QSR10

That the Illinois Legislature’s veto session is even considering reneging on the rate freeze deal it struck 10 years ago with the utilities that serve the state of Illinois speaks volumes about what is so wrong in Springfield.

First, whatever its original merits, the rate freeze deal struck by the Legislature previously was just that: a deal. As in any deal, both sides to this one committed to doing something. Now one of the sides having performed (the utilities), the other side is backing out of its commitment (we, "the people").

Is there anything "fair" about this?

When the deal was struck, neither side had perfect foresight, and things may not have worked exactly as either side could have predicted. But both sides knew that there was a risk of that when the deal was struck.

Either side could have insisted on different outcomes under different scenarios. Both sides did. But just insisting that we could renege on the commitment if things didn't work out as we expected was not one of them. Had that been one of the original terms, there wouldn't have been a deal now, would there have been?

So far no one is contending that the utilities didn’t do what they promised to do, which was to roll back and freeze for ten years the rates then in effect. Apparently what the Legislature expected to happen in the meantime was that the deregulation of the industry that also was part of the bargain would bring down utility rates to something at or near the frozen rates.

Didn’t happen, apparently.

But did anyone on the utility side of the table guarantee to the State of Illinois that it would? Why does only one side of the deal get to pretend that it's commitment was only binding if what it expected to happen did happen?

The utilities having performed their side of the bargain, on what possible grounds do we, the public, get to renege on our side of the bargain? This is not to say that we can not renege; of course we can. Maybe there will be a lawsuit over it, but resolving that will take forever and where is an Illinois court likely to come down? But just because we can, on what grounds ought we to do so?

Rest assured though that if we do, just as in our personal lives, the State's audacity will come back to haunt. Will any utility ever fall for such a stunt again? If not, does that bode well for utility rates in the future?

More likely, won't such dashed expectations cause the utilities in the future either to avoid such “deals” in the future altogether, or to structure them in such a way as to backstop themselves financially against the Legislature reneging again?

And if the Legislature knows that the utilities are backstopping against default, won’t that just increase the likelihood of a default? Is it really in our interest to impose that inflexibility on later generations of Illinois utility consumers?

Second, how can imposing a rate hike freeze ever make sense, much less extending one? When the freeze was imposed, either the Legislature knew that the utilities were then overcharging, such that they could "grow into" the frozen rates, or the Legislature knew that the utilities were not overcharging, in which case we were deliberately starving them for a 10 year period, assuming that they would be in a position somehow to recoup their losses at the other end, when the freeze ended. Was that strategy a wise one to impose on our utilities as a matter of sound public policy? Was taking such risks smart?

Next, is there not something incredibly hypocritical about our political class complaining over and over about the unreliability of our utility services (brown outs, black outs and the like) but now contending that these same utilities ought to somehow make due for another three years without an increase in rates? What other sector of our economy do we assume can absorb such restraints on investment and modernization but still provide reliable levels of services?

Most irresponsible of all are those who, speaking for the "public (and themselves having nothing at risk) contend that even if the utility companies really are in as dire financial straits as they allege, such that the rate freeze will put them under water, letting them go under is no big deal. This is because, we are assured, someone else will come along, buy up the assets, ditch the losses and continue to run the businesses better than ever.

There are at least two things sickeningly amiss about that analysis.

First, what about the employees, third party vendors, and shareholders who will absorb that financial hit when that happens? Is it really reasonable to force those “stakeholders” we always are so concerned about to absorb the loss we’re about to impose on them? Perhaps if the losses could be somehow charged to the account of those who claim it won't matter (like the Citizens Utility Board (CUB) for instance), it genuinely wouldn't matter.

Second, once the capital markets understand that the State of Illinois won't keep its word, what happens to our cost of capital down the road? When these successor utility companies that we are assured will spring up themselves go to the capital markets, say to modernize their generating facilities, what kinds of rates are they likely to have to pay for new funds? Indeed, when the State of Illinois itself goes to those markets for any reason, and it does so early and often, won’t there be a higher cost to pay across the board for this institutional breach of trust?

In the long run, these costs can be shifted to others but never escaped altogether. In the long run rate payers, not us but in the future, our children and our children’s children, will finally be stuck with the bill for our profligacy, and the sticking will be a doozey. In the meantime, we will still have to contend with the deteriorated condition of our existing energy utilities, above and beyond the impact of own shortsightedness on that market.

Today's headlines read “Price freeze would cost ComEd millions.” But ComEd doesn’t print money, and neither by the way does the Stateof Illinois). It’s going to cost us, not ComEd.

It always does.

Those who would contend we are in a post-modern and more progressive age regarding our dealings with women, “Forgeddaboudit .”

In a recent Washington Post piece about the first day at work of Congresswoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, former House leader Tom DeLay’s GOP successor from Sugarland Texas, the Post's reporter, Peter Carlson, worked in at least half a dozen thoroughly condescending remarks about Ms. Sekula-Gibbs, the worst having to do with her physical appearance.

Thus, according to the Washington Post writer, it was important that his readers to know that Ms. Sekula-Gibbs 1) had “bright” blond hair (wink, wink); 2) was wearing “a blue pantsuit with a fuchsia blouse and a string of pearls;” and that 3) she was married to her third husband, and that her two previous husbands had died.

Watch and see whether any Washington Post profiles of new male House members include such details.

If confession is good for the soul, then let’s get mine out of the way right now: I don’t have a clue what the conservative columnists and talk radio pundits attacking the President’s nomination of Harriet Miers think they are accomplishing. Or how they think that, in the unlikely event their attacks succeed, it somehow will play out to a better result.

Is it not Politics 101 in the confirmation process that first impressions count? Why then are we racing the Left to paint a picture of Harriet Miers as a clue-less crony of an inept and crony prone President? Is that a picture of the President that we really believe? If it is, then by concealing that view of him from the public for five years implicates all of us.

My utter puzzlement only increases as the details slowly begin to emerge as to who this nominee is, and how she actually spent at least the last five years of her life, across three different working for the President in the White House.

If only a sitting judge, or only an Ivy League law professor, or only a male, is qualified to understand and apply the Constitution, then of course Harriet Miers is not qualified for the Supreme Court. But that has never been the litmus test before; why is it now? Is that really the only pool we want to draw from now on?

There is no evidence to date that Harriet Miers is not a brilliant woman. In this morning’s Washington Post, Amy Goldstein and Peter Baker discuss Miers’ White House tenure, albeit in a perfunctory way only. Nevertheless, they reveal a lot more that is favorable about Miers than they probably intended.

Read the way I think the writers and their editors probably intended, Miers is a petty, workaholic bureaucrat, obsessed with pointless paper pushing details (like the text of a White House Christmas card) which, they imply, just give her an excuse to avoid the inside-the-beltway “real world” that all of the rest of Washington revels in. Oh yes, they tell us: she works hard. But if she had a real life, she wouldn’t work so hard.

In the days last November after he was elected to a second term, President Bush had chosen Alberto R. Gonzales as his next attorney general, and word was spreading that the president might replace him as White House counsel with longtime confidante Harriet Miers. A small number of advisers inside and outside the White House grumbled that she was ill-suited to become top lawyer to the president.

As a deputy chief of staff, these detractors quietly warned, Miers could be slow to make decisions, with a penchant for detail over strategic thinking. "People came to me with concerns," recalls Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society, who said he heard complaints "that her management style was one that could miss the forest for the trees." Leo, who favored a friend for the job, confirmed that he forwarded the concerns about Miers when consulted by the White House.

Funny, do you recall anyone accusing John Roberts of missing out on the stuff of life, because he worked too hard? These anonymous detractors, of course, came out on the wrong side of the President, most likely because he just flat out knew the nominee up close and personal, as none of her detractors did.

To lend some weight to these “detractors,” the Washington Post article then goes on to state, in a thoroughly patronizing tone, that dear old Harriet was a hard worker, eager to please, but thoroughly a part of the background buzz:

The thing about Harriet is, it wasn't about Harriet," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a friend. "To her, it was a matter of moving the grist through the mill. . . . She was a manager of the process."

Unlike some high-level presidential aides, Miers has never sought to advance her own views.

* * *

"She was always pleasant, always polite, always being tough as the paper kept moving," said former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. "Is that a skill you need to be a Supreme Court justice? No, I don't think so. But it's a reflection of, when she has a mission, she knows how to accomplish it."

* * *

Fleischer recalled that Miers had hoped she would become White House counsel from the outset. Instead, she was offered the job of staff secretary to the president. It is, Daniels said, "a thankless job. . . . Always a flak-catching job.

But references to what Miers actually did at the White House belies what seems like was their careful spin against her. Miers was a flak catcher all right, but at the most demanding doorway in the world: if the flak didn’t get caught where she was catching it, then it didn’t get caught.

As staff secretary, Miers was the last person to handle every piece of paper that went to [President] Bush, and, with scores of employees, it was her task to make sure each document was accurate and ready for the president's eyes. The papers ranged from correspondence to bills Bush was signing into law to memos synthesizing policy recommendations from White House and agency staff.

Early every evening, she delivered to the president's residence in the East Wing a binder consisting of his schedule for the following day and tabbed sections that contained background material on the people and issues he would face. Fleischer called it "a perfectionist's job."

Well, yes, but is that too not a bum rap? Don’t we assume that every high level employee in the White House, at least in this White House, is a “perfectionist?” If you’d ever seen Ari Fleischer conducting a morning press briefing, you’d certainly call his "a perfectionists job."

And the “scores” of “employees” referenced weren’t just petty bureaucrats; if paper even got to Miers’ level, wasn’t it pretty important stuff? Were not the “scores of employees” referenced likely cabinet secretaries, assistant cabinet secretaries and the like?

The kind of people who John Roberts worked for when he was in the White House, except not the President of the United States?

“You would have a particular phrase [in a memo] or a particular addition, and she would call you and explore at great length what that meant," said John Bridgeland, former director of the White House domestic policy council and the USA Freedom Corps.

“You had to meet her standards, which are very, very high standards, to get documents in to the president," said one former administration official who agreed to speak of a former colleague only on the condition of anonymity. "I would be fibbing if I didn't say at times that was frustrating."

Frustrating perhaps, but if the next place these documents went were to the President of the United States and then, in reliance on that same vetting, right out the door to an incredibly hostile world, wouldn’t it have taken a pretty brilliant and analytic mind to handle the flow effectively?

In this context, is it a reasonable criticism that Miers was a slave to detail? And what about such obsessive attention to detail would hurt her work product on the bench at the Supreme Court? These weren’t press releases she was working on; it was policy making.

Later in the article, but in the same mildly condescending sniff, Miers was described in her “staff secretary position” as a mediator without portfolio:

Miers played the quiet arbitrator. David W. Hobbs, the former White House director of legislative affairs, said he got calls from Miers "at 10 or 11 at night that [presidential counselor] Karl [Rove] or another White House staffer wanted the president to do something, but she wanted to check and make sure I was aware of it and didn't think it was going to cause damage on the legislative front."

Next, Miers was named the President’s deputy chief of staff. Just to remind ourselves of her caliber, when named as deputy chief of staff in July 2003, she replaced current budget director Joshua B. Bolton. Bolton, in turn moved on to serve as Director of the Budget after Mitch Daniels, his predecessor, went on to win election as Governor of Indiana.

There is no evidence that in appointing her to replace Josh Bolton at the White House, who in turn had replaced now Indiana governor Daniels, that Bush was “dumbing down” the assignment.

To the contrary,

[T]he deputy chief's job plunged her into a range of issues, some of which would become themes of Bush's reelection campaign. They included immigration policy, the space program, health information technology, Social Security, and a sequel to the No Child Left Behind law that would affect high schools.

Last fall, as the country faced a shortage of flu vaccine, Miers immersed herself in the administration's eventual decision to import supplies from Germany. "I remember Harriet wanting to understand every nook and cranny of how vaccines are manufactured, how the approval process works," Spellings said.

Most of the same conservative pundits who were plumping for Roberts, but now not for Miers, thought that this same mastery of such tasks in the Reagan White House (albeit at a far more junior level—after all he was only in his 20’s) proved his fitness for greater things.

Why is it that when the nominee is Miers, she doesn’t get credit for doing exactly the same kind of work, except at an exceptionally more sophisticated level? We may not be entitled to see the memos that Miers wrote in her advisory capacity; we have seen the work product of her advice to the President, though on public display for all to see for the last 5 years. And in the process Miers more and more was gaining his utter confidence.

Consider too what these positions require do Miers:

"She was an impeccably honest broker and accurate conveyor of information to the president with no spin or distortion," said budget director Joshua B. Bolten, who was Bush's first deputy chief of staff for policy.

Others held a less charitable view. Some colleagues "really felt she was the place where the action stopped and the hand-wringing began," said a former administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

By July 2003, when Miers succeeded Bolten as deputy chief of staff, the dominant policy issue before the White House was a drive to push through Congress a new prescription drug benefit for elderly patients on Medicare.

Thomas A. Scully, who was running the Medicare program, remembers Miers at all the meetings at which Bush was briefed. She impressed Scully as smart, but he said, "She had a very limited ego and was the ultimate Bush staff person. . . . I remember her at one point saying, I'm not a health care expert, so I'm not going to question."

"She can either dial it way down or way up as the situation calls for," said Spellings, who added that when her friend asserts herself, she does so "with the utmost intelligence."

“An impeccably honest broker” . . . with a limited ego but who, when necessary also asserted herself “with the utmost intelligence,” while dealing with the myriad complicated issues presented by a modern president’s agenda?

Why are these not strong credentials for the bench? Did anyone ever describe H. R. Haldeman or John Ehrlichman, Harold Ickes or John Podesta, to name just a few of Ms. Miers’ predecessors, in such terms? And when it was John Roberts we were talking about, didn’t we point to these same character traits as evidence of his “collegiality,” and “judicial temperament?”

And if as gatekeeper to the President, in so politically sensitive and critical a position, after all her time in the White House the worst the Washington Post can find someone to say about her, and then on condition of anonymity of course, that she was a “hand wringer,” why does that not give us comfort?

Finally, Miers followed Alberto R. Gonzales as White House counsel. As a factual matter, Gonzales and Miers did not both bring the same background to the position of White House counsel. But they both filled the same place on the organization chart. There is no reason to think that job description was scaled back when Miers took over.

The pundits now attacking Miers’ supposed lack of qualifications for the Supreme Court were not willing to argue that Gonzales was not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, at least in terms of his professional abilities. Why are the same pundits now asking us to assume that, even though she now is carrying out the same duties as did Gonzales in the White House, Miers is not also qualified?

That element of the conservative punditry, and it is not everybody, who is opposing the Miers nomination has misfired badly here, and to no good end. These attacks have needlessly muddied our arguments regarding what qualifies a nominee for the Court, undermined the President’s entire agenda (among other things feeding directly into the “cronyism” argument the Democrats unleashed against him after Katrina) and as a result has confused and divided the base.

To what end? Does anyone really believe that Harriet Miers is that dangerous a choice? I do not. And it will only compound the damage if she withdraws, or is withdrawn, from consideration at this juncture of the process.

Ronnie Earle’s prosecution of House Majority Leader Tom Delay got off to a ridiculous but not unprecedented start. Turns out that the criminal statute that prosecutor Earle brought his charge under, after an “investigation” of several years, didn’t even go into effect until a year after the acts complained of in the indictment. The new batch of screaming headlines about a “second indictment” naming DeLay gave little prominence or omitted mentioning this latter point all together.

So, faced with a fatally defective indictment, in a matter of hours Earle ginned up new charges against DeLay, this one based on the same conduct as in the earlier indictment, but construed against DeLay this time as an act of “money laundering” and conspiring to launder money.

What was the aim of the new alleged conspiracy? According to the indictment, I kid you not, it was to elect Republicans! In Texas, or at least in Austin and its liberal environs, that's a criminal offense, I guess.

Earle presented the new indictment to a new grand jury (the old one had been asked to approve the previous indictment of DeLay on the same day that it was scheduled to go out of existence). Lo and behold, the new grand jury approved it!

If Kenneth Starr had tried this kind of stuff, he’d have been filleted by the Main Stream Media (MSM) and rightfully so. Instead, the media is treating Ronnie Earle like another Archibald Cox.

Now I’m not a criminal lawyer and I’m not going to do Earl’s homework for him, although surely someone ought to. But a conspiracy based on violations of a campaign finance law that didn’t even exist when the acts complained of occurred sounds like a bit of a stretch. A conspiracy to elect Republicans sounds like even more of a stretch. Allegedly, Earle had to throw something together because on the day he issued the indictment, the statute of limitations on the new charges was about to run out.

These kinds of shenanigans confirm what we said originally, that a prosecutor in Texas can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, if he chooses to. Incompetence by Earle, or downright prosecutorial abuse likely will go unchecked here of course because Austin, Texas, where Earle holes up, is a liberal Democratic holdout in an otherwise pretty much Red State.

Moreover, Ronnie Earle is about to retire. He’s not planning on running again for re-election. So, unless a courageous and principled judge, so far in short supply, steps up to the plate and confronts this bully, Earle’s going to continue to have the run of the roost.

But that’s perfectly OK with the Democratic Party powers-that-be in Austin. After all, the object of this game is not simple justice but to knock DeLay off his perch in the House, and to keep him knocked off. Until Delay gets this and any other indictment Earle chooses to throw at him dismissed, under the strict ethics rules that House Republicans have imposed on themselves, DeLay can’t resume his leadership position.

The Democrats in Washington, on the other hand, who were originally urging Earle on, should be having second thoughts. Not only does the prosecution of DeLay look inept; it’s also looking more and more like the blatantly political hit job that DeLay said it was. Which is causing the Republican caucus in the House to rally to DeLay’s side, instead of shunning him, as was the hope.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. And Ronnie Earle is a mouse of the lowest order.

President Bush has named Harriet E. Meirs to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Supposedly, the Right is upset with the choice. Why?

We know little about Ms. Meirs, except the following, none of which ought to give us pause: She is a lawyer with a long and distinguished career in the private sector bar. She has known the President for many, many years and, presumably, he has known her. She's tough. She is also well regarded by her peers in Texas, who elected her President of the Texas State Bar. She helped The President locate and then urged him to nominate now Chief Justice John D. Roberts.

So far there are two “raps” against Ms. Meirs from conservatives: 1) Ms. Meirs is not in "the mold" of Justices Scalia or Thomas, and therefore the President is breaking his promise to nominate only such persons; and 2) the President has named Ms. Meirs only because she is an old fried of the President’s from Texas (the “cronyism” charge).

Nothing we know about Ms. Meirs validates either criticism. Worse, to accept either criticism as valid, we have to assume that the President is both a liar and a jerk. On what basis would we ever assume either?

It’s not hard to fathom what the President might have been thinking, if indeed Ms. Meirs' judicial philosophy is aligned with that of a Scalia or a Thomas. Figures the President, the Senate just approved by a comfortable and bipartisan majority a nominee who everyone (including the Left wing of the Democratic Party: Mssrs. Durbin Obama, and Clinton) believes will be as conservative judicially or even more conservative than his mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist.

The lesson, the President could well have reasoned, that we should take from the Roberts’ confirmation vote is that despite the Democrats’ bluster, ideology can’t matter, if a nominee is otherwise well qualified professionally.

If ideology was dispositive, and if Roberts was suspected of being staunchly conservative, refused to tell us how he was going to vote, but then was confirmed anyway, doesn’t it follow that any other well qualified nominee who also won’t tell us how she’ll vote deserves to be confirmed as well?

Not needing to know how a nominee will vote also means that a nominee need not have a record of opinions, or even necessarily be a judge. Bingo! Let's nominate Harriet.

Ms. Meirs appears to be very well qualified as a lawyer. Unlike Justice Souter, Ms. Meirs rose to the top of her profession, but in the private sector. Can that be a bad thing? If she had a roster of high profile clients, and I suspect that she did, wasn't it because she was so good at what she did? She also did the requisite pro-bono work ("Meals on Wheels"), so she has a heart, right?

A trial lawyer by training, Ms. Meirs knows her way around the inside of a courtroom, but can work a banquet hall too. She was the first woman elected to serve as President of the Texas Bar Association. She also served and retired from service unscathed as Chairperson of the Texas Lottery Commission. Are these too not great credentials for an associate justice? No brooding homebody she. Just the kind of person I'd love to see parsing over fine points of the law with the likes of Justices Souter or Ginsberg.

Whether she is in “the mold” of Thomas or Scalia I guess depends on what that "mold” is supposed to include. It needn’t be very complicated, really. The “mold” referred to can't include one’s biological sex. We aren’t demanding that, to be in the Thomas or Scalia mold, every nominee has to be a male. Or Italian Amewrican, or African American or Catholic.

Nor can “the mold” include judicial temperament. Thomas and Scalia are themselves of very different judicial temperaments. Scalia can be scathing in his dissents and participates actively at oral argument. Thomas’ writing is more reserved, and to date he has yet to ask a question of an advocate appearing beforew him.

The "mold" can’t include either the nature of the professional training a nominee has to have had in their working life either. Thomas and Scalia came to the court from the bowels of the federal bureaucracy, although Chief Justice Roberts did not. Therefore, if we can accept that Justice Roberts is in the "mold" of Scalia and Thomas, and I do, then how a nominee rose in his or her profession also is not a disqualifying factor. The key is that she is highly regarded by her professional peers. Ms. Meirs is.

No, so far as I can tell the only attribute of the “the mold” that the President has ever referred to is the one that he has mentioned so often: his nominees must express a fervent fidelity to the traditional role of judges in our Constitutional system, one that confines them to deciding actual cases and controversy and applying the law as it is actually written and not as they might prefer it to be written.

To date the President has consistently, and even in the face of great controversy appointed only such nominees. The Appellate Courts are now rife with them. What evidence have we that with the nomination of Ms. Meirs The President has not done so again? If he has, and she can’t be forced to disclose that in her confirmation hearings, what is the problem from the conservative perspective with her nomination?

As for being a friend of the President, though we have not been told as much (one’s personal counsel need not also be a friend, although it helps), let’s assume that she is a friend of the President. By what logic ought that to disqualify a candidate for any appointed office? Do we not trust the President to choose his friends carefully? Has he not shown a remarkable knack for making superb personnel choices?

It is also true, not coincidentally, that the Democrats right now are trying to paint the Administration as rife with “cronyism.” That term, “cronyism,” has a tainted connotation now. If the Democrats were charging the President only with appointing only his “friends” to high places, it wouldn’t be so incendiary an allegation. Today cronyism implies appointments not qualified for their positions.

But there is no evidence to support that charge, in connection with other appointments or with this one. Indeed, the President’s appointments have been pretty uniformly superb. And I certainly haven’t noticed a surfeit of Texans in his administration. That the "cronyism" charge is being leveled by Democrats also ought to give us serious pause before we adopt that characterization of any of his appointments, much less this one.

This brings us full circle to the start of this conversation. Ms. Meirs has had a high-profile and distinguished legal career. There is no evidence Mr. Meirs isn’t qualified, albeit in a way very different than was John Roberts, for her appointment.

So what’s our problem with the appointment?

The Left is in high dudgeon over the recent indictment of Tom Dale DeLay.

Tom DeLay, of course, is the majority leader of the House of Representatives. Under the GOP’s House Rules, far more strict and unforgiving than any that House Democrats ever imposed on themselves when they were in the majority, until the indictment is disposed of, no matter how frivolous it might be, DeLay must step down as House GOP Leader.

These circumstance being so gleefully seized upon by the most partisan of the Left’s partisans in Congress and the media, doesn't it behoove us all to take a long deep breath and to think about what is really going on here?

What’s Really at Stake?

First, everyone who thinks this has anything to do with political reform in Texas raise your hand. All right, now that we have that out of the way.

Leading the charge here are some of the same political figures who, to avoid a remapping of Texas congressional districts that the courts have repeatedly validated, and which reflected the new found and widespread strength of the GOP in Texas, high tailed it out of Austin and into neighboring states to avoid forming a legislative quorum on the issue.

Recall too, that Tom DeLay has been re-elected by his constituents in Texas repeatedly. He also has been elected repeatedly to high leadership positions by his own GOP colleagues in the U. S. House.

Leadership positions in the House are not imposed on the GOP membership from on high, or the outside. These are positions that can only be filled by the vote of the party’s caucus. It stands to reason then that such positions are filled by people who most GOP House members,if not nearly all of them, believe can best herd cats.

So, if any of us are concluding now, and on the basis of screaming and inflammatory headlines in a media scathingly hostile to all things Republican, that Tom DeLay was not the right guy in the Leader’s seat, then we have to also be questioning the collective judgment of the entire House GOP caucus.

Said another way, for us to assume immediately that DeLay’s constituents, and all of his fellow GOP caucus members, who know him best and work with him every day to accomplish incredibly complicated work, all made so gross an error in collective judgment really should not to be our first instinct.

Notice too another warning sign that the collective judgment of the GOP House caucus and DeLay’s constituents was not unsound can be found in the very same breathless Main Stream Media (MSM) accounts of DeLay’s imminent demise.

Noted the New York Times’ Philip Shenon and Carl Hulse yesterday in one such story, DeLay has not just played a pivotal role implementing the conservative Republican Party’s agenda for many years; he’s also been a key part of getting the agenda of President Bush accomplished over the last six years.

Observed the Times:

For years, first as the House majority whip and then the majority leader, Mr. DeLay has been an aggressive partisan as well as a proponent of socially conservative ideas. When others were urging that Republicans drop the idea of impeaching President Bill Clinton in 1998, Mr. DeLay almost single-handedly kept up the pressure that led to the House impeachment vote.
* * *
Mr. DeLay has been a linchpin of Republican success over the past decade, since playing a role in the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. He is often called the Hammer in print for his hard-nosed approach, though it is not a nickname anyone uses with Mr. DeLay himself.
* * *
During his career in the House, Mr. DeLay has used Armpac [not the PAC at issue in the indictment] to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate donations for other Republican candidates, who in turn showed their loyalty to Mr. DeLay by electing him to the House leadership.

With the Texas committee, Mr. DeLay mapped a Republican takeover of his home state's Legislature, which the party achieved in 2002. The victory allowed Republicans to redraw Congressional districts in Texas, making it easier to elect Republicans to the House and solidifying Mr. DeLay's power in Congress.

A story yesterday by David Rogers, Brody Mullins and Jeanne Cummings in the Wall Street Journal also confirmed that it is really the conservative agenda that is most threatened by this indictment:

The disabling of Mr. DeLay means Republicans and the White House have lost, at least for now, the daily leadership of a man who has been aggressive in moving the conservative agenda, from tax cuts to free-trade pacts and regulatory overhauls, as well as an array of social issues that have led him into fights with the federal courts.

So let’s read between the lines, buckos: as a way of derailing the conservative Republican Party’s agenda, nothing could be quicker or easier than for the Democrats to get DeLay’s highly coveted scalp.

And all the better that the Democrats won’t even have to prove anything, much less win an election to do it like John Thune had to do.

The Indictment:

The stakes being sky high, now let’s think a little bit about this indictment, and how the press has chosen to showboat over it.

Indictments are funny things. Historically, a prosecutor had to obtain an indictment from a local grand jury to satisfy the locals that he wasn’t just on a witch hunt. That element of “local” control today, particularly in major cities like Austin, Texas, is pretty much gone.

Grand juries today are not much better or much worse than are juries generally. The difference is though that the target of a prosecutor working through a grand jury has no right to any say in how the grand jury is empanelled, what evidence it is seeing or hearing, or even to know that it is investigating him.

Prosecutors seeking indictments nowadays also don’t have much trouble getting what they’re asking for, since they only have to present to the grand jury the evidence tending to support the charge the prosecutor is seeking. Prosecutors don’t have to present any of the evidence tending to rebut their charges (after all that’s what trials are for).

Thus,if a prosecutor seeks an indictment, he gets it. Today, it is widely cited truism that, if asked, most grand juries would indict a ham sandwich. There is no reason to think this is not also true in Texas.

That is not to say that indictments should not be taken seriously; an indictment is a deathly serious thing. Or ought to be. At least in the federal system, highly trained and politically sensitive prosecutors, like Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, don’t lightly bring indictments generally, much less against political figures. That is why we take such notice when such indictments are handed up.

That is to say that the only effective deterrent currently against political (or politicized) indictments is not the grand jury itself, but the prosecutor’s own personal sense of professional propriety, referred to generally as “prosecutorial discretion.”

Most prosecutors don’t want to run the risk that, having brought a flimsy or unsubstantiated indictment, they will be nailed by the press, politically or professionally as an out of control hack.

Is Ronnie Earle, the Austin, Texas prosecutor here, politically or professionally such an out of control hack?

Well, at this point in the analysis let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume at the least that he’s fully qualified to hold his office in Travis County, Texas.

But a few circumstances about the indictment sure suggest that it’s a highly unusual one, to say the least.

For one thing, and with the exception noted below, the indictment nowhere accuses Tom DeLay of actually doing anything in furtherance of the conspiracy of which he was a part.

That is, while DeLay’s name appears in the caption, along with two other individuals as a listed “defendant,” nowhere else in the indictment is it alleged what DeLay did in further of the conspiracy.

Indeed, DeLay's name appears most prominently towards the end of it, where the prosecutor acknowledges at length that DeLay agreed to waive the applicable statute of limitations as to the offense charged.

That appears to mean that the prosecutor, Mr. Earle, has been relieved by DeLay of what might have been the significant burden of explaining to the court why he ought to be allowed to bring charges against DeLay now, related to alleged conduct occurring almost 3 years ago. That is not a concession a man makes who is not in a hurry to get to trial.

But nowhere else in the indictment is DeLay mentioned, much less alleged to have said or done anything, except in the rote language of the charge of unspecified participation in a “conspiracy.”

Now conspiracies too can be funny things.

In the criminal law, conspiracies allow a prosecutor to charge everyone involved in a wrongdoing, even when each participant in that wrongdoing did not necessarily have a very active part in it.

Typically, co-conspirators are of two types. There are those who actually engage in prohibited conduct and those who, with knowledge of the planned wrongdoing, and through at least one overt act, prove that they are supporting it. .

In the DeLay indictment, and in boilerplate terms, DeLay, the Texans for a Republican Majority PAC and two others are alleged to have entered into an agreement to act unlawfully, although no authenticating particulars (when, where, how, etc)are provided. But unlike the two other co-conspirators, nowhere in the indictment is DeLay alleged to have engaged in any overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

PACs, of course, like “corporate” entities of every stripe, are inanimate legal fictions. PACs can only act through human agents. So, it is possible that the prosecutor’s theory has DeLay involved as an agent of the PAC, although if he does, that’s not mentioned in the indictment.

Second, as recently as a few weeks ago, Prosecutor Earl reportedly had confirmed that DeLay was not either a “subject” or “target” of the grand jury investigation, and was criticized locally for it. According to the New York Times:

DeLay said that prosecutor Ronnie Earle had said as recently as two weeks ago that DeLay was not the target or focus of his probe into election spending in the 2002 state legislative campaigns.

If this really is what DeLay was told, then it is not insignificant.

This is because, while prosecutors don’t have to tell a person they’re after anything about the status of their investigations, if asked and the prosecutor does say anything, they are supposed to be candid about whether a person is either the “subject” (i.e. an identifiable and discrete part of an active investigation) or a “target” (i.e. being actively investigated as a potential defendant) of the investigation.

Assuming that Ronnie Earle was asked just two weeks ago whether DeLay was either the “subject” or the “target” of an investigation, and confirmed that he was not, then either something remarkably pertinent just came to Earle’s attention, or he was being pressured over the last two weeks to bring a phony indictment or he was not being candid two weeks ago when asked whether DeLay was a subject or a target.

That something new just came to Earle’s attention seems possible, but unlikely. The conduct that is the subject of the investigation occurred 13 years ago, and has supposedly been under investigation for several years. Presumably has been investigated to death.

