therein lies the biggest problem it poses. If you're like me, then you've visited RCP in the past hoping to find one or two opinion/analysis/editorial pieces on a salient issue and maybe spend 20 to 30 minutes total on the whole endeavor before returning to your work. Sometimes it works out that way, but sometimes you get pulled down a rabbit hole and wind up sifting through site after site, article after article, wasting hours of time that you'll never get back. By the time you're satisfied, all you can do is cut your losses and try to avoid making the same mistake in the future. Such was the case with me on many occasions; I had finally resisted the urge to visit RCP for so long that I thought I could check out the site without falling into the same trap that I had so many times in the past. When I tried to do that earlier today, however, it didn't quite work out that way. One click led to another, and I soon found myself adrift in a sea of left-wing crazy talk.

I decided to write this blog post to call attention to two particularly ridiculous pieces of nonsense by well-respected (in left-wing circles) commentators. The first was a blurb by UC Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. It was entitled “How to create (lousy) jobs.” (Somehow, before I even read the piece, I knew it was about Rick Perry and Texas.) The sub-head read, “Rick Perry has spurred job growth in Texas by driving out unions and effectively lowering wages.” Now, I’m not sure whether Reich wrote that or the site editors at Salon put it in, but it’s just B.S. What’s more, Reich admits in the first paragraph of his article that “governors have as much influence over job growth in their states as roosters do over sunrises.” So, how exactly can Perry be “driving out unions and effectively lowering wages”? Reich doesn’t say. Instead, he rattles off a series of talking points, making specious assertions without offerring any hard-core data to back them up. Then he gets to the crux of his argument: when "governors try hard enough," he says, "they can create lots of lousy jobs. They can drive out unions, attract low-wage immigrants, and turn a blind eye to businesses that fail to protect worker health and safety."

Reich adds:

Rick Perry seems to have done exactly this. While Texas leads the nation in job growth, a majority of Texas's workforce is paid hourly wages rather than salaries. And the median hourly wage there was $11.20, compared to the national median of $12.50 an hour.
First off, if you're not counting benefits, then $11.20 an hour is pretty good money for someone just starting out, especially if you don't have more than a high-school education. Second, Reich neglects to mention that Texas is one of the youngest states in the U.S. (only Utah has a lower median age), which explains our relatively low median wage. In his eagerness to dump on the Lone Star State, Reich neglected to carefully edit his piece and let a positive fact or two slip. For example, he mentions that Texas "has the lowest percentage of workers without health insurance."

Reich then goes off on a tangent, bashing supply-side economics and conservatives in general. The only other part of his post that I want to call attention to is this paragraph:

Besides, how can lower incomes possibly be an answer to America's economic problem? Lower incomes mean less overall demand for goods and services -- which translates into even fewer jobs and even lower wages.
First of all, that's only true if everyone's incomes are lower, meaning total income, and with it, overall demand, is down. However, until recently, household gross income had been growing steadily in the United States. Second, Reich purports to be concerned about American jobs and wages, but while higher incomes translate into more consumption, they don't necessarily translate into more consumption of domestic goods. As a former Secretary of Labor, Reich should have known this.

The second little gem I wanted to critique here was Jonathan Capehart's latest column for the Washington Post. It was entitled, "Obama’s fight — for respect." After listing a series of what he perceives as House Speaker John Boehner's slights at President Obama, Capehart offers this analysis:

When George W. Bush was president, harsh things were said all the time by congressional Democrats and their leaders. Some even crossed the line. Yet, while there was disdain for the man in the Oval Office, respect for the office itself was never in doubt. I seriously worry that it’s in doubt now among some Republicans. Each petty slight by Boehner is one more chip away at respect for the presidency.

First off, to say that some Democrats "crossed the line" with their attacks on George W. Bush is, I think, a supreme understatement. Secondly, WHAT?!? So the intense, hyperbolic vitriol heaped on the last president (not to mention his family, his party and virtually every member of his administration) never evinced a lack of "respect for the office" of president, but earnest, understandable and (in my opinion) legitamite criticism of the current preisdent's policies and behavior does?

Capehart then showed us just how deep his hero worship of BHO runs. According to him, Obama "is bigger than most of us. So the petty slights that get a lot of us riled up probably don’t register to him. He’s a thinker and plotter with his eyes on the prize down the road, not the daily hysteria taking place on the road to get there."

Assuming Capehart is expressing his true feelings and not just trying to be inflammatory or provocative, I think he's kidding himself. Either that or he's incredibly oblivious to the manner in which this president has conducted himself. Ever since he took office, Obama's proven himself to be immature, vindictive and thin-skinned. I'll spare you all a long list of examples, partly because I think any reasonable, detached observer would draw the same conclusion. I contacted Mr. Capehart to see if he could explain his puzzling statements. If he responds, then I will be sure to update this post accordingly.

The Web is replete on any given day with similar examples of left-wing drivel that I could criticize, which is why I try generally to avoid venturing on to any "gateway" site that could lead to the sort of time-consuming endeavor that ate up much of my afternoon and evening today.

Going Postal

2011-09-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

I got a package yesterday. Now, when I say I "got" a package, I don't mean that someone came to my apartment and delivered it to me. I mean that I drove to the Post Office and retrieved it. See, last month I ordered several books online for my courses this fall. I received all but one of them in short order. That one book was finally shipped out on Saturday, August 27, according to the tracking history I pulled up online. it apparently went to a "Fedex Smartpost" in Dallas. From there, it was supposedly shipped to Waco on the morning of August 29th (last Monday). Pretty quick. Trouble is, I didn't know any of this until yesterday when I still hadn't received my package and tried to track it online. (I had previously tried to track it online but couldn't because it had not yet been shipped.) The latest entry on the Tracking History said "Delivery attempted" at 04:05:00 PM on August 29, 2011. There's a couple of problems with that: first, I was home at 4:05 p.m. on Monday afternoon, and I didn't hear anyone knock on my door then. Second, even if they tried to deliver the package to me, why didn't they try to deliver it again or at least contact me to let me know they had my package? Then I noticed that the "ship carrier" was USPS. Suddenly I was not surprised.

A lot of people have plenty of bad things to say about the Post Office, and I don't want to waste my time attacking such an easy target. I never intended to use this blog to vent my frustrations, and I'm not going to start doing that now. What I did find interesting is that the Postal Service has been in the news a lot lately, and it's not good news.

It's no secret that the U.S. Postal Service has turned into a money pit. It's been operating at a loss for several years now. In March, a spokesperson said USPS would cut 7,500 jobs and close seven district offices and 2,000 post offices by March 2012. Then, in July, we learned that as many as 3,700 offices could be on the chopping block. Now comes the news that the Service will default on an upcoming $5.5 billion payment for future employee health-care costs. Earlier today, Postmaster Gen. Patrick Donahoe urged Congress to take swift action to save the 219-year-old agency, saying that "radical changes" will be necessary to stabilize the tightly regulated service.

Some members of Congress are way ahead of him. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who chairs the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, is pushing a plan that would create a commission to recommend office closures, allow for five-day delivery and make other changes.

The real problem, as is so often the case with government, is that the Postal Service has made promises it can't afford to keep. Current union contracts prohibit layoffs. How can anybody run an efficient operation when their employees know they can't be fired?

Remains of the Day: 8/18/2011

2011-08-18T21:59:00.000-07:00

One of my recent YouTube videos has already gotten over 100 views. It's only the second one to reach that mark. What's even more impressive is that, as of the time I am writing this, 35 comments have been posted on it. Some of those were me replying to other comments, but most of them are from people I've never heard from before who somehow found my video. That's pretty cool, I think.

Is it too much to ask that we have one presidential candidate who's charismatic and can really energize a crowd without making a gaffe a day?

Warren Buffett says he should pay more in federal taxes. I wish that I was paying more in federal income taxes, because it would mean that I actually had an income.

I'll start my 7th Quarter of law school (6th as a full-time student) next week. Returning to law school is kind of like making love to your girlfriend for the first time after finding out that she never really had an orgasm all the other times you've been with her.

Because I'm going to be competing in a Moot Court competition this fall, I can't try out for Mock Trial. At least I have a real excuse this time.

As much as I'm looking forward to resuming my regular routine, I am going to miss having my own swimming pool. For me, a swimming pool is kind of like a bathtub (not that I use it as such): I don't like swimming in a pool with other people in it, unless the other people are supermodels or really good friends.

Gene Simmons has endorsed Rick Perry for president. Could this be the KISS of death ... or will Perry rise to it and "shock me" be winning the nomination and getting elected?

A lot of people have posted some really nasty comments on my YouTube videos, but I don't mind. What really hurts is when people I don't know read my blog posts but never comment on them. The whole point of a blog is that it's supposed to be a forum, people!

I don't begrudge President Obama for taking a vacation. Come next November, I hope the voters will send him on a permanent vacation. (By the way, I realize I'm probably not the first person to make that wisecrack, but I deliberately ignored nearly all media today so that I could delude myself into thinking it was an original witticism.)

Are We Now the World's California?

2011-08-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

I'm returning to Waco this week. Next Monday marks the beginning of the fall quarter at Baylor Law School, and needless to say, I won't be blogging nearly as much after then. Right now, I'm visiting my folks in Arlington, and later this week, I'll head back to my apartment.

On Sunday, I was watching 60 Minutes with my parents. Leslie Stahl was doing this segment on American corporations moving their headquarters overseas to avoid paying high U.S. taxes. While we were preparing supper, my Mom asked, rather disdainfully, "Why would anybody want to run a business in the United States?" My immediate answer was, "Good quality of life, I guess." That's when it hit me: the U.S. has become the California of the world.

It's no secret that California has one of the worst business climates in America. Its tax burden is also now on par with infamously high-taxing New York and New Jersey, and it has a lower bond rating than any other state. The Golden State has long believed that it can maintain this hostile atmosphere without discouraging people from living there because of what are known as "exploitable amentity asymmetries," which basically means that people will pay more to live in such a nice place. When you're in close proximity to some of the greatest natural splendor this country has to offer (not to mention the cultural meccas of San Francisco and Los Angeles), shouldn't there be some sort of premium on the cost of living?

For decades, the overwhelming answer was "yes." Ever since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, California has been somewhat of an American "promised land," the last, best hope down-on-their-luck citizens have of finding the American dream. (You could go back even farther to the Comstock Lode and ensuing Gold Rush of the 19th Century.) Recently, though, it's become increasingly apparent that California's zenith may be behind her. I just mentioned its current financial woes, and population trends are reflecting it. For the first time since the 1920s, the Great Bear failed to gain a single congressional district following the U.S. Census, a result of slowing population growth.

Back to the analogy: I remember when Gov. Rick Perry appeared on The Daily Show last year. Eventually, the discussion came around to Texas's relatively pro-business climate and why businesses (and jobs) were migrating from the Midwest and Northeast to the Sun Belt. When Perry rattled off statistics indicating just how big the jobs boom has been in Texas over the past decade, Jon asked hmi, "Why do you think that is?" Perry mentioned our low taxes, "fair and predictable" regulatory climate, "a legal system that's fair and doesn't allow for over-suing," and "accountable" school system that produces skilled workers. This exchange followed:

STEWART: Couldn't you make the same argument, though, in terms of globalization, for companies going to India and China? If you are the pressure-valve release for companies in California, [then] who's t'say, would you criticize Texas companies --

[CROSSTALK]

PERRY: Seriously, you wanna live in India, or you wanna live in Texas?

STEWART: Are you -- For real?

[LAUGHTER/APPLAUSE]

It's an excellent point. The U.S. may not have the most favorable business climate, but we have a better quality of life than any other country. That has been our trump card against the growing number of business-friendly states on the global stage. Years ago, John Stossel did a 20/20 episode in which he visited India and Singapore and compared the ease/difficulty of opening a business in each country. In the latter, it took a few hours, much less than it would in the U.S. (and a lot less than in India). He was even able to set up a booth or something in a mall before the end of the day. Singapore also has no capital-gains tax, but on the other hand, you won't get caned for chewing gum in the United States (not by the government, anyway; I can't speak for all parents and boarding schools).

In this age of globalization, it's important for policymakers in D.C. to remain constantly aware that we are competing with countries all over the world, not just for investment, but for human capital as well. A tax code that, as Leslie Stahl put it, "all but forces companies to keep their money out of the country indefinitely" needs to be reformed. This Congress should act on pending free trade agreements that the past two Congresses have pushed aside. We'll lose out on a small amount of revenue that would have come from tariffs, but it will pale in comparison to the capital that will flow into this country when we expand the market for U.S. goods. It may be too late to save California, but the entire U.S. does not have to suffer the same fate.

The Real Reason Warren Buffett's Taxes are Low - Yahoo! News

2011-08-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

The Real Reason Warren Buffett's Taxes are Low - Yahoo! News

A Question for Maryland (Full Version)

2011-08-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

Right as I was about to save the full version of the (edited) video I uploaded to YouTube on Sunday, an error message popped up telling me that Windows Live Movie Maker would have to shut down. Unfortunately, it did not give me the opportunity to save the project I had just spent hours editing, and it appears that my work was not recovered. Check back later this week; if I have any good luck in retrieving what I lost, then I'll probably still upload the video.

It was only a matter of time ...

2011-08-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

Pawlenty Drops 2012 Presidential Bid - FoxNews.com

My Take on the "Super-Committee" Membership

2011-08-12T03:03:00.000-07:00

In what would have been the big news of the day had nothing else happened, House Minority Leader and ex-Mafia queen Nancy Pelosi announced her appointments yesterday to the super committee that will be tasked with ... you know what? I'm so sick of talking about this, but I promised to critique the committee's prospective membership once all twelve members had been named, so let's get this over with.

REID'S PICKS: THE IDEOLOGUES

Since this is supposed to be a panel on deficit reduction, it's only fair that we look at its prospective members' records on the deficit, and I think Sens. Baucus, Kerry and Murray have proven they could care less about deficit reduction. For the most part, they all supported the largest contributors to our deficit/debt. All three voted for Obamacare, the "stimulus" of '09, the War in Afghanistan and the tax compromise of 2010. Sens. Kerry and Baucus both voted for the War in Iraq. All three opposed Cut, Cap & Balance and The Path to Prosperity. In short, Reid's choices for this committee betray either a lack of seriousness on his part to deal with the deficit or a cynical attempt to stymie any meaningful efforts toward debt reduction. Perhaps both.

BOEHNER'S BOYS: THE FISCAL HAWKS

While I was surprised/dissapointed that Paul Ryan won't be on the commission, I think Speaker Boehner made at least two good choices for the committee: Dave Camp chairs the House Ways & Means Committee and has a vast knowledge of our frustratingly complex tax code. Jeb Hensarling was making small efforts at deficit reduction back when Republicans were spending money like it grew on trees. Both men were members of the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission and voted against that panel's final recommendations. I have to admit, I don't know much about Fred Upton. I was curious as to why he was named Chairman of United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce, considering that he has no background in either field. What you really should know about Upton is that he is a protégé of David Stockman, the former Michigan congressman and OMB Director who, during his time in the Reagan administration, advocated a large federal tax hike to reduce the mounting budget deficit. He resigned in 1985, the year before the deficit peaked and Reagan signed the Tax Reform Act of 1986 into law, which cut the top individual income tax rate from 50% to 28% and eliminated a lot of costly deductions and tax credits. Over the next three years, tax receipts climbed 29%, and the deficit was reduced by 31%. Regrettably, Stockman apparently hasn’t given up his penchant for higher taxes. I can’t say that Upton shares his former boss’s policy views, but it’s certainly worth mentioning here.

McCONNELL'S CHOICES: THE POLICY WONKS

Maybe I shouldn't call Jon Kyl a "policy wonk," but it certainly fits Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Rob Portman (R-OH), both of whom were just elected to the Senate last year. The latter served as U.S. Trade Representative and then as OMB director during President George W. Bush's second term. During his time at OMB, the federal budget deficit fell by 35% in just one year. Toomey is a brilliant man, though I'm not thrilled with his record as president of the Club for Growth, the fiscally conservative 527 group that often does more harm than good by interfering in Republican primaries and damaging the eventual winner.