Reports that Earle was pressured to bring the indictment, valid or not, are trickling out of Austin, however. DeLay contends that’s what happened, according to the New York Times:

DeLay said that prosecutor Ronnie Earle had said as recently as two weeks ago that DeLay was not the target or focus of his probe into election spending in the 2002 state legislative campaigns.

''Soon thereafter, Mr. Earle's hometown newspaper ran a biting editorial about his investigation, rhetorically asking what the point had been, after all, if I wasn't to be indicted,'' DeLay said.

The editorial, published Sept. 11, questioned why Earle's probe had resulted in indictments of organizations, but not individuals. DeLay was not mentioned by name

That editorial was pretty scathing in its analysis of what Earle had been up to:

The editorial, published Sept. 11, questioned why Earle's probe had resulted in indictments of organizations, but not individuals. DeLay was not mentioned by name.

A state political action committee that DeLay created, Texans for a Republican Majority, was indicted earlier this month on charges of accepting corporate contributions for use in state legislative races. Texas law prohibits corporate money from being used to advocate the election or defeat of candidates; it's allowed only for administrative expenses.

Arnold Garcia, editorial page editor for the American-Statesman, said the newspaper was doing its job in writing the opinion piece.

''We're commenting on an item of public interest,'' Garcia said. ''But you should never forget the newspaper didn't indict Mr. DeLay. A grand jury did.''

The editorial said Earle and the grand jury may have good reason for indicting just organizations, but ''time is running out, and on the face of it, the felony indictments returned last week against the Texas Association of Business and the now nonexistent Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee are disappointing.''

The Prosecutor

Ronnie Earle also has a prior history of engaging in just these kinds of tactics. Just a little over a month prior to the last election, in September 2004, and with similar media fanfare, Earle had indicted three other DeLay associates in the same case.

Earle’s uses of such indictments are not flukes. Several years before the carefully timed September 2004 indictments, Earle had indicted and began to try a case against Kay Bailey Hutchison, now U.S Senator from Texas that was so riddled with error that the judge threw out the indictment and completely exonerated Hutchison.

Notes her lawyer, now working for DeLay:

"What happened is (majority leader) Tom DeLay put an entirely new face on Texas politics," said Dick DeGuerin, a Houston lawyer who represents DeLay. "And Ronnie Earle is trying to destroy him for it."
* * *
"He indicts for the political effect it will have on those people," DeGuerin said.
* * *
DeGuerin represented U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican, when she was indicted at Earle's request in 1993 on charges of misconduct while she was state treasurer.

But when the case went to trial, Earle asked to drop the charges after the judge said some of the evidence might be inadmissible. Rather than permit Earle to dismiss the case, the judge acquitted Hutchison.

DeGuerin says Earle is selective about who offends him.

Supporters say he has charged more Democrats than Republicans, 12 to 3. Detractors say those Democrats were conservatives, not liberals like him. And they say Earle never went after the many national Democratic figures in office during his tenure. "It's no answer for him to say he's indicted more Democrats than Republicans," DeGuerin said.

And if there were reasonable questions raised about what motivates Ronnie Earle, yesterday’s disclosure that for the last two years he’s been allowing a couple of filmmakers to watch him build his case against DeLay sure didn’t put them to rest either.

According to an article posted at The National review:

For the last two years, as he pursued the investigation that led to Wednesday's indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Travis County, Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle has given a film crew "extraordinary access" to make a motion picture about his work on the case.

The resulting film is called The Big Buy, made by Texas filmmakers Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck. "Raymond Chandler meets Willie Nelson on the corner of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in The Big Buy, a Texas noir political detective story that chronicles what some are calling a 'bloodless coup with corporate cash,'" reads a description of the picture on Birnbaum's website, markbirnbaum.com.

The film, according to the description, "follows maverick Austin DA Ronnie Earle's investigation into what really happened when corporate money joined forces with relentless political ambitions to help swing the pivotal 2002 Texas elections, cementing Republican control from Austin to Washington DC."

"We approached him [Earle], and he offered us extraordinary access to him and, to an extent, to his staff," Birnbaum told National Review Online Thursday. "We've been shooting for about two years."

So Let’s Delay on DeLay

Earle also thinks nothing of riding the celebrity speaking and fund raising circle for the Democratic Party in Texas:

Partisan fighting between Republicans and Democrats is particularly intense in Texas, but Republicans were particularly angered by the district attorney's speech in May at a Democratic fundraiser in Dallas.
* * *
Characterizing the DeLay case as involving money, power and corruption, Mr. Earle told Democrats: "This case is not just about Tom DeLay. If it isn't this Tom DeLay, it'll be another one, just like one bully replaces the one before."

The dinner and the speech raised $102,000 for Texas Values in Action, a political action committee created to help fund Democratic Party efforts to recapture control of the state legislature.

Texas Republicans demanded Mr. Earle's resignation, and a spokesman for Mr. DeLay said the speech demonstrated that the Travis County prosecutor was using his investigation as "a fundraising effort for Democrats."

Which brings us full circle to our original point: let’s “DeLay” drawing any quick judgments on the DeLay indictment.

There is much at stake, and lots of reasons to believe that this indictment may be a highly partisan tactic by Democrats eager to derail not Tom DeLay but the entire conservative Republican agenda, on the eve of the likely confirmation of a conservative Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and of a second associate justice far more conservative than her predecessor.

Countless high profile Democrats have been telling us for months that the votes on these nominees are as momentous as whether or not to go to war. The mid-term elections are just around the corner. In just one 24 hour news cycle every MSM mouthpiece for the Democratic Party used this indictment to convict DeLay, remove him from office, execute and bury him and kick dirt on his grave. They also projected a massive defeat for the GOP at the polls in 2006.

But based on what, exactly?

Perhaps for once we should take at face value what those Democrats opposing John Roberts have been saying about votes for Supreme Court nominees being as grave and important as votes for war. But understood a different way.

The Democrats who opposed Roberts weren’t voting against a disagreeable nominee; they were voting to go to war. The opposition to Roberts was the arcing flare marking the commencement of the first battle. The war is one to the death over the conservative Republican agenda















exas.

Once again, how we finally react to a national tragedy of Katrina will say an awful lot about what kind of a country we are, and about what kind of a country we are destined to become.

On the one hand, private charities, corporations and individuals have ignored the talking heads and the hand wringers and moved in to do what needs to be done to get people back on their feet and functioning again. The Wall Street Journal has reported several times on these remarkable efforts:

The straightforward generosity of the corporate sector has been well reported. By last count, donations had exceeded $200 million. Besides cash, companies have handed out free drugs, suspended finance payments on cars and mortgages and helped emergency personnel with equipment. As interesting, though, has been the application of corporate best practices -- from supply-chain management to logistics -- to a natural disaster.

The private-sector planning began before Katrina hit. Home Depot's "war room" had transferred high-demand items -- generators, flashlights, batteries and lumber -- to distribution areas surrounding the strike area. Phone companies readied mobile cell towers and sent in generators and fuel. Insurers flew in special teams and set up hotlines to process claims.

This planning allowed the firms to resume serving customers in record time. Katrina shut down 126 Wal-Mart facilities; all but 14 are now open. Entergy, the power company for 1.1 million households and businesses that lost electricity, had restored electricity by Monday to 575,000 customers, including areas of flooded New Orleans.

Businesses offered near-instant support to their own employee-victims. Staff set up hotlines and began tracking down missing workers. Thousands of workplace victims were provided with places to stay, promises of continued pay and even offers of replacement jobs elsewhere in the country.

At the heart of the corporate response was a stunning array of advanced communications networks that kept firms in touch and coordinating. Following on last year's tsunami aid effort, the Business Roundtable had by August of this year arranged for each of its 160 member companies to designate a disaster relief point man. These folks were in place and ready to help before Katrina made landfall. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, through its non-profit Center for Corporate Citizenship, became a clearinghouse, fielding calls from many of its 3,000 state and local organizations and compiling lists of needed supplies.

By the weekend the Chamber's CCC was turbo-charging a new computer program, designed by tech firm i2, which served as a kind of bridal registry for needed relief supplies. Each donor company indicated what order it would fill, avoiding duplication or delay. IBM got to work on a computerized job bank to help place those who'd lost work. The American Trucking Association set up a Web site to update everyone on road conditions.

Companies then focused on doing what each did best. In some cases it was simply ramping up operations, as with Black & Decker, whose employees worked Labor Day weekend to churn out extra generators. In other cases, it was firms using their modern logistical skills to get into hard hit areas. FedEx and other delivery companies used computer systems with designed-in flexibility to reroute vehicles and adjust flights to get in aid. FedEx has already moved more than 100 tons of relief supplies.

Wal-Mart mined its vast databases of past purchases to compile lists of goods most desired after a hurricane. (Among the top items? Strawberry pop tarts.) Because of its advance logistics planning, the big retail chain was able to quickly move in to devastated areas with mini Wal-Marts to hand out goods. Other firms leveraged similar supply-chain capabilities; Pfizer dispensed pharmaceuticals via Wal-Mart and other retailers. "What companies do is solve problems," says Johanna Schneider, an executive director at the Business Roundtable.

These are the kinds of efforts that brought Chicago back after the fire and that brought San Francisco back after the earthquake. Both cities came back to life with a breathtaking alacrity. None would have succeeded had the government, at any level, been involved.

One of the hallmarks of “compassionate conservatism,’ at least as this writer understands it, is its commitment to prevent big government from getting in the way of the highest and best of our human impulses—“the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln so memorably framed it.

Whether from sheer incompetence, as in the case of the state and local authorities in Louisiana, or through a misplaced and in hindsight undeserved deference to them, as in the case of the federal authorities, the private sector has had a relatively free hand in doing what needs to be done. On can seek to do so for philosophical and moral reasons, as do I. But one can also look at history and advocate such an approach because any other approach is so ineffectual.

At the individual level, consider those who rode out the storm in their homes, and even now refuse to leave their abodes. Many, but far fewer than the hysterical mayor forecasted, paid with their lives for their intransigence. But others and most apparently, did not.

The decision to stay in their homes, , and to protect the most valuable property that most have—that shelter—was hardly an irrational one. The news stories of bands of looters are not ones with which we are unfamiliar; past experience from similar storms taught the good people of New Orleans well that if they valued their property they had better stand fast, stay and protect it, and with loaded weaponry if necessary (as it was).

It is true that these people did not have summer homes in neighboring states to retreat to, nor could they afford to stay for weeks on end in hotels. But what all of these kinds of lamentations most overlook is that, whether they could have afforded to have gone somewhere else or not, they definitely could not afford to lose their homes. And in that are they not just like us? Who among us could?

Even as we speak, these same hardy individuals are in New Orleans, cleaning up and repairing their homes, streets and surrounding properties and getting on with their lives. They are not waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Or worrying about myriad environmental hazards that may, or may not be there. Some, the “statists,” say they ought to be forced to leave. One social worker interviewed on NPR, not from the area, said that she lived for the experience of talking someone into leaving their home. It was what got her out of bed in the morning, that she could arm twist someone into leaving.

The local and state officials on the ground are hesitant to force anyone out. If these officials don’t want to do so, ought we to want to do so? Of course not. Give them the tools, if they need even our tools, and then get out of the way and let them do the job.

The response of private enterprise has also been astounding, and a potent reminder of what our ‘thousand points of light” are capable of, when the government stays out of the way. Wal-Mart, Ironically, one that is leading the way, Wal-Mart, ever since the last election has been in the cross hairs of Democratic Party activists and others for its low cost imports and allegedgly abusive labor practices, lead the way. The response of the corporate sectoralso has been “under the radar." None of these private enterprises sought government’s permission before providing basic necessities to victims of the storm, nor have the Main Stream Media provided them much coverage or credit for their efforts.

Hopefully, the state and local authorities, themselves now so obviously responsible for the diasters on the ground in the immediate wake of katrina, and the the levee break a day later, will continue to dither and blather and, most important of all, just stay out of the way. FEMA is on the ground and in control now, it appears, and to the extent that any overall direction is needed, let the federal government provide that structure and framework, and then the feds too hopefully will step aside and get out of the way.

Most horrific of all is what the radical left now is talking about imposing, which is a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority approach to rebuilding the entire region, as though it has been reduced to the pathetic condition of Depression-era Appalachia. Ted Kennedy took the lead on this trial lead balloon. Said Kennedy in a press release,

We cannot be an America of haves and have nots. We cannot be an America of 50 separate isolated states. As we rebuild the Gulf Coast, we must also come together to tackle these disparities. We must be a united America--one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. And when we say all, we mean all.

To address this challenge, our government must respond in ways that are as good and compassionate as the American people. We can't just fix the hole in the roof. We need to rebuild the whole foundation.

I propose that we create a New Orleans and Gulf Coast Redevelopment Authority modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority in its heyday. We should invest at least $150 billion in its actions to work with governors and mayors and citizens and communities to plan, help fund, and coordinate for the reconstruction of that damaged region. And it should help hire workers to put people back to work rebuilding their own communities and help them get back on their feet again.

Perhaps that the proposition has so distinguished a sponsor should comfort us beyond peradventure that nothing will come of it. It is further evidence though of how determined is the left to convert us into a socialist type planned economic system.

That “Ground Zero” in New York City looks much today as it did three and a half years ago is vivid testimony to the likely course of the kind of rebuilding effort that Kennedy would have us do. Indeed, parishes in and around New Orleans have been burned before waiting for aid to arrive from outside government authorities. Noted a story in this morning's New York Times:

The citizens of St. Bernard Parish - home until Hurricane Katrina to 67,000 predominantly white, middle-class people - were weary, fearful and, some of them, angry. They were as hard hit as New Orleans, they were saying, but got less attention and they wanted the world to recognize their plight and to help.

They had another reason to be angry, or at least skeptical. History again. In 1927, when the Mississippi River flooded, the leaders of New Orleans dynamited a levee, deliberately flooding St. Bernard and a neighboring parish to save the big city. Then the political establishment reneged on its promise to compensate the destroyed communities. The money never came.

This is a story that all residents of St. Bernard Parish know and can recite, and so they are nothing if not wary of outside politicians, the ones who are not their own local leaders.

They wonder just how much of the rebuilding money heading into the state will reach just plain folks like them after the elected officials, the lobbyists and the contractors take their shares.

"It's a way of life, it's the political way," explained a steamfitter. "Everybody gets his hand in somewhere along the line."

To bring back New Orleans, and the entire region for that matter, please don’t impose Soviet style central planning; our fellow citizens down there have suffered enough.

Instead, how about setting up a regional system of massive supply depots all over the region, where for a highly reduced cost anyone can bring in his or her pick up truck and haul away all the lumber, nails, roofing plaster board and bleach as they can carry.

To authenticate need, the driver would have to present nothing more than a clear set of photos of the property being restored, and its street address. All would be scanned and be entered on a confidential computer site. To get anything else, make the driver present little more than a set of the same photos originally sdubmitted, and updated photos showing restoration process and identify it to the same address. After one year, withdraw all such offers wand shut down the distribution centers. End of story.

New Orleans and everywhere else hit by Katrina would rise again, phoenix like, in a matter a months, and as good as or better than ever.

Omitting for a moment all the acknowledgements, perfunctory or not, that he had to make, Judge John Roberts' opening statement, as meaty as any one could have imagined or hoped for, consisted of little more than the following:

My personal appreciation that I owe a great debt to others reinforces my view that a certain humility should characterize the judicial role.

Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.

The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules.

But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.

Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.

* * *

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. We do, because of the wisdom of our founders and the sacrifices of our heroes over the generations to make their vision a reality.

Mr. Chairman, I come before the committee with no agenda. I have no platform. Judges are not politicians who can promise to do certain things in exchange for votes.

I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.

* * *

If I am confirmed, I will be vigilant to protect the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court, and I will work to ensure that it upholds the rule of law and safeguards those liberties that make this land one of endless possibilities for all Americans.

One of this writer's favorite adages is, “I'm sorry for writing so long a letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

We can now predict confidently that these confirmation hearings are going to be blessedly short, because Roberts opening was short, but also carefully crafted to telegraph to the Senators assembled that he has indeed spent the time to write a short opening, to prove the power of his intellect and of his personal mettle.

First, consider the very simple metaphor that Roberts used to illustrate his view of the limited role a court properly functioning has to play in our Constitutional system: a judge is like the umpire at a baseball game.

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.
The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.

Consider in America how powerful a metaphor that is. How many of us could imagine playing baseball without firm or permanent written rules, but instead with umpires making up the rule as the game unfolded.

That’s the “living, breathing” model of the Constitution that every Democrat and many of the Republicans in the hearing room historically have embraced. Roberts has telegraphed to us that he’ll have nothing to do with it. And that he’s prepared to pound home his convictions with analogies as American as apple pie.

Second, and almost immediately into his opening statement, Roberts embraced Ronald Reagan to his bosom, openly and without shame or hesitation, and then dared anyone in the room to challenge that embrace.

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. We do, because of the wisdom of our founders and the sacrifices of our heroes over the generations to make their vision a reality.

Roberts' evocation of Reagan struck like a shaft of bright daylight to scurrying vampires. With a snarl, at least mentally, all of the Democrats, and many of the Republicans in the room, were forced to turn away, at least figuratively if not physically for the searing pain caused by the Reagan reference.

There are two sources of that pain. The first is the Democrats’ recollection of Ronald Reagan himself, and of the world wide revolution Ronald Reagan started. How did a two bit Hollywood actor, they still wonder, who couldn’t even put a sentence together without index cards, manage to win the presidency? Twice? And to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union? And not get hounded out of office with investigations? The Democrats in that Senate hearing room, and some Republicans still can’t figure it out.

The second source of that searing pain is the fact that the revolution that Reagan started isn’t by a long shot yet over; his spirit still resonates.

During the recent funereal of Reagan, each of us found ourselves pausing to think, really hard, about what it was that we all found so magnificent about this man. Even the main stream media, against its mighty collective will, had gotten sucked up in it, and had begun to realize the depth of affection this country has for Ronald Reagan, as well as the depths of Reagan’s convictions and the common sense that he brought to governing.

Roberts having evoked him, embraced him warts and all, will any Senator dare deny the greatness of Ronald Reagan, slayer of the Soviets, much less the wisdom of the remarks Reagan made about the phony constitutions of that now defunct Soviet Union?

Statements like Reagan’s about the pointless promises of the constitution of the Soviet Union are just so obviously correct and common sensical that we love them. But that also is why they are also so dangerous for the Democrats, and some Republicans, to try to pick apart.

Because those kinds of statements, and any debates the democrats might start about the validity of those statements, will set us thinking about our own Constitution, and about what gives our Constitution its breathtaking power and influence.

Isn’t it that our own Constitution is, at least for the time being, still a solemn and eternal pact of sorts, created by our direct lineal descendents, renewed again and again and again, and sanctified over and over with the blood and treasure of those who have for more than 200 years defended it?

Can that pact be as powerful, and will we be embracing the same Constitution today if that earlier pact now is construed to endorse abortion, gay marriage and other private depravities, none of which would ever have been embraced by the original founders, much less by the generations after generations that followed, swearing fealty to that same original pact? Of course not.

Perhaps the only thing phonier, more ephemeral, and fleeting than the so-called constitution of the Soviet Union, would be a “constitution” composed of little more than 5-4 plurality opinions by unelected officials, the terms of which shimmer on the horizon but always just out of reach of our collective comprehension or understanding.

With every new and novel "right” injected into that kind of a constitution, it becomes less and less a real a pact to which we all are committed, and more and more the product of a process only, and an wholly undemocratic one.

Instead of chiseled in granite, that kind of pact seems more and more like a projector beam on a movie screen, little more than the fleeting and particular light and passions of a particular and peculiar generation. When our Constitution is not one that our ancestors also fought and died for, then why ought we?

All of this, Roberts threatens to bring out at his hearings by his simple and powerful arguments embraced in his opening statement.

Finally, Roberts has made clear he has no intention of committing to ruling a certain way on particular cases nor to discuss what he would have done had he decided cases already decided, much less any about to be decided? Said Roberts,

I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.

Why will Roberts refuse to answer such questions? Because it is inconsistent with his role as umpire.

Would anyone bother playing a game, if before the game began the umpire announced how many balls and strikes he would call, and against whom?

In our constitutional system a court is called upon to decide particular cases and controversies only. They must be real cases, representing real disputes, between people with a real interest in the outcome and therefore with a genuine incentive to argue their side to the fullest.

Roberts’ hearings will be fascinating theater and educational. We all should watch as much of them as we can. The hearings also will be blessedly short, because there is present in the Senate hearing room neither the intellect, the internal logic or the will to attack him, or to explain away the glorious constitutional office to which he is about to ascend.

To read the headlines, one would think that the upper echelons of FEMA, now leading the federal government’s efforts to respond to hurricane Katrina, was composed of political hacks.

"Reports" Spencer S. Hsu of the The Washington Post,

FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.

Confirming the old adage that the lie is half way around the world before the truth even pulls on its boots, Hsu’s Washington Post story was also carried on MSNBC, under the headline “FEMA Leaders Lack Disaster Experience.“

But a quick check with FEMA’s own web site, the accuracy of which the The Washington Post does not question, paints a completely different picture.

For example, it might be literally accurate to state that FEMA Director Brown “arrived at” the agency without disaster relief experience, but that was in 2001. It is also deliberately false and misleading to suggest, as the Hsu article and the headline over it does, that Brown just arrive at FEMA, or that when he did first arrive he immediately assumed the high position there that he holds today.

According to that same FEMA web site, which the Washington Post no where contends is inaccurate or misleading, prior to Katrina, Brown’s experience included the following:

Under Secretary Brown [since 2001] has led Homeland Security’s response to more than 164 presidentially declared disasters and emergencies, including the 2003 Columbia Shuttle disaster and the California wildfires in 2003. In 2004, Mr. Brown led FEMA’s thousands of dedicated disaster workers during the most active hurricane season in over 100 years, as FEMA delivered aid more quickly and more efficiently than ever before.

Previously, Mr. Brown served as FEMA's Deputy Director and the agency's General Counsel. Shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Mr. Brown served on the President's Consequence Management Principal's Committee, which acted as the White House's policy coordination group for the federal domestic response to the attacks.

Later, the President asked him to head the Consequence Management Working Group to identify and resolve key issues regarding the federal response plan. In August 2002, President Bush appointed him to the Transition Planning Office for the new Department of Homeland Security, serving as the transition leader for the EP&R Division.

Now if FEMA’s current critics want to contend that Brown did a poor job handling any of those prior disaters or emergencies, then let them try to document that charge.

That we haven't heard any hue and cry about Brown before now strongly suggests that Brown probably did a great job.

That no one is today is rummaging through those previous FEMA operations to find people to criticize Brown's previous management of those disasters also supports the suspicion that there is nothing in Brown's past performance to suggest he wasn't the right man for the job.

If Brown's critics are contending that someone seeking the Undersecretary’s position in FEMA ought to have even more expereince than just having been involved in responding to MORE THAN 164 presidentially declared disasters and emergencies, then let them defend that position.

That wasn't the argument, of course, when Bill Clinton brought in his FEMA director, a old crony from Arkansas who had himself also learned "on-the-job," except in (ahem)Arkansas. Clinton's nominee, James Lee Witt, a construction company owner, had experience in Arkansas with exactly three such presidentially declared disasters when he was named to FEMA. The rest of his training also was "on-the-job." Also, where in the private sector does one get that kind of experience? Haliburton, perhaps?

Thus to contend as the headline does, that Brown came to Katrina lacking disaster relief experience is not just sloppy journalism but just flat out, down right wrong on the facts.

It is sloppy work like this by the press that has left the credibility of the Main Stream Media in tatters with so many of us.

At best, it is just plain unprofessional work. At worst, these kinds of articles represent partisan Bush bashing disguised as journalism. Why Bush bashing? Because these articles are trying to fill in the gaps between the fact that Katrina struck and the wish that Bush is somehow responsible for what happened afterwards. Remember, the Mayor of New Orleans, and the Governor are Democrats.

Articles like these really ought to be counted outright as a campaign contributions to the Democrats?

If the same information, presented in a video format,with the same headline, was run as an advertisement on television, it would be treated exactly as a political attack ad.

But when published in “the media” this kind of partisanship is somehow exempt from the rules by which the rest of us must play.


Memo to:Senator John McCain, be careful what you wish for--were your version of campaign reform enacted this is the only kind of information we'd have access to going into federal elections.

The “blame game” is a fun one for the political class to play, but tedious for the rest of us.

This is because most of us understand the logical fallacy embedded in the rules of their game: something awful happened; someone somewhere had predicted that something awful might happen; therefore someone else, usually Republican by political persuasion, must be at fault for not preparing for it to happen, or not preventing it from happening all together.

The fallacy is the implied premise that, before it actually happened, the “awful thing” was so obvious to anyone who thought about it that, but for evil actors, we would all have agreed to anticipate and prepare for it. In a small “l,” liberal democratic republic like ours, of course, hind sight is always more acute than foresight. The requisite agreement before the fact as to what it is that will happen is what almost never something that can happen, because before something awful happens we are never so sure that it will happen as we are after it happens.

In New Orleans, an unusually ferocious storm caused a major levee to break. What didn’t happen when it should have in New Orleans? The most obvious answer, now, and with perfect 20/20 hindsight, is that the people living in that city who weren’t forcibly evacuated from it before the storm should have been.

But, on what basis could they have been forcibly evacuated, before what was predicted would happen actually did? Who would have tolerated the forced evacuation of 450,000+ people on the off-chance that a hurricane that had been reduced to a tropical storm, whose force was dissipating and whose direction was erratic at best, would develop into the classic “perfect storm” over the newest and most recently rebuilt part of New Orleans’s levees, and cause those parts of its levees not just to spill over, but to give way entirely?

Could such an order to evacuate have been issued from Washington, D. C.? Of course not. Noted the BBC in an article posted just last night

It [the evacuation] was announced at a news conference by the Mayor Ray Nagin on Sunday 28 August, less than 24 hours before the hurricane struck early the next morning.

The question has to be asked: Why was it [the evacuation] not ordered earlier?

The Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said at the same [Nagin] news conference that President Bush had called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation.

The night before, National Hurricane Director Max Mayfield had called Mayor Nagin to tell him that an evacuation was needed. Why were these calls necessary?

Why was it necessary? Because we don't have a hereditary monarch here in the United States who can just order people about. Absent an attack by a foreign power, and even then not easily, there just is no legal basis for the federal government to nullify and override the duly elected state and local governments in whose jurisdictions New Orleans and its environs lie.

And as we have seen, the surrounding environs of several states, like Texas and Alabama and Mississippi, not just Louisiana, would have been implicated in such an order. To effectuate a timely evacuation of New Orleans, the authorities in Washington, D. C., whoever it would have been, would have had to not only take over the city of New Orleans long before Katrina’s actual path was known; they would also have had to have authority to commandeer whole stretches of the economy, including interstate highways, hospitals, thousands of private vehicles and their drivers, and a multitude of private lodgings of various sorts, in half a dozen states.

How likely was that going to happen? When the chattering classes in and around Washington, D. C. will not even countenance the government examining the reading habits of foreign agents sworn to destroy us, on what possible ground does anyone think that, ahead of the tragedy materializing, the same chattering classes would have approved of legislation authorizing the federal government to commandeer all of the state and local resources needed to address the mere contingency of a drubbing by a tropical storm not yet even within striking distance of land? Fat chance.

State and local officials we know now, understood from myriad learned studies and previous near miss experience, that an evacuation was exactly what should have been done. We also know that because New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, ordered exactly such a “mandatory” evacuation of the city on Sunday August 28, two days before Katrina hit.

Nagin did so claiming that Katrina, then still a tornado, “could” bring as much as 15 inches of rain ands a storm surge of 20 feet or higher that would “most likely topple” the network of levees and canals protecting the city. Or not. Tornados over the gulf are fickle things.

Problem is, no one took Mayor Nagin very seriously, even himself apparently. For one thing, the good mayor hadn’t done anything previously to prepare his citizenry for such an evacuation. There was no publicly announced evacuation plan in place; no one had a pre-designated place to go, or any other directions.

And perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because he knew it would be politically perilous, even after Mayor Nagin declared the evacuation, he did nothing to make the “mandatory” part of his evacuation order mandatory-in-fact. Recall that the crowds that filled the Superdome and the convention center were people who had failed to evacuate when first "ordered" to do so. They moved out of their homes, and their hotel rooms; they just didn’t leave the city.

Many reports have suggested those who stayed in their homes, didn’t leave the city for lack of an automobile. But how likely is that? Not very. Recall, the city flooded slowly enough that anyone left in the city could have at least moved to higher ground, of which there was plenty located in places other that where the Superdome sits, before being trapped by the rising water. Indeed, there were whole sections of New Orleans that didn’t flood at all. But the people still in their homes now didn’t move to higher ground; they stayed put.

Likely these people who didn’t leave their homes when they should have, or could have, and then got trapped in those homes later, chose to stay for at least two obvious reasons, both of them, frankly entirely rational decisions, as events proved.

On the one hand, most people who stayed probably didn’t really believe that the city’s historic good luck finally would run out and that Katrina would hit it hard as some had predicted it could. There had been lots of false alarms before, not everyone fled then, and the city had lucked out. It is one ting to tell everyone to get out; it is another to make them do it. The mayor didn’t try to make anyone leave. But if the mayor didn't take his evacuation threat seriously, by putting some teeth in it, then why would anyone esle?

The second reason most of the people who stayed did so is that, even if they thought that this time the storm was "the big one" that they had always worried about, whether or not the storm hit, people feared that if they left their homes, and the storm didn't take everything, then the looters would. And that too probably a fair calculation of the odds, as it happens.

So what could or should the federal government have been doing about people making those kinds of rationale judgments? Declared martial law before the storm hit, to reassure everyone that it was not only too dangerous to stay, but also not too dangerous to leave? Imagine the howls of outrage from the civl libertarians we would have heard had that been attempted.

What else supposedly went wrong?

Not enough National Guard troops? So Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco seemed to complain later in the week. But on Monday, August 29, the New York Times was running photos taken on Sunday August 28 of uniformed National Guard troops coordinating the evacuation to the Superdome. This was the Sunday before the Tuesday the levee broke, and before the storm even arrived.

So were there not enough troops in the city when Katrina struck? If not, who was asking for more troops, and for what purpose? Who should have sent more troops, without having been asked?

Many complained that there were no relief supplies pre-positioned? Wrong again. On August 28, 2005 President Bush declared the Gulf Coast a disaster area, and FEMA Director Michael D. Brown was reported to be in Baton Rouge Sunday, ready to deploy the prepositioned supplies once the location of Katrina’s landing was known. According to the New York Times, as of Sunday, August 28,

Even before the hurricane hit the New Orleans area, FEMA had positioned 23 of its disaster medical assistance teams and 7 search and rescue teams around the region. It also delivered generators, and stockpiles of water, ice and ready-to-eat meals. It even sent in two teams of veterinarians, to provide care to any injured pets or other animals.

Only in America would a disaster agency pre-position vetrenarians! Is this a great country of what?

Trouble was, Katrina wasn’t cooperating; she was moving on an unpredictable course, and unless someone thought a FEMA convoy ought to have joined the storm chasers, there was little more FEMA could do until Katrina decided where she was going to land.

Was levee construction funding shortchanged, by the venal Bushies and the Republican Congress? Well, once again, no.

Likely it's true that the Army Corps of Engineers has never, in this budget cycle or any other, gotten all the monies it asked for, because in some quarters it's viewed as a little too quick to move mother nature around, particularly on the Mississippi River. But that’s also why the Corps can always be counted on to ask for more than it thinks it can use, or reasonably expect to get.

So this year as in most, it got more than President Bush preferred, but less than it asked for, and was given that by "We the People," in Congress assembled, that balanced The Corps demands with all of the other demands before it, but also BK—“Before Katrina” that is.

Isn’t that how federal budgets are supposed to work? Let’s give the President the line-item veto if that’s not the best way for the budget to get passed. Everyone in favor, raise your hands. Do we all get to second guess the budget, once passed? In a sense we do, and our second guessing will go into next year's budget calculations. Think the Corps will get all it wants? Not a chance.

Also, whatever the levee or canal work that is on the drawing boards today, if it was supposed to have been supported with this year’s budget dollars, then it isn’t going to be finished for many years out into the future.

Alternately, whatever levees or canals didn’t get built in time to be ready for Katrina, didn’t get built because of funds not allocated many, many budgets ago.

When Hurricane Camille, a rare top Category Five storm, hit Mississippi in 1969, just missing New Orleans, the levees around the city were strengthened - but only enough to protect against a Category Three hurricane.

The gamble was taken that another Category Five would not threaten New Orleans anytime soon. This attitude prevailed among successive administrations.

Lt General Carl Strock, the Army Corps of Engineers commander, admitted that there was a collective mindset - that New Orleans would not be hit. Washington rolled the dice, he said.

After flooding in 1995, the existing system was improved. However, the sums were relatively small. About $500m was spent over the next 10 years.

Last time I looked, 1995 was five years before the Bush administration even took office. Last time I looked, in 1995 Bill Clinton was president If Bill CLinton and the Democrats way back then thought the "gamble" was worth taking, how was any Congress since, or President Bush supposed to have suddenly noticed the shortage of funds when no one else did, until Katrina struck?

Worse, for the hysterical critics, the primary levee that gave out was one just recently rebuilt and that was brand spanking new. Either it was poorly designed, or improperly built or both; but it wasn’t old or worn out or slated for any further work.

'"Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said [it] was particularly surprising because the break was "along a section that was just upgraded." "It did not have an earthen levee," Dr. Penland said. "It had a vertical concrete wall several feel thick."

Since Katrina’s landfall, the Congress has appropriated billions ($10.5 to be precise) towards. . .what? Who knows?

How fast will any of that money reach anyone? Who knows? The Bush administration will have to be very careful what it’s spending on, and account for every penny, especially if companies like Haliburton gets involved in reconstruction.

Were that to happen, why in no time at all the Democrats will be screaming that the Vice President is favoring his old cronies at the company with no-bid contracts. All in favor of releasing the government from any obligation to put those contracts out for bid, raise your hand.

The earliest polls coming out reflect that the “blame game” isn’t working very well. Lots of people think the feds have done a poor job so far, but even more think that the state and local authorities did even worse. Problem is, in Louisiana, at the state and local level, the political leaderships is heavily Democratic; only the federal government is Republican.

Thus, unless it can all be pinned on the feds, but it can’t be, the blame game is turning into a zero sum game for Democrats. Once again the American people seem to be more focused on substance over form, and we still are glad that the grownups remain firmly in charge.

In today’s Wall Street Journal one Fumio Matsuo, former Washington bureau chief of Kyodo News Service, on the anniversary of the Japanese surrender to the United States marking the conclusion of World War II in the Pacific, suggests that “Tokyo Needs Its Dresden Moment.”

That is, to help heal what Mr. Matsuo describes as a still unresolved rift between Japan and the United States, an amendment to the descriptive plaque on the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institute would be in order.

Japan should ask for changes in the placards on the restored B-29s that dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- Enola Gay at the Smithsonian and Bock's Car at Dayton's Air Force Museum. The placards explain that the aircraft dropped the bombs toward the end of the war but do not mention the estimated number of victims -- 140,000 at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki. Listing the number killed is the least we can do to allow the dead to rest in peace.

Stating the number of victims is admittedly controversial. In 1995, the year of the Dresden Reconciliation, the Smithsonian organized an atomic bomb exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII, but many Americans objected to any reference to the number of victims. Today these displays should be of little concern to Americans since Japan and the U.S. have become so much closer, particularly in light of the deployment to Iraq. Most Americans believe the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives on both sides by bringing a swift end to the war. That stance is not incompatible with listing the number of victims or having Mr. Bush mourn them. In fact, those actions would be a minimal requiem for the dead. I believe Americans will accept these facts.

Although the Journal does not say how long he served here, likely Mr. Matsuo stewed too long in the peculiar juices of the Kyodo News Service’s Washington Bureau, and that is what makes him sound so much like a John Kerry "wanna be."

But frankly, and with just a slight further amendment, most Americans probably wouldn’t have any problem with Mr. Matsuo’s suggestion at all.

On the Enola Gay plaque let’s not mention only the number of Japanese “victims” of the bombing; let’s add to the plaque as well the best-guess estimates that President Truman made regarding how many victims of the Japanese war-making machine, whether Japanese, or Americans Chinese, Russians, Indonesians, Filipino, Korean or any other nationality who would be spared as a result of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That would be an informative plaque, and give the Japanese all the Dresden Moment that they should require.

The Drudge Report, and the Wall Street Journal’s online blog “Political Diary” are both reporting on some of the Looney Left views of current media martyr, Cindy Sheehan, as though it has just discovered them. But it hasn't. It now appears that she's been ranting this stuff for months. Proving once again just how unreliable or unfair or both is the Main Stream Media (MSM).

Cindy Sheehan is the grief stricken mother demanding a second opportunity to discuss her son’s death in Iraq with the President. Sheehan’s intent on making a career of her press conferences attacking Bush and as usual the press is in full cooperative mode, since after all the target is the President.

Ultimately, the saddest thing about these reports is that it appears that the Sheehan woman may be genuinely unhinged mentally. One can only wonder, because until recently the press has not been reporting that Sheehan has the kinds of whacked-out political views she in now being quoted as spouting.

Sheehan type views are NOT uncommon, among a vast swathe of the Looney Left. That's why she now has so much company down on that dusty road near the President's ranch. But we just hadn’t heard before that she held such views.

If Sheehan didn’t have such views before, but has adopted them now, then she genuinely seems to be heading for or may even be in the midst of a mental crack-up.

That Sheehan may have been a little unhinged before the traveled to Crawford had already been hinted at, of course, when it was revealed early on that her account of her first meeting with the President several months ago differed substantially from the account she was giving of it to the press on her arrival on the dusty Texas plain.just outside of the Presidential compound.

In an earlier and near contemporaneous account of that first visit, Sheehan was quite laudatory of the President’s empathy and all around classiness as our “Commander -in-Grief.”

Accoding to a local newpaper's report of her account of the meeting:

The 10 minutes of face time with the president could have given the family a chance to vent their frustrations or ask Bush some of the difficult questions they have been asking themselves, such as whether Casey's sacrifice would make the world a safer place.

But in the end, the family decided against such talk, deferring to how they believed Casey would have wanted them to act. In addition, Pat noted that Bush wasn't stumping for votes or trying to gain a political edge for the upcoming election.

"We have a lot of respect for the office of the president, and I have a new respect for him because he was sincere and he didn't have to take the time to meet with us," Pat said.

Sincerity was something Cindy had hoped to find in the meeting. Shortly after Casey died, Bush sent the family a form letter expressing his condolences, and Cindy said she felt it was an impersonal gesture.

"I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis," Cindy said after their meeting. "I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith."

That was then.

This is now.

In her later accounts, like this one August 8, 2005 in the New York Times, the President was a thoughtless thug and a frat boy cad. According to the Times, Sheehan's account of the visit with the President was remarkably different than her own earlier account:

In Ms. Sheehan's [current] telling, though, Mr. Bush did not know her son's name when she and her family met with him in June 2004 at Fort Lewis. Mr. Bush, she said, acted as if he were at a party and behaved disrespectfully toward her by referring to her as "Mom" throughout the meeting.

By Ms. Sheehan's account, Mr. Bush said to her that he could not imagine losing a loved one like an aunt or uncle or cousin. Ms. Sheehan said she broke in and told Mr. Bush that Casey was her son, and that she thought he could imagine what it would be like since he has two daughters and that he should think about what it would be like sending them off to war.

"I said, 'Trust me, you don't want to go there'," Ms. Sheehan said, recounting her exchange with the president. "He said, 'You're right, I don't.' I said, 'Well, thanks for putting me there.' "

These contradictions were reported in only a few places, and not widely by the national media, so far as I have seen.

Looking around now, it’s not hard to find lots of other examples of what a coarse and nearly incoherent rambler about Bush and the war this Cindy Sheehan really is. But note carefully the date line on some of these accounts of her espousing these views. Did not the MSM have access to these stories quite a while ago? Were they not on notice back then that Cindy Sheehan was not the cute little old lade in tennis shoes that was depicted?

There is another possibility, of course, which is that Sheehan has held these wacko views all along, and that the MSM knew it. But it just didn’t think they would be important, in helping us to assess and understand what Sheehan was doing there down in Crawford.

The MSM does try try to help us this way, recall. This is the same press corps that inevitably tells us, when a court decision issues striking down an environmental rule imposed by the Clinton administration, what president appointed which judge on the appellate panel involved.

Or what the President "failed to mention" in his response to a question at a press conference. But it did not think that we needed to know about Cindy Sheehan's creepiness about the death of her son, indeed that she was so creepy on the subject that her own husband finally couldn’t take any more and moved out on her.

The press has told us, albeit only recently that Sheehan and her estranged husband were both “liberals,” and that was even more liberal than her husband. And of course none of her views are outside the mainstream of what passes for left liberal orthodoxy these days.

So could the press have known about Sheehan’s nuttiness all along, but in its zeal for impartiality and fairness, just chosen to conceal it from us? Likely.

If the press didn’t know, and as it now appears her views were readily “knowable,” then the MSM press has proven again that it is supine, when the “story” fits its narrow pre-conceived (and yet wholly erroneous) notions of how the American people ought to be thinking about such things. Too convenient.

No, if as it now appears the press did know that Cindy Sheehan had such opinions, but just failed to tell us, then the press has been complicit in her anti-Bush jihad.

And that’s just as sickening as is Cindy Sheehan’s rants in Crawford. Both Cindy Sheehan and the press coverage of her make you just want to avert your eyes, hoping that both she and the press covering it will be mercifully gone when we look back.

A story in this morning’s New York Times once again demonstrates what really is at stake in connection with the John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court. Do we want a super legislature? Or a judiciary?

The Times’ Eric Schmitt reports on efforts by certain Democratic governors to oppose the closing of air national guard facilities in their respective states. The threatened facilities were identified by the bipartisan base closing commission with which we have all become familiar.

Base closing recommendations are made taking into account the needs and recommendations of the Pentagon, among other things. The base closings in some states are accompanied, almost always, with the transfer of their military assets to bases in other states, or the phasing out of obsolete missions.

Regardless, the commission is very much an arm of the Legislative and Executive branches: it was formed by the Congress, mandated to work in close consultation with the Pentagon and is answerable to the Congress at several stages of its functioning.

The two state governors, Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, and Rob Blagojevich of Illinois both are democrats. Both have filed lawsuits in some court, somewhere challenging the Pentagon’s right to close or even to scale back bases in their states, arguing that the Pentagon’s proposals will in some manner inhibit their states’ ability to protect themselves against terrorist attacks and to call out their respective National Guards to perform fire fighting functions and the like.

The Schmitt article in the New York Times doesn’t dwell at any length on the validity of the legal positions of these governors, except to note that the Department of Justice recently issued a legal opinion to the effect that the Commission had the legal authority to do what it was doing, over the objection of these and other state governors. The legal merits to these lawsuits to one side, though, most revealing of all is what these state governors have to say about their perceptions of the power of the judiciary, as opposed to the legislative branch, or anyone else for that matter:

"We have a solid legal case that we will continue to fight because the law and common sense is on our side," Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, a Democrat, said in a statement. "What the Pentagon is proposing flies in the face of reason."

Adrian R. King Jr., deputy chief of staff to Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview: "The D.O.J. opinion is like any other opinion. At the end of the day, the state believes the only opinion that matters is that of a judge in a court of law."

So there you have it, in all of its stark simplicty. Forget about the Congress, forget about the Executive Branch, forget about the Pentagon, forget about the Department of Justice, forget about everyone in the whole d--n country if you have to: In the Democratic ethos: At the end of the day. . .the only opinion that matters is that of a judge in a court of law."

So, do we want a super legislature? Or do we want a judiciary?

Concluding not from anything Roberts ever said but by the support he is receiving from the Right, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) has started running an ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of defending abortion clinic bombers.

To substantiate this charge, NARAL juxtaposes a 1991 Supreme Court argument that Roberts made with news clips of clinic bombings in 1997. The ad is blatantly false and misleading, according to the non-partisan Annenburg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which apparently analyzes such things.

Understand of course, that accuracy is not what NARAL has any interest in whatsoever. NARAL and its ilk have learned long ago that most of us do not follow politics; indeed most of the time we loathe even hearing about political things, except on the eve of national elections and then we make up our minds late in the game, and on any host of factors that may, or may not, have any realistic connection with the candidates at issue.

The theory behind ads like NARAL is running is that if enough nastiness washes over us, often enough, and even even when we feign disinterest, some of it sticks. NARAL wants its message against Roberts, however disgusting and unfair, to stick, at least to a few of us.

Indeed, as this ad is demonstrating, groups like NARAL now try to make their ads as outrageous as possible, and then run it in a few obscure markets, alerting freindly media to it, and hoping that the controversy it generates will catapult the ad into the national media pool, where it will get free airplay, over and over again, and far beyond the initial ad run.

When called on to pull the ad, of course, you refuse, contending that it is true or somehow otherwise defensible. That response generates yet another cycle of free publicity. NARAL appears to be following that script to the letter.

And the mouthpiece for the Left, the New York Times, is bending over backwards to accommodate the strategy, running an above the fold page one story about the ad this morning, and reporting breasthelssly that the ad had provoked a “furor.”

[Recall that this is the same newspaper that, just yesterday, buried on page A13 a story that should have provoked a furor, about how the 9/11 Commission had failed to report on a Pentagon task force in 2000, during the Clinton administration, had specifically singled out and identified as potential plane hijackers Mohammed Atta and three others, but was told it could not share its information with the FBI. In a follow up story this morning, the NYT pushed the story even further back into the paper, to A14]

Contrary to the New York Times headline this morning, the NARAL ad had not, of course, created any such “furor” at least so far, because NARAL ran it in obscure (and hence inexpensive) media markets.

Until now, most of us had never heard or seen the ad. But now that the New York Times has spoken, the ad will be getting the free national exposure that NARAL counted on.

In a perverse and unintended way, though, the NARAL ad is performing a valuable public service, to the extent it reminds us of what is at stake with the Roberts nomination. To understand why, consider the ad, and the reality behind it.

What NARAL is unhappy about is that in the case at issue and by a 6-3 majority the Supreme Court declined NARAL's invitation to construe a Reconstruction Era civil rights law intended to target Ku Klux Klan violence against newly freed slaves to prohibit pro-life demonstrators from protesting in front of abortion clinics.

To make the statute stretch that far, of course, NARAL had to argue that, because only women had abortions, and the demonstrators were trying to discourage abortions from occurring, the demonstrators were acting to deprive women as a protected class of their rights as citizens, such that the conduct fell within the reach of the civil rights statute.

To reach that result, of course, the Supreme Court would have had to ignore not only the original and well documented purpose of the legislation; it also would have had to find that demonstrations at abortion clinics were aimed at women as a class, and not at the act of abortion itself. Indeed, had NARAL’s view prevailed, it is not clear how anyone anywhere could have continue to protest against abortion, in any way, without risking being charged with a violation of the civil rights of women.

On behalf of the United States government, as principal deputy solicitor general, and representing the Reagan administration, John Roberts argued against that result. His argument carried the day. Incredibly, the decision was not unanimous but only by a vote of 6-3.

Did that mean, as NARAL now says, that abortion clinics thus became fair game for demonstrators, or clinic bombers or anyone else? Of course not. It just meant that if the federal government was going to get in the business of extending to such clinics special protections, it would have to do so openly, in broad daylight and through the legislative process. And of course that is exactly what the federal government then did.

But for NARAL and its ilk, the legislative process is just too time consuming and frankly just too small ‘d” democratic. It just takes too much time and effort to develop legislation that can garner a majority vote, especially on tough issues like abortion. You have to talk to people, even people who may not agree with you, and reason with them, and take into account their point of view. Legislating in the judicial system is so much easier.

So now NARAL is attacking Roberts, not because it can with a straight face contend that he is, or is not, in favor of abortions, or because they know that he supports or does not support violence against abortion clinics.

No, NARAL is opposing Roberts because he appears not to consider the Supreme Court to be the kind of imperial superlegislature that the Left in general, and Democrats in particular, would prefer that it be (or that it be so long as it is safely peopled by left wing liberals like themselves).

In a Roberts Court, the judiciary would be back in the business of applying the law to particular cases and controversies, and not trying to solve every knotty social problem that we as a society are trying to contend with.

Thank you NARAL, for reminding us what is really what is at stake in this nomination. Do we want a NARAL superlegislature? Or a Judiciary?

The New York Times reports that the supposedly non-partisan commission that was to determine how planning for the September 11, 2001 attacks could have occurred undetected by American intelligence, was unaware of a Pentagon data-mining operation that, in the waning months of the Clinton administration, had focused on the 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. Apparently through these efforts, and while Bill Clinton was President, the Pentagon had identified Atta and at least three of his associates as potential hijackers.

The Times buried the story on page A13 of this morning’s editions, since if true would demonstrate that it was the Clinton administration, by then well established in office for almost 8 years, and not the 8 month old Bush administration that had been asleep at the switch and culpable.

That the story indicts the Clinton administration for not preventing the 9/11 attacks explains why the Times buried the story deep within its bowels. Indeed, given its political elanings, that the Times buried the story would only seem to reaffirm that the story is a bombshell that, if accurate, calls into serious question the validity of everything that the 9/11 panel did.

According to the Times, unidentified retired intelligence officials have confirmed that

“by the middle of 2000 the [Pentagon] operation had identified Mr. Atta and three of the other future hijackers as a member of an American-based cell and that the information was presented that summer in a chart to the Pentagon's Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

The official said that the chart included the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and the others, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawar al-Hamzi. Mr. Weldon and the intelligence official said Able Danger members had recommended that the information be shared with the F.B.I., an the (sic) idea that was rejected.

The request to share information with the FBI was rejected, of course, as a result of “the Wall” erected between the FBI and our foreign intelligence gathering agencies like the Pentagon and the CIA.

It was this Wall that the Clinton administration, children of the sixties all, maintained and strengthened while in control of the Executive branch. It was this Wall between our intelligence agencies that prevented them from comparing notes and coordinating their intelligence findings.

Recall that while the Commission was operating, a tremendous controversy arose regarding whether Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton era Justice Department official directly responsible for reinforcing the Wall, should properly have sat on the Commission at all.

Tearing down the Wall was one of the primary recommendations made by the 9/11 Panel, and the Bush administration has acted with alacrity to do so. Questions about what Gorelick did or didn’t do as a panelist will rise again, given this startling new revelation.

If the 9/11 Panel currently seeking to continue their operations well beyond what Congress mandated had a credibility problem before, it has a huge new one today. "If this is true, somebody should be looking into it," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. No Duh, Tom.

The larger question of course is, how did Kean and his slapdash sleuths not come across any information about this data mining operation during its formal tenure? And what if anything does it tell us about the validity of the Commission’s final report?

Some commission members are trying to blame the Pentagon for failing to disclose the operation earlier. But it isn’t just the Pentagon at issue here. Who, at what agency, concluded that the Pentagon could not share what information that it developed with the FBI?

Kean of course was just in the news earlier this week complaining that, even though his panel was disbanded officially almost a year ago, no one was taking him seriously when he demanded that officials throughout the executive branch report to him on their efforts to implement his panel’s findings. Perhaps Kean’s time would have been better spent overseeing what the Commission itself had been doing in the first place, and making sure that it’s report was thorough, accurate, and complete.

In a previous post I predicted the Democrats and their cohorts in the Main Stream Media (MSM) would try to inflame public opinion against Judge John Roberts by any means at their disposal.

Today's brushfire is the charge that the White House is declining to produce to the public Justice Roberts' tax returns. The media is trying hard to fan the flames, contending that the White House (which hasn't asked for or received them) is itself declining to produce the returns and that this is a "break with precedent" that could exacerbate tensions over the nominee.

A scandal? A smoking gun? Stonewalling?

No, it turns out that the Bush administration hasn't been requesting or disclosing such income tax materials concerning any of its judicial nominees:

The change in policy on tax returns could fuel the debate. The Bush administration changed the policy in 2001, no longer requiring judicial nominees at any level to provide tax returns. Instead, the IRS performs a "tax check" of the past three years to detect any problems or disclose if investigations were conducted during that period. "The reason we changed it was an effort to reduce the duplicative paperwork and streamline the process," White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino said yesterday.

This means of course that this wasn't a "change" in policy; its been policy for the last four years. It also means that Judge Roberts didn't produce his tax returns when he was nominated, and confirmed overwhelmingly, to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia just two years ago.

If Judge Roberts' tax returns didn't matter to anyone in the Senate just two years ago, why should they now?

In recent weeks the Democrats have been widely lauded for discovering the art of“framing.” According to “framing” theory, arguments are won or lost in the opening inning, no matter how long and drawn out the game eventually becomes. Framing, the Democrats think will lead them out of the political wilderness that they now are wandering in. This is nothing new of course; the Greeks called framing “rhetoric.” And as a New York Times journalist recently noted, not even the best framing in the world can make a bad argument convincing.

Democrats and their allies in the Main Stream Media frantically are trying to frame the debate over the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court. They aren’t succeeding. By any historic or customary standard, the President has found an ideal nominee. Even Justice O’Connor, whose seat Roberts would be assuming, has described Roberts as an excellent choice, although (and stating the obvious---no?) disappointed that he was not a woman.

Modest, unassuming, a strict constructionist to the core, and just as Bush has promised repeatedly, Roberts is a justice in the mold of a Scalia or a Thomas, but perhaps even better. Roberts’ educational achievements are generally of a higher caliber, as is previous his career trajectory. But believe you me, we are arguing only at the margins here. Roberts is a brilliant candidate, whose accomplishments are all the more impressive as his previous work product comes into public view.

The Democrats are coming to realize this of course. Thus they have no hope of beating back Roberts’ confirmation, or even of wounding him on his way to the bench, but by the low, gutter-ball tactics for which the Democratic Party has become known: Gross distortion of the nominees’ record coupled with as many diversionary brush fires about “process” as they can light. This is “framing” played at its highest levels, at least for the Democratic Party.

To date the “frame” the Democrats have chosen is to depict Roberts as a “stealth” candidate, who is hiding his “conservatism” and actually intending to overturn a whole host of controversial opinions, once elevated to the bench. To that end, the Democrats are determined to learn his political opinions regarding a whole host of inflammatory issues, and to demand to know how he would rule on them once on the bench.

So far these tactics have been backfiring. This is predictable, because the whole Democrat attack is built on a false premise, namely that a nominee must have political opinions and that those political opinions are significant, because on the bench that is what he or she will be expected to assert.

This is proving to be a fatal flaw in the Democrat’s strategy for at least two reasons:

First, Roberts has not expressed his personal political opinions in many places. Responding to the demands of the Democrats, the Bush administration is producing reams of Roberts’ public work papers, drawing the line only at that kind of work product which, in the opinion of every currently living former Solicitor General, is outside the boundaries of what ought to be fairly sought from a nominee.

But in the reams of papers produced, Roberts has not disclosed his own political opinions on any topic. This should surprise no one. Roberts is not now and never has been a politician, or a pundit, or a talk show host, or political fundraiser or a party chairman or any other form of provocateur. Roberts has never having served in a position where his political opinions, per se, would have had any relevance whatever to his duties.

Remember, Roberts is a very well-educated and well-trained lawyer. And as a lawyer, Roberts’ personal opinion about almost anything, and particularly at the start of his career, was pretty much irrelevant. In his “political” positions, Roberts was hired and worked for people, like Chief Justice Rehnquist, with long established opinions of their own. What those employers, his clients if you will, sought from Roberts was judgment, which his papers to date have proven was superb.

That is, when Roberts was asked, on behalf of such clients, to analyze an issue or a position, it was not because his superiors sought to know what his personal opinions were about issues. Rather, his superiors sought his views, taking into account the larger context of a particular administration’s publicly stated policies, the current state of the law, and whatever other political considerations relevant to that client that ought to have been taken into account, regarding how that client ought to be handling those issues.

Second, the Democratic view of what the Supreme Ccourt ought to be, liberalisms last redoubt, is not one they've ever asked the American people to impose on themselves. As a result, the Democrats are going to have a real hard time explaining why Roberts’ opinions, except on the subject of how a judge ought to decide a case, really matter anyway.

Is a nominee with personal political opinions expected to vote according to his or her opinions, once on the bench? Wouldn’t our knowing how a nominee was going to vote on such issues undermine and subvert the credibility of the bench? And why would a nominee's political opinions be more valid than those who wrote the legislation being adjudicated, after all?

Moreover, if a nominee to the Supreme Court is expected to tell us not only how he or she will vote, but to keep his or her promise once in office, then what really is the point of appointing people to the bench in the first place? Couldn’t we just assign a well-trained circus bear to the seat, surround him or her with reliable clerks to write the appropriate opinions, and set them all loose?

No, the real problem for the Democrats, going into these hearings, is that they’ve “framed” Roberts in such a way that they can only win if they can convince the American people that their revolutionary conception of the Supreme Court, as just another branch of the legislature, and a liberal, free-wheeling, and unrestrained one at that, is one that the American people now ought to be willing to adopt.

But their view of the judicial branch is what has given us abortion on demand for minors, euthanasia, rights of full citizenship for terrorists, sweeping governmental property condemnation powers, the abolition of religion in the public square, and gay marriage. Do the Democrats have the intestinal fortitude to defend all of that on national television? I sure don’t believe that they do.

And all of this will come out in the wash of the Roberts’ hearings, and for the entire world to see, if the Democrats aren’t careful. Indeed, because of this very risk, I’ll predict that the Democrats, having seen the way Roberts has handled issues in the past, and knowing full well how able a thinker and a debater he is, will make darn sure that these hearings are going to be short, sweet, to the point and blessedly brief.

And I also will predict that Roberts will be confirmed by a comfortable margin, and in time to assume his seat on the Court by the October 3, 2005 start of the Court’s next term.

By any convention standard, President Bush's choice is superb; Judge Roberts is better qualified for his appointment than almost any of the current sitting justice. And I say “almost any” sitting justice only because, frankly, I don’t pretend to be intimately familiar with the background of all of them. That said, it is hard to imagine any who have better qualifications than does Judge Roberts.

Except for his gender, Roberts’ qualifications are infinitely better than were Sandra Day O’Connor’s when she was first selected by Ronald Reagan for the Court. Therefore, if we are looking for someone with excellent judgment to apply the law as written with to particular cases and controversies, then there is no principled ground for anyone to oppose this nominee, and he ought to be affirmed by acclamation. The Loonie Left knows this; that is why they are so subdued this morning.

Whether Judge Roberts in fact be confirmed will be determined not by the quality of Robert’s credentials, which are impeccable, but by what model of the Supreme Court we are opting for in the future.

Under the United States Constitution, the judicial branch of the federal government was intended to decide particular cases and controversies, and between particular parties. As a result, although capable of having an impact on the rest of the government, and as a check on some of its excesses, its decisions for the most part were expected to have only small, indirect, and incremental effects on our culture as a whole. And being the least democratic branch of government, it was never intended, nor equipped to create or enforce novel public policy.

That is not to say its decisions could not have a significant impact. If and when a case or controversy arose presented a particularly significant issue to the Court, and in particular regarding the meaning of the Constitution itself, then the Court could exert considerable influence indeed.

But here too, the Supreme Court’s power was severely circumscribed, as in that context too it was only construing a written document that anyone else could read and analyze, and arguably as easily as could the Court. Thus, if the Court strayed too far from a reasonable reading of the Constitution, its decisions would have no credibility. And because the Supreme Court has no power of enforcement, its own credibility is really all the Court can count on to have its decisions respected.

For this kind of a Supreme Court, deciding particular cases and controversies between real parties with actual disputes, as we anticipated that it would under a written Constitution, Roberts is a superb choice.

If Roberts is not readily confirmed, then it will be only because as a nation we have decided to institutionalize a new model of the Supreme Court, and of a kind not contemplated by our Constitution.

This new model of the Court, yet another by-product of the tumultuous sixties, pays lip service only to the original Constitution, and in a ritualistic and symbolic sense only. Under this model of the Court, our written Constitution becomes a sort of talisman only. As a “living, breathing” document, it is unconstrained by its own text or its origins, and capable of generating every manner of new “rights” not found anywhere in the document itself, depending on whatever influences 5 of the 9 justices writing on any given day.

If this is the new model of the Supreme Court we are adopting, then no one can yet know whether Roberts should be confirmed, because by profession he is a scholar, a lawyer and a judge, and not a politician. Therefore, he hasn’t got much of a record on any of the burning issues of the day. For this model of the Court, then, Roberts is not necessarily a good nominee at all, and, as some Democrats have already said, will have to prove himself “worthy” of his appointment.

If Roberts is not confirmed, then, it is because we are moving inexorably towards institutionalizing this new model of the Court, as some a kind of super-legislature, counsel of elders, not bound by any written Constitution, appointed for life, and “elected” only in the sense that at their confirmation hearings, the justices sitting had to satisfy 51% (or 65% if the Democrats launch a filibuster) of the Senate then sitting, that they were politically correct enough to sit on the bench, and free thereafter to create and enforce whatever public policy they desire.

But, frankly, were this the kind of Court for which he was nominated, then the fight wouldn’t be worth the candle anyway.

If you're one of those opposed to the untrammeled growth of government spending you can’t help but marvel that our greatest ally in the fight against budget bloat is the growing evidence that the bureaucracy literally can’t spend the money being allocated to them fast enough.

So now we have a choice, do we just throw all accountability out the window and start distribute government cash from open crop duster cockpits? Or do we begin to think about returning to what in radically other contexts the Left likes to call a more “sustainable” model?

Three easy examples, all appearing in just this week alone, demonstrate what is happening:

Zero Need At Ground Zero:

Remember when the President, just after 9/11, was starting to get flack from, among others, Chuck Schumner and Hillary Clinton about not getting enough monetary aid to New York City? The Democrats sought to take advantage of national sympathy for their plight (and to exploit the tragedy for all that it was worth) by asking for more money than they ever believed a Republican administration would want to give them

But Bush called theirbluff. How much would be enough, he asked? Their answer, pulled out of that proverbial place and noweher else, was $20 billion. Then that’s what you’ll get, said the President.

And apparently Bush kept his word. Said another way, if he hadn’t, you can be sure there would be squealing out of Manhattan easily heard in the fruited plains and from sea to shining sea. No, New York City got the money.

Turns out though that they couldn’t figure out how to spend it all.

So, four years later, and assuming that if they couldn’t figure out what to do with it by now, according to Anahad O'Connor of the New York Times, the Bush administration is asking for a chunk of what’s left back.

Four years after scores of rescue workers were injured in the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center, the federal government plans to rescind $125 million that was allocated to help them, and many of those who requested compensation are finding their claims being disputed at 10 times the rate that typical workers face.

The money, included in a $20 billion aid package the federal government gave to New York in late 2001, was part of $175 million that was earmarked for the state's workers' compensation program. So far, only $50 million of the part set aside for trade center workers has been spent, and a provision in the Bush administration's budget for fiscal 2006 would reclaim the remaining $125 million.

But New York wants to keep the money. After all, it argues, we really don’t know what the long term effects of the attack were, and maybe we will need the money in the future. So why not just let us keep it?