PELOSI'S PICKS: THE LEFT-WING LACKIES

In picking Reps. Jim Clyburn, Chris Van Hollen and Xavier Becerra (CA) for the joint committe, the ex-Speaker was clearly rewarding some of her most loyal toadies. Clyburn was House Majority Whip, the person tasked with shoring up votes for controversial pieces of legislation, when Democrats were in charge from 2007 to 2011. After the American people made their voices heard in 2010, the Democrats created the new post of "Assistant Democratic Leader" so that they could avoid having to demote Clyburn, the highest-ranking black member of Congress, from a leadership post. Van Hollen, a tenacious pol with a history of saying stupid things, chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2007 to 2011. Becerra, a former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, is currently Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus.

I'd like to add to this column, but I'm very tired. Perhaps I'll write more later. Good night, y'all.

Shoddy Journalism at its ... well, not "Worst," but Pretty Awful

2011-08-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

Get a load of this Reuters article by Kevin Drawbaugh, Richard Cowan, Donna Smith, Thomas Ferraro and Dave Clarke:

Three Senate Democrats -- Max Baucus, John Kerry and Patty Murray -- were named by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday to serve on a 12-member "super committee" being set up to address deficit issues.
Here are facts about the three Democrats, as well as a list of other lawmakers seen by analysts and congressional aides as front-runners for the nine committee slots still to be filled.

I'll stop right there to point out two things: (1) that is the longest by-line I’ve ever seen on a Reuters piece, and (2) when a reporter (or a group of them) purports to offer you "facts" about something, do you really expect that what you're about to read is purely a list of facts? I guess that second thing was actually a question. Anyway, the article describes Max Baucus this way:

A centrist leader known for his ability to work across party lines, Baucus is chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee and has urged tax reform. He was a member of the 2010 Bowles-Simpson deficit commission formed by President Barack Obama. Baucus voted against the final Bowles-Simpson proposals because they would have cut benefits for the elderly and veterans and hurt his largely rural home state of Montana by raising gasoline prices. He fought President George W. Bush's push to privatize Social Security and is a critic of a House Republican plan to privatize Medicare for future retirees.

Okay, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, calling someone a "centrist" is an expression of opinion, not a statement of fact. Also, surely one of the five people it took to write this puff piece was aware that "privatize" is a politically-charged term with a loaded connotation. If they wanted to make it clear that Baucus, like most left-wing partisans, opposed The Path to Prosperity and George W. Bush's plan to reform Social Security by allowing individuals to set up personal savings accounts with a portion of their payroll taxes, then why didn't they just say that? Moving on: Drawbaugh, Cowan, Smith, Ferraro & Clarke stuck to the facts on John Kerry, which is to say they didn't say much about him except that he was the unsuccessful 2004 Democratic presidential candidate and currently chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and serves on the Finance Committee. They also write that Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) "has had an open mind about closing some tax loopholes." Complimentary, to be sure, but again, an opinion. Later on, they said that balancing the budget without raising taxes "a key Republican goal and one that most budget experts say cannot be met without devastating budget cuts." It's technically not an opinion if your stating that somebody else said something or weighed in on an issue, but there's too many relative terms in that sentence. What do the authors consider "raising taxes"? Who qualifies as a budget expert? And "devastating budget cuts" is too ambiguous a phrase to use unless you're directly quoting someone.

The piece really portrayed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican, in a negative light, saying he lived “up to his reputation as an aggressive partisan unlikely to compromise.” Whether or not someone has a reputation and what that reputation is are matters of fact, but any good journalist knows it should be up to the reader(s) to decide whether the person lives up to that reputation. Finally, while not mentioning The Path to Prosperity by name, the article called the brainchild of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan "a plan to slash Medicare costs and benefits." That's misleading if not utterly false (though it is technically a fact). What Ryan's plan actually does is slash costs without cutting benefits. It's one of the few criticisms I have of the Path to Prosperity: the plan makes no changes to Medicare until 2022. If we actually did "slash benefits," then it would be a lot easier to save the program from bankruptcy.

I'll address the prospective members of the joint committee in a future article. For now, I just wanted to express disdain for this lousy piece of drivel that barely qualifies as journalism and express my heartfelt gall that it took five people to write this crap.

WHAT?!?

2011-08-10T12:27:00.000-07:00

One of the key elements of the Budget Control Act of 2011 is the so-called "Super-Congress," a 12-member congressional committee, made up equally of Republicans and Democrats from each chamber, tasked with finding a $1.5 trillion in budget savings on top of the spending reductions already enacted. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi each get to select three members from their respective chambers to serve on the committee. Reid announced his picks yesterday, and Boehner and McConnell came out with their selections earlier today. I'll post a critique of the committee's prospective membership once all twelve individuals have been selected, but today something was revealed that I just had to blog about right away.

Perhaps no one seemed a more obvious choice for one of the three slots to be filled by House Republicans than Rep. Paul Ryan (R–WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee and the principal author of the GOP’S "Path to Prosperity." Many expected Boehner to tap the seven-term Wisconsin lawmaker, and some even called Ryan "a natural choice" to co-chair the joint committee. Yet today, when the Speaker revealed his three appointments for the super committee, Ryan's name was conspicuously absent from the list. Alana Goodman, writing for Commentary, asks:

Why no Paul Ryan? It’s hard to believe he wouldn’t have been one of Boehner’s first choices, so could it be Ryan wasn’t interested in the position?

Goodman offered her own well-developed answer, but she only needed to look at Paul Ryan's official web site to solve the mystery. The congressman released a statement today in which he said that he had asked the Speaker not to consider him for the Joint Committee. His reasoning was that "only the Budget Committee can write legislation to reform the budget process." That’s true, but it's somewhat of a shock that one of the smartest guys on the Hill would not want to participate in an endeavor where his intellect and logical acumen will be sorely needed.

Democrats Fall Short in Wisconsin Recall Effort

2011-08-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

Click here to read Sean Trende's excellent write-up on the results of yesterday's recall elections in Wisconsin.
Dan Cantanese also reported on the story for POLITICO.

Five Left-Wing Myths About the Economy

2011-08-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

The recent debate over the debt ceiling and fiscal issues in general provided ample opportunities for politicians and pundits alike to flood the airwaves/blogosphere/print media with their rhetoric. A few relied on objectively verifiable facts to bolster/support their arguments, but most stuck to their trusty talking points. I thought this would be as good a time as any to list, analyze and debunk some of the most salient (and, when believed, dangerous) falsehoods I've seen/heard propagated repeatedly.

1. The Bush tax cuts are the largest contributor to our deficit/debt.

I'm not sure where this one has its roots or when the Left first started chanting it, but it's demonstrably false. The number I keep hearing cited as the "cost" of the "Bush tax cuts" is $1.6 trillion. Simply put, that was the initial number used by the Bush Administration (!) when it pitched its proposal to a skeptical Congress and the American public. Before I go any further, it's important to recognize that there were actually two rounds of "Bush tax cuts," one enacted in 2001 (EGTRRA) and another in 2003 (JGTRRA). After the first round of tax cuts, which primarily benifitted middle- and lower-income Americans, was enacted in 2001, the CBO issued a report stating that the Economic Growth & Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 ("EGTRRA") would "reduce surpluses by a total of almost $1.4 trillion from 2001 to 2011." (In the same report, it projected that real GDP would grow at average annual rate of 3.2% for 2003 through 2011. Nominal GDP was projected to grow by an average of 5.3% annually during the same period.)

Then came the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, which were quickly followed by a rash of corporate scandals and the federal government's ill-conceived response to them (Sarbanes–Oxley). The combined effects of all these events were a prolonged recession and sluggish recovery. Of course, the CBO had not predicted any of this, so when it issued its Cost Estimate for the Jobs & Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 ("JGTRRA"), many proponents of the new tax law (including yours truly) received it with a few more grains of salt. (To tell you the truth, I didn't even read the damn thing until I sat down to write this article.)

In its May 2003 report, the CBO projected that JGTRRA "would increase deficits by about $350 billion" through Fiscal Year 2013. The bulk of that $350 billion was the anticipated reduction in revenues, but some $39 billion would result from "outlays for refundable tax credits" and something called the "Temporary State Fiscal Relief Fund."

So, what actually ended up happening? Well, the deficit for FY2003 (which we were nearly eight months into when JGTRRA was enacted) came in at $377.6 billion. It peaked the following year at $412.7 billion, then started to come down. This is where the argument that the Bush tax cuts created huge deficits and added over a trillion dollars to our National Debt starts to break down. We all know that Congress and the president spent like drunken sailors during the last decade, and yet the deficit dropped sharply (from $412.7 billion for FY2004 to $160.7 billion in 2007, a 61% reduction in just three years). The manifest explanation is that revenues increased at a faster-than-expected rate. As I explain here, total budget receipts shot up 44% (from a low of $1.78 trillion in 2003 to nearly $2.6 trillion in 2007) after the second round of tax cuts. By comparison, total receipts under the old tax rate structure maxed out at $2.03 trillion in 2000, then plummeted because of the recession.

It's impossible to know what would have happened had the tax code gone unchanged, but it's clear that the original "estimate" of what the tax cuts would "cost" should not be cited as empirical data or anything other than what it was: an estimate based on projections that turned out to be wrong. As the CBO itself now admits:

In January 2001, CBO's baseline projections showed a cumulative surplus of $5.6 trillion for the 2002-2011 period. The actual results have differed from those projections because of subsequent policy changes, economic developments that differed from CBO's forecast, and other factors. As a result, the federal government actually ran deficits from 2002 through 2010 and will incur a deficit in 2011 as well. The cumulative deficit over the 10-year period will amount to $6.2 trillion, CBO estimates—a swing of $11.8 trillion from the January 2001 projections.

What is clear is that the federal government ended up collecting vastly more revenue after JGTRRA and EGTRRA were enacted (an average of $2.3 trillion per annum from FY04 through FY08) than it was before (an average of $1.6 trillion per annum from FY94 through FY00). Even adjusted for inflation, that's a BIG difference. Remarkably, some people are so obtuse as to not even acknowledge this when you lay it out for them in the simplest terms possible.

So, if EGTRRA and JGTRRA aren't the largest contributors to our staggering National Debt, then what is? Certainly the War on Terror stands out as the single largest budget-buster of the last decade. Add up all the expenditures on Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the cost of veteran benefits for those who had not served prior to 2001, the newly-created Department of Homeland Security, and the additional billions spent on intelligence/counterintelligence after 9/11, and you'll come up with a lot more than $1.6 trillion. Yet, there are other factors worth mentioning here. As Kevin D. Williamson wrote for National Review Online in April:

The Department of Health and Human Services will see more than $900 billion in outlays in FY2011. About $83 billion of that is discretionary spending on things like the Centers for Disease Control. Almost all of the rest is Medicare and Medicaid — the two programs that President Obama has vowed to shield from substantial reform of the sort envisioned by Rep. Paul Ryan. The other big driver of spending, as the president himself acknowledged yesterday, is Social Security, meaningful reform of which he also promises to resist.

2. Spending cuts will have a devastating effect on the economy.

This is a favorite old saw of the Left, and it's been repeated ad nauseum ever since Obama took office and, along with a willing Democratic Congress, kicked federal spending into hyperdrive. I'll refrain from a lengthy critique of Keynesian economics for the time being and stick to a brief rebuttal of this ridiculous argument. First, I must once again point out that it's crucial to distinguish between actual reductions in government spending and reductions in the growth of planned spending. (The latter are often referred to as "reductions in the baseline.") It is a very rare occurrence when total federal spending actually drops from one fiscal year to the next. That happened in 2010 (for the first time in 45 years), but only because we spent so G*d***n much in FY2009. However, when we actually spend less on certain programs/services, it's fair to call the decreases in spending on specific items real spending "cuts."

With that in mind, the most significant federal spending cuts in the last 60 years took place in the 1990s, the early 1980s and the mid-1960s. You'll notice that none of those dates coincides with the beginning of a recession. In fact, the spending cuts in the '60s and '90s took place amid historic economic boom periods that continued for years after the effects of the cuts were felt, if they were even "felt." The country was already in a deep recession when President Reagan took office and persuaded a divided Congress to slash the federal budget in nearly every department, and the economy was no worse for the wear. The last time a recession in this country was precipitated by deep spending cuts was 1945, when World War II ended and government spending appropriately cratered. (To give you an idea of how big the crater was, total outlays dropped from $92.7 billion for FY45, which at that time ended on June 30, to less than $30 billion for FY48.)

Let's pause here for a moment to note what exactly a "recession" is. Traditionally, we have recognized a "recession" in the U.S. as two or more consecutive quarters of economic contraction (meaning a decline in real GDP). Defining when a particular recession begins and ends has proven to be a much more controversial matter. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has become somewhat of an unofficial authority on the subject; it defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real gross domestic product (GDP), real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales." The definition of GDP is much less disputed. Simply put, our gross domestic product (GDP) is the sum total of all final goods and services produced in the U.S. during a given year. Government spending is part of GDP. So, it's technically possible for a recession to occur just because government spending drops. History reveals, however, that such an occurrence is very rare and usually coincides with the end of a war, which is actually what happened in 1945.

On paper, the Recession of 1945 looked to be a mild one. It lasted only eight months, and while GDP declined sharply, the unemployment rate (as it was then calculated) for 1945 ended up at only 5.2% or, as it’s now called, “full employment.” Getting back to the present, this bogus argument that even the mildest spending cuts are a bad idea given the current state of our economy has been advanced by so many individuals that it hardly seems worth it to cite anyone. However, the old saw appears to have spread beyond opinion commentators and politicians to previously objective journalists. Lex Haris of CNNMoney, for example, recently crowed that cutting spending by $111 billion in 2012 (the “Cut” in Republicans' “Cut, cap and balance” plan) was “just too much, too soon without risking another recession.” (For the record, the CBO currently projects outlays of $3.655 trillion for FY2012, so $111 billion would amount to a whopping 3% haircut off the baseline.) If our economy can't handle a 3% reduction in something that constitutes less than 25% of GDP without risking another recession, then we're in real trouble.

Though instances of true fiscal restraint by Washington are few and far between, history shows that austerity in the form of belt-tightening (which is necessary now more than ever) should not hurt our economy very much, if at all. Besides, it's not like the reckless spending of the past three years has created a robust economic recovery.

3. Many wealthy Americans want to pay higher taxes.

Of all the outrageous myths being pushed by the Left in America today, this one is probably the most laughable. It's impossible to know what's going on in someone else's mind, and I can't speak for the likes of Warren Buffett or George Soros, but the reality is that, no matter what these tycoons say, if they really wanted to pay more in taxes, then they would send bigger checks to the government. The fact that they don't is all the proof anyone should need that these proponents of higher taxes on "the rich" do not want to pay more. There is no law (and I've looked) that bars taxpayers from voluntarily paying the government more than they owe in federal taxes, nor is there any statute forbidding the U.S. Treasury from keeping the surplusage if one of these magnanimous fat cats decides to give Uncle Sam a bonus, with express indication that (s)he is aware of it and does not want a refund. In fact, the federal government welcomes contributions to reduce our staggering debt. You can make a contribution online at Pay.gov or write a check to the Bureau of the Public Debt. (Make sure to notate in the memo section that it's "a Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public.") These are the facts.

4. Free trade costs American jobs.

Unfortunately, the Left is not alone in propagating this one. There has been a disturbing strain of protectionism spreading throughout the country of late, fueled by a number factors (not the least of which is the understandable anxiety over our economic conditions and the bleak forecast of things to come). Sadly, many on the Right have now jumped on the anti-free trade bandwagon. Some, like Lou Dobbs, have been beating the protectionist drums for a while now. Others, such as a number of Tea Party activists, joined the march more recently.