But yesterday, lawmakers called on the White House to withdraw its proposal, saying the money was still badly needed by ground zero workers who are fighting for lost wages and facing the prospect of long-term health problems that doctors are only beginning to understand.

In 2004, for example, a study at Mount Sinai Hospital looked at 12,000 rescue workers and found that roughly half would need continued treatment for respiratory problems and psychological issues as a result of their work at ground zero.

"We recommend that they not rescind this money, and that they make sure that every penny is there for these workers," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, referring to the White House as he spoke at a news conference yesterday afternoon on Church Street near ground zero.

Now recall: this isn’t New York money raised from New York Taxpayers; this is all of our money. More likely, its money being raised from us, our children, and several generations of Americans hereafter.

Pentagon spending out of control

The second example is at the Pentagon. No one is accusing the bureaucracy there of veniality—at least yet. Considering how much money is sloshing around in that gas tank, its amazing that there aren’t more scandals than the few we do hear about. But, as with New York City with 9/11 funds, the Pentagon has just got more money being thrown at it than than it has the ability to spend:

Nine years ago, the Navy set out to build a new guided missile for its 21st-century ships. Fiascoes followed. In a test firing, the missile melted its on-board guidance system. "Incredibly," an Army review said, "the Navy ruled the test a success."

Recently, the Navy rewrote the contract and put out another one, with little to show for the money it already spent. The bill has come to almost $400 million, five times the original budget.

Such stories may seem old hat. But after years of failing to control cost overruns, the most powerful officials at the Pentagon are becoming increasingly alarmed that the machinery for building weapons is breaking down under its own weight.
"Something's wrong with the system," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld recently told Congress.

The Pentagon has more than 80 major new weapons systems under development, which is "a lot more programs than we can afford," a senior Air Force official, Blaise J. Durante, said. Their combined cost, already $300 billion over budget, is $1.47 trillion and climbing.

Perhaps in regards to the military these problems are inevitable.

We are fighting a two front war, in the midst of a huge changeover in how we defend ourselves from and attack the enemy. And government work still probably doesn’t hold much appeal for our “best and brightest.”

But really, what is the point of sending more money down the pipeline than the Pentagon in any way is equipped to handle? According to the NYT that’s exactly what we’re doing, and with the absolutely predictable result we'd expect:

Oversight is dwindling, Pentagon officials acknowledge. While the dollar value of weapons contracts doubled over the last decade, the Pentagon halved the size of the work force that polices their costs. The government work of managing the design, development and production of weapons has been largely outsourced to the weapons contractors themselves.

Technological troubles add billions to the cost of armaments, Congressional auditors said. But no one knows precisely how much, since the Pentagon often cannot keep track of the money it spends.

No More Aid for AIDs

Finally, the Bush administration is getting a lot of flack from the press at least for not agreeing with Tony Blair to double our spending in Africa. Turns out though that the reason the President won’t do that is that we haven’t been able to find outlets for the funds already currently allocated to solving some of the most devastating problems facing that devastated continent:

Administration officials have also signaled that the White House is not inclined to commit itself to Mr. Blair's call for doubling aid to Africa. The officials said that in the last four years, the United States had roughly tripled, to $3.2 billion, the amount of money it provided to Africa. They said American aid would continue to increase, especially as existing programs to battle AIDS and provide financial assistance to well-functioning governments get more fully under way.

They said the levels of aid the United States provides in the future should depend primarily on what African governments and aid organizations are able to use effectively. They also said government aid in any case was only part of the economic equation for Africa, with increased trade and private flows of investment capital capable of playing a far more potent role in the continent's development.

Now, this article is lengthy enough as it is, so I’m not going to explore the same kinds of issues in regards to many other popular programs like Medicare, or No Child Left Behind, for example, where funds currently in the pipeline to the States also aren’t being spent, for lack of any idea what to do with them.

The real bottom line problem is that as a nation we seem to have come to the place where our first reaction to any cause that sounds like a good one is to throw money at it, even though there is no plan in place for how to spend the money, or whether the additional funds will do any good. Good. But there is no logical reason to believe that this is true.

And now a growing case file of anecdotal evidence suggesting that plainly it is not.

Jim VandeHei, a Washington Post staff writer, has just discovered that the country has been moving to the right! According to Jim, the GOP Is Tilting Balance Of Power to the Right.

Welcome to the party, Jim. We’re glad to hear that you’ve finally come out of that coma that had you in its grip.

In a grudging bow to the public’s increasing district of the Main Stream Media the Washington Post dubbed VandeHei’s musings as “analysis.” But it is really little better than left wing Democratic propaganda, and unconvincing as heck at that.

The problem is, and the Post editors have to know this, people who haven’t followed politics for the last twenty years might read it and believe that it is authoritative.

Well, it is authoritative, to the extent that it reflects the official Democratic Party world view. This kind of stuff just isn’t analysis though or, for that matter a very fair depiction of what’s been going on in Washington since the commencement of the Reagan Revolution.

But is it propaganda? Uh, yes. VandeHei has a theme, and distorted the “facts” recited to fit the theme ho chose. It’s easy to demonstrate, by the way, if you happen to have even a passing familiarity with what VandeHei is talking about. VandeHei recalls the Gingrich tenure in the Congress thusly:

House Republicans, for instance, discarded the seniority system and limited the independence and prerogatives of committee chairmen. The result is a chamber effectively run by a handful of GOP leaders. At the White House, Bush has tightened the reins on Cabinet members, centralizing the most important decisions among a tight group of West Wing loyalists. With the strong encouragement of Vice President Cheney, he has also moved to expand the amount of executive branch information that can be legally shielded from Congress, the courts and the public.

Of course what really happened is that House Republicans limited the independence and prerogatives of the Committee Chairmen in the Congress because they voted to discarded the seniority system. And at the time, almost everyone recognized this as a huge reform, not a power grab. Because that it exactly what it was, a reform.

Under the old seniority system, the chairman of every House Committee was chairman for life, and positions much to be coveted, not because of the good one could do as chair, but because of the power such chairmanships wielded. The chairs of these committees were who effectively ran the place, because they had absolute power over what went on in their committees. And if they didn’t like you, your career in the Congress went nowhere.

One way the institution responded to the problem of life time appointments to these positions was to create more committees, dozens of them, until almost everyone of any significance at all was the chairman of some committee or other. This didn’t make legislating, or oversight for that matter, much easier. All of those committees needed something to do, of course. And so they scheduled hearings, and issued press releases and reports and nonsense like that, or had turf battles with one another.

Recall that in the 9/11 Report there was much whining and gnashing of teeth about the myriad committees in the Congress that had oversight of essentially the same things. That was the direct result of the Seniority System for which VandeHei now laments.

VandeHei claims that now the Congress is “effectively run by a handful of GOP leaders.” Effectively? Perhaps that was intended as a back-handed compliment, but considering the source, we assume not.

VandeHei provides no evidence of how a handful of GOP leaders are running the Congress now. And the article coming on the heels of extended coverage of the deal just struck by 14 maverick Senators around the backs of the leaders of the GOP caucus and of their opponents caucus, it’s not hard to see why: Congress isn’t operating that way any more.

After all, if you assume the chairmanship of a committee, knowing you’re only going to be allowed to serve for one or at most two terms, and then have to seek a chairmanship somewhere else, you’re probably going to treat your fellow representatives a little more attentively than if you were designated the chair of your committee for life. That's what House GOP Leader Dennis Hastert has been doing, by the way.

According to VandeHei, having conquered the Congress, the “Right” now has its eye on the judicial branch:

Now, the White House and Congress are setting their sights on how to make the judiciary more deferential to the conservative cause -- as illustrated by the filibuster debate and recent threats by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and others to more vigorously oversee the courts.

Notice that VandeHei just assumes that his readers will agree with all of the arguments implicit in this statement. So he doesn’t even attempt to back them up. For instance, by what possible measure could the filibuster “debate” be construed to have the intended purpose of cowing the judiciary?

That debate was about whether the Constitution allowed the rules of the senate to be manipulated to require a supermajority vote for judges when no supermajority vote for judges is provided for in the Constitution.

The outcome of that debate could have no affect whatever on sitting judges, who are, as the Democrats have been screaming at us for months, appointed for life. And how intimidated would you really be by Tom DeLay’s remarks, when all he was lamenting was that judges fail to apply the law as it was intended by the legislature. Since when is the view that judges should just apply the law as the legislature intended it, and not create new law for its own policy purposes, right wing view?

Finally, VandeHei contends that the level of secrecy in government is somehow strengthening the conservative cause, as though the secrecy he’s talking about was just another policy instituted by the Republicans:

This has coincided with a dramatic increase in overall government secrecy. In 1995, the government created about 3.6 million secrets. In 2004, there more than 15.5 million, according to the government's Information Security Oversight Office. The White House attributes the rise in information the public cannot see to the security threats in a post-Sept. 11, 2001, world.
But experts on government secrecy say it goes beyond protecting sensitive security documents, to creating new classes of information kept private and denying researchers [sic] access to documents from past presidents.
"We have never had this kind of control over information," said Allan J. Lichtman, a professor of history at American University. "It means policy is being made by a small clique without much public scrutiny."

VandeHei provides no evidence to support these statements either of course. And even though a VandeHei “expert” (and he refers to many such “experts,” while citing only one) contends that policy now is being made “by a small clique without much public scrutiny,” no such clique is identified. Was there one, its existence certainly be an explosive development.

And if it were true, you’d think this enterprising reporter would deign to identify the membership of this “small clique,” which, being small, shouldn’t have been hard to do. VandeHei fails to do so of course, and I’d bet the kid’s lunch money that if challenged he’d fade away on that ridiculous assertion too. But there isn’t such a clique, of course, so VandeHei’s baseless assertion of its alleged existence appears deep in the article, perhaps where VandeHei’s editor figured no one would see it anyway.

What the editors of the Washington Post and others like them don’t seem to realize is that their circulation figures are plummeting because of this kind of tripe, and because more and more people know that it is tripe.

Unless and until analysis analyzes and news articles convey news, those numbers are going to continue to plummet.

And it's because of articles like this one.

Whatever happens on the filibuster story, you’re not going to hear it first from the Main Stream Media (MSM). This is because the MSM, and the inside the beltway contingent of the MSM in particular, just hasn’t got a clue. One wonders if they will ever get out of their cocoons.

Case in point: today in the Washington Post political guru Don Balz purports to give a detailed analysis of the current state of the struggle. Balz places all the emphasis though on what he says washington insiders now are referring to “the Group,” six Democrats and six Republicans who are attempting to go around their respective party leaders to strike a deal on judicial nominees.
How exactly would they do this? By entering into a pact to break ranks with their parties and vote in such a way as to guarantee that certain Bush nominees make it to the bench, and that certain others do not. Supposedly this would force Bush to name only nominees acceptable to . .the twelve.

At times they have appeared agonizingly close to a deal. At other times their cause has seemed hopeless. But what is most remarkable about the dozen or so senators working to avert a historic showdown over President Bush's judicial nominees is their potential to control the Senate's destiny without the explicit blessing of their leadership or their party's most important constituencies.

In an era of polarized politics, in which party and congressional leaders have been increasingly responsive to their most ideologically driven activists, the bipartisan band of senators has attempted to steer a different course. Behind closed doors, they have tested whether it is possible to find language to codify the principles of trust and goodwill at a time when little of either is left in the political system.
The senators involved have found it difficult to overcome deep-seated differences and suspicions that now govern the relationship between Republicans and Democrats.

But they have acted with the knowledge that, if they strike a compromise, they alone have the power to control events from here forward in the battle over judicial nominees and the change in Senate rules that has come to be known as the "nuclear option." That, in the estimation of congressional analysts, has made their efforts almost without precedent in the legislative branch.

What is bizarrely wrong with this picture? Sigh. . . !

Where does one start?

First, the scenario these senators allegedly are spending time constructing assumes that these twelve senators can enter into a pact that each member of the group will actually honor. There is no sound reason to expect that this will happen. For one thing, how in good consceince could they commit to voting a certain way without even knowing who the nominees would be? Or for what court? Or to fill which vacancy?

Trying to imagine ahead of time all of the different scenarios that might come down the pike is almost impossible.

Also, in politics, no such “pact” is enforceable, except if the men entering into it are honorable men, in which case their individual word of each participant would be “pact” enough.

Obviously, if they 12 are thing to negotiate a pact not only is the deal a complicated one; those trying to negotiate it, or at least some of them don’t believe that all of them are, because they’re reportedly spending a lot of time haggling over the specific language that will describe their agreement.

Now I happen to believe that lawyers bring a lot to the legislative process, because lawyers have a better than average understanding of language, and of how to think about and to write clear and concise language to express what is intended. This is assuming, of course, that all of the parties involved are acting in good faith and want to be unequivocal about what they are drafting.

But the down side of having lawyers in the Congress is that they think that they can reduce everything to words, and to assume all agreements once reduced to a writing, can be “enforced.”

In politics, of course, none of these assumptions are true. That the participants in the Group of 12 either don’t know this, or think that in this instance they need something more enforceable thatn the usual “word is my bodes ill for the outcome.

Third, it also assume that votes for all future judicial nominees brought to the floor, known and unknown, will routinely be cast based solely on party affiliation. For the Group of 12 to have the power to work its will on the rest of the senate, they would have to honor their own commitments and have perfect knowledge regarding how every other vote on that nominee will be cast. That is, every Republicans will have to vote for every nominee, and every Democrat will have to vote against them. But how can anyone assume that that will happen?

Finally, this is politics we are talking about here. If all six of these senators are committed to their pact above the wishes of their respective party leaders, how will their own other legislative priorities do, once they have asserted their “pact” against the wishes of their colleagues and their respective party caucuses? If I had to guess, I would surmise that all 12 would become virtual pariahs.

Perhaps if the Democrats follow through on their threat to “nuke” the legislative process for the rest of the year, that won’t matter. But even the Democrats have conceded that they can’t (and won’t) prevent the doing of “essential” business. And definitions are everything in a room full of lawyers.

Is the Defense bill “essential?” Recall that when Newt Gingrich shut down the Congress in the Clinton era, these same democrats waxed eloquently of how much was at risk if they weren’t able to churn out legislation at their usual pace.

But what this Balz article really reflects is that the Main Stream Media people who supposedly are most knowledgeable about how things in Washington work don’t really have a clue. Second, that they even would depict this strategizing as anything other than the plotting of an anti-democratic palace coup, and as a potentially attractive way out of the current dilemma (if you believe we are in one) is even more bizarre.

The Left loves the courts, when they are able to people it with their own sympathizers, because then they can pass legislation with as slim as 5-4 majorities, instead of going through the messy and time consuming legislative process. Presumably they would love even more to turn over the whole process to a Group of 12, and do away even with the need for accountability of any kind.

But you heard it here first; it ain't gonna happan, and the Group of 12 are going to come out of this as The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.

According to John Harwood at The Wall Street Journal, the public's "approval" of Congress is eroding :

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that disapproval of Congress's performance is higher than it has been since 1994, the year voters swept Democrats out of power on Capitol Hill. Americans have grown gloomier about the nation's direction, the economy and Iraq, and by 65%-17% they say Congress doesn't share their priorities.
"If you're a member of Congress ... you'd better be looking over your shoulder," says Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who helps conduct the Journal/NBC survey. His Republican counterpart, Bill McInturff, adds that a particular concern for incumbents looking to 2006 is unhappiness among senior citizens, a group that disproportionately turns out to vote in midterm elections.

What we should take from these kinds of survey results is awfully hard to fathom, of course, because the surveys never really explore in any depth what irks the respondents about particularly Congressmen, or even the Congress in general.

This is because most of us just don’t give a rat’s behind what’s a going on in the Congress; we either have a vague sense that everything’s all right, or that it's not.

Only when a national election approaches will we start to think harder about it, if ever. And when a particular Congress is both pretty evenly divided by party, and intensely partisan as is the current one, shall we assume that the results indicate a public irritated about the pointless prattling on there, or about the specific legislation that the Congress is passing?

For example, several weeks ago, the Congress passed by significant bipartisan margins highly significant tort reforms and bankruptcy reform, and by similar or even larger margins a special appropriation for Iraq.

But more recently and also by solid bipartisan margins, the Congress pased hugely bloated highway legislation. And now Democrats are threatening to shut down the Capital, if they don't get their way on the filibuster rule, and if Tom DeLay doesn't resign, return to Texas and volunteer himself for a prison term (that last is the suggestion of that dear, old, sweet talker, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean).

If the survey reflects constituency anger, is it at any or all of this legislation, at the Democrats' grandstanding, both or none of the above? Is it because the public wants the Congress to go harder on deadbeats than it did in the bankruptcy bill, or softer; to spend even more on new highways, or less? Who knows?

Republicans ought to take more solace than Democrats from this poll however, I’d say. For one thing, in the most recent two election cycles, and against all odds, Republicans increased their margins in the House and in the Senate. The Democratic Senate Minority Leader, Tom Daschle, also was sent packing.

Therefore, if the public is now unhappy with how the Congress collectively is behaving, it seems more logical to assume it's because the Congress is not acting Republican enough, and not because it’s doing exactly what the candidates running for election, or for reelection promised that they would do if elected.

It does not seem as logical that the electorate is unhappy because the Republicans aren’t acting more like Democrats, although you can bet the farm that’s how the Democrats am
nd their colleagues in the Main Stream media will be spinning it.

From the vantage point of the Democrats, they also can spin this result as dissatisfaction with the kind of legislation that the Republicans are passing, if that legislation was radically different from what the Republicans said that they’d be passing if their majorities in the House and Senate were maintained.

Particularly in hindsight, admittedly always 20/20, this is a pattern we’ve seen with President Bush’s favorability ratings: he seems to do least well in the polls when he’s acting least “Bush-like.”

Thus, when the “insurgents” (that's spelled "t-e-r-r-o-r-i-s-t-s" to the rest of us) in Iraq were plundering Faluja unmolested, public support for the President’s handling of the war started dropping like a stone. When we sent in the Marines and succeeded in “neutralizing” the insurgents, Bush’s ratings started to tick up again.

Perhaps there’s a bit of projecting on my part. After all, if I were answering these kinds of poll questions, I would have expressed dissatisfaction with the Congress too, and in particular its members who are Republican. But my dissatisfaction would stem from my frustration that in both houses of Congress our representatives are doing so poor a job getting the Bush agenda enacted.

I really don’t buy into the argument that filibustering the President’s judicial nominees, or chasing after Tom Delay is the highest and best use of anyone’s time. But that explanation for my response would never be reported—-just that I was among the 65% dissatisfied with the job that the Congress is doing.

Finally, it is said that if both parties are unhappy about the settlement of their differences, then it’s probably a good settlement. I suspect the same things can be said about legislation.

Every now and then one sees an article that illustrates with such startling clarity what is amiss among the wacked-out Left that one just scratches one’s head in wonder. The lead article in the Sunday New York Times Week in Review Section, The Mystery of the Insurgency, is one such article.

So incredibly hostile is the press to anything that the United States is trying to do in Iraq that the writer or the article, James Bennet, literally begs the “insurgents” there to behave better, for fear of its losing all legitimacy whatever!

Bennet never, ever comes close to conceding what his article makes plain, that the insurgents have no coherent program, except to impose their will, by brute and indicriminate terror, on an innocent people. And this is in an opinion piece!

Bennet’s frustration with the insurgents now slaughtering people in Iraq is palpable:

The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans. They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.

Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21 people.

Unwilling though just to call a spade a spade, Bennet then proceeds to speculate about what the insurgents must have in mind, they not being a bunch of cretin thugs, after all.
Offering the microphone first to American experts on insurgencies, Bennet solicits this unhelpful response:

Counter-insurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency; if, as in China in the 1930's or Vietnam in the 1940's, it is taking insurgents a few years to organize themselves; or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation.

"Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate, there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare. The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he continued. "And there's a name for these guys: Losers."

Losers! Can't call the insurgents "Losers;" that's the ultimate hipster insult today. This is because calling someone a loser doesn't require a value judgmenet about what you are doing; it just means that you're failing at it, and everything else that you touch for that matter. You just aren't cool when you're a loser.

Concluding that calling the insurgents “losers” is so, so—judgmental, Bennet then proceeds to look around for some other experts that might have a contrary view.

Adolph Hitler being passé, or perhaps too incendiary even for the New York Times, and Pol Pot not having left a lot of theoretical writings behind (at least that Bennet is familiar with) Bennet resorts instead to looking for suggestions from two of history’s bloodiest “insurgent” tyrants, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong.

Che has some useful revolutionary insight, Bennet thinks, although it too leaves little room for romanticizing the insurgents, which is what Bennet desperately seeks to do:

If the insurgency is trying to overthrow this regime, it is contending with a formidable obstacle that successful rebels of the 20th century generally did not face: A democratically elected government. One of the last century's most celebrated theorists and practitioners of revolution, Che Guevara, called that obstacle insurmountable.
"Where a government has come to power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality," he wrote, "the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted."

So Che also would depict the insurgents here as “losers,” or at best premature winners perhaps. Noting that the insurgents seem to be killing mostly Iraqis, i.e. the “people,” which makes it impossible to contend that they are “populists,” on behalf of, Bennet then notes that the insurgents’ choice of adversary is “unusual.”
Ah, but not to worry, “nuance” is what liberals do. According to Bennet, and as Mao noted, a revolution that seems to kill, torture, maim and otherwise terrorize the very people it supposedly is intended to serve has much historical precedent:

The relationship between insurgents and the general population is always complex. Mao Zedong famously postulated that guerrillas move among the people as fish move through water. But he also warned that "a revolution is not a dinner party," and many insurgents, including the Vietcong, effectively used terror - often selectively applied - against civilians to compel segments of the population into at least passive support.

So, Bennet appears to have painted himself into a corner: The Iraqi insurgents themselves are killing significant numbers of apparently innocent Iraqi civilians, to no obvious end, and the Left doesn’t know how to grapple with that. Surely there must be some way to blame the West, and more particularly the United States.
Then comes the “AHA!” moment. It isn’t that these are just a bunch of useless and ruthless thugs power tripping on their own impotence (that would be our military, if we were killing innocent Iraqi civilians left and right).

No, no. Nuance! Nuance! That we don’t understand the insurgency, that we can’t rationalize it, that we don’t know why it is occurring, that it looks like cold blooded murder, just shows how foolish we were ever to venture into this part of the world in the first place:

Yet it may prove to be one of history's humbling lessons that history itself fails to illuminate the conflict under way in Iraq. No one really knows what the insurgents are up to.

"It clearly makes sense to the people who are doing it," said Dr. Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. "And that more than anything else tells us how little we understand the region."

Pathetic. Just pathetic.

Now we can have a real debate.

Supposely against the wishes of his party's leaders, the first Democrat to break the party’s ranks and offer a plan to reform social security, other than to block the Bush administration’s plan, has come forward, according to Joel Havemann in the Los Angeles Times:

In new political maneuvering over Social Security, a Democratic lawmaker says he will introduce a plan Monday for shoring up the finances of the retirement system, putting him at odds with leaders of his party.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) says that by imposing a 6% tax on wages above $90,000, to be paid half by workers and half by employers, the government could raise enough money to solve Social Security's financial problems for 75 years.
Workers and employers pay a combined 12.4% Social Security tax on wages up to $90,000 a year, but none on amounts above that.

The Wexler plan does not include private savings accounts, although it doesn't appear to preclude them either. Even though it's not presented as one for cutting current benefits, of course like the current Bush trial balloon, that’s exactly what it does.

How is that? Because the historic social security compact between each of us and the government is that we will get back what we pay into social security. Historically, that meant if you were able to pay in more while you were working, the government would be returning more to you at the other end, when you retired. After all the funds taken from you while you work were yours, and being kept in the proverbial "lock box" right?

That’s why, until now, increasing the amount of income on the front end subject to the social security tax was self defeating as a way to bring the system into balance, because it was suppposed to be offset by an increase in benefitsn retirmemnt. otherwise, it was just another tax. Thus currently the amount of income taxed at the front end is capped at the first $90,000 of income.

If the government taxed more at the front end (current income), it would irritate people for one thing. And because under the historic formula, the more the government took at the front end, the more it had to pay back to you when you retired. If you’re already making that kind of money at the front end, chances are you’d be more irritated by the tax than grateful for the payment in retirement.

Wexler’s plan calls only for the government to take more in taxes at the front end, but pay no more (and maybe even less) in benefits at the back end. That means in effect that above the $90,000 amount, the Wexler plan would rewrite the benefits formula, and the so-called social security tax afte that would become just another tax on our income, to be transferred to someone else, not us, in retirement, and without any pretense that it’s part of a retirement savings fund at all.

The Democrats are livid at Wexler, for at least two reasons. First, after the Bush administration seized the “third rail of politics” Democrats they pulled out all of the stops to paint him as insane, and they thought it was working. So long as it was working, Democrats didn't have to present any alternatives. exler, from Florida seems to be saying that strategy isn't working, at least for his retiree consituents.

Second, the Democrats all know that the only alternative they have to offer to Bush’s plan is exactly this kind of alternative: a massive tax increase without a commensurate increase in benefits.

Now they either have to admit it and be pilloried for that (Does anyone, except Tipper Gore, really believe that any such tax increase will be “lock-boxed” away for future beneficiaries?) Or the Democrats have to deny that this plan is anything like what they have in mind.

Disingenuous to the core, the Democrats have gone into their standard denial mode:

Aides to the top House Democrat and the Senate Democratic leader predicted that Wexler would not draw much support from others in the party.

"He's a party of one on this," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Jennifer Crider, press secretary to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), said, "This is not the Democratic plan."

We think it’s always a good thing, of course, when Democrats start eating their own.

But really, what is the Democrats’ plan to reform social security if not something very m uch like the Wexler plan?

When Tom Daschle lost his November 2004 bid for reelection to Tom Thune, the Democrats also lost their chief spokesman in the Senate. That the Democrats chose the inept Harry Reid as Dashle's replacement proves that their bench is a very shallow one indeed.

Not having access to their inner councils, who can know whether the Democrats are happy with the job Reid is doing? But Reid is so offnsive to so many people that Republicans ought to be ecstatic.

The first of Reid’s contretemps, at least that made it through the Main Stream Media’s sieve that protects the Democrats from many of their pratfalls. was his questioning of the intelligence of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. According to Reid, Thomas just wasn’t very bright. As proof of this Reid argued that Thomas's opinions were poorly written. The exchange at issue, with Tim Russert on Meet the Press, went as follows:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to judicial nominations. Again, Harry Reid on National Public Radio, November 19: "If they"--the Bush White House--"for example, gave us Clarence Thomas as chief justice, I personally feel that would be wrong. If they give us Antonin Scalia, that's a little different question. I may not agree with some of his opinions, but I agree with the brilliance of his mind."

Could you support Antonin Scalia to be chief justice of the Supreme Court?

SEN. REID: If he can overcome the ethics problems that have arisen since he was selected as a justice of the Supreme Court. And those ethics problems--you've talked about them; every people talk--every reporter's talked about them in town--where he took trips that were probably not in keeping with the code of judicial ethics. So we have to get over this. I cannot dispute the fact, as I have said, that this is one smart guy. And I disagree with many of the results that he arrives at, but his reason for arriving at those results are very hard to dispute. So...

MR. RUSSERT: Why couldn't you accept Clarence Thomas?

SEN. REID: I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I don't--I just don't think that he's done a good job as a Supreme Court justice

Whatever one might think of Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice, there is not and never has been any evidence whatever that he is an intellectual lightweight. Anyone familiar with his personal story, his qualifications or who saw him triumph over what Thomas himself had termed an attempted "high tech lynching" of him by the Democrats know that Thomas is ahighly intelligent man.

And the fact that Reid could only cite as evidence of Thomas' lack of intelligence what Reid described as "poorly written opinions" also suggested that Reid didn't really have any fcatual basis for his charge either. This is because most Supreme Court opinions are written with the help of very sophisticated and well educated law clerks who can make any Justice look good. So its unlikely that the opinions of any of the Justices are not well written. They might be illogical, or even wrong, but they are never poorly written.

Subsequently, Reid was outed as more likely just a racist when he was later pressed to identify any Thomas opinions that he contended were poorly written. Eventually he managed to identify only one, on the Dec. 26, 2004 episode of CNN’s "Inside Politics:"

Henry: When you were asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether or not you could support Justice Thomas to be chief justice you said quote, "I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written." Could you name one of those opinions that you think is poorly written?
Reid: Oh sure, that's easy to do. You take the Hillside Dairy case. In that case you had a dissent written by Scalia and a dissent written by Thomas. There--it's like looking at an eighth-grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard.
Scalia's is well reasoned. He doesn't want to turn stare decisis precedent on its head. That's what Thomas wants to do. So yes, I think he has written a very poor opinion there and he's written other opinions that are not very good.

Unfortunately for Reid, Justice Thomas didn’t even write the opinion in that case. He wrote a concurring opinion of exactly one paragraph in length. In the Hillside Dairy case, Thomas states his concurrence as follows:

I join Parts I and III of the Court's opinion and respectfully dissent from Part II, which holds that §144 of the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996, 7 U.S.C. §7254, "does not clearly express an intent to insulate California's pricing and pooling laws from a Commerce Clause challenge." Ante, at 6-7. Although I agree that the Court of Appeals erred in its statutory analysis, I nevertheless would affirm its judgment on this claim because "[t]he negative Commerce Clause has no basis in the text of the Constitution, makes little sense, and has proved virtually unworkable in application," Camps Newfound/Owatonna, Inc. v. Town of Harrison, 520 U.S. 564, 610 (1997) (Thomas, J., dissenting), and, consequently, cannot serve as a basis for striking down a state statute.

Now Reid is (or ought to be) embroiled in a new controversy regarding a reference he made on the floor of the Senate to a confidential FBI report on Henry Saad, a Roman Catholic of Arab descent, and one of the President’s current judicial nominees. According to The Washington Times,

Minority Leader Harry Reid strayed from his prepared remarks on the Senate floor yesterday and promised to continue opposing one of President Bush's judicial nominees based on "a problem" he said is in the nominee's "confidential report from the FBI."

Those highly confidential reports are filed on all judicial nominees, and severe sanctions apply to anyone who discloses their contents. Less clear is whether a senator could face sanctions for characterizing the content of such files.

By making these remarks, Reid not only attempted the cheapest kind of political smear, since Reaid knew that neither Saad nor anyone else had access to those reports or were entitled to discuss anything in them pouiblicly.

Reid also appears to have violated an unequivocal Senate rule against the disclosure of such matters:

Republican aides pointed to Standing Rule of the Senate 29, Section 5: "Any Senator, officer, or employee of the Senate who shall disclose the secret or confidential business or proceedings of the Senate, including the business and proceedings of the committees, subcommittees, and offices of the Senate, shall be liable, if a Senator, to suffer expulsion from the body; and if an officer or employee, to dismissal from the service of the Senate, and to punishment for contempt."

Furthermore, a "Memorandum of Understanding" covering the use of FBI background reports limits access to committee members and the nominee's home-state senators. Mr. Reid would fall into neither category.

Recall that Reid is the leading Democratic member of the United States Senate, whose historic prerrogatives Harry Bryd is supposedly so determined to defend in the form of his right to filibuster. No doubt Byrd's taken Reid to the proverbial wood shed by now for so openly flouting the Senate's rules.
Reid's smear of Saad was not unintentional. The Detroit Free Press reported in a June 2004 story that both of Michigan’s senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow had made similar remarks about Saad’s background check, although without elaboration.

Reid not only repeated the smear; by doing so he was acting either without knowing any of the details substantiating the previous smear or knowing those details because they have been shared with him. If the latter, then Reid also acted in violation of the Senate’s rules and the above referenced “Memorandum of Understanding” in that respect as well.