So, what's the rap on free trade? Well, for starters, there's this growing notion that it's made America less competitive globally. Apparently, more and more Americans are rejecting the general principle that free trade agreements prove mutually beneficial to the countries that enter into them. Sara Murray and Douglas Belkin of the Wall Street Journal report:

The rising hostility seems a delayed reaction to a slow economic recovery and high unemployment. To many, China has replaced Wall Street as the villain du jour. Opposition to trade is fueled by reports that many U.S. multinational companies, sitting on huge stockpiles of cash, are reluctant to invest in the U.S. and are looking overseas, and by the fact that China has pulled out of the global slump much faster than the U.S.

John Wallis, 50 years old, blames imports for the 2001 death of his 12-employee business that made small electronic prototypes for the telecommunications industry and the subsequent loss of his Chicago-area home. "Trade is fine and dandy in a scenario where everybody wins," Mr. Wallis said. But the U.S. isn't winning, he said. Mr. Wallis now works in programming and design for an international manufacturer in Rhode Island, but doubts he'll ever be able to repay debts from his old business. "Financially we've never recovered," he said.

That whiny Chicagan's sob story about losing his business reminded me of something. It took me more than a week to find it (which is why this is the first post on my blog in a week), but I finally came across an old edition of National Review with an article I remember reading more than three years ago. The whole thing is really a pretty good read, but here's a little preview: According to Standard Textile’s Gary Heiman ("the upstart competition in his old-line industry"), the notion that the U.S. has lost jobs due to trade with other countries “is nonsense.” Trade takes the blame when people lose their jobs because it’s an “easy target,” Heiman says, absolving shortsighted industry leaders and labor unions when companies run into financial trouble and jobs are eliminated. Rather than take responsibility for failing to adapt, he says, “it’s much easier to say, ‘It’s their fault. It’s China’s fault. The Chinese are taking away our jobs,’ when in fact, that’s just not the case.”

Another riff against free trade is that it sucks capital out of the U.S. and into foreign markets, throwing our current account balance out of whack, but the numbers suggest something different. At year’s end 2009, the value of foreign investments in the United States exceeded the value of U.S. investments abroad by some $2.4 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Granted, we have a huge trade deficit, but we don't seem to have a problem attracting foreign capital; the BEA's preliminary numbers show that, in 2010, net investment in the U.S. continued to increase.

Getting back to the big lie, protectionists want people to think that free trade agreements make it easier for American companies to "ship jobs overseas." There's no truth to this whatsoever. Last fall, I spotted an opinion piece in the New York Times by none other than Robert Lighthizer. Yes, that Robert Lighthizer. The former deputy U.S. trade representative pointed out that, during the last decade, our trade deficit in manufactured goods was “about $4.3 trillion,” and “the country lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs.” But don’t confuse correlation with causation. The fact of the matter is that free trade agreements make American goods cheaper overseas, increasing the market for our goods abroad. Ask any devout protectionist to explain how NAFTA and other free trade agreements are responsible for the loss of American jobs in any sector, and all but the most erudite scholars are quickly exposed as hacks.

Back when he was alive, William F. Buckley, Jr. took note of the increasingly conspicuous protectionist rhetoric in America and exposed its absurdity in an online article that doubled as a defense of free trade from a nationalist standpoint (something very few men could pull off). More than two centuries ago, “Adam Smith was resoundingly correct in laying down the law that both parties benefit,” Buckley wrote, “giving us the benefit of exposure to Lou Dobbs, and the freedom to reject his counsel.”

5. We were heading into a depression in 2009, and President Obama's policies saved the economy.

The second half of this conjunction has been bandied about considerably less of late, probably because enough Democrats and their surrogates in the media have realized that Americans don't appreciate being told how the president "saved" the economy when everything seems to be getting worse. Yet, many left-wing apparatchiks are still singing the first half of this tired old song. (As this video shows, some of the people who like to say we were headed for another Great Depression when Obama took office don't know what they're talking about.)

Again, it's impossible to know what would have happened if Obama and the Democrats had taken a hands-off approach in 2009 or if the GOP's alternative stimulus plan had been enacted, but the sobering reality remains: the economy has only gotten worse on President Obama's watch. The unemployment rate for January of 2009 was 7.8%, a far cry from Depression-era levels. That same month, Christina Romer (incoming chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers) and Jared Bernstein (Joe Biden's "top economic adviser") released this report on the pending stimulus legislation. The report contained this now-infamous graph: Wow. Boy, was that wrong. Then the CBO came out and projected the unemployment rate would climb to 8.3% in 2009 and peak at 9% in 2010. In February, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf sent a letter to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH). According to the CBO's revised analysis, the unemployment rate would hit 9% in 2009 without the stimulus, which at that point had already passed both houses of Congress but had yet to be signed into law by President Obama. With the stimulus, the CBO projected the unemployment rate for 2009 would be anywhere from 7.7 to 8.5 percent.

By October of 2009, the unemployment rate had shot up to 10.1%. That may sound like a very steep climb in a very short period of time, and it is. Look, the easiest part of this myth to debunk is the notion that Obama's agenda prevented the economy from getting worse. One thing that economists on the Left and Right agree on is that the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), enacted under President George W. Bush and expanded by the Obama Administration, acctually did more to save us from "a second Great Depression" than any other government action since 2008. As Danielle Kurtzleben of U.S. News & World Report reported a few months ago:

In propping up major financial institutions, TARP provided relief from the immediate problem of frozen credit markets, according to James Gattuso, a senior fellow in regulatory policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank: "It served a critical function in terms of providing liquidity at a time that it was needed to counter a panic in financial markets," he says. Doug Elliott, a fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution, believes that without government support of financial institutions, the financial crisis would have taken on far greater proportions. "The recession we had would have been substantially worse; millions of people would have been out of work," he says.

(In fairness, Kurtzleben's article also explained why critics of TARP say it was a flop. Follow this link to read the entire article.) Obama may have voted for TARP, but it was not his brainchild. He also played no integral role in crafting the legislation that created the program, so if you think that TARP rescued the economy, then don't give Obama any credit for averting a worse recession.

I don't expect to convince anybody who thinks otherwise that we were not headed for another Great Depression in 2009. What I can do is present the data and offer my own analysis to explain why I think what I think. If anyone feels my arguments lack cogency or thinks they could be stronger, then please comment below. I realize the preceding list is by no means exhaustive; there is an abundance of left-wing mendacity out there, and it's not just limited to economics. When I sat down to decide what "myths" I would attack in this piece, I purposefully omitted such oft-repeated claims as "the rich aren't paying their fair share of taxes" because those are technically opinions, and "fair" is a relative term. Also, I realize that I could have developed my arguments more thoroughly/extensively, but I didn't want this column's length to discourage people from reading it and actually taking its content to heart. Thank you for reading it, and I look forward to hearing the response, if there is one.

Fiscal Fracas: It's a Deal!

2011-07-31T22:47:00.000-07:00

Well, it seems congressional Republicans and Democrats have struck a deal to raise the U.S. borrowing limit and cut spending (sort of). President Obama presumably supports the agreement, since he announced it earlier this evening from the White House briefing room. No votes are expected to be cast until tomorrow (because the legislation has to at least be drawn up and brought to the floor of both houses for a vote), so only time will tell if this compromise becomes law. I'll hold off on analyzing the content of the deal until then. Tonight, however, I ask the question that a lot of people are (or will soon) be asking: is this a good deal? To answer that question, I use an objective three-part test that can be applied to just about any compromise, regardless of the details:

1. A good compromise leaves everybody mad.

I first saw this expression used in a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip. Like many expressions, it's generally applicable if you don't interpret it too literally. I suppose the political version of this may be, "Both sides walk away feeling like they caved." That was certainly the case of the last two grand compromises to come out of D.C. (the agreement on taxes last December and the budget deal this past spring). From what I've heard said by members of Congress on this agreement, this criterion has definitely been satisfied.

2. The far left hates it, and the far right hates it.

The major blogs were already abuzz this evening, and from a sampling of left-wing and right-wing forums, I can safely say that this deal has very much angered the extremes. Far-left members of Congress are already attacking the deal. The Congressional Black Caucus, which has only one Republican member, reportedly called the deal a "sugar-coated Satan sandwich," and out-and-proud socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said it was "grotesquely immoral."

3. A majority of the electorate voices at least tacit support for it.

Here, we'll have to wait and see what the American people say, but I expect a majority of those polled about this big debt deal to express relief (or some positive reasction) that a huge crisis was averted but react unfavorably to the content of the legislation.

Well, that's all I've got for y'all tonight. I'll be adding more posts to this blog and updating my web site quite frequently in the next few weeks, so check back often, and spread the word!

Fiscal Fracas: My Solution to the Debt Ceiling Problem

2011-07-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been trumpeting a four-part deficit-reduction package as a comprehensive, center-right accompaniment to any debt ceiling increase. Reactions have been mixed, and I know that it has no chance of passing, but it’s not like anyone in Washington would actually take it up, so why should I bother trying to come up with something that could actually make it to the president’s desk?
As I've said repeatedly, whatever compromise ends up averting a crisis, it will be far from the best possible solution. Any plan that would garner enough votes to pass both houses of Congress and the president's signature will contain less-than-adequate curbs on spending and changes in the tax code that fall well short of the real tax reform needed to make this country's tax system simpler, fairer and more productive. So, today I'd like to elaborate on the four pieces of legislation that should be attached to any debt-ceiling increase.

A Balanced-Budget Amendment

This was a major sticking point in the past couple of weeks. Boehner couldn't get a debt-ceiling increase through the Republican-dominated House without attaching a BBA, and the Democrat-controlled Senate wouldn't vote for any bill that included the BBA. I've listened to and read up on the arguments for and against amending the Constitution to require a balanced budget—the debate is far from new—and, on balance, I have to say it's not only a good idea but possibly a necessity. In the first place, it would provide the strongest possible restraint to guard against future spending sprees by Congress that always occur whenever revenues increase. At some point, our economy will recover, and God willing, the federal government's coffers will once again be flooded with cash. History has taught us that, no matter what the composition of Congress, there comes a point where all that additional money is just too much to resist. If we're ever going to balance the federal budget, then nothing short of a BBA will provide the requisite bulwark against fiscal irresponsibility.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, voting for a BBA carries virtually zero political risk. Multiple polls indicate that between 60 and 70 percent of Americans who participate in these surveys support it, which makes congressional Democrats' near-unanimous opposition to it somewhat confusing. Consider also that getting it through Congress is only the first step. No less than thirty-eight states must ratify any change to the Constitution, so what we're really talking about here, inasmuch as Congress is involved, is submitting an amendment to the states.
As for the logistical problems associated with such an amendment, we could start with the language of S. J. Res. 1, the 1997 version of a BBA that won approval from 66 Senators (including the current Vice President), one short of the requisite 2/3 needed to submit a Constitutional amendment to the states. Then there are the arguments about how deficit spending is necessary in times of great economic strife and inevitable in times of war. These are all good arguments, but I'm going to ignore them right now so that I can get to the rest of my plan.

Full Repeal of Obamacare

I'm aware of the "Repeal & Replace" mantra that the GOP has largely adopted, but an adequate replacement to the so-called "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" is not something that can be crafted and properly evaluated, debated and sold to the American people in a matter of days or even weeks. Besides, since our country and its health-care system would be better off without Obamacare than it is with the law in place, whether or not we replace it with anything, just repealing the damn thing is arguably an improvement in and of itself.
The House already passed a bill to repeal the Act in toto; the Senate voted down a similar measure in April. As far as I'm concerned, the language of H.R.2 is satisfactory. All we need now is a Senate with enough reasonable people to approve it.

REAL Spending Cuts

When we talk of spending CUTS, it's important to distinguish between reductions in spending and reductions in the projected growth of spending. Put a different way, are we actually going to spend less than it is now or just less than it had planned to spend? (In some cases, the answer is both. But don't be fooled. Spending less than the "baseline" is often characterized as a "cut," even if it still amounts to a net increase over the current budget.) Ideally, we would actually reduce total outlays by enough to bring government spending down to less than 19% of GDP by ... let's say 2016. That's five years from now, plenty of time for the economy to adjust and Washington to ease a public that's frankly been spoiled for years now on government largesse into a new era of austerity. I say 19% of GDP because it's still more than what the government normally collects in tax revenues but low enough to shrink the deficit down to a manageable size so that we're on track to balance our budget by the time the Constitution is amended to require it.

REAL Tax Reform

It's been 25 years since our government last overhauled the entire federal tax code. We're about due for another comprehensive reform. The basic scheme is not that complicated: eliminate/reduce a lot of these costly deductions and tax credits, and lower income tax rates. Some people may end up with a slightly higher effective tax rate, but a lot of households and individuals would pay less, and the best part (arguably) is that the resulting increases/decreases in the tax burden wouldn't be skewed toward one particular group of people.
There are so many deductions and credits in the Internal Revenue Code that it hardly seems worth it to list which ones should be eliminated/reduced. It may be simpler to list which ones should be preserved as is. The only two that come to my mind are the deductions for charitable contributions and education expenses. (The latter group really ought to be expanded.) As far as I'm concerned, there is no argument for reducing or eliminating these types of deductions that is less persuasive when used to justify reducing or eliminating any other deductions. Even the wildly popular Home Mortgage Interest Deduction ought to be phased out. Deductions for state and local taxes are fair and helpful but difficult to justify given the current fiscal mess we're in. Ditto the deductions for work-related expenses (travel, meals, lodging). As for credits, you've probably heard a lot of criticism directed at these green-energy tax credits and wasteful boondoggles like Cash for Clunkers, but there are some others that have been around for a long time but do a lot more harm than good. The Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, should have gotten the axe a long time ago. It's basically welfare for people who have a job. I'd keep the child tax credit, but don't increase it for a while. , remember how Obama & the big spenders in Washington tried to sell us on the "stimulus" bill of 2009 by claiming that something like 40% of it was "tax cuts"? Well, to the extent that's true, all of the tax cuts in the Act ought to be repealed, if they're not going away automatically. Here's why: according to an AP article I claim to have read, "many taxpayers are seeing their bills drop under Obama because of more generous tax credits for college students, working families, homebuyers and the working poor. Many of the changes were enacted as part of the big economic stimulus package passed in 2009."
I should point ut that, in explaining what I think "real tax reform" would entail, I've mainly focused on individual income taxes. That's because, if we want to be fair and, most importantly, smart about this, then we need to devote much more attention to detail when making changes that affect individual income taxes (as opposed to corporate income taxes). This rather simplistic notion of "closing tax loopholes" and lowering rates is much easier to apply to taxes on corporate income for many reasons that I won't go into right now.

Of course, the current president wouldn't sign off on any part of this, and there's no way you'll find a supermajority (2/3) in each house to approve all four parts. But, as I said, I'm not burdened with having to conjure up something that has a realistic chance of becoming law. This article is about what should be done, not what will get done. That's just one of the few small pleasures of being a columnist and not a legislator.

Fiscal Fracas: Much Ado About the Debt Ceiling

2011-07-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

Moments ago, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill touted by Speaker John Boehner as a compromise to raise the country's debt ceiling and cut spending by trillions over the next decade. All 218 "Yea" votes came from GOP members. 22 Republicans joined 188 Democrats in opposition to the bill, which would raise the debt limit by about $900 billion, necessitating another increase in about six months.

According to FOX News, Boehner rallied skeptics in his own party around the plan in a passionate speech on the House floor that drew "roaring applause" from Republicans:

"I stuck my neck out a mile to get an agreement with the president of the
United States," he said. "It's time for the administration and time for our colleagues across the aisle to put something on the table. Tell us where you are!"

Instead of promptly voting down the proposal (like they did with Cut, Cap & Balance), the Senate put the House bill “on hold” while they tweak an alternative proposal by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), who should have been voted out of office months ago but was somehow re-elected by a bunch of people who were either idiots, fools or villians out to destroy the U.S. and our way of life.