The lesson here isn’t just that Harry Reid is loose cannon for the Democrats and a lummox; he is. The lesson is that this is exactly ho the Democrats want as their chief spokesman because that's how Democrats play poltics.

The lesson here also is that the Democrats will do anything to get their way. This utter lack of principal can be a challenge to their opponents, because if you get down in the mud with them you’re not only at a disadvantage because they are so much better than are we in wallowing there; you lose all credibility for them wallowing there in the first place.

Though a story about it was hard to find and barely covered at all in the pages of the New York Times itself, a recent internal New York Times analysis of that paper's flaws does a pretty good job of documenting what many of us have known for as long as we have been reading the liberal rag--that The New York Times really is a pretty crummy newspaper: parochial, biased, sloppy in its fact checking, intolerant and anything but diverse.

The paper's got a great vocabulary--it's technologically sophisticated, its got a great look and feel to it too; it just isn't a trustworthy or accurate source for news. But, what the hey?

Regarding parochialism, The New York Times' own internal analysis flatly admits that Midwesterners, rural folk, people of faith and the military, among others, are all totally alien to the culture at the paper:

Many staff members say that the paper covers breaking news well, but that it needs to take additional steps to cover the country in a fuller way. The national desk is already moving in this direction, but we encourage more reporting from the middle of the country, from exurbs and hinterland, and more coverage of social, demographic, cultural and lifestyle issues. We would also welcome even more enterprise reporting beyond New York, Washington and a handful of other major cities.

Nothing we recommend should be seen as endorsing a retreat from tough-minded reporting of abuses of power by public or private institutions. In part because the Times's editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolithic. Both inside and outside the paper, some people feel that we are missing stories because our staff lacks diversity in viewpoints, intellectual grounding and individual backgrounds. We should look for all manner of diversity. We should seek talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths.

"Different faiths?!" Try you're not at home in any faith, of any kind, whatever. See what we mean? If the New York Times can't even understand its problems, and it can not, then it has no hope of remedying its problems.

The dilemma facing the the New York Times is that if these really are its problems (and downward trending circulation figures suggest that they are), then the Times is doomed. This is because it's so incredibly unlikely that any of the problems address in the report can ever be remedied. And this in turn is because the New York Times is the newspaper of record for the liberal's liberal.

It can't correct all, or even most of its deficiencies without bravely attempting to appeal to a whole new and different demographic. And if you know anything at all about the NYT, it's that it has the cajones of a female wren. Of advanced age. In the final stages of dementia.

Oh sure, on the editorial page, the writers of the Times will rant, rave and rage against anyone, so long as its from its highly insulated and wholly anonymous perch. There, its all fire and brimstone. But there, its preaching to the choir, as evidenced by the letters to the editor that echo the page's views right back to it.

But exposed plagiarist and former much lauded New York Times reporter Jason Blair blew the cover of the editors there. Face to face with a black man, with chutzpah to beat the band, Blair's supervisors at the Times failed utterly to see through him , to call his bluff, or to reign him in any way. If the New York Times couldn't deal with Jason Blair, can it ever find the nerve to stand up to the likes of Nancy Pelosi or Tom Daschle or John Kerry or Fidel Castro or Jacques Chirac or Saddam Hussein? [But we repeat ourselves.]

Of course it can't. Dan Rather, cut of the same pusillanimous cloth, would be right at home at the Times. Remember his boot licking interview with Saddam Hussein? If the typical New York Times reporter could be personified, Dan Rather is the New York Times, personified.

A story today by Elisabeth Bumiller on President Bush's last stop on the way back from his visit with Vladimir Putin is a great example of how the New York Times reports a story about someone it loathes.

To minimize the fact that Bush was hugely popular in Georgia, as evidenced by the huge and enthusiastic crowds he drew, Brumiller went out of her way to suggest, gratuitously that the Georgians who were cheering Mr. Bush just must not have been none-too-bright stage props manipulated by the White House media crew:

The White House, which has often scheduled the last stops on Mr. Bush's European trips in the former Communist countries where the president remains highly popular, had planned the Tbilisi speech to serve as a final feel-good picture before Mr. Bush headed west across Europe and the Atlantic for home.

The Georgians did not disappoint. On a hot spring day, the boisterous, largely youthful crowd - said to be one of the largest ever to gather in Georgia - seemed unaware or did not care that the Bush administration steadfastly backed Mr. Shevardnadze in 2003, refusing to meet with the pro-democracy forces until after the former Soviet foreign minister had fled. Mr. Saakashvili, a 37-year-old lawyer who studied at Columbia and was the main benefactor of Mr. Bush's visit, estimated that as many as 150,000 people had come to see Mr. Bush, the first American president to visit his country.

Now how did Bumiller know what these 150,000 people were "aware" or not "aware" of, or cared or didn't care about?

She didn't, of course. She just imagined that if they were all so happy to see Bush, then they couldn't possibly have known what she knew, because if they did know what she knew then they'd all be as contemptuous of the President as is she herself. Or was it that they were just stupid?

If you know the Times you'd also know too that at least in this article the Times failed to include a picture of the crowd itself, so that its readers could judge for themselves whether "the largest [crowd] ever to gather in Georgia" was fairly depicted as having been composed of only "as many as 150,000" persons.

One picture ran with Bumiller's story shows a handful of bystanders watching a video of the President's jet departing. A second photo is from the vantage point of the crowd onto the stage. What did the two photos have in common? No view of the crowd itself was anywhere to be seen.

No, the Times wouldn't be the Times if it weren't infuriatingly biased and, worse, so darn self-righteous and smug about itself. It will never change because it is being what its subscribers want it to be--the newspaper of record for the liberal's liberal.

The primary reason that the Democrats are going to continue to lose elections is that they are on the wrong side of history. For example, just when all of Eastern Europe and even Russia is shaking off socialism, and embracing private market economies and the freedoms they entail, the Democrats continue to embrace it.

The Democrats also are going to continue to lose elections because they repeatedly are dishonest in their arguments on policy matters. John Kerry’s distortions of his service record were a case in point during the last election. The attacks the Democrats have mounted against John Bolton are the most current example of this phenomenon. Democrats just can’t tell the truth. Their credibility is in tatters.


Case in point: The Democrats have opposed John Bolton’s nomination as U.N. Secretary presumably because he is too aggressive with staff and has allegedly been
a subversive bureaucrat, distorting intelligence and making unauthorized and highly provocative remarks that also subvert American foreign policy goals.

This space has previously pointed out ("Irreconcilable Differences," Wednesday, May 04, 2005,) that the former charge has been disproved already; the latter charge now is collapsing as well.

At the heart of the latter part of the Democrat’s case against Bolton was that he enraged former Assistant Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage with remarks he made about North Korea that allegedly weren’t approved by the State Departments. As a result, a directive supposedly circulated internally at State shutting Bolton down, and prohibiting him from speaking again without the most explicit advance clearance and authorization.

As it turns out none of this is true. According to Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post internal State department e-mails have now established that Bolton’s remarks had all of the requisite Department approval before he delivered them. As Kessler notes:

Democrats have suggested that Bolton's staff did not get full clearance for the speech. But a State Department official provided copies yesterday of e-mails between the staff and other government agencies indicating that relevant officials had signed off on the speech a week before it was given.

The first e-mail, sent on the morning of July 23, went to the National Security Council, the Defense Department, the office of the vice president, and top officials in the State Department, including Armitage's office. It included a draft of the speech, then titled "The Kim Jong Il Dictatorship: A Legacy of Tyranny and Squandered Opportunities," and asked for comments by noon the next day. The title gave a hint of its unusual quality -- it personalized many of the complaints U.S. officials had made about the North Korean government, referring to Kim more than 40 times.

Over the next two days, a variety of relatively minor comments were received. The Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs -- which oversees the ambassador in Seoul -- cleared the speech without a comment. Armitage's special assistant suggested toning down one line, though he acknowledged he may be quibbling.
"Good speech," he added.

Worse, the Democrats knew or should have known these charges weren’t true, or at the least were highly suspect. This is because 1) former Secretary of State Powell has never spoken out against the Bolton nomination and Richard L. Armitage affirmatively endorsed it. Does anyone beleive that either man would have taken such positions if any of the charges against the nominee were valid?

Does the demeanor of Powell and Armitage towards Bolton mean that the Democrats should have known that the charges against Bolton were per se false? No. Did it mean that the Democrats, and their allies in the press, should have known that there were at least strong reasons to question the original charges? Absolutely. Yet the Democrats went full bore with them. Shoot first; ask questions later.

Pathetically, all that is left now is the charge that Bolton’s personality is such that he is unfit for this or any other office. Taking this to a truly absurd level, the New York Times today ran a column by a a clinical psychologist based at the University of Surrey, England noting that the line between the archetypical hard driving over achiever boss and the deviant sociopath criminal is a fine one, and who know on which side Bolton falls?

Who knows indeed? And if no one knows, why print this drivel, much less with John Bolton’s name referenced Is there any responsible basis whatever even to mention Bolton’s name in connection with such a discussion?

More to the point, those who have actually worked closely with Bolton in the trenches, and are willing to identify themselves to boot, have nothing but praise for both his ability and his collegiality. James Baker and Edwin Meese, both of whom actually worked with Bolton,

At the heart of the claims made by Mr. Bolton's critics is the charge that he was imperious to those beneath him and duplicitous to those above. The implication is that Mr. Bolton saw himself as something of a free agent, guided by nothing more than his own notions of what he thought good policy might be. Woe be to those who might dare to disagree, according to these critics, be they lower-level analysts or cabinet members.

In our experience, nothing could be further from the truth. John Bolton was as loyal as he was talented. To put it bluntly, he knew his place and he took direction. As cabinet members, we took our direction from our presidents, and Mr. Bolton was faithful to his obligations as a presidential appointee on our respective teams.

In his service as assistant attorney general and assistant secretary of state, we had complete confidence in him - and that confidence turned out to have been well placed. In our view he would be no different in fulfilling his duties as our United Nations ambassador.

Nor is this inadvertance on the part of the Left. Last weekend on Air America, the floundering attempt of the left to answer Rush Limbaugh, host Al Franken was chortling about the Bolton nominatiuon, and hoping that it would not be withdrawn, so that for as long as posisble Bolton would be left "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind." The potential institutional damage that treating nominees this way might cause is not soemthing that the left factors into their thinking. If a controversy can be created, even false controversy, then let's fan the flames for as long as we can.


At the Army McCarthy hearings the famous line that marked the beginning of the end of the of the Senator from Wisconsin into ignominy was “Have you no sense of decency [?] At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Is this too not an apt question to be posing to the Democrat minority currently serving in the Congress?

Once again Illinois state politicians are trying to come up with a budget for next year. And once again the only issue on the table is how much new revenue can be safely squeezed out of us hapless taxpayers without causing a taxpayer revolt.

How the boodle raised will be spent, once safely in the sack, is a side issue, for now. First our representatives have to raise new revenues. No one that this observer has seen is talking about cutting state spending anywhere, except as a way of opening the door to new spending somewhere else. This is what has passed for "politics" for the last thirty years.

Illinois Governor Blagojevich deserves credit for at least pretending to be interested in make government more effective. But all his drive has turned to dross, or worse. First, the Blagojevich claimed that his own Department of Central Management Services (CMA) had identified some $600 million is savings that could be realized just by managing state assets better. That's real money, even in Springfield. The Governor promptly crowed about his "leaner" administration.

This sounded like good news, of course, if those were real savings and also if they could be captured, in the form of lower spending overall, or a cut in taxes or even tax refunds. More likely, anyone in Springfield who heard the governor kicking this figure around immediately picked up the phone and began to devise new spending programs to consume every cent and more of the funds suddenly freed up.

[Worse, the Governor's own auditor then said that the CMS'S claims appeared to be so much hooey, and also reported that CMS was unable to document anything near like savings that substantial. Worse yet, the auditor reported that CMS itself was on a spending binge, lacking all rationality much less cost controls.

Among other things, the auditor claims, CMS was allowing potential bidders to help design contract parameters, and many of the contracts that were being let out were going to major donors to the Governor.

One particularly nasty example the auditor cited was that of Illinois Property Asset Management LLC, which has a contract to streamline Illinois state government spending. IPAM not only was involved in designing the parameters for the bid it then won, it also attempted to charge the State for expenses incurred obtaining the contract, including costs associated with a victory dinner to celebrate winning the bid.

After ridiculing the findings of his own auditor, and defending IPAM, Blagojevich did an about face and has now "fired" IPAM for unspecified improprieties.]

Are the Republicans doing any of this any better? Only marginally. Their spending priorities might be just a little more rational, and occasionally they're trying to legislate on matters other than just taxes and spending.

But query whether they'll get anywhere either, because they have no strong central spokesman, and are trying to do most of their work "under the radar" and furtively. To get anything that they want in that mode, they'll have to take sides in the tax and spend debate the Democrats have going. And trying to decide whether you favor more taxes or more spending is a dead end game.

The result is a continuous mess in and around Springfield. In the short term, its only going to get worse before its going to get any better. This is because all of the participants are a part of the current system and all of them, without exception so far as I can see, have been raised in politics to believe that this is what legislatures do: figure out new ways to raise revenues and then how to spend everything that you've raised.

It may that the only way anything will ever change is if someone has the gumption to stand up and declare that the emperor has no clothes. That is, that this mode of "doing politics" is unsustainable.

This may be about to happen, as the benefits promised already, by all levels of government, have already swamped the economies ability to pay for them. Thus, according to Robert Pear in the New York Times, some state's governors and legislators are already beginning to figure out ways to PARE BACK SPENDING, not because they want to but because they have to.

Noted one such state legislator John Hurson from Maryland, a self-described bleeding heart:

"I am a Democrat, a liberal Democrat, but we can't sustain the current Medicaid program. It's fiscal madness. It doesn't guarantee good care, and it's a budget buster. We need to instill a greater sense of personal responsibility so people understand that this care is not free."

But there are a whole bunch of programs equally unsustainable.

Interest groups are lining up to fight for the status quo, or at least appear to be doing so. According to the New York Time's Pear, these include the usual suspects:

A coalition of beneficiary advocates, labor unions and health care providers is already gearing up to fight any significant cutbacks in Medicaid. The coalition includes AARP, Families USA, pediatricians, hospitals and nursing homes.

These groups, of course, probably have no idea what legislator Hurson or anybody else really has in mind. They'll shoot first and ask questions later. Simultaneously with heading for the trenches, of course, these AARP types also send out a new round of fund raising letters to incite contributions.

The hard fact that our current generation of politicians is just now starting to confront is that there just aren't enough people working hard enough who will put up with being taxed enough to pay the level of benefits that have been promised over the years to everybody else.

Whichever party first gets a handle on that, will be the party that dominates the political landscape for the next 20 years.

ABC News' Daniel Arnall reports that the economy added 274,000 new jobs during the month of April, according to government reports. In addition, the government revised up its previous estimates for March and February. March now reads a 146,000 gain (previously 110,000) and February has a newly reported 300,000 (from its original 243,000). Unemployment rate remains unchanged at 5.2 percent.

Want to guess what the ABC News headline said summarizing these reports? "Economy Grows At Slowest Pace In Two Years."

Want to know why we are so cynical about how the Main Stream Media covers the news? The opening paragraph of this post was taken verbatim from ABC"s "The Note." Each morning in The Note ABC"S "political affairs director" summarizes stories he thinks its important for other journalists to know about. His own summary of the story that own news division prepared on the latest economic reports released by the government spins it as positive news.

However, the headline that his own news division writes over the same story and the part of the economic reports released by the government that the news story itself totally focuses on, is the slow growth in the economy, at least when compared to rate at which the economy had been growing.

Oh, and by the way, ABC's "Poltical Affairs Director" is Mark Halperin. The senior Halperin is one of the most left wing members of the Democratic Establishment who was so off the charts on foreign policy matters that after Bill Clinton nominated him as an Assistant Secretary of Defense, the firestorm of protest that arose forced Clinton to withdraw the nomination.

Not that that matters, we are sure.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been taking lessons an American politics from the Democrats, it appears. Echoing a line right out of John Kerry's recent presidential campaign, Putin complains that the United States never should have gone into Iraq, and now should not leave! According to CBS News:

Putin also believes the U.S. democratic system does not travel well and that is precisely why he was against the war in Iraq from the beginning. "Democracy cannot be exported to some other place. [Democracy] must be a product of internal domestic development in a society," says the Russian president.

But pulling out of Iraq is not an option, says Putin. "But if the U.S. were to leave and abandon Iraq without establishing the grounds for a united and sovereign country, that would definitely be a second mistake," he tells Wallace.

President Bush says Putin is someone we can work with, and I'll take the President at his word. But if these moves are any indicator, Putin's political instincts are pretty pathetic.

Reportedly, Putin was already pouting at Bush for spending time on his way to the Death Star with former Soviet era satellites, now independent, on his way to celebrate Russias's victory over the Nazis in World War II (they're still re-writing history over there).

Slamming the President's key policy on the eve of his visit to your country doesn't seem like a real smooth thing to do. Particularly since our invasion of Iraq probably did more to relieve Putin's Chechen pressure than anything else that's happened in the last five years. And trying to poke the President in the eye through an interview with the by now thoroughly discredited CBS network news division looks even more deliberately churlish.

OK by me though. Bush tends to look right past such provocations, and never let's them take his eye off the ball. And if that's what Putin thinks works with Bush, then he probably is someone we can deal with. He's an empty suit. There's less to him than meets the eye.

No wonder he is starting to remind me so much of John Kerry.

Press coverage leading up to yesterday's British elections, and now analyzing the returns only confirm that our press corps is even more supine and unreliable when it comes to reporting European politics than it is reporting politics here at home. Wasn't all of Britain up in arms over Tony Blair's support for the coalition in Iraq? Weren't the voters in Britain just itching to throw him out of office? Turns out not.

Why the huge disconnect between the reality of Blair's win and what we've been told about British politics for the last two years? My suspicion is that it's because we get our European news through two filters: the ultra-liberal and government controlled BBC and our own Main Stream Media. By the time the news filters through to the rest of us, it probably has very little to do with reality on the ground.

That being said, the bottom line of this most recent election is that Blair won, and convincingly, albeit with a smaller percentage of the returns than in his prior two elections.

According to Glenn Frankel in the Washington Post, Labor received 37% of the popular vote; the Conservatives won 30% and parliamentary seats contested, while the more leftist Liberal Democrats won 22%. That appears to mean that 59% of the electorate voted against Blair, but his coalition is intact, if incoherent.

What lessons may we meaningfully take from these results?

For one thing, no matter what the impression conveyed here of British politics over the last two years, either the Brits have a lot of issues other than Iraq on their minds, and like Blair on those other issues, or they are far more content with Blair's Iraq policies than we've been lead to believe. Most likely it's a bit of both.

Despite all of our talk about the help we've received from the Brits, and it has been material, England's investment in the war, politically and otherwise, has been minuscule compared to our own.

Indeed, the Brits have gained far more bang for their pound of investment, in the short term, than have we. They've hitched their wagon to ours once again, and are the better off for it.

And for all of the talk about how anti-war the British electorate allegedly has been, there has been precious little hard evidence of that. What anti-war demonstrations there were were composed mostly of the usual ragtag suspects, and anti-war statements and resignations by leading British politicians, while widely covered, came mostly from the left and the far leftward edges of the British political establishment.

Blair's also had lots of political problems governing the country that have had nothing to do with Iraq. He is considered about as honest and trustworthy in general as was Bill Clinton during his interregnum here, and those perceptions began long before he was attacked for pettifoggery over Iraq. In addition to Blair's credibility problems, his administration has also been rocked with sex scandals (not involving him) and the like, and his advisors have taken "spin" to a whole new level, and worse been caught talking candidly about doing so. In that case, it was the failure to cover up, not the cover up, that cost Blair support.

On the other hand, Blair's Conservative opposition is in disarray. From what we can see here, the Conservatives in England continue to lose elections because no one understands anymore what the party stands for. Its slogan in this last election, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" suggested that what they were thinking was unthinkable. Else why not just tell us? "Liberal Lite" is not an identity.

There is a lesson to be learned by conservatives here on that score. When conservatives start losing their victory margin, its not time to abandon the message but to hone it to a sharper edge. The Conservatives in Britain refuse to do that.

Whatever the real meaning of Blair's win, let's have fun watching our intrepid press corps spin it out for us. If Tony Blair had lost, of course, the analysis would be that the Iraq adventure did him in. Now that he has won an unprecedented third term, doesn't that mean that his Iraq policy has been vindicated? Well, logic would dictate so.

But is that what we're going to be told? I'm predicting not. Instead, the press will tell us, Blair's convincing win wasn't really a win at all. Oh no, we'll be instructed. Blair really lost, because his margins were so small and it was all because of the unpopularity of his Iraq policy. Indeed, it's already started:

While the projected results still give Labor a solid majority in the 646-member chamber -- the first time the party had won three consecutive elections -- the sharp reduction in its total number of seats could speed Blair's departure from office. The results follow a short, sharp and highly personalized campaign in which opponents claimed Blair had lied about the reasons for going to war and could no longer be trusted.
The main opposition Conservative Party, which ran a pared-down, sharply focused campaign that emphasized law-and-order issues such as restricting immigration and adding police officers, would gain 30 to 44 seats, according to the projections. The third-party Liberal Democrats, the only major party that opposed the war, would gain five to 15. If the poll and projections prove accurate, Labor would be returned to power with the lowest share of the national vote of any ruling party in British history.
A tight-lipped Blair, speaking before local constituents after he was reelected in his northeast England district, acknowledged that Iraq had been "a divisive issue" throughout the country. "It seems clear that the British people wanted the return of a Labor government but with a reduced majority, and we have to respond to that sensibly and wisely," the prime minister said.

For many years and at moments like this one we have ridiculed the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) for "misunderstimating" George Bush. I think now that we've gotten it all wrong. The Left, and their pals in the media, continue to misunderestimate "We, the people.

Remember when prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib first broke into the headlines? The Left was screaming, again, for Don Rumsfeld’s head. The prisoner abuses couldn’t have been the result of renegades, the argument went. There had to have been higher- ups involved. And since Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was the highest higher up, he had to go. Even John Kerry got into the act, calling, again, for Rumsfeld to resign.

None of this made any sense, even at the time. For one thing, the prisoner abuse story that broke was in the form of the premature disclosure that an internal Army investigation then already underway, and ordered by Donald Rumsfeld. The Main Stream Media pretty much ignored that aspect of the story. Recall, a presidential election was then under way that John Kerrey was not then being projected to win.

It is always amusing too when the Left attacks the civilian leadership in the Pentagon. To the Left, our own military, and not those who would do us harm, has always been the enemy we must defeat (the “baby killers”). So logically they’d want the military on a short leash and answerable to us more humane civilians, no? Well, no. Not when the civilian is a Republican, or something other than a raving pacifist.

Now that the prosecutions of those individual soldiers actually involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses are proceeding, and each of the defendants are being given a chance to explain how their superiors made them do it, guess what? To date, not one has proffered any convincing evidence whatever that superior officers, in the local chain of command, much less at the Pentagon, had anything to do with what happened.

Charles Graner, the highest ranking soldier yet convicted of wrongdoing, is a real charmer. Reuter’s today reports that to his former wife and children, he is an unreconstructed horror show:

"He's like my Hannibal Lecter, he really is. He's the monster in my life," said Morris, who has two teenage children from her 10-year marriage with Graner, the central figure in the Abu Ghraib abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Graner's unpredictability helped undo a plea bargain deal this week for Lynndie England, a fellow reservist and ex-lover with whom he has an infant son. Subpoenaed but not called to testify, Morris described England's reaction and her own sometimes bizarre life with Graner in an interview after the case collapsed on Wednesday. "He screws up everything, doesn't he?" a disappointed England told Morris about Graner after the judge ruled that trial would have to start from scratch in the future.

The irony of all of this is that, if you really want people to be accountable for their conduct you make them accountable for their conduct. If the Left had gotten its way, and Rumsfeld had been forced out of office just because these things happened on his watch, the Graners and Englands of the world would never have been held accountable for what they had done, including violating every Army regulation conceivable to engage in and then to conceal their own misconduct.

As soon as she saw the breaking Abu Graib story, Graner’s wife knew that her former husband was the culpable party, because she knew what he was accused of and she knew what he was capable of.

When the news of American abuse of Iraqi prisoners spread last year, Morris said she knew Graner was involved because of his e-mails, and she struggled to tell their children.
"How do you explain something like that? My daughter, all she wanted to know was why," she said. "I had them in counseling again."
After a military court sentenced their father to 10 out of a maximum 15-year sentence, the children remained bitter. "They thought he didn't get enough time," Morris said.

To the Left, of course, neither who was involved nor what kind of people they were mattered. The story just became another vehicle for their incessant attacking of the military. And beheading the military, by getting rid of Don Rumsfeld, would not only be a set back for the war effort; it would also cow both the military, and Rumsfeld’s successor into being something other than what a military leader is, which is all that the Left really wanted to accomplish all along.

So, at long last, the Army is being held accountable. That's a good thing. But when do we ever get to hold the Left accountable?

The biggest problem the Democrats seem to have these days is that they can’t reconcile what they say today with what they’ve said, or done, yesterday. The Democrats shoot from the hip, and lead with the lip. Republicans need to keep firmly affixed in front of their eyes the old adage that, when your opponent is self-destructing, never get in the way.

Just in the current news cycle there are myriad easy examples of how ridiculous the Democrats are making themselves look:

Just Kidding, Tom

For weeks now, the Democrats have been trying to string up Housae Majority Leader Tom DeLay by the neck until dead for little more than his past personal friendship with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Abramoff used to be on DeLay’s Congressional office staff. Turns out Abramoff was involved with arranging trips for DeLay (which DeLay fully disclosed and paid for) and may have helped to pay for them (until DeLay could reimburse him, to the extent that he was required to do so, and which DeLay appears in every case to have done.)

Abramoff may have some other problems with how he conducts his lobbying shop. He doesn’t hesitate to suggest to his clients that he has clout with DeLay that he may, or may not, actually have. That’s what lobbyists do, of course. Whether that violates whatever code of ethics that governs the lobbying trade (assuming that there is such a thing) that’s Abramoff’s problem, and has nothing to do with DeLay.

If you wonder whether this is what lobbyists do, just ask Mrs. Tom Daschle, who had one of the most powerful lobbying niches in town when hubby Tom was the Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate. She can tell you all about how that apparent proximity to power helps one’s lobbying practice.

But whatever clout Abramoff may have, to date the only thing the Democrats have been hollering is “guilt by association:” if Abramoff has problems with his lobbying practice, and he and DeLay are friends, then DeLay himself is tainted for that friendship, and needs to go.

Now after a little deeper digging, it turns out that Abramoff was organizing and financing trips the same way for lots of Democrats too. Probably none of this was ever going to turn out to have been illegal, or even unethical. And if you bother to read the stories carefully, none of this even has the proverbial “appearance of impropriety” we hear so much about when nothing else seems to stick. But more to the point, you can bet that now that the Democrats have been caught doing the same thing, suddenly it’s not going to be so wrong anymore.


The Fony Filibuster Kafuffle

Another example: The Democrats are wailing and gnashing their collective teeth over the efforts of the Republicans to prevent them from using the filibuster to prevent an up or down vote on the senate floor of the Bush administration’s judicial nominees.

But the press is replete with accounts of these very same Democratsarguing for doing exactly that when it was Republicans who were using similar procedural tactics (other than the filibuster) to snarl up Bill Clinton’s judicial nominees. And recall it’s the Democrats who now are contending they will shut down the government if the Republicans get their way. Recall what the Democrats were saying about that tactic when Gingrich tried this in 1995?

Howard Dean Redoux

Next, after electing the mercurial former governor of Vermont to their party chairmanship, the Democrats claimed that he was reformed and/or he would be leashed, or risk losing his position. In other words, they contended, they had elected a kinder and gentler Howard Dean than the one we had come to know and loathe during the last Democratic primary season. Now all the buzz is how vicious and partisan Dean has been ever since.

Never mind.


Boltin’ on Bolton


Finally, after having blown a gasket over the nomination, the Democrats are finally doing their homework about John Bolton’s management style, and discovered that the picture is a little more nuanced” than it had first appeared.

In fact, Bolton has been disclosed to have been a hard charging skeptic and hands-on consumer of intelligence within the State Department, who pushed analysts hard to explain their conclusions and in particularly anything that appeared to justify a softer line towards North Korea.

They either did so, or answered to him for it. There is no evidence however, that Bolton ever sought much less got professional retribution against anyone with whom he crossed intellectual swords.

Try to reconcile all of this with the Democrats’ push for a decentralized and fragmented intelligence bureaucracy, to discourage “groupthink” or with its severe and continuous criticism of the Bush administration to “deal with” the threat posed by North Korea. You won’t be able to do it, of course.

Word of the wise to the Democrats: “It’s the hypocrisy, stupid!

The importance of allowing President Bush to appoint otherwise highly qualified judges who also agree with his judicial philosophy is emphasized again by a recent decision by the United Sates Supreme Court to accept for review lower court cases holding the so-called "Solomon Amendment" unconstitutional.

The Solomon Amendment requires only that colleges and universities that bar military recruiters from campus also forgo their federal funding. Were the Court to uphold the striking down of this legislation as unconstitutional, then every other attempt by the federal government to put restrictions on the recipients of its funds would be jeopardized as well, including most pointedly No Child Left Behind.

The Solomon Amendment has been on the books (and embroiled in litigation ever since--it has never been fully implemented) for nearly a decade. The amendment wasn't and isn’t the product of wild-eyed right-wing fanatics either. Unlerss that's all the U. S. House has consisted of for the lest ten years. The Amendment was passed originally in 1995, and reached only schools accepting Department of Defense funds. President Bill Clinton signed it into law.

In 1997 the reach of the Solomon Amendment was dramatically expanded, to include schools receiving almost any other kind of federal funds as well.

In 1999 the Amendment was reaffirmed.

In March, 2004, by a vote of 343-81 the House again reaffirmed its support for the Amednment. In February of this year, the House passed a non-binding "Sense of the House" resolution, 327-84, yet again reaffirming its commitment to the Amendment. Thus, the amendment enjoys long-standing and overwhelmingly bipartisan support in the United States House of Representatives.

That the Courts are the last refuge for the Looney Left is made clear by the series of lower court opinions that lead us to this sordid pass. In one underlying suit against the Amendment, the Court had to characterize a schools merely allowing military recruiting on campus as "propagating, accommodating and subsidizing the military’s expressive message” to get to its desired result, namely deciding that the right to 1st Amendment free speech of the college trumped the right of the U. S. House of representatives to put any strings on its funding of that speech.

According to Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times,

"Ruling in a lawsuit brought by a coalition of law schools and law professors, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that because the Solomon Amendment required law schools to "propagate, accommodate and subsidize the military's expressive message" of disapproval of homosexuality despite the schools' commitment to nondiscrimination, the measure probably violated the school’s First Amendment rights."

It is not clear, of course, that the federal government could not require colleges and universities accepting federal funds to propagate whatever the government might insist upon, if that is what the enabling legislation required. Believe it or not, there has not yet been found a "right" to federal funding in the Constitution. And no institution has to accept federal funds, either, if the strings attached are too onerous. See Bob Jones University, for example.

But that is not what is required by the Solomon Amendment. All it requires is that colleges and universities that accept federal funds allow military recruiters on campus.

The Third Circuit, however, wasn’t about to forgo the opportunity to get involved, and to rule imperiously from the bench that the Congress of the United States, “we the people,” assembled, had overstepped our prerogatives.

And so it likened military recruiting on campus to something far more pernicious, and then struck down the legislation as though something far more pernicious was really at issue. That is “judicial activism” at work.