Anyway ... we seem to be at an impasse, which is where we've been for weeks (actually, months) now. Neither the Reid plan nor the Boehner plan sound palatable, and neither has any chance of becoming law. Both combine less-than-adequate spending cuts with a debt-ceiling increase that almost nobody wants but nearly everyone acknowledges we need.

I've said repeatedly that I think both sides will cobble together some half-assed bill at the last minute and then rush it through Congress to the president's desk. He'll sign it, averting a crisis but once again kicking the proverbial can down the road. The far-left and far-right will rave against the compromise, but most of America, having long tired of this nauseating debate, will ignore them.

As for me, I'm going to keep blogging, posting columns that no one will read and videos that ... sorry. It's supper time. I have to go!

Fiscal Fracas: Now It's Getting Serious.

2011-07-23T23:47:00.000-07:00

By now, you've probably gotten sick of all this fuss about the debt limit without anything substantial being accomplished. I know I have. Things came to a head Friday when it came out that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) had given up on trying to negotiate a "grand bargain" with the White House. Apparently, Boehner sent a letter to Republican House members saying that he had "decided to end discussions with the White House and begin conversations with the leaders of the Senate in an effort to find a path forward."

Then, a visibly angry President Obama called a press conference and spent more than half an hour at the podium, explaining his version of what had happened and answering questions from the press corps. Shortly thereafter, Speaker Boehner took to the airwaves and said that talks with the White House had collapsed for two reasons:

First, they insisted on raising taxes. ... secondly, they refused to get serious about cutting spending and making the tough choices that are facing our country on entitlement reform.

Obama claimed Republicans walked from an "extraordinarily fair" deal, while Boehner said the President "moved the goalposts" after a deal had been reached. Despite this apparent stalemate, however, both men met at the White House earlier today, along with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and, for some reason, Joe Biden. I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure what transpired, but this photo should tell the tale:

Unsurprisingly, no deal was reached.

So, where do we go from here? I'm no soothsayer, but it looks like each side is going to present their own proposals for what to do going forward, and their surrogates in the media will argue about it while the country moves closer and closer to the brink of chaos.

Few things are certain in life, let alone in politics, but I think it's fair to say that the nation's debt limit will only be raised if the legislation authorizing it is attached to significant curbs in spending. Without getting into the complexities of the federal budget and the CBO scoring criteria, I'd like to offer my take on a few of the plans that have been put forward:

The "Gang of Six" Proposal

We still don't have all the details of this underwhelming product of months of negotiations between three U.S. Senators from each party; you can read their own thumbnail report on it here. Frankly, I think G-6 is a good start. It reduces or eliminates a lot of costly deductions and reduces individual and corporate income tax rates, much like the Tax Reform Act of '86. However, it needs some major tweaks. First off, the reductions in spending should be much greater (but I understand there's only so much a group of six men that includes the notoriously fiscally irresponsible Kent Conrad and Dick Durbin can agree to). Also, this concept of scrapping deductions and tax credits and lowering rates works much better with corporate income taxes than the individual income tax. For one, the charitable deduction should not be altered (even though it benefits higher-income taxpayers more). To make up for this, the Mortgage Interest Deduction, which the G-6 plan reduces but does not eliminate, ought to be phased out.

Cut, Cap & Balance

So far, this is the only package both the House and Senate have voted on. It passed the House late Tuesday evening and was rejected by the Senate, in a party-line vote, on Friday. I read through this bill (It's only 12 pages), and I have to say, while it's a good, straightforward way of tackling this impending debt crisis, I'm not sure I would like to have seen it become law. For one, it places too much power in the Executive Branch (an especially dangerous thing to do with this administration in charge). Title II of the bill–the "CAP" in "Cut, Cap, and Balance"–caps government spending as a specified percentage of GDP for each fiscal year through FY2021, but it defines "GDP" for any fiscal year as "the gross domestic product during such fiscal year consistent with Department of Commerce definitions." What's more, § 319, entitled “Enforcing GDP Outlay Limits,” calls for using the OMB estimates for projected GDP. In other words, the entire “CAP” part of the bill would be executed using the Commerce Department's definition of GDP and the OMB's projections of what that GDP will be! This and the next administration would be in a position to manipulate the numbers and undermine the spirit of the law.
Another problem with H.R.2560 is the Balanced Budget Amendment. In Friday's Wall Street Journal, Yale Law School Prof. Peter H. Schuck points out a downside to amending the Constitution to require a balanced budget, as many states have done: it would empower judges to exercise more political and policy-making discretion than any other law. He lays out a persuasive argument, but getting thirty-four state legislatures to approve a federal BBA is such a hurdle that it's hardly worth having this discussion right now, and at any rate we know it won't even get out of Congress with the current Senate.

McConnell's Debt Ceiling Fix

This is a crafty way of shifting the power/responsibility to raise the debt ceiling from Congress & the president to just the president. Essentially, McConnell's proposal would allow the president to raise the debt limit by $2.5 trillion, provided he does it in three installments through the end of next year. The president would request each debt-limit increase, which would be subject to what McConnell called "a resolution of disapproval." Then, all the president would have to do is veto that resolution, and if Congress didn't override his veto (which it wouldn't do), then Presto! He's got his debt-ceiling increase.
Do I even have to explain why this is a bad idea? Maybe I do, seeing that unimpeachably conservative commentators such as George Will and Ann Coulter have voiced support for it. Like Cut, Cap & Balance, McConnell's plan places too much power in the hands of the president. Also, it doesn't include any spending cuts. But Harry Reid seems to like it, so maybe it can pass the Senate. Just don't count on it making it through this House of Representatives.

Whatever solution they come up with, it won't be the optimal one. There are too many unreasonable people in Washington. I have more to say - much more - but I'm finding it very hard to think stragiht and focus. Maybe it's because it's late, and I'm tired. Or, maybe it has something to do with that third Gin & Tonic I downed half an hour ago. Either way, good night, and God bless.

Fiscal Fracas: The Austan Goolsbee Trilogy

2011-07-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

In light of the pervasive discourse over our country's fiscal policy, I am republishing three articles I wrote earlier this year and posted on my web site. The first was prompted by a bunch of stuff Austan Goolsbee said during his May 18, 2011 appearance on The Colbert Report. I wrote a follow-up column after watching Colbert's “unedited, extended interview” with Goolsbee online. Then, somebody posted a comment to that column under the name “GladYouWrote”, and I noticed that (s)he sounded a lot more erudite than Austan Goolsbee, so I posted a lengthy reply to his/her comment.
Hopefully those of you who haven't seen these posts before will find them interesting and informative. I also hope you'll share them with people who need to learn more about our fiscal situation.

Fiscal Fracas: “Morning Joe” Panel Confused About Debt, Deficits, History

2011-07-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Usually, “Morning Joe” is too boring to draw my attention. Then, last month, Mark Halperin said something interesting (and, in my opinion, spot on) about President Obama, and I decided to pay the show a little more mind.

On Friday, one of the shows guests was Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), Chairman of the House Republican Conference. Now, Jeb is not my congressman, but he does represent an area I'm very familar with—namely, the northeastern suburbs of Dallas. (It's a very nice place to live.) Anyway, you can watch the full segment here:

I was very glad to hear Hensarling make a point that more Republicans really ought to be driving home to the spectators in this debt debate—to wit: that President Obama expects Republicans to agree to tax hikes in order to pay for spending that they opposed. How can any Democrat justify making Americans pay more in taxes to pay for spending that many taxpayers didn’t want and knew wouldn't work? (If any of you have an abnser to that, then PLEASE let me know.) Anyway, before, after and during the congressman's appearance on the show, I caught several curious comments by the panel that gave me pause. I'd like to address three of them now.

When Hensarling chided President Obama for not offerring a budget plan since his last proposal was rejected by the Senate in a humiliating 97-0 vote, Mika Brzezinski seemed to think she had something relevant to say and chimed in. If Republicans aren’t willing to “give on everything,” she asked, then “why should the president lay out a plan?”

I think that question is absurd enough on its face, so I didn’t bother to transcribe Hensarling’s response, but I also want to call attention to Mika’s apparent surprise when her co-host noted that, in his budget plan, Paul Ryan got rid of a lot of costly loopholes in the tax code. Evidently, she didn't know that Republcians were willing to close up those "tax loopholes" our president keeps talking about. How about that? Months before Obama started talking about "tax loopholes," Republicans had already laid out a tax reform plan that included eliminating a bunch of these deductions and credits that allow corporations to avoid paying their fair share.

I'd advise Mika to make sure that she knows what she's talking about before she asks a serious person like Jeb Hensarling a question about such an important topic from now on, but since she seems to think that listening to everything Obama says is tantamount to being well-informed, I don't think my words would have any positive effect on her. Also, she doesn't read my blog.

On to something that Joe Scarborough said. Frankly, I was surprised to hear this from Joe, who served as a Republican member of the House from 1995 to 2001:

"George W. Bush and Republicans took a $155 billion surplus, turned it into a $1.4 trillion debt, took a $5.7 trillion national debt, turned that into an [$11.5-trillion-dollar debt]."

The Morning Joe Staff actually excerpted that statement, along with the question by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R - TX) that preceded it, and posted it on the show's blog. Here’s the problem: I’m not sure what Joe Scarborough is talking about (Also, when Hensarling stated that he thought Republicans were “rank amateurs compared to the president and the previous democratic Congress,” Joe said “That’s not true ... as a matter of math, that is not accurate.”)

So, what do the numbers say? Well, since he said “George W. Bush and Republicans,” we can start with the numbers for FY2001, when the federal budget ran a $128.2 billion (not $155 billion) surplus, even though I think Joe Scarborough did Republicans (many of them his former colleaguse) and his viewers a disservice by not acknowledging that Republicans first took us from a $164 billion deficit to that $128.2 billion surplus. Well, assuming Joe meant to say “a $1.4 trillion deficit” and not “$1.4 trillion debt” (a charitable assumption, to be sure, but I think the context warrants it), that’s not even close to true. In fact, there are no objectively true facts to support such a claim. True, during George W. Bush’s first term, the surplus turned into a deficit that peaked at $412.7 billion in FY2004. Then it came down. By the time Democrats took over Congress and control of the federal budget, the deficit was down to $160.7 billion. So, it’s fair to say that George W. Bush and Republicans took a $128.2 billion surplus and turned it into a $160.7 billion deficit. But, where on earth did Joe get the $1.4 trillion number from? Even while George W. Bush was still in charge, the deficit went up to $458.6 billion for FY2008, but by that time, Republicans & Democrats were @ least equally culpable for the mess. When Bush left office, the deficit for FY2009 was somewhere between $500 and 600 billion. (It’s difficult to calculate because the federal government only gives us month-to-month numbers; also, no one can say for sure what would have happened before the fiscal year ended had Bush still been president.) As for the debt, Joe’s numbers are pretty much accurate.

Then, towards the end of the segment, I heard John Heilemann say this:

"What Republicans are saying is that they will not accept any net increase in revenues, and the truth is, as we know, over the long haul, the only way to address ... the deficit and the debt is to have a net increase in revenues ... ."

Before I dissect his remarks, I just want to express my dismay that Heilemann had to shout over the other talkers on the panel to get his thoughts out. I know what it's like to be in the company of people who claim they want to hear your opinion and then don't let you get a word in edgewise, but anyway, like John Heilemann, I don't know what Congressional Republicans are thinking, but he's not claiming to know what the GOP wants; he's interpreting what he's seen and heard them say. I have no doubt that congressional Republicans want to see an increase in revenues. throughout this debate, Many of them have repeated the conservative mantra on how to increase revenues: we don't need more taxes; we need more taxpayers. And, while I can't speak for anybody in Congress, I can tell you that some republicans, including me, would like to see people who are gainfully employed but currently have no federal income tax liability start paying their fair share. Everything I've heard from congressional Republicans throughout this debate leads me to believe that most of them would like to see the government collect more in tax revenue; the question is how best to achieve that. Bottom line: the totality of the circumstances should lead a reasonable person to believe that GOP members of Congress would agree to changes in the Tax Code that would result in more money being collected by the federal government.

Fiscal Fracas: What To Do About the Debt Ceiling

2011-07-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

Now that the Casey Anthony trial is over, the cable news media can redirect its attention to much more important matters. Lately there's been a spike in coverage of/relating to the debate over raising the debt limit and the larger issue of how to get our fiscal house in order. This has given me a lot to talk/write about, and even when I pare it down to what people need to hear and what I think their actually interested in, I'm still left with far to much material for a single post. So, today I am starting a new series about the federal budget. In addition to providing my personal analyses of things I pick up on, I'll be offerring some of my own ideas for dealing with the fiscal challenges that confront us. As usual, I'll be careful to only speak authoritatively about things where such a confident and assertive tone is justified.

Right now, the hottest issue in the fiscal arena concerns the national debt ceiling/limit. Before I get into specifics, there are a lot of questions that Americans are asking (or should be) about this topic:

What is the Debt Limit?
The debt limit or "debt ceiling" is an arbitrary number limiting the amount of money our federal government can borrow. If the national debt ever exceeds that limit, then planes will fall out of the sky mid-flight, crops will be burnt or devoured by locusts and our rivers will run red with the blood of children and the disabled ... or not. I don't know.
Why is it so important that we raise the Debt Limit?
Don't ask me that. Everybody seems to have a different answer. There are plenty of answers to that question out there right now, so if you don't like what you hear, then just look for a different response.
Will our nation default on its loans if we don't rate the debt ceiling?
It doesn't have to. Basically, as long as the U.S. continues to pay the interest owed on our debt, we will never default. Even according to the most dire predictions, the federal government would still have enough money (from tax revenues) to make these payments on time.

Now that I've gotten the basics out of the way, everybody listen to Paul Ryan. He always knows what he's talking about:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Thoughts on Turning 24

2011-07-07T21:03:00.001-07:00

It's been a week since my 24th birthday, and I have to say, I'm feeling pretty good about where I am in life right now. I'm past the halfway point (knock on wood) in my law school career; I'm working for a great judge at the Tarrant County Justice Center; and next month I hope to return to Baylor and finish out my law school career without taking another quarter off. In spite of all that, I can't help but feel a little dejected when I consider that:

Tim Tebow is 23 and, in addition to being a two-time winner of the "Best Male College Athlete" ESPY Award, is/was the first college sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy.

Rory McIlroy is 22 and just won the U.S. Open, the youngest bloke to do so in nearly 90 years.

Petra Kvitová is 21 and just upset 5th-seeded Maria Sharapova to win the women's singles at Wimbledon.

Of course, we're not just talking about professional athletes here, and these aren't just achievements; these are their careers. I have chosen to follow a different path in life, and right now I'm right about where I'm supposed to be, according to my plan. So, I thought, I needn't feel sad about not having done more at this point in my life. After all, how much can a 24-year-old full-time law student accomplish outside of school?

Then I found out about Ricky Gill, a second-year law student at UC Berkeley who is currently running for the U.S. House of Representatives in California's 11th Congressional District. Gill, a Republican, just reported raising an eye-popping $420,000 in the 2nd quarter, all of it from individuals. If he wins the GOP primary, then he'll likely face three-term Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Pleasanton) next November. By then, Gill will be 25, the minimum age members of the House must "have attainted to" under the Constitution.

Maybe I should run for Congress. On second thought, that's a really stupid idea.

Damn Blogger!

2011-07-07T21:00:00.000-07:00

I just wrote a very lengthy post, and when I clicked "PUBLISH POST," I got one of those "Oops! This link appears to be broken" messages, so hit Backspace, only to find that my entire post had been wiped out.

Jon Stewart, PolitiFact & FOX News (Part II)

2011-07-06T00:08:00.000-07:00

Last week, I blogged about Jon Stewart's misuse of PolitiFact to try and point out various "false statements" FOX News had made. If you haven't read that post, then you really should. Today, I hope to finish the job I started and never blog about this again.
One highly dubious analysis on PolitiFact's part fact-checked FOX News Alpha Male Bill O'Reilly's claim that "Attorney General Eric Holder is involved in the dismissal of the criminal charges" against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation. PolitiFact rated O'Reilly's statement "False." Trouble is, nowhere in the analysis did PolitiFact provide any evidence that Holder was not involved. Instead, its analysis focused on the distinction between the civil lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in 2009 (before Eric Holder became AG) and the decision by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division not to pursue criminal charges. Whoever wrote the PolitiFact piece stated that "O'Reilly and other Fox commentators have confused the issue by suggesting Holder and the Obama administration made the call not to pursue more serious charges against the New Black Panther Party members. [Assistant Attorney General Thomas] Perez stated that the Civil Rights Division decided pre-Obama not to pursue more serious, criminal charges. So when O'Reilly brings on legal analysts who paint it as an outrage that the Justice Department did not pursue a criminal case, and the only person condemned by O'Reilly is Holder for not 'representing the United States in a fair and balanced way,' that's misleading and misplaced. We think it's fair to hold Holder accountable for the decision to limit the civil case, but not the criminal one."
Frankly, I think PolitiFact is splitting hairs with this one. At any rate, it's hardly comparable to Stewart's blatantly false assertion that "FOX viewers" are "the most consistently misinformed media viewers," according to "every poll."
Sometimes PolitiFact's fact-checking hinges not on the interpretation of the statement being checked but on the speaker's interpretation of one or more sources. Here's an example: two years ago, PolitiFact analyzed this allegation by Glenn Beck:

John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, "has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population."

PolitiFact offerred a lengthy analysis of Beck's claim and ultimately rated it "Pants on Fire!" It acknowledged that "Beck's allegation has its roots in a book Holdren co-authored with Paul and Annie Ehrlich more than three decades ago called Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment." The analysis provided several excerpts from the book that explained Beck's damning accusation but concluded, "We think it's irresponsible to pluck a few lines from a 1,000-page, 30-year-old textbook, and then present them out of context to dismiss Holdren's long and distinguished career." Trouble is, as I read Holdren's writings, Beck's interpretation seems reasonable. Even if Holdren has since changed his views, what's at issue is whether he had ever proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in drinking water to control population, not whether he currently supports such measures.
As I pointed out in my last column, PolitiFact often runs the risk of making someone sound like a liar by ruling a statement false or "Pants on Fire!" even though the person(s) making the statement relied in good faith on a reliable source. Many of the "false statements" Jon Stewart said PolitiFact "checked" FOX News for were just such claims. I like to call these "WMD statements," where the speaker says something that he/she has every reason to believe is true but turns out to be false. Yesterday I offerred the examples of Kimberly Guilfoyle's remarks about the Cars.gov web site and the oft-repeated claim about White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard once being Bertha Lewis's "right-hand man" at ACORN. Here's another example:
In a Dec. 3, 2009, broadcast of his FOX News show, Glenn Beck said that Andy Stern, then head of the Service Employees International Union, was "the most frequent visitor of the White House." Said PolitiFact:

We found the source of Beck's claim. When the White House released its first batch of visitor logs on Oct. 30, 2009, as part of a pledge to bring more transparency to the White House, Stern's name did indeed appear 22 times, more than anyone else listed, including [Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton, who was listed three times.

Yet, PolitiFact again slapped Beck with a "False" ruling because, it said, "that's not the whole story."
It seems Beck's data was out-of-date. PolitiFact explained:

Stern led the pack for the first data release, which covered visits from Jan. 20, 2009 to July 31, 2009. But he was surpassed by several other individuals in the second release, which updates the data through Aug. 31, 2009 (and which was made public more than a week before Beck aired his comment).

Also, PolitiFact says, "the first batch of data -- covering the period from Jan. 20, 2009, to July 31, 2009, which found Stern in the lead -- is not a complete accounting of White House visits during that period. It only includes data for visitors whose names were first requested by the public. If no one requested a specific name, then that name wouldn't appear in the database. So there's no way of knowing whether Stern actually had the most visits for that period; he simply had the most of anyone whose name was requested by the public." So, in that particular instance, PolitiFact was right to rate Beck's claim false. But then Stewart took PolitiFact's work and again made it sound like somebody at FOX News had intentionally misled the public.
In a couple of instances, PolitiFact fact-checked statements that nobody at FOX News had even made. I gave one such example yesterday (PolitiFact twisted Laura Ingraham's words about Mitt Romney to make it sound like she said the health care plan he signed into law as governor is "wildly unpopular" among state residents.). Here's another: opinion After Dr. George Tiller, the well-known Kansas abortionist, was shot to death while attending church in Wichita on May 31, 2009, Bill O'Reilly became the target of more vicious attacks from left-wing hatemongers. In a widely published article, O'Reilly asserted that he "reported on the doctor honestly," but "the loons asserted that my analysis of him was 'hateful.'" He continued:

Chief of among the complaints was the doctor's nickname, "Tiller the baby killer." Some prolifers branded him with that, and I reported it. So did hundreds of other news sources.

PolitiFact seized on those statements, which its staff apparently interpreted as O'Reilly claiming "he didn't call Dr. George Tiller a baby killer, as liberal groups charge, but was merely reporting what 'some prolifers branded him.'"
Now, if you read O'Reilly's article - or just the excerpts (which, by the way, PolitiFact's Angie Drobnic Holan included in her piece) - then you'll notice that O'Reilly didn't claim that he never called Dr. Tiller a baby killer. Had he said that, PolitiFact could have justifiably rated his comments false.
The rest of the statements on Stewart's list that had received a false or "Pants on Fire!" rating were demonstrably false, and PolitiFact provided the relevant context. It's worth pointing out, though, that in several cases, the claims attributed to FOX News were not just made by FOX News personalities; Stewart declined to mention that as well.
Hopefully, that's the last we'll hear about the unpleasant three-way between Jon Stewart, FOX News and PolitiFact. Good night, all!

Jon Stewart, PolitiFact & FOX News (Part I)

2011-07-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

Earlier in the week, I promised a critical analysis of PoltiFact's so called "fact-checking" of FOX News items, specifically the stuff that Jon Stewart mentioned on his show last week as part of a "21-Lie Salute" to FOX News. Before I get to that, I feel I should explain the mindset with which I approached this.

Any truly credible fact-checker should take care to distinguish between facts (statements that can be declared "true" or "false") and opinions (subjective expressions of how someone feels). The distinciton is key in defamation cases. Genuine statements of opinion are not actionable (meaning someone can't sue another for defamation based on the latter's expression of his/her opinions). However, one cannot escape liability simply by disguising a factual statement as an opinion. Perhaps then-Justice William H. Rehnquist put it best:

Thus, unlike the statement, “In my opinion Mayor Jones is a liar,” the statement, “In my opinion Mayor Jones shows his abysmal ignorance by accepting the teachings of Marx and Lenin,” would not be actionable. Hepps ensures that a statement of opinion relating to matters of public concern which does not contain a provably false factual connotation will receive full constitutional protection.

Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 497 U.S. 1, 20 (1990). Now then, on to the matter at hand. As I mentioned in my earlier column, PolitiFact rates the accuracy of selected statements with its registered "Truth-O-Meter" rulings. Says PolitiFact, "The goal of the Truth-O-Meter is to reflect the relative accuracy of a statement."

Of the 21 claims Stewart referenced in his comedy bit, fourteen were rated False, which according to PolitiFact means "The statement is not accurate." Five received a "Pants on Fire" rating, which PolitiFact says means "The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim." The other two were each dubbed "Lie of the Year" by PolitiFact.

The first flaw I want to point out in Stewart's use of PolitiFact to assail FOX News's credibility (or whatever he was trying to do) has less to do with PolitiFact's credibility and more to do with Stewart's deceptive use of their analyses. Many of the "lies" Stewart attributed to FOX News were actually not made by FOX, or at least not just by FOX, according to PolitiFact. Let's start with one of those two "Lie of the Year" awardees.

In a December 16th, 2010, announcement, PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair and reporter/researcher Angie Drobnic Holan published the following:

PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen "government takeover of health
care" as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits,
it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan
and was a significant factor in the Democrats' shellacking in the November
elections.

Jon Stewart not only listed as one of the "false statements" made by FOX, he said, "That one was all over FOX. They were runnin' wild on that one!"

Sure they were, Jon, sure they were. However, nowhere in the extensive "Lie of the Year" analysis (which you can read in full here) did PolitiFact mention FOX News or even the FOX Network. Adair and Holan did, however, take care to point out specific instances in which the "lie" was uttered elsewhere in the press:

The phrase proliferated in the media even after Democrats dropped the public option. In 2010 alone, "government takeover” was mentioned 28 times in the Washington Post, 77 times in Politico and 79 times on CNN. A review of TV transcripts showed "government takeover" was primarily used as a catchy sound
bite, not for discussions of policy details.

In most transcripts we examined, Republican leaders used the phrase without being challenged by interviewers. For example, during Boehner's Jan. 31 appearance on Meet the Press, Boehner said it five times. But not once was he challenged about it.

PolitiFact also published items attributing the "government takeover” claim to Rep. Robert Hurt (R-Va.), Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (R), the Republican Party of Florida and Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young (R-Fla.), but I couldn't find a single thing on the web site attributing such a statement to FOX News.

That's just one example. Others require an even more complicated explanation. Consider FOX News contributor and occassioal O'Reilly Factor guest host Laura Ingraham’s remarks on the May 12, 2011, edition of the Factor. Discussing a speech given earlier that day by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, in which he discussed the historic reform of his state's health care system that has caused him so much grief on the campaign trail, Ingraham said, "Look, I like Mitt Romney. I think he's a really smart guy, and I think he would be a good president. ... On this, I don't get it, though, Bill. I mean, costs have gone up. It's wildly unpopular."

PolitiFact rated Ingraham’s statement False. Actually, the statement it rated "false" was actually not uttered by Laura Ingraham. It was what the site's editors/writers interpreted Ingraham as saying. The item Jon referenced on his program is published on the site under the heading, "Laura Ingraham says Massachusetts health plan is 'wildly unpopular'". On that page, you'll also find that the "claim" PolitiFact actually fact-checked was "The Massachusetts health care plan is 'wildly unpopular' among state residents."

So, before doing its analysis, PolitiFact made two assumptions about Ingraham's statement: (1) that she was referring specifically to the "Massachusetts health care plan," and (2) that she was saying it is (not was) is "wildly unpopular" among state residents. (So, I guess that's actually three assumptions.) The first may be fairly inferred, given context and the subject matter of their conversation, but I personally think it's a bridge too far to declare that Ingraham was only referring to Romneycare's popularity among Bay Staters. Even if that is what she meant, though, PolitiFact had no way of knowing what she was thinking. The entire analysis should have been disregarded.

That brings me to PolitiFact's 2009 Lie of the Year: "Death panels."

Some of you gramatically astute folks probably seized on the obvious: "Death panels" is not a statement. Actually, the original "statement" that PolitiFact rated was, like the thing about Romneycare being "wildly unpopular" among state residents, a mutation of what someone actually said. Back in August of 2009, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin posted the following on her Facebook page:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's ‘death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care.

The statement that PolitiFact rated "Pants on Fire!" read as follows:

Seniors and the disabled "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."

Now, it's plainly obvious that Palin was not making a definitive accusation about any part of the Democrats' health care reform bill, but the use of the phrase "death panel" - something ostinsibly absent from the American lexicon prior to Palin's notorious post - became commonplace in the health care debate that continued through the end of the year. HOWEVER, attributing the origin of the phrase to FOX News was way out of line. Palin was not hired by FOX News until January of 2010, according to the network, so even if she did unequivocally assert that "death panels" were part of the Democrats' "nationalized health care plan," the claim still would not have originated with FOX. Again, this is not an error on PolitiFact's part; it's Stewart's misuse of PolitiFact's analysis.

I'll do one more for now, just because I'm getting tired. PolitiFact rated this statement, which it attributed to FOX News legal vixen Kimberly Guilfoyle, false:

If you log into the government's Cash for Clunkers web site (cars.gov) from your home computer, [then] the government can "seize all of your personal and private" information, and track your computer activity.

As PolitiFact acknowledges, what Guilfoyle actually said was: "They are jumping right inside you, seizing all of your personal and private information, (crosstalk) and it's absolutely legal. . . ." Guilfoyle was talking to Glenn Beck on his FOX News show. When Beck pulled up the Cars.gov web site on his computer, he told his viewers, "I go in and I say, 'I want to turn in my clunker.' The dealer goes to Cars.gov, and then they hit 'submit transaction.' Here it says 'Privacy Act and Security Statement,' and it's like, oh, it's the Privacy Act of 1974. Whatever. I agree." Beck then read the warning statement that appeared out loud. PolitiFact verified the language that appeared and included it in the post dubbing Guilfoyle's statement a falsehood:

"This application provides access to the DOT CARS system. When logged on to the
CARS system, your computer is considered a federal computer system and it is
property of the United States Government. Any or all uses of this system and all
files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited,
inspected, and disclosed to authorized CARS, DOT, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign."

Despite acknowledging the context of Guilfoyle's words and her clear reliance on the language that appeared on the Cash for Clunkers web site, PolitiFact rated her "claim" false because, they say, "we think anyone who saw the July 31 program — in which she claimed 'seriously, they can get all your information' — would be left with the clear impression that anyone who logged into the cars.gov site was opening their computer to Big Brother. And that's False." (BTW, Jon Stewart got the mangled version of Guilfoyle's claim that PolitiFact fact-checked wrong. On his program, he listed the statement as "Cash for Clunkers will give government complete access to your home computer." Now that claim would be false, but Jon Stewart's allegation that such a statement was ever made by anyone at FOX News deserves a "Pants on Fire" rating.)

So, it seems Jon Stewart owes FOX News another apology. He may also want to apologize to PolitiFact for trying to use their work in an attempt to ridicule/discredit one of the few reputable news organizations left in this world.

I'll have more to say on this later, but tomorrow is July 4th, and I've got some big plans. Also, some idiot just set off a bunch of fireworks somewhere near my house, and now my dogs won't leave me alone, which makes it hard for me to get any work done.

Okay, Michele, You Have My Blessing, But for the Love of God, Will Somebody Please Stop Rick Perry?

2011-07-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

Photo Courtesy San Antonio Express-News.

Back in May, I wrote about why I didn't think it was a good idea for Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to run for president this time around. Then she announced her candidacy. As I made clear, I will vote for the Republican ticket in 2012 no matter who the nominees are. Now let me make something else clear: I don't like Rick Perry. I have never voted for him, and I hope I never will. To me, he is the Republican Clinton (Bill, not Hillary): a media-savvy politician who's had a pretty smooth run as chief executive, thanks in large part to his predecessor's sound governance. Like Slick Willie, Ol' Rick seems to have no problem taking credit for a good economy he had very little to do with. Yet, it's that economy - and the laissez-faire policies that facilitated it - that may make Perry an appealing candidate if he decides to throw his hat into the ring.

I have to admit that, on paper, Perry looks like an awfully appealing candidate. He has a wealth of experience. He succeeded to the governorship in 2000 having served nearly two years as lieutenant governor, eight years as Agriculture Commissioner and three terms in the Texas House of Representatives. He's also an Air Force veteran and former Eagle Scout. Originally elected to the state legislature as a Democrat, Perry joined the Republican Party in 1989 and could thus make a personal appeal to Democratic and independent voters about crossing over to the GOP, à la Ronald Reagan. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that the three-term governor “has decided to run for President, though the official word from Team Perry is still a definite maybe.”

So, why is that such a bad idea? For one, Perry's impressive résumé is undermined by his problematic, sometimes larger-than-life personality. Originally a "big-government conservative" in the mold of his predecessor, Perry co-opted the Tea Party movement to assist in his 2010 re-election bid. His main obstacle to winning a third term came not from the Democrats but from his own party: he faced Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and the self-proclaimed Tea Party candidate, Debra Medina, in the Republican primary. Painting Hutchison as a creature of Washington, D.C., and basically ignoring Medina, he managed to win the nomination with 51% of the vote, narrowly avoiding a runoff. His hypocrisy in casting Hutchison as the big-government Republican in the race was just the latest in a long line of stunts and follies that soured me on him.