A second lower court has also struck down the legislation as unconstitutional. Its reasoning was a little different. Analogizing Yale University to the Boy Scouts of America, that court contended that just as a private organization like the Boy Scouts is allowed to “discriminate” against gays who seek to be leaders in the Scouts, so may private colleges and universities chose not to convey an unwanted message, in this instance the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies against gays in the ranks. Says Greenhouse:

As it reaches the Supreme Court, the FAIR case is the latest to frame an issue of gay rights in the context of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. In recent years, the court has upheld the right of the Boy Scouts and of the organizers of the Boston St. Patrick's Day parade to exclude gay men and lesbians as an aspect of the right of "expressive association" not to carry or convey an unwanted message.

Of course, if the Supreme Court refuses to uphold the striking down of the Solomon Amendment, then the left will go into paroxysms of outrage and contend that the anti-gay Boy Scouts are being protected while our great pro-gay colleges and universities are not.

The Bush administration must spend time, money and political capital to defend the Congress in these cases. Its arguments, as also depicted by Greenhouse, make eminent sense, and also expose the lower court’s decisions as highly politicized and activist ones:

In its Supreme Court appeal, the administration maintains that the analogy to the Boy Scouts case is misplaced because "the Solomon Amendment is not concerned with an institution's method of determining its own internal composition and organization." Rather, the administration's petition said, "the role of recruiters is to attract students to seek employment outside the school." The law school remains "free to make appropriate disclaimers or to express its disagreement" with military policy, the petition said.

The Third Circuit also found that the threat of withholding millions of dollars in federal grants had the effect of compelling the universities to speak on the military's behalf. But "the Solomon Amendment does not compel anything, let alone require law schools to convey any antagonistic message," the administration's petition said, because universities do not have to accept the federal money.

Further, "there is no realistic danger that the statements of military recruiters will be uniquely attributed to the school, and the school is free to make its own views clear," the administration said.

That as a society we can afford to go through these exercises is telling testimony to our great wealth. That we do so is testimony to how corrupt has become the decision making process on the federal bench. That is why this administration needs a free hand in appointing judges that can win a vote on the floor of the Senate.

And mark my words; if the courts continue on their present course, it is only a matter of time before some court, somewhere, declares our Constitution itself “unconstitutional.”

High level politicians send down the order: we need campaign workers and lots of contributions, and we need them now. The pressure to come through, though always unspoken, is also unequivocal and it is intense.

Desperate to perform, hack underlings quickly cross the line into illegal fund raising. Companies doing business with the high level politicians pony up. Although there is absolutely no specific evidence linking the higher ups to the illegal fund raising that occurred on their watch, the press smells blood in the water and starts implying the link.

Reporters of all stripes continues to pound the story, relentlessly. They do, that is, if the high level politicians are Republicans, like former Governor George Ryan.

If the higher ups are Democrats, however, like Richard M. Daley or Rahm Emanuel, then it’s a different story altogether.

Oh sure, there are a few gory headlines. But where is the steady drip, drip, drip of insinuation and innuendo that followed the Ryan bribes-for-license scandal, for almost a decade? Nowhere to be seen, because it's the Democratic ox about to be gored.

The New York Times today ran one of the most remarkable, thought provoking and well written obituaries that I have ever seen, marking the death of Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the African American psychologist whose studies on the effect of segregation on black children in the nineteen fifties provided what intellectual underpinnings there were for the Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

If you knew nothing about race relations in the United States and could also not afford to attend a year-long seminar on the subject, you would be far better served by spending several hours studying and refelecting on this remarkable obituary.

Just three quick examples of the insights that the obituary provides, and then you are on your own:

In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court overruled Plessy v. Ferguson. In doing so, the Court cited social science research conducted by Dr. Clark as "evidence" to support its decision. The Brown v. Board of Education opinion had no business, of course, citing the social sciences for its rationale.

A little back ground is in order. Dr. Clark was the first black man to earn a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University.

In the early ninteen fifties, Dr. Clark was doing social science research with black children. With the best of intentions, Dr. Clark thought that he had uncovered a hugely important insight about the effect of segregation on young black children, namely that early on, and as a result of their segregated status, they developed feelings of inferiority compared to whites.

The evidence cited for this was that these children, though black, identified themselves with whites, such as by preferring white dolls to black ones and by describing black dolls as looking “bad” and white dolls as looking “nice."

Dr. Clarke, and the liberal establishment generally, concluded from this result that segregation, “separate but equal,” had to go, because it was causing actual harm to blacks. Or something.

One must say, “or something” because the social science described in the obituary, to put the best face possible on it, was pretty darn shaky. Indeed, query whether this kind of research would even withstand peer scrutiny today.

For example, Clark reads much into the fact that black children identified with and appeared to want to be like whites. But is it not today well documented fact that white suburban boys today strongly “identify” with black “urban” rap artists? It is simplistic however to contend from that result these same white children today have any feelings of inferiority, or at least any such feelings that deserve massive redress by the courts.

The fact of the matter is, the Supreme Court made a highly moral decision in Brown v. Board of Education, namely that in this country and by definition separate could not logically, legally, constitutionally or otherwise be defended any longer as “legal.”

Where the Court ran right off the rails, and set in motion consequences we continue to contend with to this day, is when it went on to suggest that its decision under the Constitution was in any manner whatever compelled by the social science work of social scientists like Dr. Clark. It was not. The overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson was compelled by the morality of the Constitution itself.

Second, the obituary notes that in the same year as the Brown v. Board of Education decision, i.e. 1954, Dr. Clark embarked on an effort to integrate New York City’s schools and “push for smaller classes, an enriched curriculum and better facilities in the city’s slum schools.”

Sound familiar? It should. Because today, almost half a century later, the liberals on the left are still contending that, if only there were more of these kinds of expenditures the utter failure of our public education system could be reversed.

And yet today are we not spending, on a per pupil basis, tens of thousands more per student than we were ever spending in the 1950’S and getting far less bang for the buck to boot? Of course we are. More spending is not and never has been the answer to the mess in which we find our public schools.

Dr. Clark himself recognized, in his own life, that spending more money was not going to solve much, when at about this same time he and his wife pulled their children out of the New York City public schools and shipped off to the suburbs. Dr. Clark made a telling remark, explaining why he and his wife did that: "My children have only one life.” Black parents in Milwaukee, Cleveland and in Washington, D. C. are saying exasctly the same thing today.

Finally, after watching the "reform" process grind on for some thirty years, Dr. Clark called on the New York State Board of Regents to supersede the authority of local school boards if they chronically reported low test scores.” Sound familiar? Of course it does. That’s exactly what, in his No Child Left Behind program, President Bush is insisting on as well.

Dr. Clark also created controversy when he resigned from the Board of Directors of Antioch College, that bastion of left wing liberalism, after is established race based segregated dormitories and studies programs that excluded whites. And he caused further controversy when he concluded that the Washington D. C., school system was pretty darn pathetic, and that what students there really needed was better teachers and tougher courses. And to stop speaking “ghetto” in the classroom. Recall, this was in the 1970’s!

Perhaps the saddest part of the obituary was in its closing paragraph, where the writer noted that:

Despite the many honors he won and the respect he commanded, Dr. Clark said he thought his life had been a series of "magnificent failures." In 1992, at the age of 78, he confessed: "I am pessimistic and I don't like that. I don't like the fact that I am more pessimistic now than I was two decades ago."

Not being more familiar at all with this man, or the course of his career, there is certainly nothing in his obituary that suggests that his life was a failure at all. Indeed, that Clark was willing to be as candid and honest as he appears to have been about the problems facing blacks in the education establishment suggests exactly the opposite: that he maintained his integrity to the end.

Anyone of such historic note who can, at the end of so illustrious a life, say that his integrity remains intact, is not a magnificent failure at all; he is a magnificent success.

Am I the only one relieved to hear that First Lady Laura Bush has never seen a single episode of "Desperate Housewives," even though she used that television series as a springboard for some pokes at her husband, the President?

My relief is palpable. It confirms two things, I suspect, about Mrs. Bush that I desperately want to believe: 1) she doesn't have the time or inclination even to watch television; and 2) if and when she does, she doesn't watch garbage like "Desperate Housewives."

Although not yet confirmed, I'm also willing to bet the ranch that Mrs. Bush has never been to Chippendale's stripper show either.

According to news reports, the Bush's twin daughters have watched the "Desperate Housewives" program, perhaps even regularly. And regardimng a Chippendale show, I wouldn't make the same bet about whether they've ever been to one as I would regarding their mother.

That just goes to prove that even families with all of the advantages of the Bush's have a heck of a time raising kids with their heads on straight, in the current cultural climate we have in this country.

A full and busy life has kept me from my Blog for the better part of April, to the point that there were so many things to talk about that it didn’t seem possible to keep up with it all.

But this is a new month and the world is looking pretty beautiful out there. I’m raring to get back into the trenches.

The biggest news that occurred during my self imposed hiatus was the death of John Paul II and the prompt and near unanimous election of his successor, Benedict XVI. Indicative perhaps with our continuing struggle with “values,” the networks and the internet gave unprecedented coverage (At least I think it was unprecedented—-anyone else know?) of both of these events, and disclosed once again the huge gap between the media elite and the rest of us.

Almost anyone who understands Catholicism understood pretty quickly that none of the major network anchors, or their producers understand Catholicism at all. Recall the anchor who identified one of the readings at a Mass as from “palm” 23? But the media still had to cover the proceedings, because millions of people were converging on Rome, physically and spiritually, and no advertiser can ignore a demographic like that.

So, once again, proof that values matter to many, many, people.

For those of us who follow politics like others follow sports or television or fashion, the biggest question we have about the "values" issue is whether it is for real. Is there an insurmountable gaps betweens reds and blues that is now driving our politics? Or is this just another passing political fad?

It is not a passing fad.

The chasm between Reds and Blues is wide, deep and insurmountable. One side or the other will prevail. The other side will not necessarily be vanquished. It will be more or less absorbed, however. It’s pretty exciting stuff, really. It’s no holds barred too. This is blood sport.

We’re on the cusp of a true cultural revolution, whether we know it or not, and how it comes out will decide the country’s course for at least a generation or more to come. Who of us is prepared? Only the carefully educated and nimble of mind will participate. Everyone else will be on the sidelines, glued to their Ipods, and waiting to see how it all comes out--or not.

One reason that the gap is insurmountable is because those standing on one side of it, the Blues, refuse to admit that there is a gap and even when they do admit that it exists, they show no interest whatsoever in breaching it.

Family chauffeuring obligations leave one with a lot of time to kill, sometime even out of state. And in those circumstances its not unusual to end up at the nearest Barnes & Noble.

In that very circumstance yesterday, I perused for the first time a copy of what has been touted as a highly readable and dead-on analysis of the values issue as it played out in the last election cycle called “What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” by Thomas Frank.

Now as a rule I don’t buy these books because to me they tend not to be very insightful. Worse, they often aren’t very well written. And once you’ve got the gist of the author’s point, the rest of the book is a waste of time because he or she just repeats the point over and over. It’s like a newspaper column, writ exceedingly long.

Frank’s book is no exception. The thrust of his argument seems to be that we Reds keep voting for Republicans because we’re so d--ned stupid. Even though our economic circumstances continue to get worse and worse, according to Frank, we’ve fail to recognize where our true interests (economic) lie. Rather than voting for the Democrat’s promises of a welfare state that will some day get it right and actually work, we keep falling for the Republican’s “values” campaigns.

Now at a minimum Frank exhibits terrible political instincts. Respectfully, Mr. Frank, in a representative democracy, can a platform premised on your audience accepting the notion that they’re stupid have a whole lot of appeal?

Worse, it’s not clear that Frank really cares if the Reds are screwing themselves over. His book is plainly not intended to bridge the gap that he describes, but to confirm its existence and, if anything, to wallow in self pity about it.

If it's the Reds who don't get it, and that's what Frank thinks, well, they'll have to suffer the consequences and let them suffer. They deserve it, for being so thick. In the course of making this case, of course, Frank only widens and deepends the chasm, by consistently mocking and patronizing Reds. Which only goes to prove that Frank really doesn't get it.

Not only are Blues like Frank not interested in bridging the gap; they probably haven’t got a clue how to do so even if they were.

That’s because the sole intellectual basis for being a Blue is to have—-no intellectual basis. All the Blues believe is "relativism:" that is, that we’re all equally good, we’re all equally bad, we’re all equally indifferent. Who really cares? Pass the tequila and let’s do some ecstasy.

The fundamental problem with relativism is that it contradicts itself; if there are no core values, then how can we contend that relativism is “good?” Blues won’t try to figure that out, because it makes them tired. Better to treat everything the same. Can't we all just get along?

Which brings us full circle, to the coverage of the Pope’s death and the subsequent election of his successor. Why is Benedict XVI being derided as “conservative?” Because he values his religion above all else, his religion is premised on what it contends is a revealed truth, and that revealed truth, by definition, is not and can not possibly be amended or changed by vote or discussion or in any other way.

That there is a truth ands that it is unchanging is anathema to our modern ears; the exact opposite of "relatavism." So harsh; so simplistic; so authoritarian. Let’s go somewhere else. Let’s focus on the new Pope’s Nazi Youth past; his eating habits; or his overall stamina and health. We don’t have to think so hard if we focus on those kinds of things.

Much has been made recently of how the Democrats, after their most recent election trouncing, have finally gotten the message, and are trying desperately to figure out how to recast their party’s principles , to better resonate with the “faith-based” electorate that is increasingly dominating our election cycles. That the Democrats refer to us “reds” as the “faith based” electorate as opposed to themselves, the “blue” or rational and “fact” based shows how pathetic is the depth of their understanding of what is going on in this world. But no matter. Give the democrats credit. At least they seem to have recognized, at least for a fleeting moment that they had a problem. And recognizing that you have a problem is after all the first step top recovery.

The big problem really is that the Democrats know exactly what’s not selling, and they just don’t want to admit it. This is because they believe that they are right, and we are wrong. As a result, and s always, the Democrats have spent most of their post election time seeking to fine tune their spin cycle, instead of examining their ideology and at least coming to grips with what about it so fails to resonate with the majorities in the electorate required to win elections.

Thus, shortly after the election, we learned, the Democrats were consulting desperately, but not regarding the issues about which they lost. Oh no, they were consulting with linguists , and ministers compatible with their party platform, to determine how to better spin their same old positions, but in a new more tricky and less transparent way.

Lord knows that I’d love to have access to the billing statements to the Democratic National Committee that these consultations have been generating. As the adage goes, “a fool and his money are soon parted.” If the Left is paying much of anything for the advice it’s been getting, then it’s proving the adage true, all over again. Because they haven’t learned much of anything.

Case in point: news of the death of Pope John Paul rocketed around the globe last Friday, even before it was true. In his Saturday address, President Bush devoted the bulk of his time to noting the Pope’s passing, and praising the Pope’s positive influence on all of our lives, for the duration of his papacy and beyond. Presumably, no such weekly radio address is ever not “political, since given by a politician (the President) and directed to an audience that the politician is seeking to reach. But if such a radio address ever can be characterized as “apolitical,” the President’s address on Saturday was an apolitical one.

Did the Democrats follow suit? Why, heck no. The Democrats had a pre-set agenda, political as it could be, and were totally unwilling to budge their priorities to mark the passing of the Pontiff. Besides, said House Leader Pelosi’s office, they didn’t want to appear to be “pandering.”

Now if you’ve ever had the privilege of accidentally tuning into one of the Democratic Party’s Saturday addresses, and were unable to get to the radio dial promptly enough, you know that the Democrats know what pandering is. I always thought they couldn’t pander worse when Tom Dashle’s office was handling the script writing; Pelosi’s office makes Dashle sound like Cicero, compared to her.

It’s fine stuff, these typical Democratic Party address, if you think Oliver Stone is the world’s greatest political historian, or a freshly minted soaking-wet-behind-the-ears political consultant, not yet disabused of the notion that you build coalitions by larding your every public utterance with the vilest kind of attacks against your opponent, and then promise literally everything to every interest group that you can think of, if only you were still in power. Believe you me, when Nancy Pelosi is claiming to eschew pandering, the Lady protesteth too much.

That this is about the extent of what the “blues” have learned from the last election is proven all over again, by the decision today of the “Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence” outfit to mark the death of Terri Shiavo and the death of Pope John Paul II with an ad challenging the country to “Err on the Side of Life,” not by outlawing death by starvation, or abortion but by outlawing. . . handguns! Notes the Brady Bunch ad, that while “speeches lauding “The Culture of Life still echo around the halls of Congress” we should all tell our Senators “to [p]ractice what you preach. If every life is precious then how do we value 30,0000 lives that will be lost to gun violence this year?

This ad is so offensive on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. So, likely, I won’t. If you agree with me, then I don’t have to explain to you why the ad offends. If you don’t agree with me, then nothing more I could say likely will ever convince you. But just for starters, was the life and death of John Paul II or the weeks long agonizing death of Terri Shiavo really remotely relevant to . . . gun control?

What the ad has to affirm for any of us on either side of the great divide is that the Left just doesn’t get it.

Republicans thinking about jumping on the anti-Blagojevich bandwagon regarding corporate contributions or “pay as you go” need to think long and hard before they do so. Judy Barr Topinka and Joe Birkette both have their shoulders to the wheel, but to what possible end? Topinka's already gotten burned, for accepting the same kinds of contributions that she claims that the governor should not have.

The assumption behind these attacks on the Governor, and the insistence that the Blagojevich return any contribution received from any corporation also doing business with the State, is that 1) such corporations have no right to support a particular politician or party; and 2) if they do so it is only because they expect to gain an improper benefit from doing so.

Neither assumption withstands scrutiny. And prohibiting all political contributions from anyone doing business with the state merely serves to further limit the number of state citizens, corporate or otherwise, who will have the right to speak about political matters.

Given the scope of government today, it is almost inconceivable that any politician could be bought, and stay bought, by a corporate benefactor on any particular issue. This is because on every issue that government deals with, there are powerful interests arrayed on all sides of every issue.

Energy is an easy example. Should the state favor ethanol? Environmentalists and agricultural interests, including giant corporations like ADM, as well as run of the mill family farmers, are arrayed in favor. Coal, oil, natural gas and other alternative energy sources are arrayed in opposition. The smart politician gets contributions from all of them. But which powerful interest is going to be able to buy its way to a given result? None of the above.

Transparency, not another layer of campaign funding laws, is what is called for here. President Bush led the way on this issue in the 2000 campaign. In 1999, at the outset of that campaign, and when the two parties started to quibble about what they would disclose and how promptly, Bush ended the debate by announcing unilaterally that his campaign would voluntarily publish the identities of all of his contributors and the amounts given.

And Bush also made sure that this donor information was published as nearly instantaneously as technology would allow, and on the internet, where anyone with a computer could access it. Now the Federal Election Commission provides all of that kind of information, at a single, well-organized site.

If anyone wanted to contend that he was bought and paid for by any particular donor, all anyone had to do was to identify the contributor, the issue that mattered to him, and expose the perfidious link to the public. Al Gore had no choice to follow suit with his own donor information, and he did.

Guess what: to date nothing untoward has been disclosed. Not a thing. Indeed, despite the enormous amount of political donor data now publicly available, no one has yet made the case that any particular donation bought any particular favors from the Bush administration.

And rest assured, if such campaign finance laws are passed regarding state level elections, it won’t silence every fat cat voice. The public employee unions, the so-called "public interest" groups, and the notoriously biased Main Stream Media will still all have their say. So too will wealthy individuals like Barbary Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg and their Hollywood crowd. Is that really going to improve the level of political discourse in Illinois?

Birkette’s gripe is in regards to closed door bidding but, again, the answer is utter transparency and to his credit Burkette is calling for just that. It is naïve to believe that syaye bond work isn’t going to require the retention of highly skilled and, consequently, very well-compensated attorneys and other professionals. That the State of Illinois, like any other client, will have to pay professionals market rates is a given. And if anyone’s getting more than market rates, then they deserve approbation.

But instead of going the highly regulated route, let’s just try total transparency, and then let the chips fall where they may.

The main stream media is having a real hard time reconciling the lopsided vote in the Congress in favor of the Terri Shiavo legislation with what it says are polling results showing the “public” ovewrwhelmingly opposed to any further intervention on behalf of saving Terri Shiavo’s life. According to one New York Times Op-Ed piece today by Andrew Kohut, the vote reflects how "Christian conservatives" have come to flex their muscles on Capital Hill.

While there were probably more votes of conscience in Congress on the bill than the public thinks, it is also pretty clear that the Christian conservative movement now has the clout on life-and-death issues to do what the National Rifle Association has done for years on gun control.

Strengthened by the results of the November elections, the movement can convey to legislators that the intensity of their constituents' beliefs is more important than the balance of national public opinion. Swayed by this reasoning, more than a few Democrats may be more interested in moving to the right on moral values than in staking out the middle of the political landscape.

What this analysis ignores, as to both organizations like the National Rifle Association and whatever "Christian conservative" groups Kohut is referring to, is that these organizations have clout only because they have lots of members. And their members vote.

Which is why, of course, “more than a few Democrats may be more interested in moving to the right on moral values than in staking out the middle of the political landscape.”

The Terri Shiavo controversy, and the federal legislation it spawned, may represent many things. But one thing that it does not represent is the Republican’s contradicting themselves, as the liberal left now is arguing.

As Adam Nagourney notes in a New York Times article this morning:

The Republican Party has long associated itself with limiting the power of the federal government over the states, though this is not the only time that party leaders have veered from that position. Most famously, in 2000, it persuaded the Supreme Court to overturn a Florida court ruling ordering a recount of the vote in the presidential election between Al Gore and George Bush.

But that’s just ridiculously bad history. The premise of the argument, that the Republican Party stands for small and unobtrusive government, when it comes to protecting fundamental constitutional rights, is ja demonstrably false one. And from that false premise the analysis, unavoidably, runs downhill.

Since its founding of the Republican Party has stood for a strong federal government in regards to a few key issues, and other than that for freedom and equality of opportunity.

A strong federal government and one that is limited are not incompatible at all. Only a strong national government can provide for the common defense, maintain interstate waterways and keep them open to commerce, and build interstate railways and highways, for example. Those things that it can not do well, like regulate schools, or property taxes, or marriage, it ought not to attempt.

More to the point in the debate over the fate of Terri Shiavo, since its founding, it is the Republican Party that has stood for a strong national government that protects fundamental federal Constitutional rights for all of us, whatever our race, color, creed, or in the Terri Shiavo case degree of dependency on the decency of others for our very lives.

The Civil War was the first great test of the Republican Party’s convictions regarding such Constitutionally guaranteed civil rights. Under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican if ever there was one, a strong federal government established once and for all its right to survive against a “states rights” challenge lead, to the extent it was lead by any national party, by the Steven A. Douglas/ George McClelland wing of the Democratic Party. Said Douglas at Alton:

Those Compromise measures of 1850 were founded upon the great fundamental principle that the people of each State and each Territory ought to be left free to form and regulate their own domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Federal Constitution. I will ask every old line Democrat and every old line Whig within the hearing of my voice, if I have not truly stated the issues as they then presented themselves to the country. You recollect that the Abolitionists raised a howl of indignation, and cried for vengeance and the destruction of Democrats and Whigs both, who supported those Compromise measures of 1850.

Post-war reconstruction was the next great test of the Republican Party’s convictions. After all, it was the Republican Party majorities in the Congress that passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Under the determined leadership of another Republican president, Ulysses S Grant, the Republican Party again rose to the occasion. Under Grant’s administration, a strong federal government made sure that these reconstruction era civil rights amendments were enforced, even against the often recalcitrant state governments of the former Confederacy.

Responding to attempts by the “Dixicrat” wing of the same Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party nonetheless, to stall the great civil rights legislation of the early 1960’s, the Republican Party rose again to the occasion. For example, it was the leadership of Illinois' Republican Senator Everett M. Dirksen that broke the back of the filibuster that the Democrats had mounted in the Senate against the Cicil Rights Act of 1964, and it was Republican votes in the Senate, not Democratic ones, that gave that historic legislation the margin of victory that it needed.

Against this history, the Republican Party would be rightly criticized for abandoning its glorious civil rights precedents were it to have abandoned the enfeebled and the defenseless Terri Shiavo’s of the world. So called "state's rights" have nothing to do with it.

As Representative Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who is the House majority leader, effectively put it: "I really think it is interesting that the media is defining what conservatism is," Mr. DeLay said. "The conservative doctrine here is the Constitution of the United States."

Pathetically, the Democratic Party has been equally consistent in its convictions, supporting “states rights” once again, when in defense of destroying the defenseless.

With a characteristically misleading headline and opening graf, Sara Rimer at the New York Times breathlessly reports that the Harvard “faculty” has “censured” Harvard University President Larry Summers:

Professors, in Close Vote, Censure Harvard Leader

AMBRIDGE, Mass., March 15 - The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard approved a resolution on Tuesday expressing a lack of confidence in the leadership of the university's president, Lawrence H. Summers, citing longstanding dissatisfaction with his management style and, to a lesser extent, his remarks in January about women in math and science.

The vote was 218 in favor and 185 opposed, with 18 abstentions.

Even the later text of the same article itself, of course, confirms that this is not what happened.

Instead, at a meeting attended by only 321 of the 802 voting members the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University, some 218 members attending voted in favor of a resolution of “no confidence,” whatever that means. No one knows what that means, of course, because no such a resolution has ever been offered before at Harvard. Some 185 faculty present voted against the resolution. Eighteen abstained.

Before the meeting, which was widely publicized on campus and indeed throughout the New York Times nation, everyone with an interest in the matter, and even those without one, knew that a vote of no confidence was likely to be taken. And the publicity had an impact. The turnout of 321 faculty members was unusually high, for a faculty meeting. Usually only about a hundred attend. At a meeting february 22, 2005, some 500 faculty were in attendance.

Doing the math, of course, if only 321 of 802 faculty members attended that means that some 481 members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences faculty chose not to attend, much less to cast a vote in favor of the “censure” motion.

It is difficult to construe a failure even to attend the meeting as anything other than a vote against censure. And if 18 of the 321 faculty members at the meeting abstained from voting, those votes are even more impossible to construe as ones "in favor of" censure. These circumstances considered, then, the more accurate depiction of the vote would have been 684 votes against censure, and only 218 in favor. So how can the New York Times construe this as a censure vote by even the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, much less by any significant portion of the faculty of the entire University? Well, how indeed?

Moreover, the vote was essentially meaningless, and before a single ballot was cast everyone knew that it was meaningless. This is because only the seven member Harvard Corporation has the power to hire or fire Summers.

And before the vote, after the vote, and on every occasion it has been asked, the Corporation has indicated it continues to have full confidence in Summers. Therefore, even a vote against Summer’s continued tenure was a safe one to cast, since there is no reason anything except a lot of negative publicity about him (and the University) would come of it.

Oblivious to all of this harsh reality, and after the result of the secret ballot was announced, one triumphant faculty member said that Summers had “no noble alternative” but to resign.

That’s kind of the way the Left thinks about such things at Harvard, and elsewhere. Construe a vote that you lost as one that you “won,” by some convoluted logic only you can understand, and then insist that your foe has been vanquished.

Frankly, it is only a matter of time before Summers does resign. This is not because he ought to; he's done much good and nothing wrong in this episode. And this vote plainly does not reflect any particular lack of support for him at the University, or even among the more narrow constituency of the Arts and Sceince Faculty at Harvard.

Rather, expect Summers to resign because, to date, Summers has demonstrated that he really doesn’t understand how to make any other answer to attacks like these, except to try to appease his opponents.

For example, to date Summers has imposed on himself a sort of voluntary brainwashing, or what the Red Chinese used refer to as “rehabilitation.” You know, the kind John McCain was undergoing at the Hanoi Hilton while a POW.

It’s to no avail, of course. The faculty attacking Summers are PC bullies. The appetite of bullies are never sated but only whetted by appeasement.

Why did Summers respond this way? Recall, that up to this episode, Larry Summers was part of the Democratic Party’s uppermost upper echelon, an inner inner circle elite. As a student at Harvard Summers had a hugely distinguished run. Early graduation; early tenure, early everything. Except political seasoning, likely.

Summers' political rabbi, was Robert Rubin “hisself,” for goodness sakes, the godfather of the go-go 90’s Clinton economy that we’re still trying to crawl out from under.

As such, Summers really doesn’t have a chance at Harvard now. He’s offended the bluest of the blues and in regards to his political correctness no less. And his knee jerk response is to throw himself at the mercy of his accudsres, who will show no mercy.

But in some quarters, the chortling over Summers’ predicament, and Harvard’s, is just getting louder and louder. Like much of the Left today, they think, Harvard and its Arts and Sciences faculty have maneuvered themselves into the no-win corner. If Summers survives, the faculty members who sought his ouster will be exposed as the impotent lightweights that they appear to be.

If Summers is forced out, on the other hand, the faculty who did him in will only be encouraged to new and more ridiculous outrages, some of which they will achieve. In the meantime, Harvard’s reputation for genuine scholarship will be seriously tarnished, and its credibility overall will continue to be undermined. It will become a parody of itself.

The pundits' chortling today are more than a little off though. Becasue none of this really matters a whit. Harvard is hugely powerful and Harvard degree is hugely in demand. Harvard will survive. Not unlikely, it will come out of the whole episode emboldened, with its reputation enhanced.

This is because, after all, what the entire vote really demonstrates is that 2/3s of the Arts and Science Faculty at Harvard thinks that the rest of their colleagues are buffoons.

And that really says something positive indeed about Harvard.

Some weeks ago, Arlen Specter announced that he would attempt to gather a consensus in the Senate around the more "moderate" Bush judicial nominations. Specifically, Specter proposed an agreement with the Democratic minority that he would only advance "moderates" and they would agree to floor votes for them. How this was to be construed as a "compromise" with the Democrats is beyond us. In any event, the proposal is going nowhere, for two reasons. Both were utterly predictable.

First, Senate Democrats are still not in a compromising mood, and the current crop of them never will be. Since the election, the Democrats have elected Howard Dean, a bomb thrower ("we're good; they're evil")of the George McGovern mold, as their national party chairman.

They've also elevated the sweet talker Harry (Alan Greenspan is "one of the biggest political hacks we have in this town")Reid of Nevada, apparently incapable of saying anything graceful about anything or anyone, their speaker.

And finally, and speaking of hacks, the Democrats wheeled out and propped up former Ku Klux Klan member Bobby Byrd of Virginia, who in 1964 famously used the filibuster rule (as it had frequently been used before, by racist Democrats like Byrd, to try to prevent passage of the Civil Rights Act), to expand the use of the filibuster against judicial nominees (as it has never been used before)

Nothing about these choices suggest that the Democrats are prepared to do anything but hunker further down in their self righteous smugness, and continue to implode. They simply aren't going to accommodate anyone who is a Republican, RINO’s excepted.

On judicial appointments, there also is no indication whatever that Democratic Party discipline will be relaxed to allow a floor vote to go forward on any Bush nominee, that is, any nominee that that the Democrats deem "outside the mainstream." This was absolutely the same line taken by Tom Daschle last term, and with any luck the outcome here will be exactly the same too. Nevada deserves better than Harry Reid.

Second, and this has been the case for as long as memory serves, the Democrats' idea of a compromise is for you to give away the heart and soul of your position and then insist that they’re also, by the way, entitled to at least half of what they want as well.

Thus, in the case of judicial appointments, the Democrats will allow the Senate to function as it traditionally has regarding judicial nominees, which means allowing nominees to come to a floor vote, if and only if the Republicans agree at the outset to ignore the last several election cycles and nominate only the kinds of judicial candidates that Bill Clinton would have nominated, when he was trying to fool everyone into believing that he was the moderate, say as compared to Newt Gingrich.