His first year in office, Perry proposed the Trans-Texas Corridor, a privately-operated transportation network of tollways, rail lines and data lines that would criss-cross the state. Despite an elaborate plan and enthusiastic pitch, Perry failed to sell a majority of Texans on the project, which some decried as "Tolls Across Texas." Even more disturbing (to some) than the idea of privately owned and operated toll roads was the manifest potential for rampant eminent domain abuse. In 2006, all three of his opponents in the gubernatorial race ran against it. Yet, it took a decade before the Legislature finally killed what had become arguably the most salient boondoggle of Perry's governorship.

There's a lot more I could say about Rick Perry that could well turn some of his most ardent fans against him, but I'll hold back out of decency (and laziness). Also, divulging some of the more unseemly details about Perry's life and career would likely endanger my sources, whether or not I identified them. So, suffice it to say, I hope Perry doesn't run. If he did, then he could well mess things up and possibly even win the nomination. I seriously doubt he could beat Obama, but even if he could, I still wouldn't want him to run. Republicans have a good shot at taking back the White House next year, and we can do a lot better than Rick Perry.

Mark Halperin Tells It Like It Is (and Gets Punished For Doing So).

2011-06-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

I've had a pretty nice birthday so far today. One of the best presents I got was Mark Halperin’s exceptionally candid reaction to President Obama’s news conference. I was actually going to post a column today about the president’s disgraceful behavior at yesterday’s press conference, but I just can’t ignore the chain of events that unfolded after Halperin let loose on MSNBC today.
Let’s start with his exact words. At 5:07 a.m. CT on Morning Joe today, Halperin said of our president, "I thought he was kind of a dick yesterday." He added, "I think the president was posturing."
Before I go any further, let me say that I believe Halperin’s analysis was spot-on. The president behaved like a dick when he dumped on “corporate jet owners.” At least corporations pay for their jets. Our president gets two Boeing 747s to fly around in, courtesy of the American taxpayers. And, if it weren’t for many of those thriving corporations and their highly-paid executives, then our government’s coffers wouldn’t have near as much revenue to spend on our worthless commander-in-chief. It was dickish to say that he was “very amused when I start hearing comments about 'well, the President needs to show more leadership on this.'” To hear him tell it, Obama’s idea of “leadership” consists of calling other, unspecified “leaders” together and saying that “we have to get this done.” Oh, and to imply that Republicans wanted “to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship” and “stop funding certain grants for medical research” and compromise food safety in order to “keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners” and “oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars,” that goes far beyond dickishness.
Unfortunately, Halperin then proceeded to disappoint me by apologizing. But the story didn’t end there. The higher-ups at MSNBC can’t tolerate a cross word from someone on their payroll about our president, unless it’s some criticism of him for not governing even farther from the left. Here’s the statement from MSNBC:

Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and
unacceptable.　 We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our
viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no
place on our air. Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role
as an analyst.

Sadly, Halperin then had to go and prostrate himself with this statement:

I completely agree with everything in MSNBC’s statement about my remark. I
believe that the step they are taking in response is totally appropriate. Again,
I want to offer a heartfelt and profound apology to the President, to my MSNBC
colleagues, and to the viewers. My remark was unacceptable, and I deeply regret
it.

Halperin’s other employer, TIME Magazine, chimed in with this:

Mark Halperin’s comments on air this morning were inappropriate and in no way
reflective of TIME’s views. We have issued a warning to him that such behavior
is unacceptable. Mark has appropriately apologized on air, via Twitter and on
The Page.

Just so we’re clear, I still like Mark Halperin. I think he’s one of the most moderate, unbiased political analysts out there. He offers his opinions but is very hard to peg politically. He’s one of the few sane, reasonable people on MSNBC, so it was probably just a matter of time (no pun intended) before they found some excuse to get rid of him. As for what he said about Obama this morning, look, it’s inappropriate for someone who’s billed as a non-partisan “senior political analyst” to say our president–any U.S. president–“was kind of a dick,” even if the president’s actions totally justify such a remark, which they definitely did in this case. That being said, prior to 2008, I never thought we would have a president as bad as we do now. This president has been an abomination. He has allowed his administration to run rife with corruption. His policies have wreaked havoc on this country’s economy, the government’s reputation, and our image abroad, but what really distinguishes him from past awful presidents—Carter, Hoover, Wilson, e.g.—is his attitude. He looks down on hoi polloi with a contempt that he doesn’t even try to hide. People who disagree with him are to be marginalized, derided and harassed by government, if possible. All others are potential supporters, but I doubt he respects more than a few of them. If they’ll vote for him and/or donate to his campaign, then that’s all he cares about.
I’m not sure if he despises or feels threatened by real leaders like Chris Christie and Paul Ryan. Perhaps it’s both. Whenever their courage and leadership is on display for the public to see, Obama must feel some sense of inadequacy. I can only imagine his immediate reaction to The Path to Prosperity or Christie's latest victory in Trenton: How dare they make me look feckless and cowardly by comparison! How DARE they call my bluff and demonstrate real leadership by tackling difficult issues and taking big political risks for the good of the country!
Had Obama chosen not to go into politics, had he remained a lawyer or law professor or whatever he was before he was in a position to cause real damage that affects millions of people, if he were just a neighbor or a colleague of mine, then I dare say we might have become friends. I’m sure I would have enjoyed arguing with him, but alas, the allure of power was just too much for him to resist. If you have a problem with my admittedly harsh words about our president, then please let me know. I can defend everything I’ve said about him in this article.

I'm Sick of This Already.

2011-06-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

I honestly didn't think I would get fed up with this latest tit-for-tat between Jon Stewart and FOX News, but I'm starting to, so I'll keep this short and to-the-point.

Monday night on The O'Reilly Factor, veteran journalist and cantankerous old Jew Bernie Goldberg said this:

Starting right now, conservatives have to throw around the word "racism" as cavalierly as liberals have been doing it for years and years, so tonight, I am going to tell you that Jon Stewart, because of what he did, is a racist. I don't believe that, but I'm gonna tell you that anyway.

Bernie followed his comments up with this post on his web site. Then, on last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart did this:

The Daily Show - Oh, for Fox Sake - Stewart Eviscerates Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

That's all I'm going to write on this for now. Besides, today's my birthday, and I've got a lot to pack into this 24 hours. Peace out, y'all!

The Jon Stewart/FOX News Tit-for-Tat That Just Won't End

2011-06-28T18:25:00.000-07:00

It's been nine days since diminuitive Jewish comedian Jon Stewart appeared on FOX News Sunday w/ Chris Wallace. If you haven't seen the whole interview, then I highly recommend you watch it here.
As much as FOX News hyped this interview, the pre-interview hype was nothing compared to the flurry of analysis that permeated the blogoshpere and TV airwaves, especially on cable, in the immediate aftermath. I would very much like to do a play-by-play breakdown of every pertinent segment on FOX News and The Daily Show since the interview, but that would be far too time-consuming to hold most people's attention. Instead, suffice it to say that, on the day after the interview aired, Stewart led his program with it. Apparently, he felt that the lead take-away from the interview was Chris Wallace's "admission" of FOX News's "bias." Stewart played a clip from the interview in which he asked Wallace if he thought "that FOX News is exactly the ideological equivalent of NBC News," and Chris responded that he thought FOX News was "the counterweight," saying, "I think that they have a liberal agenda, and I think we tell the other side of the story, but, since this is my show, I'm asking the questions."
In a hypertechnical and not-at-all funny critique of Wallace, Stewart tried to argue that by saying that FOX News tells "the other side of the story," C.W. had implicitly confessed that FOX News tells only one side of the story. According to Jon, "FOX News isn't fair and balanced. It's balancing the system, man!"
I should pause for a moment here and reveal a little bit about where I'm coming from. I started watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report at almost exactly the same time that I started watching FOX News regularly (late 2006). When I want to get the left-wing viewpoint, I prefer Stewart and Colbert to MSNBC (because they're not as visceral and vitriolic) and CNN (because they're more interesting). Frankly, I think Stewart is really funny when he wants to be, but like a lot of comedians, he falls flat when he lets his ideology infect his humor. He has a very creative staff of writers; the only cheap shot I'll take at him is that I think he's more dependent on his writers than Colbert, but I could be wrong. (He did all right during the writers' strike of '07-'08.)
As for FOX, I personally do not believe that FOX News has a right-wing bias, and no sane person can believe that it's a propaganda outfit (like MSNBC). However, I do think it would be good if FOX News had one hour-long opinion/news analysis program hosted by a left-winger. (Juan Williams occasionally hosting The O'Reilly Factor doesn't count.) I must also admit that I don't mind MSNBC operating as a propaganda network; I don't even mind its anchors' stubborn and at times laughable insistence that they work for a serious news organization. I watch MSNBC periodically for much the same reason(s) that people like to go to the zoo and watch lesser-evolved primates hurl their feces at one another.
Now, then, back to Stewart's latest pique with FNC. After the interview and Stewart's subsequent send-up, PolitiFact got involved. For those of you who aren't familiar with this organization, it's a non-partisan web site known for its "Truth-O-Meter"®, which it uses to rate the accuracy of political claims. PolitiFact National is run by editors and reporters from the St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper I read whenever I'm in St. Petersburg. The PolitiFact state sites are run by news organizations that have partnered with the Times. Their purported mission is "sorting out the truth in politics." I'm not prepared to assert that the site has a political bias, but several of its ratings have given me reason to doubt its credibility. (For example, on the June 26, 2011, edition of ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) said that Democrats "do not want to raise anybody's tax rates. That's never been on the table." PolitiFact rated Clyburn's blatantly false claim "Barely True," which, according to the Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter, means "an element of truth mixed with a lot of misinformation." Yet, this is the same rating it gave Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's demonstrably true claim that, "under Barack Obama, the last two years, the number of federal limousines for bureaucrats has increased 73 percent.") See, in his interview on FOX News Sunday, Jon stated emphatically that "FOX viewers" are "the most consistently misinformed media viewers," according to "every poll." PolitiFact rated Stewart's claim "False." Then, on last Tuesday's Daily Show, Jon Stewart accepted PolitiFact's "False" verdict and said, "I defer to their judgment, and I apologize for my mistake. To not do so would be irresponsible, and if I were to continue to [bla bla bla]." But alas, he just couldn't let it go. Stewart needed some sour grapes to wash the taste of crow out of his mouth, so he proceeded to fire off what he dubbed a "21-Lie Salute" to FOX News, rattling off a long list of claims seen/made on/by FOX News that received a "False" rating or worse. I spotted several issues with the items Stewart featured on his show, so I went to the PolitiFact web site to see how they explained their various classifications of what seemed to me to be either at least partially true statements or opinions that can't technically be assigned a truth value. There's a lot of material to go over, so I'll publish my criticism in a separate piece.
Anywho, Chris Wallace closed out his show this past Sunday by calling attention to Stewart's specious spin on his remark about telling "the other side of the story." Predictably, he told his viewers that "I wish I had said, 'the full story.'" (Stewart interpreted this as Wallace saying, "I accidentally told the truth and wish I could take it back.") He then proceeded to give a specific example of how FOX News tells both sides of the story when other networks don't, citing FOX News's coverage of the astonishingly poor response of the federal, state and local governments to the devastated Mississippi River Delta region in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. While the mainstream media was busy highlighting how FEMA dropped the ball (in what I'm sure was a bona fide attempt at hard-hitting journalism and not at all a cynical hit job on the Bush Administration), FOX News made sure its viewers were informed about who all bore responsibility for the abysmal response, including the bumbling mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin (D), and the administration of Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Stewart did not seem to care for that. The following night on The Daily Show, he played a few short clips of Wallace's comments and supplemented them with his own brand of derisive mockery. He tried to somehow bolster his by now thoroughly discredited claims that FOX News is not "fair & balanced" by playing a clip of William LaJeunesse reporting on the "Operation Fast and Furious" fiasco. Apparently, Jon took issue with LaJeunesse's remark that some say the operation was an innocent mistake. "Others believe it was allowed to happen to justify tougher gun laws in the U.S." Jon cut the clip off right after that last syllable. He was very excited. "Did you see that?" he exclaimed with childish delight. "He just threw it right in there. President Obama is either incompetent, making an innocent mistake, or the architect of an evil conspiracy to wreak violent carnage in Mexico as a way to take away Americans' guns." Flashing a cheesy grin, he added, "You know, both sides of the story." Then, feigning exasperation, he said, "Who said that America was involved in the type of conspiracy that, if true, could ultimately lead to the impeachment of a president? Who said it? [dumb voice] Others."
Yes, Jon, “others,” like NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. (Seriously, who told you to use that as an example? Do you know how easy it was for me to find someone who suggested that this could be part of an sinister plot by the Obama Administration to push a political agenda? I just typed "ATF agent fired" into a search engine. I wasn't even looking for someone who made that claim; I was just trying to get the name of the operation right. This was one of the first videos that popped up!)
Stewart took some more shots at Wallace and FOX News in general, but at this point, I'm actually feeling sorry for the little guy (despite him having nearly everything I want out of life but haven't attained yet, viz. a great job, his own TV show, an adoring fan base, a wife & kids). So, I'll close this out with his parting shot at the man he actually called "a friend of mine" as he insulted the man's employer. Said Stewart, "you know what this whole victim thing makes FOX? Well, perhaps this term a friend of mine used once to describe our current presidential administration is most apt."
Cut to: clip of Wallace telling Bill O'Reilly, "They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington."
Tomorrow: the back-and-forth continues as Bernie Goldberg calls Jon Stewart a racist, and Stewart ... well, he does something to himself "with his own mouth." That's all I'll tell you for now. I'll also have some boring commentary on economics or some crap.

Remains of the Day: 6/27/2011

2011-06-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

इ've picked up on a lot of interesting stories इन थे न्यूज़ of late, and I'd like to comment on a few of them really quickly. First off, Republican dynamo Chris Christie appeared on "Meet the Press" yesterday. Here's the video:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now, David Gregory is not a good interviewer, but this was a terrific performance by Christie. His answers were direct and to-the-point; the only dodge I caught was his answer to the Afghanistan question. Basically, Gregory asked Christie if he thought that the president was "pulling troops out too fast," and the Gov said:

You know, David, as the governor of New Jersey, I got to tell you, I'm not going
to put my judgment in place of the president of the United States who is
briefed on this much more extensively than I am. And so I'm just not going
to go there with that.

He also said that Obama "knows a lot more about this than I do. I'm not going to go down that road." Am I the only one who thought he did that on purpose? Surely an astute guy like Christie has formed an opinion about our ongoing operations in Afghanistan. Not sharing it when prompted sure seems like a clever way to further convince skeptics that he has no interest in running for president.

Also, I must express my frustration with FOX News's excessive coverage of the Casey Anthony trial. I actually turned to MSNBC multiple times this week to quench my thirst for news and analysis of topics I want to see/hear more about. Get it together, FOX!

Lastly, in a follow-up to something I wrote about earlier this month, the Generic Congressional Ballot continues to provide comfort to Republicans. Every Generic Ballot poll I’ve seen in recent weeks has the GOP tied with or leading the Dems. The only exception was a Democracy Corps survey that gave the Democrats a statistically insignificant one-point lead (46%-45%). Now, the latest Democracy Corps poll finds the GOP leading the Democrats by three points, 47%-44%. This is further evidence that the Democrats’ cowardly, cynical attempts to demagogue the Republicans on entitlement reform and other issues are not working.

In other news:

Much to my dismay, former Texas Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams has abandoned his bid for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Williams will instead run for the House of Representatives in the newly created 33rd Congressional District, which actually includes my hometown of Arlington.

A poll by the Des Moines Register finds Michele Bachmann रुन्निंग नेक्क-एंड-नेक्क with Mitt Romney in Iowa.

Former Illinois governor and Big Boy model Rod Blagojevich was found guilty on 17 of 20 counts Monday, including trying to auction off Barack Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat in 2008.

GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain tells FOX News's Juan Williams that he was "not offended" by Jon Stewart's ignorant, borderline racist impression of him but insists that Stewart doesn't like him because he's "an American black conservative."

Speaking of ignorant bigots, David Carr.

The Margin-of-Error Guy

2011-06-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

Take Mitt Romney, subtract the curate’s egg that is Romneycare, replace it with a few successful conservative reforms, add some serious foreign policy credentials, take away most of his name recognition and positive/negative press, and what do you get?

Answer: Jon Huntsman, Jr.

Okay, that’s a little too simplistic. Huntsman never rescued an Olympiad, and he doesn’t have near as much private-sector experience as Romney does. And, while Jon Huntsman, Sr.’s net worth dwarfs that of Romney, his eldest son is barely a tycoon by Republican standards. Then again, Huntsman’s background as a corporate executive isn’t nearly as ripe for distortion and attack. He’s also 13 years younger than Mitt and, in my opinion, is more charismatic. Maybe the better description would be: imagine a taller, younger Mitch Daniels with foreign policy experience.

Look, I’ll level with y’all. I normally avoid selling people on someone I don’t know personally, but the more I learn about Huntsman, the more bullish on him I become. I started touting him as a great potential candidate for president two years ago, which is why I was so mystified/disappointed when he accepted Obama’s appointment to be Ambassador to China. I remember thinking, What is that job going to consist of for the next four years, other than begging them to buy up more of our T-bills? On the plus side, it bolstered the former Utah governor’s already-impressive foreign policy creds. (In addition to running his family business's overseas operations in the Pacific Rim, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Singapore under the first President Bush and Deputy U.S. Trade Representative in the last administration.)

So, in a situation where I don’t know any of the candidates personally, I evaluate them on their records first, then on other factors, such as each one’s viability as the potential nominee. Huntsman clearly stood out from the rest of the pack on that first criterion, but should he decide to enter the race (as he is widely expected to do), he’ll have a lot of catching up to do before he attains "top-tier" status. He’s registering very little support (anywhere from 1 to 4 percent) in all of the polls I’ve seen. This is almost entirely due to his low name recognition, so we’ll have to see how well he does at introducing himself to most of the American public.

Of course, most of those polls have Sarah Palin, who I’ve repeatedly said will not run for president in 2012, and Rudy Giuliani, who isn’t even close to running, rounding out the top tier. Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain are the only other candidates to draw double-digit support. Once the Republican primary electorate knows that Palin is out, there will be a wide opening for somebody to move up in the polls and rival Romney’s frontrunner status. Trouble is, that opening is already pretty wide, and the “Palin void” – as I’m going to call it – is likely to get jammed up with several candidates making an incremental rise in the polls, rather than one contender who breaks away from the rest and surges into the lead, or at least a statistical dead heat, to close out the year. There’s also the chance that Romney could see a sharp drop in his support, like Giuliani did in '07. Recall that the early 2008 primaries actually turned out better for the GOP than many where expecting, with the race quickly boiling down to a three-way tie between Huckabee, Romney and McCain, while Obama quickly caught up to and overtook Hillary on the Democratic side, throwing what was supposed to be a cakewalk into a prolonged, increasingly nasty fight that lasted until June. (I don’t want to get too far off topic, so let me just cut off this tangent by saying that I don’t expect Gingrich to mount a comeback like McCain did, and that means Romney will become the heir apparent to the Republican presidential nomination in short order.)

A few people on the right are already speaking out against a Huntsman candidacy. Last month on Hannity, Michelle Malkin said she was “not looking for McCain-Lites, like Jon Huntsman,” the folks over at Verum Serum produced this video mocking Huntsman as a RINO ... with an actual rhinoceros. The Conservapedia article on Jon Huntsman, Jr. describes him as “a RINO who was born into an extremely wealthy family in Utah.” When last I checked, that entry had gone unedited since June 4th.

Still, you have to admit that, on paper, Huntsman looks to be a formidable contender. He has a more conservative record than any of the ex-governors currently running. (It helped that he had a cooperative, overwhelmingly Republican state legislature to work with, but so did Tim Pawlenty during his first term, and I defy anyone to compare Pawlenty’s record with Huntsman’s.) He flattened the state’s income tax, taking it from one of the most steeply graduated progressive rate schedules in the country to a flat rate of 5%. He signed legislation protecting unborn children from abortion, red meat for social conservatives. Maybe the most impressive achievement during his governorship was the establishment of the first statewide school voucher system in the U.S. Nothing drives the Left crazy like wildly successful Republican policies that Democrats and their union cronies fought tooth-and-nail. During his tenure, Pew Research Center dubbed Utah the "Best Managed State in America", and last year Forbes Magazine recognized the Beehive State as having the "Best Financial Situation in the Country" and being "America's Best State to Live In." Also, he averred his unequivocal support for the Path to Prosperity before any of the declared Republican candidates did the same. (In fairness, Gary Johnson has advocated some arguably more austere entitlement reforms, as has Michele Bachmann, who voted for the plan when it came before the House, but she was not yet a candidate at that time.)

If Huntsman joins the fray, then I will probably vote for him, but I’ll vote for the Republican in the general election no matter who it is. As for those of you who aren’t sold, let me ask you this: who else can you think of that has Mitt Romney’s managerial finesse, Newt Gingrich’s intellect, Michele Bachmann’s conservative bona fides and Tim Pawlenty’s disarming, down-to-earth demeanor? Before you answer, consider that this should be someone willing to run, with a comparable degree of foreign policy experience. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

A Reply to Someone Far More Well-Versed Than Austan Goolsbee

2011-05-25T17:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was delighted to discover that someone had posted a lengthy reply to one of my recent columns. Because the commenter, identified as “GladYouWrote”, sounded much more informed, erudite and honest than Austan Goolsbee did in last week’s interview on The Colbert Report, I felt I could do no less in the way of a response than a new article on my home page.

First of all, I did not mean to attribute the growth in tax revenues under George W. Bush “singularly to lowering the top income tax rate,” but the federal income tax is the government’s main source of revenue; in any given year, individual income taxes alone account for between 45 and 50% of the government’s haul. Also, consider that, because some other major sources of revenue–such as payroll taxes–are (supposed to be) set aside for specified purposes, when the gov’t thinks we need more revenue, it’s only logical to focus first and foremost on the income tax.

GladYouWrote also took issue with my statement that “clearly, the government took in more revenue per annum under George W. Bush than it did under Bill Clinton,” saying, “without context that claim is disingenuous. As a proportion of GDP, 1992-1999 saw 18.7% return in the form of federal revenues, contrasted with only 17.6% return during the years 2001-2008.”

As the graph I displayed in one of my posts shows, tax revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product did hit a historic a historic high in 2000, while the old income tax rates were still in place, but this was obviously an unsustainable level of tax revenues, no matter what the rate structure. Notice that, even before the first round of tax cuts (EGTRRA) was enacted, revenues started to decline because of the recession. Perhaps this graph from OMB, which shows revenues and spending as a percentage of GDP over the past 60 years, may shed some more light on the historical levels.

GladYouWrote also says that I should “include significantly more analysis” to validate their success of the Bush tax rate cuts “than general unemployment and GDP growth.” I think that’s fair, but this suggestion was followed by somewhat of a non-sequitur: a series of references to a report by the CBO entitled “Policies for Increasing Economic Growth and Employment in 2010 and 2011.” I checked out this report, and, I have to say, I almost ended up forgoing this blurb in favor of a much more in-depth article critiquing the CBO’s report. (I have a tendency to get sucked down rabbit holes, which is one reason I prefer this to an in-person debate where one’s opportunities to make effective arguments & counter-arguments are undermined by cumbrous time restraints.) Thankfully, I was able to control myself, and at the risk of interrupting the flow of this column, let me make 3 quick remarks before I resume my reply to what GladYouWrote actually said:

The report was mostly well-written, and I realize that the CBO is meant to provide objective analysis and not to author normative policy statements, but as I was reading this, I couldn’t help but wonder who, if anyone, edited it? For example, it began “After the most severe recession since the 1930s, the U.S. economy appears to be recovering.” What? Look, I’m not going to claim that an entire report is worthless just because the author made a few mistakes, but this particular report contained several highly suspect obiter dicta that could just as easily have been typos as evidence that whoever wrote the report is a very poor student of history.

In the report’s Introduction and Summary, the CBO states that it is measuring the cost-effectiveness of the analyzed policies “by the cumulative effects on GDP and employment per dollar of budgetary cost and in the time patterns of those effects,” so it seems odd that that GladYouWrote would suggest that I use more ”than general unemployment and GDP growth” to evaluate the success of fiscal policies and then cite to a report that does just that.

I can’t remember the last time I heard/saw someone who wasn’t an economics professor, gov’t-employed bean counter or policy analyst @ a think tank refer to the tax acts of 2001 and 2003 as EGTRRA and JGTRRA, respectively. I stopped using the terms myself years ago in favor of the commonly understood, if technically inaccurate, “Bush tax cuts.” Most people don’t seem to care about the distinction(s) between “tax cuts”/”tax rate cuts”/”tax relief”/”tax reform”/etc. This is a really minor point, but I think I’m glad to see there’s someone out there who is familiar with the correct names of the legislation.

Now then, back to the matter at hand: I could not find anything in the entire report stating that “EGTRRA and JGTRRA tax decreases produce less than 40 cents of economic output over five years for every dollar spent, as opposed to increased aid to the unemployed and low-income earners and direct government investment in short-term infrastructure and job creation, both of which produce an average of 75 cents more than straight-up tax relief.” The closest thing I could find to such a conclusion anywhere in the report was this statement: “CBO estimates that a two-year AMT patch and one-year deferral of the EGTRRA and JGTRRA tax increases would raise output cumulatively between 2010 and 2015 by $0.10 to $0.40 per dollar of total budgetary cost.” As for the part about “increased aid to the unemployed and low-income earners and direct government investment in short-term infrastructure and job creation” (which some of us prefer to refer to sardonically as “welfare & waste”), the CBO analyzed what the impact might be of, inter alia, “increasing aid to the unemployed” (from March 2010 until July 2011), “providing additional refundable tax credits for lower- and middle-income households in 2011,” and “investing in infrastructure.” In addition to “cost-effectiveness,” the CBO identified “timing” and “consistency with long-term fiscal objectives” as the key criteria for judging policy options. Before I go any further, I should just point out that the post GladYouWrote replied to was meant to be a repudiation of what Goolsbee said on Colbert, not a pitch for any particular policy going forward. I supplemented it with historical facts to prove that many of Goolsbee’s arguments lacked merit, and in doing so I suppose I ended up defending the soundness of EGTRRA and JGTRRA.

As I said, I don’t want this to become a deconstruction of the CBO report, so for now, let’s just remember that, like many other CBO reports, this was a policy analysis based on predictions/projections of what it thinks will happen if certain policies are implemented. My previous posts on this subject concerned the actual effects of past and current policies. To what extent the economic circumstances, as indicated by the various facts and figures I included, are/were attributable to those policies is not something I profess to know. Finally, I’ve never been one to begrudge wealthy individuals for their (legally compliant) success, which I suppose explains my political affiliation. It’s fair to say that many of these individuals don’t care to distribute the fruits of their labors to people who don’t need/deserve it, but GladYouWrote’s assertion that “the rich (despite what conservatives want desperately to believe) care little about distributing their acquired wealth to the overall economy” is too dubious to simply stand by itself, unsupported by any stated premises. Before I rebut that assertion, I’d like to know what the author meant by that.

Austan Goolsbee: Leading the Charge in the Obama Administration’s War on Reality

2011-05-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I watched what Colbert billed as his “unedited, extended interview” with Austan Goolsbee online, and not surprisingly, he continued to make specious claims, this time focusing much of his time on deceiving the audience about Republican policies. He pitched that favorite old saw of the Left: that high-income tax cuts don’t work. Let me make this about as clear as I possibly can while still relying on specific, objectively verifiable facts: under the rate structure that was in place from 1993-2001, we never collected more than $2.03 trillion in one fiscal year. Under George W. Bush, the top income tax rate was lowered from 39.6% to 38.6% in 2001, then to 35% in 2003. In 2007, federal receipts totaled $2.6 trillion. The government actually saw an increase in revenues in 2008, but it made the ill-advised decision to give about $150 billion back as part of the first misbegotten stimulus. So, clearly, the government took in more revenue per annum under George W. Bush than it did under Bill Clinton. That is beyond dispute. So, when Austan Goolsbee says “the high-income tax cuts did not work the first time we passed them,” I wondered what he was thinking. I wish I could ask him what he meant by that. Unfortunately, it’s not as much fun refuting someone when I’m not sure what he means. If he’s talking about the Bush tax cuts, then let’s remember that there were actually 2 separate tax acts passed and signed into law by President Bush. Ostensibly the purpose of these tax cuts was to stimulate an economy that was reeling from the impact of a dot-com bust, the 9/11 attacks and a series of corporate scandals. In that regard, the tax cuts were an enormous success: the unemployment rate never went above 6½%, our GDP increased from $10.1 trillion in 2001 to $14.4 trillion in 2008, and federal revenues increased by 44% (from a low of $1.78 trillion in 2003 to nearly $2.6 trillion in 2007). Now, as for jobs, there are different ways to measure employment, and the Labor Department changes the controls with some frequency. (You can see ten years’ worth of raw data on the BLS’s web site here.) The standard measure–the figure you usually hear people refer to when they say the economy added/lost so many jobs–is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the “seasonally-adjusted” employment level. By that standard, not only did the economy add 10 million jobs after the end of the recession; it added jobs every month for 52 consecutive months, a first in recorded history. By contrast, using the same metric, our economy has lost a net of 2.5 million jobs since Obama took office. This is important because when Goolsbee boasted about the “2.1 million jobs” that he claims were created in the “last 14 months,” he’s neglecting to mention the 4.2 million jobs that were lost during Obama’s first year in office. Now, is it fair to blame Obama or his policies for the loss of all those jobs? Of course not. But nor is it fair to blame George W. Bush or his policies. Like Bush, Obama inherited a bad economy, but unlike Bush, Obama has made things worse.
I also heard Goolsbee say that, during the last decade, “middle-class incomes fell by $2,000.” I’m not sure what, if anything, he’s basing that claim on or how he defines “middle-class,” but nearly everyone I know who was gainfully employed (and is willing to discuss their salary openly) saw their incomes increase from 2001 to 2008. Also, this is another example of Goolsbee using vague, ambiguous language so that it’s difficult to prove or disprove his claims. Is he talking about household income or per capita income? Is he going by the mean or the median? Stay tuned; I have more to say on this matter.

Austan Space (Sorry, I couldn’t think of a better pun.)

2011-05-21T16:52:00.000-07:00

Last night, I saw Austan Goolsbee on The Colbert Report. If you don’t know who Austan Goolsbee is, then he’s the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. As far as I can tell, his job consists primarily of explaining this administration’s economic policies to the American public in a way that disguises how destructive and ideological these policies are. I’ve read some of his writings and watched several of his media appearances, and not surprisingly, he attempts to sell his policies the way most people on the Left do—by lying about them. He also misleads his audience when talking about Republican ideas and policies. Lest anyone think I’m just attacking someone with whom I disagree and not providing any evidence to back up my assertions, here is the video of the interview as it appeared on TV:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Apparently, the full interview lasted sixteen minutes, according to Colbert, and had to be edited down to the video embedded above, which is just under seven minutes. I’ve included the link to it in this post because I want to call attention to three specific things he said during the interview I saw, and this way, no one can fairly accuse me of taking his words out of context.

1. “The high-income tax rates are the lowest they’ve been in some 60 years.”