And at a minimum, that means that no nominee can be less than ideologically pure on abortion, first and foremost because, to the Democratic Party, if you are not pro-abortion, then you are not "mainstream."

This same kind of "compromise" is all that the Democrats are offering on Social Security. President Bush has put forth a proposal that takes the best of all prior proposals and weaves it into a fairly simple, easy to understand package that won't reduce and likely will increase benefits, that won’t break the bank and that will thus provide a far more sound foundation going forward for the Social Security system than anything currently in place.

At the heart and soul of the proposal are the President’s promise of no increase in taxes, and the utilization of private investment accounts. These private investment accounts are intended only to get the more powerful investment options available in the marketplace available now to retirement accounts, and to stop the hemorrhaging of red ink that the current system has at its very foundation.

In response, the Democrats claim that they are open to discussing changes to Social security, so long private accounts are not part of the reform, and tax increases are.

That’s the kind of “compromise” any party in its death throes would leap at the chance for.

Once again, whether the United Nations has any validity as a force for peace and stability in the world is the issue on the front burner. And ancient lessons are being relearned. The UN can be a force for positive change. If it is backed by a superpower willing to give the UN's edicts teeth.

The people of Lebanon have taken to the streets, demanding that Syria remove its troops and its intelligence forces from the country. Not that it ought to matter, but their demands happen to coincide with a Syrian promise in 1989 to do just that, recent UN resolution, passed 9-0, demanding that Syria do as it promised some 15 years ago. In the 2004 UN vote, there were 6 abstentions, which in the context of UN voting processes, amount to “aye” votes as well.

President Bush today demanded that Syria withdraw. Syria says it does not intend to withdraw yet, but bets are it will. The MSM reports this as a rebuff to the President. It is not, of course, but to the international community.

The 2004 UN resolution that Syria is defying,passed in 2004,

“1. Reaffirms its call for the strict respect of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, unity, and political independence of Lebanon under the sole and exclusive authority of the Government of Lebanon throughout Lebanon;

“2. Calls upon all remaining foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon;

“3. Calls for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias;

“4. Supports the extension of the control of the Government of Lebanon over all Lebanese territory;

“5. Declares its support for a free and fair electoral process in Lebanon’s upcoming presidential election conducted according to Lebanese constitutional rules devised without foreign interference or influence…

As perhaps we’ve come to expect from the UN, this resolution was not passed at the outset of a crisis but at its tail end. And principals had little to do with it. Indeed, in 1989, Syria agreed to pull its troops out of Lebanon, as soon as Israel did.

Israel, not a signatory to the 1989 agreement, nevertheless did withdraw its forces from Lebanon, in May, 2000.

But even after Israel did so, Syria ignored its own commitment to do the same. Instead, Israel having withdrawn, Syria used Lebanon as a platform for accelerated terrorist attacks on Israel.
The Lebanese people having taken to the streets to demand nothing more than that Syria comply with its own commitments, as also demanded by an unopposed vote by the UN, what stands in the way of Syria compliance? Nothing, except its determination to see if the world community really is serious about forcing it out.

Which, really, is the ultimate point. Un talk is nice. But if it isn’t accompanied by “facts on the ground,” then it can never be more than just that: talk.

That is and always has been the iron clad rule in international diplomacy. Countries that can't, talk. Countries that can, act. President Reagan made the point when he attacked Libya after Libyan terrorists started blowing jetliners out of the sky and attacked out troops in Germany.

President Bush proved it again, when for almost two decades the UN proved unable to accomplish anything against Saddam Hussein's terror regimen, except to facilitate the impoverishment and slaughter of the Iraqi people. It was only after the US invaded Iraq, to enforce UN resolutions that no other significant major member state except Great Britain was willing to enforce, that the rest of the world stood up and took notice.

And our doing so set off repercussions we have yet to fully see or grasp. But without a doubt what is happening in Lebanon is one of them.

The Main Stream Media's obituary for Social Security reform has been proven way, way too premature to say the least.

In a lengthy New York Times "news" article contending that Bush's legislative program is out of step with the rest of the country's, was this startling note about a recent poll:

[Mr. Bush's] argument that the system is approaching bankruptcy - a contention disputed by Democrats and independent analysts - seems to be taking hold. Two-thirds of respondents say the system will be bankrupt by 2042 if nothing is done to repair it. Sixty-one percent said the program has worked well until now, but the next generation will need a different kind of program to assure that they receive benefits.

And 55 percent said the problems with Social Security were serious enough that they should be fixed now, compared to 35 percent who said they did not need to be addressed for another 10 or 15 years.

Now, recall, that the State of The Union address, at which this reform effort was formally launched, occurred just barely a month ago. And recall that in the month that followed the President also had a few other things to keep track of (for instance, blowing through Europe like a whirlwind). And there have been a few other events distracting him from his reform timetable (for instance the assasination of a major opposition leader in Lebanon, followed by the spontaneous liberation from within of that country, elections in Saudi Arabia, junky little stuff like that).

Recall further that the President told us that his campaign for that reform would have two components: 1) to convince us the Social Security system as currently structured is broken and needs to be fixed; and 2) that his is the best way to fix it.

So already two thirds of us have been convinced that the social security system will be bankrupt in 20 years, 55 percent of us beleive the system needs to be fixed now, and 61 percent of us believe that the next generation will have to have a different system? Given that The President's time and attention has been just a wee little bit divided in the last 30 days, those resulkts sure sound to us like Part I of the game plan has been pretty effectively done, if that NYT poll is any indication.

What’s more, the gang that couldn't shoot straight Democrats aren’t doing much for their cause either, whatever it is these days. The Wall Street Journal reports that, though by a hair's breadth, the public now trusts Republicans more than democrats to handle Social security reform.

Ouch!

If this be defeat, make the most of it.

Are we missing something? Is the Social Security debate really that complicated? Or are the Democrats attacking any social security reform to prevent President Bush and the Republicans for getting the credit for saving the system?

You be the judge.

1) There is no crisis.

What! We have no choice but to fix Social Security. It will be grossly insolvent in about ten years. That means that the “trust” cupboard will be empty. After that, benefits have to be paid directly out of the annual Federal budget.

The only way anyone can contend that we have no crisis is to couple that contention with an alternative solution. For the Democrats, its higher taxes. Period. But higher taxes will tank the economy. A tanked economy generates less tax revenues than does a healthy one. And more government obligations. And who's going to vote for that?

2) Why private accounts?

Private accounts are being pushed because the same money invested in the private accounts will a) generate higher rates of return than the government IOU’s we are now forced to invest in; and b) will allow us to pay for our retirement out of those investment proceeds, not tax revenues.

What’s not to like about that?

3) Won't we have to accept lower benefits when we retire?

No.

With private accounts, the total retirement benefits we are likely to receive won't be lower but higher than what we could have expected from social security.

To the extent that we are investing less in our government investment account, we'll be entitled to fewer benefits, FROM THAT SOURCE. But this is only because the current social security benefits formula is based on our receiving back a portion of what we pay in. Social Security was not supposed to be the dole. It was supposed to be a form of forced savings. Thus the more we paid in, the more we get back in retirement.

Unless that changes and I don’t know why it ought to, then after private accounts are in place, the same formula will be in effect. So, since we’re paying in less, we’ll be getting back less when we retire, FROM THAT SOURCE. The difference, and then some, will be more than made up from the benefits we then will be receiving from our private investment accounts.

4) How can young people be trusted not to squander their retirement funds?

They won't have the opportunity. Why would we allow early withdrawals? No one is going to be allowed to squander the account on a vacation, or a new SUV, or a country home.

And if we die sooner than we were expected to, our retirement fund doesn't just go up in smoke like it does now. It is still there for our heirs.

Our investment choices also will be limited, and conservative. Will there be more “risk?” in private accounts than in our current government accounts? Of course. Higher returns are paid when people invest in riskier ventures.

But the depletion of the Social Security trust fund is not just a “risk;” it’s a certainly.

5) Isn't this just a big windfall for Bush's brokerage cronies?

This argument seems to be premised on the fear that private accounts will be far more expensive to administer than is the governments social security fund. But why exactly would that happen? Does anyone think such accounts can't be administered cheaper in the private sector?

Also, the government’s administrative fees are almost non existent because the government isn’t really doing anything with our social security accounts.

That is, the government merely makes ledger entries reflecting our “deposits,” invests all deposits received in treasury bonds or their equivalents, and then cashes in the treasury bonds when funds are needed to pay out benefits.

This isn’t rocket science.

Private account administrative fees may, or may not be higher than what it costs the government to administer the current system. If the return we earn on the private accounts is higher, or better yet premised on the rate of return earned, why would we care?

6) The costs of transition are going to be huge.

There are significant "costs" of “transition” that are going to have to be paid in the short term; but we will more than make up the transition costs in the long run.

“Transition” costs arise because, as private accounts are set up, the amount that current workers are contributing to the trust fund are reduced. Therefore, the time within which the government will have to pay retirement benefits directly out of the current federal budget, and not just from social security taxes being paid currently by younger workers, will come that much sooner rather than later.

BUT, for every private account set up, the government's long term debt obligation for that beneficiary’s future retirement benefits will also immediately be decreased.

Thus, upon instituting the reforms, a huge chunk of future government liability for future benefits payments disappears. The net impact on the government's credit worthiness is positive.

And, all of this money moving into the private sector, coupled with the lifting of the social security “overhang” now depressing the market, likely will also drive the stock market through the roof.

Which would not be a bad send off for all of those new investment accounts.

Isn’t this all win/win?

And, really, what is the alternative?

While the World Trade Center ruins still were smoldering, the more partisan political enemies of the Bush administration began to find their voice again. Louder and louder, they criticized the Bush Administration’s alleged failure to “connect the dots.” Had the Bush administration only “connected the dots,” this Greek chorus wailed, 9/11 could have been avoided.

The “dots” that the Bush administration allegedly failed to connect in the eight months in office prior to 9/11 were few, far between and had also not been spotted by the Clinton administration over the previous eight years. But no matter.

Most of the dots were only “dots” at all, much less connectable, with the benefit of perfect 20/20 hindsight. The “dots” referenced ranged from plot devices in Tom Clancey espionage novels to the circumstance that nationals from wealthy Arab countries, like Saudi Arabia, were learning to fly passenger jets.

And remember that intense FBI desk jockey from Minnesota, Colleen Rowley? Right after exclaiming that, had the world only listened to her, 9/11 could have been prevented, Rowley voluntarily wrote up a 13 paged single spaced screed addressed to FBI Director Muelder and helpfully explaining to him how he ought to re-organize the FBI?

In the last several weeks, we have had staring us in the face a whole new set of the biggest and blackest dots anyone can imagine, and the lines connecting them, are not chimera, but cables of the coldest steel.

Consider what's being uncovered in Spain:

MADRID, Spain (AP) - A suspect in the Madrid train bombings was found to possess a sketch and technical details about Grand Central Terminal in New York, a report said Wednesday.

The sketch and data were on a computer disk seized about two weeks after the March 11 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people last year, the newspaper El Mundo said.

Spanish police turned the disk over to the U.S. agents from the FBI and CIA in December once they understood the scope of the technical data, the report said.

A U.S. Embassy official confirmed that American law enforcement authorities received information related to Grand Central Terminal from Spanish authorities in December. The official declined to go into detail.”

Any alarm bells going off? Naw. According to the same story, “a Spanish police official said Spanish and U.S. authorities don't lend much credibility to the sketch, saying it is not even clear it is supposed to be a picture of Grand Central Terminal.


Meanwhile, closer to home, in Alexandria, Virginia, the AP also reports

A man accused of plotting to assassinate President Bush admitted many times that he joined al-Quaida and pondered hijackings similar to the Sept. 11 attacks, an FBI agent testified.

Agent Barry Cole's testimony Tuesday came at a pretrial hearing for Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 23. A federal magistrate said Abu Ali posed a "grave danger" and ordered that he remain jailed pending trial. "The defendant has in his own words indicated he is a grave, grave danger to this community and this nation," said Judge Liam O'Grady after hearing Cole's testimony.

Abu Ali’s attorney argued that none of this evidence should have even been considered, because it ws (or, more accurately, might have been) obtained by torture.

Defense attorney John Zwerling claims the government obtained its confessions through torture, and that four attorneys had seen scars on Abu Ali's back the defendant says were inflicted by Saudi authorities. Zwerling said after the hearing that he has more evidence to confirm claims of torture, but he would not discuss specifics.

Cole testified that he interviewed Abu Ali over four days in September 2003 and Abu Ali admitted he joined al-Qaida and discussed various potential acts, including a plan in which he would personally assassinate Bush.

Cole said other plans included hijacking planes in Great Britain and Australia and using them as missiles to attack targets in the United States, a plan to free prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and a plan to destroy naval ships in U.S. ports.

Zwerling said the various plots that Cole described were "preposterous."

"How is he going to free the brothers at Guantanamo? Is he going to take a rowboat? Doesn't that sound bizarre to you?" he asked Cole.

O'Grady called Mason's comments disturbing, and Zwerling said they are evidence the government did not believe it had a case.

Cole, a counterterrorism agent, said Abu Ali's confessions are supported by the admissions of an al-Qaida cell leader in Saudi Arabia who surrendered to authorities. Cole said the al-Qaida cell leader gave Abu Ali money to purchase a laptop computer and cell phone.

No dots there?

Meanwhile, in France, and also according to the AP:

LYON, France (AP) - The New York City police department is "very concerned" that al-Qaida is pursuing efforts to obtain chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, a senior official said Wednesday.
Michael Sheehan, the NYPD's counterterrorism commissioner, said officials know that Osama bin Laden's terror network is searching for biological weaponry and it appears to have sympathizers with medical and scientific backgrounds who could handle them.

"We are very concerned they are still trying to seek chemical, biological or radiological weapons," he told reporters on the sidelines of an Interpol conference on bioterrorism in Lyon, southeastern France.
"We don't have any information that at this time they have that capability, but we do know they're trying to get it," Sheehan said of al-Qaida, declining to provide specifics.

He said al-Qaida's operational ability appeared to have declined since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 pushed them out of their bases and into hiding.

"However, we still know they are very much out there - and capable," Sheehan said. "We don't underestimate their ability to bounce back as a serious threat of terrorism."

The threat was not just al-Qaida, but could come from any terrorist organization "or some type of deranged person," Sheehan added.

Where now are the critics of the administration’s previous alleged failure to “connect the dots” today? Clamoring for the renewal and strengthening of the Patriot Act? No, seeking to abolish it.

Demanding that the government act on this kind of information, aggressively and preemptively, to prevent another attack? No, accusing it of using interrogation techniques (none of which involved physical abuse, by the way) of being “the equivalent of” torture.

Meanwhile the legal arguments, based on a civil framework that has nothing to do with fighting a war, drone on and on and our enemies see less and less reason to fear us.

Over time there are dots to connect. But they are not the ones that the President’s critics demanded that we connect in 2001.

The picture that emerges after you connect the dots, however, is not of patriots acting in defense of the country, but of malcontent anti-American subversives seeking only to tear us down, if not literally cause us to be destroyed.

The Court Again Unveils Its Crystal Ball

By a 5-4 vote, the United States Supreme Court struck down its own precedent of little more than dozen years ago, and concluded that the United States Constitution does, after all, prohibit the execution of “minors” for a crime.

In 1989, the Supreme Court upheld the imposition of the death penalty for anyone over the age of 15. The “consensus” the Court now proclaims is that our living breathing Constitution prohibits the execution of anyone under the age of eighteen, the Court’s new Constitutional definition of a “minor,” from being executed for his or her crimes.

According to a late breaking news article in the Washington Post, this means almost certainly that 17 year old Lee Boyd Malvo will not get the death penalty for gunning down 19 people (13 fatally) in suburban Maryland a few years ago. Indeed, not only can we now look forward to Malvo not being executed; we also can anticipate lots more such slayings by "minors."

How does the Supreme Court reach its stunning new view of the Constitution? Was the Court just wrong previously in upholding the executions of minors? Or is it wrong now? When it resorts to an ill-defined "consensus, instead of the Constitution itself, how the heck do we know?

According to the Washington Post, the Court said in a case from Missouri “that there is now a "consensus" in American society that juveniles, along with the mentally retarded, are "less culpable" for their crimes because they lack sound judgment. Execution is therefore a "disproportionate" sanction that violates the 8th Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, the court ruled, with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority.”

Query what evidence the majority Justices had before them of this newly emerged “consensus,” or why, if it is so clear cut a consensus; only five of the nine justices looking were able to discern it?

The problem with these kinds of decisions is two fold: First, they undermine the legitimacy of the judicial process in our system of government, by suggesting that “Constitutional” principals, supposedly bedrock, are malleable indeed.

Secondly, they deprive us, The People, acting through the legislatures of fifty states, or through the United States Congress, of the ability to develop a true political consensus on these issues, by engaging in serious and sustained public debate about and experimentation with these issues.

The current 5-4 majority may, or may not have got it "right" on the morality of the death penalty. But they plainly got it wrong, either in 1989 when they said that the Constitution allowed 15 year olds to be executed, or this time around, when they decided after all that it did not. No one can contend with a straight face that the same written document can mean two diametrically opposite things.

No one also can contend with a straight face that the Court’s majority in these cases are somehow endowed with any more wisdom, or understanding or foresight than are we all, when through our duly constituted political system, we legislate solutions to the kinds of problems that the Court addressed in its opinion today.

And yet with a straight face that too is what the Court is asking us to accept here, yet again.

The Spectacle of Arlen Specter

Arlen Specter’s cockamamie proposal for shepherding some of the President’s previously blocked judicial nominees through the Senate deserves no political cover from the White House whatsoever, or from the Republican caucus in the Senate. Not only would the Republicans be capitulating to the Democrat’s outrageous and ahistorical use of the filibuster; doing so would also set a horrific precedent for the further politicization of the federal courts.

Most important, capitulating would not likely result in the President getting significantly more nominees through the Senate, and would not only no contribute to but would set back on its heels his efforts to bring the Courts back into their proper sphere, under the separation of powers doctrine long established by the Constitution, as arbiters of specific “cases and controversies” only.

The Republicans ought not only disavow that Specter is speaking for anyone but himself (in an article by Neil A. Lewis in today's New York Times the proposal is misleadingly described as “A new G.O.P. Tact”); the proposal itself ought to be shot down and without a moment’s hesitation.


The Specter proposal

In the guise of preventing a melt down of the Senate, which is what the Democrats are threatening if the Republicans strip them of their ability to filibuster judicial nominees into oblivion, Senator Specter is proposing that of the judges currently being blocked from a confirmation vote, floor votes be allowed, but only when the nominee proposed for confirmation is one who brings ideological “balance” back to the judicial district or circuit to which the appointment is being made.

Thus if a district or circuit court currently is tilted too far to the left (like the Ninth Circuit), then “conservative” appointees to that district or circuit will be allowed a floor vote. Presumably, if the Circuit is already tilting too far to the right (like the Fourth), then either the President has to appoint a more “moderate” justice, or face the continued filibuster of a floor vote for the nominee.


Specter's Fatally Flawed Judgment

There are scores of objections to this proposal all of which, assuming that Specter is not intentionally shilling for the Democrats, reflect horribly on Senator Specter’s judgment.

First, Specter’s proposal would finally legitimize the Democrat's new contention that judges shouldn't merely decide cases impartially, based on the law and the facts before them. Rather, under this new approach, judges are supposed to decide cases to advance specific and identifiable political agendas.

How else can the political persuasion of an appointee have any relevance to his or her fitness for the bench? In other words, instead of leaving their prior partisanship at the court house door, upon confirmation, the new convention will be for a nominee to carry onto the bench the political ideology that gained him or her confirmation in the first place.

It follows that if maintaining political “balance” now is the object of an appointment to the bench, then at confirmation hearings it will also become fair game to establish not just whether a nominee is academically, intellectually and temperamentally qualified for the bench; we also will be entitled to know, and the nominee will have to appropriately prove that he or she is either reliably “liberal” or reliably “conservative.” Which he or she must be, liberal or conservative, will depend, in turn, not on the results of the last presidential election, but whether there is a particular tilt one way or another on the bench to which the appointment is being made.

Now how in heaven’s name could appoinments ever be made under this scheme? Would we not be forced to closely examine a nominee’s political history, or demand that a nominee disclose how he or she intends to decide cases?

And even doing that, what kind of personal history will be deemed too “liberal” or too “conservative” for a particular bench? If as an advocate, an attorney always represented medical malpractice plaintiffs, or owners of private property in zoning board appeals, what does that reliably indicate about his or her party affiliation? If a nominee were a registered Democrat, would he or she also have to prove that they voted in primaries? What if a nominee early in his career was a liberal (i.e. followed his heart), but over time became a conservative (i.e. followed his brain)? Do we assume his or her initial instincts likely will re-emerge on the bench? Or should we count on his or her subsequent conversion to right (or left) thinking will continue to prevail?

And whatever our prediction, what if we turn out to be completely wrong about a nominee? Will there be an ability to recall him or her, if they start to vote unpredictably? Indeed, if the object is to predict votes, why have courts at all? Just denominate a seat Republican or Democrat and let decisions be made depending on the luck of a party's draw.

Of course, if we ever reduce our confirmation battles to that level, then the role of the courts in our carefully calibrated Constitutional system of checks and balances will have been completely undermined and something completely new put in its place.

Originally, the judiciary was to be the branch of government where the law as written by the legislature would be applied to specific cases and controversies. The object of its conduct was to conform outcomes in particular and discrete cases to what we believed that the legislature intended, and only when parties genuinely and fairly disagreed regarding what that intention had been.

Under Senator Specter’s proposal, on the other hand, the courts would themselves become miniature legislatures, where the really tough decisions about almost everything that the government has its hand in (i.e. almost everything) would be decided by persons who were not even elected, much less purporting to represent any constituency whatever, other than the party they represent on the bench, and even then only tenuously.

Additionally, if balance is the object, then what comes of a power of the Executive Branch to shape a court, over time and subject to the vagaries of illness, retirement and the like, in the direction dictated by the election?

Finally, who and on what criteria is anyone going to decide that an existing district or circuit court panel is too liberal or too conservative? Like so many solutions the Democrats come up with, this one too will bog the parties down in endless negotiations regarding how to characterize a particular bench. But who is to say?

The most oft cited basis for describing the Ninth Circuit as “too liberal,” for example, is its statistically high rate of reversal by the United States Supreme Court. But any liberal will tell you the current Supreme Court is itself be thoroughly dominated by “conservatives.” Remember, it threw the 2000 election to Bush.

That being understood, will not liberals argue that the unusual frequency with which the Supreme Court reverses decisions out of the Ninth Circuit doesn’t reflect poorly on the Ninth Circuit’s liberalism; it reflects the overly conservative make-up of the current Supreme Court.

Avoiding the Democrat’s threat of chaos in the Senate, if their power to filibuster judicial appointments in reigned in, is also hardly a principled basis for caving in to this wholesale revamping of our entire judicial system.

Indeed, the last time a party threatened to shut down the Congress in a fit of pique, the Republicans under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, President Clinton made a cause celebe of it and the Republicans were trounced in the next election cycle. It is one thing for a party to play hardball; the electorate has quite another view of a party that tries to kick over the chess board when things aren't going it's way.

Cut Specter No Slack

Senator Specter also ought not to receive any encouragement whatever from the G.O.P. for this idea, much less succor.

There may have been a defensible political calculation for President Bush’s decision to campaign in Pennsylvania for the liberal Arlen Specter, in his primary fight against the far more conservative Patrick Toomey, last year. Without the President’s intervention, and the support also of fellow Republican Senator Rick Santorum, Specter might well have lost his primary fight. But the conventional wisdom is that Toomey likely would have lost the general election and that the Republicans would have been left with one less seat in the Senate than they have today. Fair enough. We'll give the President and Senator Santorum the benefit of the doubt on that one.

But that was then and this is now. Specter was re-elected. He is safely ensconced in his seat for another six years He has gone out of his way to ham string the Republican Party agenda on judicial nominees. He neither deserves nor ought to receive any deference whatever for his injudicious scheme.

Empty Democratic rhetoric

The Social Security debate now is only a few weeks old. It must be going well, since the Left and the MSM have fallen into a familiar rut: the President’s plan is a scam; support for any social security reform is waning; the usual "and some Republican" suspects are running for cover; and therefore the President had better beat a retreat and strike a compromise, before it is too late.

Ignore it.

If anything, these pronouncements are proof certain that the Bush Social Security reform proposals are starting to get some traction.

“The President’s social security reform is a scam” argument though, hasn’t been getting much traction lately, because nothiong about the plan itself appears to be a scam—-it’s the whole social security system that is starting to look like a scam of sorts, and has been for a long time.

No one is denying that the present system, concocted almost a century ago, is badly out of whack--they just about how out of whack it might be. No one is claiming that no changes are necessary. Those attacking the President's proposals are just contending that that private accounts aren't the answer (that higher taxes, and postponing and/or cutting benefits (a later retirement age) are going to be the alternative answer is not something that the critics are conceding, but they will).

The other problem with the argument that the reform proposed is a scam is, it's been hard to divine an evil ulterior motive for Bush's proposed reforms. Wall Street has been as or more generous a supporter of the Democrats than the Republicans over the last several election cycles, it seems, or about even. Ask former treasury secretary Reuben about that. Well then why would the President be pushing for the reform he has in mind?

Well, implies Richard W. Stevenson in the New York Times Sunday, because he comes from a several generations long line of stockbrokers. And some of his ancestors even liked Barry Goldwater. According to the pseudo-Marxist left wing analysis of the world that passes for the loyal opposition's standard critique these days, that is enough.

Mr. Bush has told aides that he cannot remember precisely when he was introduced to the idea of individual investing as part of Social Security, and until he ran for president he did not have a high profile on the issue. But he comes from a family with deep roots on Wall Street; his great-grandfather founded an investment bank, and his grandfather later ran Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the most prominent firms in the world of finance. His early political education included exposure to the ideas of Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative standard-bearer who in 1964 was among the first Republicans to make a national issue of private investing as an alternative to traditional Social Security, and Ronald Reagan, who also took up the idea.

In Texas, before and during his years as governor, aides say, Mr. Bush learned about [Texas] counties that had opted out of Social Security under an old federal provision and instead offered their employees investment accounts. As governor, his involvement in issues relating to Latin America piqued his interest in Chile's retirement system, which gave workers the chance to invest and became a prototype for other nations.

As he prepared to run for president, Mr. Bush sought the opinions of people who shared his belief in private accounts, including Edward H. Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization; José Piñera, the architect of the Chilean system; and even a Swedish official who helped revamp his nation's retirement program.

Now making this kind of argument is a two-edged sword, of course. After all, if Bush has been thinking about social security reform this long and this hard, consulting with experts and stuff, even from other countries, its not going to be so easy to convince us that he's flown off half-cocked with the idea. Indeed, this kind of history makes the President sound like maybe he's given this stuff some thought and that he might even be a pretty formidable debater on the subject.

No matter too that President Bush himself isn’t a stock broker, has never been a stock broker, and has no known stake in any such companies that engage in brokerage. This argument too, of course, would disqualify, among others John Forbes Kerry from having much to say about social security reform as well, presumably. It is also pretty hard to contend that Bush's reforms are doing the bidding of Wall Street, since twenty fve years ago Bush wasn't running for anything, much else in any position to do anything about Social Security.

The empty lockbox

Perhaps the biggest boon to the president’s case has yet to get as much attention as it deserves: An unidentified AP reporter in the New York Times, advises that he tracked down the social security "lock box," or at least the closest thing that we have to one, and found it stuffed with--you guessed it--paper promises from the government to pay what it has "borrowed" of our social security surplus over the years.

This confirms, of course that the so–called social security trust fund is, indeed, composed of nothing more substantial than government IOU's—just as the administration has been contending all along:

``The paper is symbolic,'' says Pete Hollenbach, spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Public Debt, the creation of a 1994 law that anticipated the current debate about Social Security's solvency and whether the trust funds held anything more than IOUs.

As the computer era flowered, Congress passed legislation requiring the Treasury to create a ``physical document in form of bond, note or certificate of indebtedness, rather than accounting entry.''

``I viewed it as somewhat Biblical ... like doubting Thomas,'' says Andy Jacobs, the former Indiana congressman behind the law.

All IOU's are "symbolic," of course. Hence the saying that from a lousy credit risk, an IOU is not worth the paper that it is written on. Worse, even a creditor with the best of intentions, won't pay if he doesn't have the bucks, and that's what about to happen in just a few years from now.

This is why Bush and other reformers have been trying to get out attention; because when current social security tax receipts fail to cover our social security outlays, those IOU's are going to have to be redeemed.


The government hasn’t been saving up the fund to redeem them, however; therefore it will be paying them back out of whatever general tax revenues are then being collected, form any source, just as it will be paying for any other treasury obligations coming due at the same time. To pay those IOU's, the government will have to raise taxes or cur spending; there really is no other place to get the money.
The fact of the matter is that the Democrats, with the help of the MSM, is “misunderestimating” Bush again. And usually that’s usually exactly where he likes his opponents to be.

And by the way, is the "U.S Bureau of Public Debt" one of the 150 programs that the President is proposing cutting? It sounds like another really useless operation.

Howard Dean and his left wing leadership cadres at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are watching with trepidation. John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, is fighting off reform. Will he prevail? If not, the DNC loses big. If not, the DNC still loses, just not so big.

Welcome aboard, Howard! Terry McCauliffe, whose mess this was, jumped ship just in the nick of time.

Seems his membership can’t understand how they benefit from sending union funds, election after election, into Washington, D. C. to support the DNC's candidates, only to see the Democratic Party's nominee nominee lose, election after election.

Said Andrew Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union (an AFL-CIO affiliate), and reflecting on John Kerry's recent loss, "we're verging on irrelevancy." Isn't there a better way?

The insurgents want more of their union dues, lots more, directed to organizing unions locally, say at a Wal-Mart. Membership in unions is at an all time low, 12% of the labor force today versus 34% in 1955. And why not?

What exactly is the point of joining a union, anyway, if all you’re doing is funding the DNC, and the Democrats can't win an election to save their lives?

If that's all you're going to do with our dues, lots of the locals are telling Sweeney, why can't we just send the money directly to the DNC, or to our own local candidates, or even (gasp!) to a Republican candidate, instead of through the AFL-CIO?

The insurgents are growing in strength. His back against the wall, Sweeney now says, well, maybe we’ll try that. But before sending money back to the locals, Sweeney insists, he'll need some accountability. The locals need to pledge to use any money he returns to them for organizing efforts only, and to provide him with tangible evidence that their efforts "are working.” If they can't get results, then the flow of money will stop.

Let's see, the locals send their union dues to Washington, D.C. Can you say “taxes?”). In Washington, the experts are spending the money like drunken sailors, but with no tangible result (Can you say “pork barrel spending?”). When the locals protest loudly enough, Washington agrees to let the locals spend more of their own money, locally. But the locals have to commit to spending it only for its intended purpose. And the locals have to demonstrate that their spending is actually getting the intended result.

Hey, this sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? Can you say President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” education reform?

So, why is this kind of an accountability perfectly defensible to the AFL-CIO, when it comes to spending its own members’ dues at the local level, but not defensible when it comes to getting control over how our taxes are being spent locally, educating our children?

February 19, 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the allied invasion of Iwo Jima. These anniversaries of landmark World War II battles are noted less and less frequently, as the "greatest generation" gradually fade out of our consciousness. But Arthur Herman in The Wall Street Journal paid an appropriate tribute.

The scope of the invasion enterprise boggles the mind. Compared to the casualties we've grown accustomed to whining about in Iraq, for example, at Iwo Jima,

Some 2,300 Marines were killed or wounded in the first 18 hours. It was, Sherrod said, "a nightmare in hell."