First of all, that’s not true. Second … well, there really is no need for a second point; just look at the facts. Right now, the highest federal individual income tax rate is 35%. 60 years ago, the highest federal income tax rate was 94%. That rate stayed in effect until 1954, when it was dropped to 91%. Since then, the federal tax rate on the highest individual income bracket was changed several times and ultimately dropped to 28% under the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86). One novel feature of TRA86 was the so-called “bubble rate.” The rate structure included four individual income tax brackets, and the rates were 15%/28%/33%/28%. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, which was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Pres. George Bush, did away with this “bubble rate” and established a new surtax on the highest-income-earners, effectively raising the top tax rate on individual income to 31%. Maybe Austan misspoke, or maybe he just flat-out lied. Either way, there’s no disputing that what he said was false.

2. “The president has said he doesn’t think we can afford to keep rates at these historically low levels, and I think he’s totally right.”

OK, if Mr. Goolsbee had said that we can’t afford to keep taxes at these historically low levels, then I would agree, but he didn’t say “taxes;” he said “rates.” Look, I’m not prepared to admit that Austan Goolsbee is a smart guy, but I believe he’s the sort of person who chooses his words carefully. Of course, I don’t know what measure he has in mind when he says “levels,” but the rest of his statement sounds pretty clear. We already know that tax rates are not at a historical low, but what could be an objective measure of tax “levels”? How about total tax revenues as a share of the nation’s economy? According to the Congressional Budget Office, as a share of the nation’s GDP, the government’s take this year will be the lowest since 1950. Now the CBO projects that “total federal revenues will be about $2.2 trillion in 2010, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009,” when tax receipts were only 14.8% of GDP, but “total federal revenues will rebound sharply from the current historically low amounts relative to GDP starting in 2011.” (See this.) I’d just like to point out that an AP article I saw in February said that, in George W. Bush’s “last year in office, tax receipts were 17.5 percent of GDP, just below their 40-year average.” What this all boils down to is that taxes are too low, but the problem is that the people who aren’t paying their fair share are not the same people who Obama and the Democrats want to pay more taxes. The AP’s Stephen Ohlemacher explains the problem thusly:

Income tax rates remain unchanged. But many taxpayers are seeing their bills drop under Obama because of more generous tax credits for college students, working families, homebuyers and the working poor. Many of the changes were enacted as part of the big economic stimulus package passed in 2009.

So even if we can afford to maintain the current schedule of tax rates, I doubt a majority of the electorate will accept the kind of budget cutbacks that will be needed to balance the budget if we do that. Look, I’m a conservative (Actually, I prefer to call myself a classical liberal, but whatever.), but I’m also a pragmatist, and there’s no good reason why so many people pay little or nothing in federal taxes. If you’re making $50,000 a year, then I don’t care what your personal situation is: you should be feeding the kitty, even if you’re only paying $1,000 in income taxes. So, let’s keep the current rates where they are and get rid of a bunch of these costly deductions and tax credits. That would mean a higher effective tax rate for some people, but if Goolsbee is serious about deficit reduction, then he has to concede that those individuals should pay more.

3. “Let’s return to tax revenues from high-income people that are more like the historic norms.”

That line got a big round of applause. Once again, I believe that Austan Goolsbee choose the words he used here carefully and deliberately, so when he said, “Let’s return to tax revenues from high-income people that are more like the historic norms,” I thought, Yes, let’s. I don’t know how he defines “high-income people,” but this graph shows total tax revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product over the last four decades: As you can see, the CBO pegs the federal government’s average annual tax collection at just above 18% of GDP for the period shown in the graph above, so let’s call that the historic norm. So, what would a return to the historic norm mean, and what would it accomplish? According to the most recent numbers available, current-dollar GDP just topped $15 trillion in the first quarter of 2011. (You can read the “advance” estimate on the BEA’s website here.) Of course, that’s going to be revised, but for now, let’s just say that if real GDP totals $15 trillion for 2011, then based on “the historic norms” as shown, we should be collecting about $2.7 trillion in tax revenues, but Austan just said he wants to “return to tax revenues from high-income people that are more like the historic norms.” So, using Austan’s benchmark, that sounds like he’s content with the current levels of tax revenue the government is collecting from all other individuals, which would mean running the government on less than $2.7 trillion. (For the record, we haven’t done that since FY2006.) Now, if you’re the sort of person (as I am) who’s not content to deal with this in the abstract, then let’sat least agree that, for the budget to balance, total revenues must match or exceed total spending. So, assuming we can all agree on that point, it must follow that, to get our fiscal house in order, if we can somehow get tax revenues back up to a level that’s ”more like the historic norms,” then we must necessarily reduce federal spending to equal or lower levels. The problem with returning to “the historic norms” is that, historically, the U.S. government has run huge budget deficits. Thus, if we want to “return to tax revenues … that are more like the historic norms” and still balance the budget, then we should cap spending at a level below the historic norm. (Nick Gillespie & Veronique de Rugy of Reason Magazine have written extensively about this; they call it The 19 Percent Solution.)

As to these ”high-income people,” look, I don’t know what Austan’s thinking; I can only listen to what he’s saying and compare it to objectively verifiable facts. So, for simplicity’s sake, let’s talk about the top 5% of wage earners (since Obama’s fond of saying he “cut taxes for 95% of Americans”). What share of federal tax revenues, historically, has the government collected from the top 5%? Well, according to the CBO, in 2001, the last year we had a budget surplus, the share of the total federal tax burden shouldered by the Top 5% of households was 38.5%. That share hit a record high of 44.7% in 2006. Perhaps even more impressively, the Top 5%’s share of individual income tax liabilities increased from 55.2% to 60.9% during the same time period, and it hit an even 61.0% for 2007, the most recent fiscal year for which the CBO provides this data. (My source on the CBO web site can be seen here.) Bottom line: returning “to tax revenues from high-income people that are more like the historic norms” would likely mean collecting less tax revenue that one would think Mr. Goolsbee wants to see the government collect.

Tying all this together, if Austan truly believes that we can balance the budget just by raising taxes on a small minority of income earners and accomplish the rest through spending cuts, then he should explain: (1) what incomes are “high” enough to warrant an increase in the marginal rate; (2) how will you cut the budget down to a level that does not exceed total revenues; and (3) given that individuals in the highest income tax brackets are making more money, paying more in taxes and paying a larger share of the total tax bill than they were when the higher tax rates were in place, why should we return to the old rate schedule? I’d also like to hear him explain why he only thinks people at a certain income level should pay more taxes, but that’s more a question of fairness and not crucial to the policy goals he’s laid out.

The ten most important House races of 2010 : SFGate: Politics Blog

2010-09-19T17:03:00.000-07:00

The ten most important House races of 2010 : SFGate: Politics Blog: "Kristi Noem returns from a hunting trip with a pickup full of dead birds"

The TOP 10 Reasons Tonight's Primaries Matter

2010-08-24T23:45:00.000-07:00

Tuesday is Primary Election Day in Florida and Arizona (also in Alaska and Vermont, but who cares?). That’s right people! Some states still haven’t held their primaries yet! Anyway, none of us live in either of those states, so what should we care? Well, elections in these two states should be of national interest for many reasons, so before I returned to law school, I collected some information on what I considered the most intriguing campaigns in what have become refuges for New Yorkers and Californians, respectively, but first, a little background:

Arizona and Florida are two of the fastest-growing states in the country. They are also two of the most gerrymandered states in the country, and, of course, both states have large Latino populations. As a result of the 2000 Census, each state gained two congressional districts, and the GOP-controlled legislatures who redrew the boundaries wanted to make them as beneficial to Republicans as the Constitution allows. In Arizona, that meant splitting up the Democratic bastions of Phoenix and Tucson, and in Florida, then-House Majority Leader Mario Diaz-Balart (R) made sure the new 25th congressional district included his state House district, allowing him to run for the seat, which he won and still holds.

In the last two election cycles, however, Democrats have gained three districts from Republicans in each state. (An additional district in Florida was won by a Democrat in 2006 and flipped back to the GOP in 2008.) Now the GOP is targeting those districts—and one or two more—in a year that promises to be much better for Republicans. Over the past week or so, I compiled the following list of what I’m calling the top ten reasons tonight’s primary results are worth checking out. However, I’m only going to list eight of them. Why only eight? SHUT THE HELL UP, THAT’S WHY!!!

10. Will conservative insurgent Joe Miller defeat Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in the Republican primary? Miller has attracted a lot of grassroots support and endorsements from conservative rock stars such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, but Murkowski is not as vulnerable as some may think. “Palin's decision to wade into the primary race in her home state was always somewhat puzzling,” Chris Cillizza opined on his blog. “Murkowski is not beloved among all Alaska conservatives but neither did she create the sort of animosity within the base that a Sen. Bob Bennett, for example, did in Utah.”
7. Arizona’s 8th congressional district provides an excellent example of the kind of seats Republicans must win if they’re to take back the House this November. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) should be ripe for the pickin's. She won a Republican seat in 2006 and was narrowly re-elected in 2008. Over the past year-and-a-half, she has cast several votes that put her at odds with her constituency, supporting the President on TARP, health care, cap-&-trade and the $787 billion "stimulus" package. However, Giffords has been careful to attend to the issues her constituents care most about, foremost amongst them immigration. She’s also amassed a massive war chest that dwarfs the campaign account of any other House candidate in Arizona. This race also evinces the importance of party unity: Republicans have a top-tier candidate in former State Sen. Jonathan Paton, an Iraq War veteran and native of Tucson. Paton’s raised enough money to get on TV with campaign ads (This one is my favorite.), but he faces a tough primary challenge from another vet, Jesse Kelly. Kelly, an 29-year-old businessman and Marine Corps veteran, has proven himself an effective campaigner and fundraiser. Conventional wisdom says that Paton would be the stronger candidate against Giffords, but in this political climate, it may not matter.
6. Who will take on freshman Rep. and 1st-class a**hole Alan Grayson (D) in Florida's 8th congressional district? The bombastic multi-millionaire narrowly won his seat in 2008, and Republicans attracted a political heavyweight when former state House Speaker Daniel Webster (Yes, that’s his real name.) joined the race, but Orlando businessman Bruce O'Donoghue may be the only one who can compete with Grayson’s money. If you’re a fan of racial profiling, then you may be rooting for Dan Fanelli, a retired Naval officer and commercial airline pilot who was a piloting Boeing 727 on September 11, 2001. However, don’t count out Cuban-American banker and political activist Armando Gutierrez. Considering the political environment, it may not matter how much money Grayson spends, but the diverse cast of characters vying for the GOP nomination is something worth checking out.
5. See how badly Sen. John McCain (R) crushes J.D. Hayworth in the Arizona Senate primary. McCain is an American hero, and Hayworth is one of the few people who makes conservatives look bad. His boneheaded decision to challenge Arizona’s most popular public official makes Pat Buchanan’s quixotic quest for the presidency in 1992 look like a ... oh, forget it. I just wanted to use the phrase "quixotic quest."
4. The free-for-all in Florida's 2nd congressional district is nothing to scoff at. Since being elected to Congress in 1996, Rep. F. Allen Boyd (D) has never had a terribly difficult time getting re-elected. This year may be different, however; Boyd has all but abandoned his “Blue Dog” status, voting for TARP, the "stimulus" package, Cap-&-Trade and the health care overhaul. Five candidates are seeking the Republican nomination in Boyd's district, but the congressman’s biggest challenge is within his own party. Despite voting the party line on every major piece of legislation this session, Boyd is still facing a tough primary against Florida Senate Minority Leader Al Lawson, and the recent indictment of a Washington lobbyist with ties to Boyd has given his opponent "a fresh line of attack." To make things even more bizarre, earlier this month a group of mayors endorsed Lawson, then withdrew their endorsement on the eve of the primary. Even though none of the Republicans has been able to raise or spend much money, There’s little doubt the primary battle has weakened Boyd for the fall election; as of this month, he’s already spent a whopping $2.2 million on his campaign. Bottom line: an underfunded Republican dark horse w/ no political experience will take on a career politician in a moderately conservative district. Who wins is anybody’s guess. John McCain received 54% of the vote in this district, and The Cook Political Report, the Rothenberg Political Report and RealClearPolitics are all calling the race a tossup.
3. I forgot that I didn’t have time to write a piece on the Republican gubernatorial primary in Florida between state Attorney Gen. Bill McCollum and unscrupulous rich dude Rick Scott, a venture capitalist & former CEO of Columbia/HCA, but the next race on the list is really more interesting.
2. For the 4th time in nine years, Florida will get a new Attorney General. Former Hillsborough county prosecutor and FOX News analyst Pam Bondi is seeking the GOP nomination. Ordinarily I, being a very important person, wouldn’t care about these types of races, and I wouldn’t expect you to, either, but that doesn’t change the fact that Pamela Bondi is really, really good-looking. Also, she got a bum rap in most reports of a recent controversy involving a St. Bernard she rescued from a shelter after Hurricane Katrina. Apparently, the vet told her that the dog had serious health problems even before the Hurricane struck, and after the original owners tried to take him back, Pam had serious reservations about returning the dog, so of course she got portrayed as this horrible person who wouldn’t give a dog back to its loving family. What a crock. As St. Petersburg Times Columnist Sue Carlton explains, "the ugly mess ended peacefully, though not without tears. Bondi would send medication and food. The dog would go home." Worse still is that the infectious opprobrium that emanated from the drive-by media has pricked the ears of many canine-loving conservatives, who have posted comments all over the web that include copious references to Pam Bondi as a term that, ironically, is only appropriately used to describe a female dog.
1. Arguably the most interesting primary in a race for the U.S. House of Reps. is taking place in Arizona's 3rd congressional district, where the retirement of Rep. John Shadegg (R) set off a frenzy of Republican campaigns for his House seat. The identity of Shadegg’s successor is anybody’s guess. Will it be Ben Quayle, the son of former Vice Pres. Dan Quayle who’s taken up residence in Scottsdale? I’m not going to talk about Quayle’s fundraising or the recent scandal threatening to derail his campaign, in part because I wrote extensively about this race but seemed to have lost that file, so I’ll just copy and paste this excerpt from CQ Politics:

A good number have now jumped into the race, including ... entrepreneur Steve Moak. Former Paradise Valley Mayor Vernon Parker, who switched from the gubernatorial contest to the House race in February, also had a good quarter.

Well behind were former state Rep. Sam Crump; former state Sens. Pamela Gorman and Jim Waring; and attorney Paulina Morris, though they are still considered possible contenders.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, responding to the Shadegg’s retirement decision, elevated this race to its list of top challenges for Republican House seats in November.

But the seat will be a tough one for Democrats to pick up, given its Republican registration advantage and the political climate. While Shadegg slipped a bit to a 54 percent to 42 percent win over Democratic tax lawyer Bob Lord, Arizona Sen. John McCain carried the district’s presidential vote by 56 percent to 42 percent vote over Democrat Barack Obama. President George W. Bush, at the top of the 2004 Republican ticket, topped Democrat John Kerry by 58 percent to 41 percent in the 3rd District.
My personal favorite in the race is Parker. He hasn’t raised as much as Quayle or Moak, and he’s only run two ads so far, but they’re good 'uns. He’s also scored a litany of endorsements from prominent local political figures, including his successor as Mayor of Paradise Valley, Scott P. LeMarr, as well as the mayors of Tempe and Scottsdale, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, former Congressman and state GOP chairman Matt Salmon, and Rep. Trent Franks (R). Waring has been endorsed by McCain, and the Phoenix Republic threw its support behind Morris.

Okay, there y’all go. I’ve got work to do.

Rasmussen: Republicans Widen Lead Over Democrats on Generic Ballot

2009-09-01T19:41:00.001-07:00

Check out this latest story from Rasmussen Reports:

Generic Congressional Ballot

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Continuing a trend that began in late April, Republicans have widened their lead over Democrats in the Generic Ballot poll to seven points. This is a stunning turnaround from less than 8 months ago, when congressional Democrats had the same 7-point advantage over the GOP. One can only guess what the polls will show in April.