And overlooking it all, rising 556 feet above the carnage, stood Mount Suribachi, where the Japanese directed their fire along the entire beach. Taking Suribachi became the key to victory. It took four bloody days to reach the summit, and when Marines did, they planted an American flag. When it was replaced with a larger one, photographer Joe Rosenthal recorded the scene -- the most famous photograph of World War II and the most enduring symbol of a modern democracy at war. Yet, in the end, a symbol of what? Not victory.

The capture of Suribachi only marked the beginning of the battle for Iwo Jima, which dragged on for another month and cost nearly 26,000 men-- all for an island whose future as a major air base never materialized. Forty men were in the platoon which raised the flag on Suribachi. Only four would survive the battle unhurt. Their company would suffer 75% casualties. Of the seven officers who led it into battle, only one was left when it was over.

But the Marines pushed on. Over the next agonizing weeks, they took the rest of the island yard by yard, bunker by bunker, cave by cave. They fought through places with names like "Bloody Gorge" and "The Meat Grinder." They learned to take no prisoners in fighting a skilled and fanatical enemy who gave no quarter and expected none.

Twenty out of every 21 Japanese defenders would die where they stood. One in three Marines on Iwo Jima would either be killed or wounded, including 19 of 24 battalion commanders. Twenty-seven Marines and naval medical corpsmen would win Medals of Honor -- more than in any other battle in history -- and 13 of them posthumously. As Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, said, "Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue."

[emphasis mine]

This time around I took something new from this account--something even more sobering than the horrific cost to the allies: Some 7,000 of the casualties referenced were American. That means some 19,000 Japanese fell resisting us on that little island, skillfully and fanatically, and willing to die doing it.

Said another way, the good were vastly outnumbered by the evil at Iwo Jima in that battle. Indeed, the evil to which our soldiers were sacrificed was an unmitigated and malevolent one, that resisted even to the death any limitation on its ability to work its dark will on the little corner of the globe it had brought under subjugation. There have always been terrorists, and bullies, and terrorist bullies.

We've been incredibly lucky in Afghanistan and Iraq. Casualties there have yet to surpass the first day's carnage at Iwo Jima.

For once let's just concede that maybe the United States got it right. We drew a line in the sand, and we enforced it, before evil even had a chance to pull on its boots.

In a previous post we argued, forcefully and convincingly we might add, that at the heart of the so-called Illinois budget crisis is our utter unwillingness to do anything about run away spending. New examples are coming hard and fast.

Today, Dave McKinney in the Chicago Sun-Times reports that the head of the state pension system for suburban and downstate schools (i.e. not Chicago) is warning that Governor Blagojevich 's current education budget fails to account for the increased local spending that will have to occur to make up for cuts the Governor is proposing elsewhere in teacher pension benefits.



What is he talking about. Well, apparently, it is now accepted practice for local school districts to "goose" a retiring teacher's salary on the eve of their retirement, to provide a richer pension. This occurs, in turn, because the controlling pension benefit formula is calculated on the teacher's highest four year salary average over the previous ten years. The school districts pay the higher salaries, briefly--but the state pension system has to pick up the longer term and now sky rocketing cost of the resulting "goosed up" pension.

Now, despite the outcry, notice that Governor Blagojevich isn't even pretending to be draining this boodle pond entirely. He's just proposing that loacl school districts either limit these end-of-career pay raises to three per cent, or require the locval school districts to pay not just for the raises themselves, but for any resulting increase in the pensions to be paid as a result of any salary increases above three per cent.

Were this proposal passed, of course, and the goosing continued, local school districts would have to come up with the new revenue to pay for it. And, incidentally, the three percent per year increase would become the new floor.

Rather than focus on why this scam is allowed to continue in any form, the state and local officials quoted in the Sun Times article are all screaming about the "unfairness" of requiring one level of government versus another to pay the piper for this scam.

This is exactly the problem with our political leadership today. The issue is never whether a particular practice is defensible at all--it's always about how can we find more tax revenue to pay for the program at current funding levels, and to expand it if we can. When did anyone last hear politician boast of the specific cost-savings he would impose, if elected? Talk about third rails in politics.

Another case in point: Fran Spielman, also in the Sun-Times today, reports that Mayor Daley's been fuming at the governor for failing to do anything about the "unfairness" of the way education is funded from property tax revenues. Daley isn't unhappy about the level of taxes generally, or the pathetic state of our public schools, no matter how much more money we pour into them.

No, what really's got Daley's cork is that Blagojevich’s education budget is setting him up and he knows it. The previously discussed pension plan problem, for example, can only be cured with new tax revenues. That means higher property taxes. But if Daley raises property taxes he's going to get booted out of office.

So Daley wants an increased sales tax, or some other tax, to be used for school revenue. This is the pitiful level of our political discourse today--arguing over where the tax man will call first, and who does or does not possess the courage to call for changing the order of his route.

Eventually, and sooner rather than later, all of these state officials will come together to denounce the proposed Bush budget for failing to fully fund education. Just you watch.

And that’s not because anybody thinks spending at the federal level is more efficient. It’s the borrowing that’s easier. Because at the federal level you can tap into the full faith and credit of the United States, namely the federal deficit.

The kerfuffle currently crackling over the remarks Harvard University President Lawrence Summers allegedly made recently about women in the academic workplace, and why they weren't fully represented in the upper echelons of the science and engineering faculty at Harvard, exposes once again that college professors today are just as insular and spoiled and illogical and bullying as they were when we were in school--except more so.

To hear Summers' critics describe his alleged remarks, observers of his fracas with his faculty would have thought that Summers had been advocating skinning female job applicants at Harvard alive and hanging their still-quivering carcasses in Harvard Yard. For his efforts to act like a well-educated person, the majority of the Harvard faculty now propose hanging Summers.

Now that the transcript of Summers' remarks have been published, it is plain that all Summers has really been guilty of is insisting that his faculty behave like, well--educated people.

The session that gave rise to this controversy was one of a series of such sessions, to discuss hiring practices at Harvard. Summers, explicitly, was trying to stimulate a discussion of the reality, not cant(or Kant, either), about the effective hiring women faculty. From all appearances, not only was Summers trying stimulate such a conversation; everyone who came to the meeting understood that this was exactly the purpose of the meeting in the first place.

Just as we all were taught to do, at the outset Summers told his audience where in his remarks he intended to be going:

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions.

One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis.

The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

Notice that in these preliminary remarks, Summers never contended that he himself believed that any of these theories had been established conclusively, or was contending for any of them. Indeed the closest Summers came to commenting on his personal views at all was when, at the end of this portion of his remarks, Summers ranked the hypotheses in what he said he thought were their relative order of "importance."

In his remarks, Summers then digressed just for a moment, to decsribe what he brought to the table himself, as a result of his own history of trying to contend with the issue:

Maybe it would be helpful to just, for a moment, broaden the problem, or the issue, beyond science and engineering. I've had the opportunity to discuss questions like this with chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large law firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders of other prominent professional service organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher education. In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field.

Now the people who went to graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, twenty or twenty-five years ago.

And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered profession.

Why, to prove he was not just throwing his weight around or hogging the spotlight because of his position as chair of the meeting, would Summers not want to describe to the faculty assembled some of the experiences that he brought to the table at the meeting? Afte all, does he not have a point of view as well?

And, again, in his presentation, note how careful Summers is not to contend that he drew any overarching or final conclusions from any of these experiences; he was just warning his audience that they ought not to assume that he had never before that occasion thought about the issues before, or discussed them in depth with others. From these experiences of his own, and only from those, he then stated his own tentative conclusions, but plainly and expressly subject to correction from longer-term and more objective and scientific studies that might shed light upon them:

What does one make of [the experiences he had described]? I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work.

They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women.

That's not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe.

One can put it differently. Of a class, and the work that Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz are doing will, I'm sure, over time, contribute greatly to our understanding of these issues and for all I know may prove my conjectures completely wrong.

The heart of the controversy arose over what Summers did, or did not say regarding the second point of his three point discussion--namely in regards to any alleged "different availability of aptitude at the high end" of these scientific professions.

In this regard, Summers cited research that he said "was all over the map" but that he thought also seemed to show that while not necessarily predictive of success, that there were some "systemic differences in variability in different populations," and that IF that were so, and IF those variances correlated with success or failure in certain fields, including the hard sciences, then that phenomena would have to be grappled with in developing an appropriate faculty hiring model.

Rather than address the findings he referenced, or the logic of his argument, the Harvard faculty's attack against Summers that followed regarding this part of his remarks seems to be that, merely by stating the possibility that scientifically conducted research contradicted common campus cant, Summers had committed academic apostasy.

We can laugh at the picture this controversy presents to the rest of the world--just academicians behaving badly.

Except that any fair minded review of Summers' remarks demonstrates that he was engaging one of the most highly qualified faculty in the world as they should have been engaged and that nothing about his presentation should have caused offense. Worse, and on the basis of their "religious" beliefs about gender and equality, the Harvard faculty responded by seeking to burn him at the stake.

If it happens this way at Harvard, does anyone believe that it does not happen in academia most everywhere?

The adage used to be, "those who can’t—teach." Perhaps the saying now needs to be update to be that "those who can’t be taught—teach."

It’s been widely reported in the press that the Democratic Party believes that it now has to “rethink” abortion. Having now realized that over time, and with the benefit of more revealing ultra sound technology and other incriminating science, those of us who believe that there should be no restrictions whatever on abortion is decreasing. In the meantime, those of us who believe abortion should be barred under almost all or most circumstances is on the upswing. This is not good for the abortion party.

But not to worry; to Democrats, accustomed to and capable of taking any position on any issue just to win an election, "rethinking" doesn’t mean rethinking the moral implications of its position, or whether the party's uncompromising hard line platform is remotely in synch with what voters believe; to the Democrats "rethinking" abortion means rethinking how to spin its position on the issue, to convey the impression that the party means something other than what it actually is saying.

This is like Steven A. Douglas in the 1850’s discussing slavery. Douglas argued that he didn't care whether people owned slaves or not; he just wanted to preserve their right to choose. The Democrats today don’t want to take a position expressly in favor of abortion; no one's in favor of abortion they now like now to say. (Put away those "I've had an abortion" t-shirts, ladies). But so long as for the time being its perfectly legal and also government subsidized, as now it is, all the Democrats need to do is to figure out how to put abortion to one side as an issue.

Out of sight, out of mind.

For Hillary Clinton, that means trying to shift the focus of the debate to the earliest beginnings of life’s continuum, that is, on the newly created fetus and not on what the fetus too quickly becomes later, when most abortions occur.

Thus, Hillary recently was heard to contend that while she “respects” the right of wooly-headed Catholic neanderthals and their evangelical ilk to spout their utter nonsense about the unborn (poor things, there, there), at least so long as they don’t try to become federal judges, she’d also like to work harder with them to make birth control and other means of contraception (except, ahem abstinence of course) that isn’t so, well. . . so obviously destroying human life, more available to our young people.

Yet, even that apparently reasonable position has caused a tidal wave of controversy in today's Democratic Party.

According to the David R. Kirkpatrick story recently in the New York Times, to bolster up the party’s pro abortion backbone, Emily’s List, which supported Democratic abortion rights candidates to the tune of $34 million(!) in the last election, immediately circulated a “study” commissioned by pollster Mark Mellman that reportedly stated that abortion was not a factor in voters’ decision-making” in the November election.” “Values,” perhaps. But abortion? Na-a-a-h!

Why the panic? It’s the party’s economy, stupid.

That’s right. It turns out that the Democratic Party’s fat-cat donor base is virulently pro-abortion. See Barbara Streisand?

Indeed so confident is this donor base that the Democrats will never compromise on abortion that they’ve even boasted of it: Said Karen Pearl, President of Planned Parenthood, “When the day is done, I don’t believe [the Democrats] will backslide,” in part, according to Kirkpatrick’s NYT article, because of the importance of abortion rights advocates to the Democratic Party’s base of activists and contributors.

So, just as in the 1850’s when Stephen A. Douglas courted the South by making the apologists’ case for slavery, so today his direct descendants in the Democratic Party continue to defend the horrific procedure that its opponents call abortion because that is what the party’s donor base demands.

About abortion, is there anything more base than that?

Pogo famously said that "We have met the enemy and he is us." Nothing better illustrates the accuracy of this observation than the pork barrel spending that is still being authorized by the Illinois legislature for programs with dubious objectives and no evidence whatever that they will accomplish anything of any significance for the commonweal. But they'll do all kinds of good for our Democratic friends who shamelessly are sponsoring them.

That's right--even in the midst of the Illinois budget crisis, these programs continue to be hatched, and to receive funding, right under our noses, and from politicos who will never be held accountable for them.

According to Carl K. Johnson in The Chicago Sun Times the sovereign state of “Illinois” (not the Governor nor the legislature (no fingerprints, please) but us, "Illinois") is launching a $3 million initiative “to help more legal immigrants become U.S. citizens.” The funds are to be distributed to some 48 different agencies, mostly in Cook County and the Chicago suburbs. Curiously, in a National Briefing note, the New York Times also carried the story, probably because for reasons that will become obvious, the same kinds of "initiatives" are being proposed in other states too.

Of the $3 million that “Illinois” budgeted for this year, only $2,350,000 will be allocated to the agencies themselves; the rest of the money will be spent on local native-language television stations, to let potential citizens know of the availability of the program. The initiative is to provide English classes, citizenship classes and “legal counseling.”

The program was the handiwork of Governor Blagojevich (D), U.S. Representative Luis Gutierrez (D), and State Senator Martin Sandoval (D) and State Rep. Harry Osterman (D). All three are activist Democrats, oh my. And that a U. S. Representative is involved strongly suggests that we're also funding this "initiative" with monies from the federal budget deficit as well.

So what pressing need is were being addressed by this new spending? Targeted are the 340,000 immigrants in Illinois now allegedly eligible for citizenship, “but [who] for some reason haven't taken the first step of applying.”

According to the Johnson article in the Sun Times, the initiative will be a three year effort, although it will spend consume all $3 million referenced in its first year. Presumably that means that the whole “initiative” will cost at least $9 million over three years. This is assuming, against all experience, that its budget will not increase over years two and three from what it is for year one.

While the alleged unmet need is 340,000 persons, the program expects to help only 20,000 new citizens a year to obtain citizenship. That the initiative’s own target is some 20,000 new citizens per year also verifies that this is not to be a three year effort but one intended to extend indefinitely out into the future forever. After all, if 60,000 are worth making citizens, what about the other 280,000 non-citizens who would still be left?

In the same articles, it also was announced that the initiative will be managed by something called the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). But now the plot thickens (or thins to virtual transparency, depending on where you sit).

According to its website, the ICIRR:

is dedicated to promote (sic) the rights of immigrants and refugees to full and equal participation in the civic, cultural, social, and political life of our diverse society. In partnership with our member organizations, the Coalition educates and organizes immigrant and refugee communities to assert their rights; promotes citizenship and civic participation; monitors, analyzes, and advocates on immigrant-related issues; and, informs the general public about the contributions of immigrants and refugees.

And according to this same ICIRR website, what was the last major “initiative” of the ICIRR? Why registering immigrant voters, of course. And to what end?

As part of the broader strategy to ensure that immigrants participate fully in the civic life of our society, ICIRR in partnership with the Center for Community Change recently launched an ambitious voter registration, education, and mobilization program called the New Americans Vote: 04. This effort is part of the Center for Community Changes national effort, the Community Voting Project, to mobilize 250,000 new or infrequent voters. The goal of our non- partisan program is to register 20,000 new immigrant voters and mobilize 50,000 new or unlikely voters in an effort to build the political power we need to move issues like legalization and civil rights and liberties.

The Center for Community Change, in turn, just happens currently to be organizing opposition to the Bush budget, among other things. According to the CCC's site:

"The President’s budget is not just an accounting tool—it is a statement about our priorities and values as a nation,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change. “And we “blues” are looking forward to a great, free-wheeling discussion with our “red” friends about what it really does mean."

"We 'blues'?" "Our 'red' friends?" Hmmmm. Now of the two major political parties, in whose columns do you think these "new" or "infrequent" voters will be registering?

Which pretty much explains why this is only a three year initiative: in the fourth year they'll registering all of those newly minted citizens that they identified during the previous three!

But give 'em credit where credit is due; we, not they, are paying for it no less.

With no fanfare yesterday, the Senate gave its "advice and consent" to the President's appointment of Michael Chertoff as head of the Homeland Defense Department. The vote was 98-0. That's right; no Democrat voted against the nominee.

Hillary Clinton, whose husband "Bill" was prosecuted by Chertoff when Chertoff was in the United States Attorney's office, had been the sole "no" vote against him in 2003, (11 Democratic brave hearts "abstained”) when 88 other senators voted to confirm his nomination to the Third Circuit bench. This time even she swallowed hard and voted to confirm Chertoff.

Is it not curious that this white middle-aged male nominee, who allegedly had participated in developing our so-called torture policies, and who also oversaw the "round up" of men of Middle Eastern backgrounds shortly after the 9/11 attack, drew not a single “no” vote from the Democrats?

Is it not curious too that this unanimity in the Democratic ranks occurred even though one of Chertoff’s previous employers, the notorious office of the Attorney General, continues to refuse to provide documents that the Democrats had demanded regarding advice Chertoff allegedly gave regarding our policy on torture? Indeed, wasn’t the failure to provide exactly these kinds of documents the excuse given by the Democrats, just one session ago, for refusing to allow a second highly qualified Hispanic nominee to the federal bench, Miguel Estrad,a a straight up or down vote on the Senate floor?

And "curiouser" yet, isn't it, that Condoleezza Rice, the President's Black female nominee for secretary of State was raked over the coals during her confirmation hearings for allegedly participating in these very same policy-making activities, and was only confirmed by a vote of 85-13 the nays, again, all being Democrats).

And let's remember too that Alberto Gonzales, a former Justice of the texas Supreme Court and the President's Hispanic male nominee for Attorney General not only got similar heat in his confirmation hearings, but also was openly opposed in the final 60-36 vote, all "no" votes being Democrat.

Indeed, wasn’t the Bush administration’s failure to provide exactly these kinds of documents about advice he had given while in the office of the solicitor general the excuse given by the Democrats, just one session ago, for refusing to allow a second highly qualified Hispanic nominee to the federal bench, Miguel Estrada an up or down vote on the senate floor?

The Democrats continue to outrage with their hypocrisy.

But will their Black and Hispanic base ever get wise?

They would be wise to think hard about the new GOP outreach slogan: "Give us a chance and we'll give you a choice.”

Can they really be this obtuse?

One of the two reporters seeking to avoid her duty to testify before a grand jury regarding a potential federal crime said today that "A case like mine is a warning to people not to talk because the government will come after you, and that's what we're fighting. That's what the press ought to be concentrating on: the threats to the First Amendment and the free press." Huh?

Is not her employer, the New York Times, also incredibly dull witted too? The New York Times, after all, is paying her legal fees. Is this not the same newspaper that excoriated the Bush administration for "outing" Valerie Plame in the first place, and then loudly and self righteously demanded that an investigation be conducted to see who done that dirty deed?

When the newspaper was pointing its self-appointed finger at Karl Rove, no constitutional niceties were cited. But Rove has testified and no suspicion lingers around him. The bloom is off that rose. The case doesn't seem nearly as interesting to the Times now.

And does it not matter at all that there is simply no legal authority to support taking such the position that these reporters are taking? Can these reporters, who after all work for the New York Times, not remember the Watergate affair, and the historic case it gave rise to, called U. S. v. Nixon (1974)? In that case the Supreme Court held, and reaffirmed twenty years later in Clinton v. Jones (1997), that not even the President of the United States, on national security grounds or any other, is entitled to withhold evidence from a validly constituted grand jury?

When we talk about appointing judges who will apply the law and not rewrite it, we are talking about judges who will need only about as long as it takes to skim the briefs supporting an argument like these two reporters have been making to dispose of their arguments, dismiss the arguments out of hand, and fine both the attorneys and the clients who retained them a substantial sum of money for wasting even that small amount of the court's time.

Until we get those kinds of judges on the bench again, the wheels of justice in this country will continue to grind, and exceedingly small.

President Bush has resubmitted for appointment to the federal bench all of the judges he appointed during his first term in office, but who were denied by his Democratic opponents an up or down vote in the Senate. He was right to do so. Each is eminently qualified. No one has ever argued otherwise. In doing so The President proved once again that he is a stand up guy, and that he REALLY knows his politics.

Resubmitting these nominees, or at least all of those who were willing to go through the meat grinder again, proves that he’s a stand up guy because, having committed himself once to appoint these people on the quality of their character, and no one proving he was mistaken in his judgment, there is no valid reason NOT to re-nominate them. Therefore, it was the right thing to do. It was way we’d like to be treated by someone in a position to do that for us. It is what we hope that we would have the courage to do were we ever in the position in which the President found himself.

It is also great politics. It’s great politics because not only is it the right thing to do; it presents one more hatful of rattlesnakes to the Congress that the President’s opponents now will have to figure out how to handle, on top of everything else.

Now make no mistake about it; no one now laboring away in the House of the Senate hasn’t already got one eye cocked to the 2006 mid-term elections. And no one has forgotten either that against all odds, that this President not only improved his governing majority in the last mid-term election, but went on to get re-elected and improve his governing majorities once again.

It also can’t have been lost on any sentient observer either that the President doesn’t just wait for issues to coalesce around him; he makes them coalesce. He’s on the stump now pushing for Social Security reform and just when his opponents think that they might have gotten a handle on that whirlwind, Bush sets another one a’twirling down the aisle. Bush is driving the agenda. And by doing so he plays out these issues when it suits him, not his opponents. That gives him a leg up at the get go.

The President’s opponents in the meantime also have to be wondering, based on those last two election cycles, whether it is more life preserving to try to oppose him on six fronts simultaneously, or just get out of his way, give him what he wants, keep your head down, and wait out his term unscathed.

They wonder about that because they know that today the electorate is incredibly fickle. Most of the time voters aren’t really paying that much attention or at least they don’t appear to be. Then all of a sudden, on some issue or another that no one saw coming (like someone’s record thirty years ago in Viet Nam for crying out loud, or judicial nominees getting screwed on the floor of the Senate right after another state Supreme Court declares that the Founders meant to protect gay marriage), they rear up out of their slumber and whack somebody. And lately it hasn’t been this President.

You gotta be worried about that, if you're a weasley incumbent not used to showing your cards and the President knows that if you oppose him, you are worried—real worried.

Lots of other events, here at home, and around the world, almost all of them also out of anyone’s ability to predict or control, can also jump up and bite. Perhaps Bin Laden gets captured (or killed). Or maybe someone finds definitive links between the Syrians and the recent assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, or maybe the stock market goes through the roof, wiping out the national debt again.

And without even making a link to the news that made us all feel so goll darn good that day, there’s that Bush guy appealing for votes on social security, or judicial nominees and whoops there we go again we give it to him, just because he’s such a nice guy.

Then who gets left holding the rope? Not that guy from Texas.

Unless it’s the end without the noose.

Tomorrow February 16, 2005, the Kyoto Treaty kicks in for those countries that have signed on and, guess what? No country on which the treaty imposes any significant restraints is remotely prepared to begin complying with its obligations under it and most are trying to finesse there way out. In a great article today the Wall Street Journal lays out the ugly truth about the treaty--its all eyewash!

Treaty proponents, but not the United States, are madly scrambling around trying to figure out how to avoid it is testament to the downright common sense that robust democracies like ours tend to bring to the table when such nonsense is being discussed. It also is testament to the utter hypocrisy of the “greens” of the world, including Canada and Western Europe, who have been demanding all of these years that we ratify this ridiculous treaty. Finally, how the signatories are reacting to the implementation date also is testimony to the maturity and wisdom that George W. Bush brought back into our policy making apparatus when first elected in 2000. What is worse: refusing to pretend you are complying with the treaty, as we are doing, or pretending to comply when everyone knows that you are not, and making a complete fool of yourself?

When the treaty was first being discussed, the United States Senate warned the Clinton administration, in advance of the commencement of the Kyoto negotiations, and by a unanimous vote (95-0), in the Byrd-Hagel amendment that any climate treaty that did not include meaningful obligations by the developing countries would not be ratified by the Senate. Undeterred, the Clinton administration’s negotiating team, lead by then Vice President Al Gore, proceeded to negotiate a treaty that, if ratified, would have done exactly that.

Why did Clinton and Gore proceed to negotiate a treaty that did exactly what the Senate said they better not do? Probably Clinton did so because, as one author has put it, "because he could.” He probably also believed that without United States support the treaty would never be ratified by the requisite number of polluter ountries anyway—which at the time was a pretty good bet.

Knowing him as we do today, Gore likely did it because Clinton told him to and because he thought that he was the smartest kid in the room anyway, and that once negotiated the treaty could be forced through the Senate regardless. Unfortunately for Clinton/Gore and fortunately for the rest of the world, the Senate did not back down and when Gore brought the treaty home Clintons put it up on the shelf and forgot about it; he never even submitted it to the Senate for ratification.

The Senate’s objection to this facet of the treaty was well founded of course. This is because “developing countries” under the treaty include, among others, China and India! That would mean that China and India are free to continue to pump pollution into the air while they both smother our economy, figuratively and otherwise.

Today the Democrats are screaming about of our balance of trade problems—that we are importing far more than we are exporting. Imagine how that imbalance would be faring were we required, on top of everything else we’d had to deal as well in the last several years, with a Kyoto mandate to reduce our industrial emissions by the magnitude required under the treaty!

This is exactly what all of the other nations that did ratify the treaty now are contending with. Indeed, the disparity between what the treaty imposes on the so-called “industrial” states and the developing world have widened, given that at least one of these so-called developing countries, China, has virtually no pollution controls in place on its industries at all.

Al Gore and his ilk have often contended, as did John Kerry as recently as the last election, that we should have signed onto the treaty and then been the first to develop new technology to sell to other countries required under the treaty to develop cleaner industrial processes. That is of course a strategy any of the industrialized signatories could have pursued, had it had an ounce of sense to it. None did.

The private sector never saw the profit potential in such a venture either. Even Al Gore could have made that the focus of his new post-office private sector career. Gore failed to do so, of course, instead investing in a venture that, in essence intending to profit off of a declining stock market. Recently, Gore announced that he was getting involved with a new venture to take advantage of the Kyoto treaty’s demands—in England (less scrutiny there, eh Al?). And in the meantime, some of the largest public pension plans, including CALPERS, are considering pressuring companies in which they have large holdings of shares to go green.

Can anyone say “George Soros?”

The biggest problem though with the Kyoto treaty is that it is premised on very unresolved science. Since to comply with the treaty countries would have to jam extensive pollution regulations down the throats of their respective economies, transforming them into something very socialist ones, should not the science be a heck of a lot more sound before we even begin to discuss such a thing?

All of which explains why George W. Bush let the world know, loud and clear and even before he was first elected, that Kyoto had no more chance today of becoming the law of this land under a Bush administration than it did under William Jefferson Clinton. And I happen to believe him.

As their wounds callous over, Democrats give every indication that they have learned nothing from the last election cycle. Indeed, instead of taking a frank look at themselves, they are busily laying the groundwork for extending their party’s losing streak through several more election cycles.

Thus a just released USA Today/ CNN poll reports that in a survey of Democratic National Committee activists, about half said that President Bush won the recent election merely because he was an incumbent president in war time, and thus unbeatable.

That wartime presidents can’t be beaten was a story line first hurled out by Clinton consigliore and then DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe shortly after the polls closed and the results were in. Twenty percent of the respondents blamed poor grass roots organizations. Only 16% blamed John Kerry’s inadequacies as a candidate.

Since these same Democratic Party activists probably had the most to do with selecting Kerry as a candidate in the first place, it is not to wonder that they remain blind to his faults as the standard bearer of their party. And it also probably should not surprise that, being at the top of the DNC’s organization chart, these same party insider elites also are blaming the grassroots organizations that they were responsible for supervising before they blamed themselves for the last round of defeats.

But most heartening for Republicans ought to be the utter blindness these party leaders are showing about the real reason their party has performed so disastrously in recent elections: it’s totally out of step with where America is and too where the country is going as well. Indeed, the Democrats seem to be as willing as ever to ignore that just how out of step they are on values issues (including “patriotism,” by the way) is the current cause of their party’s “malaise,” as former President Carter would have put it.

The oft repeated canard now elevated to the status of holy DNC writ this poll suggests), namely that no one can defeat a sitting President in war time is just that—-a canard. It has no basis in objective historic reality, unless one defines “war” selectively, for example equating our current war on terror with World Wars I and II, or the Civil War. The analogy is a stretch, to say the least.

This supposed iron clad rule about wartime incumbents also ignores that at least two such “sitting" Presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman, were so unpopular as commanders-in-chief that they preemptively withdrew their names from possible re-nomination before anyone even asked whether they were available. And a third such "wartime" incumbent, Abraham Lincoln, while re-elected, was facing a significantly disenfranchised citizenry as a result of their own rebellion against the very federal government conducting the election. (Ask the Confederacy about uncounted ballots!).

Howard Dean’s elevation to the chairmanship of the DNC also proves that this new USA Today/ CNN poll did not tap into some anomalous vein of opinion at the DNC. Howard Dean was disastrous as a candidate in the Democratic primaries, made lots of enemies in the party, and also failed to make any significant contribution to the Kerry general campaign thereafter. Yet the Democrats now controlling the party are embracing Dean, meaning they have refused to change and, if anything, are likely to move even further to the left than they already have positioned themselves, just to be heard.

In fact, it now appears that nothing is going to change in the Democratic Party until a new cadre of leaders emerge from the ruins of the party and remold it much as did Tony Blair with the Liberal Party in England. But that’s not going to happen soon.

In the meantime, the worst that the Republicans have to fear is overconfidence. And overreaching.

They face little in the way of a credible opposition.

In the last several weeks, as Howard Dean clawed his way to the throne at the Democratic National Committee, there has been a lot of commentary regarding the apparent implosion of the Democratic Party.

Setting aside for now whether there is really much difference between Terry McAuliffe, the current DNC chair, and Howard Dean, the Democratic Party's problems are far deeper than just a deeply dysfunctional party bureaucracy in Washington.

No better proof of this can be found than a recent commentary by Senator Joe Biden Jr., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign relations Committee. Remember, if the Democrats controlled the Senate, this guy would be the Chair of that Committee. And if Biden otherwise had his way, he would also be the first President of the United States from Delaware.

Citing unspecified overtures from his friend, Jacques Chirac (!), Biden claims to have "sensed a new willingness to work with us in Iraq" and therefore contends that the time now is ripe to turnover the future of Iraq to--a Committee! Query what Biden's finely tuned "senses" have told him about the recently completed election.

And some committee this would be. According to Biden, just to keep the group manageable, it should include only the following interest groups:

* the United States;

* the Iraqi "government"(punt Joe--who would this include, and leave out?);

* the "major" European powers (presumably not to include Poland or any of the other current "alliance of the willing");

* "regional" allies (another punt),

* NATO; and

* the U.N.

According to Senator Biden, this craftily constructed little working group, meeting oh-say once a month maybe, "would review progress and coordinate assistance and strategy." But there's more: an even larger group, including unspecified "international financial institutions" and other members of the G-8, could meet "on a regular, but more infrequent basis" in order "to discuss ways to support the contact group's efforts."

Somehow, in one fell swoop, Biden has demonstrated why no US Senator is probably qualified to ever become President, least of all anyone from Delaware sitting on the Foreign Relations Committee, absent some additional experience in the real world by which he can demonstrate he has a shred of common sense about something.

First, this is because as Biden proves, it is plainly possible for a complete idiot to be elected to the Senate in the first place, and not to be "outed" for several terms, indeed for decades; and 2) the Senate being so incredibly isolated, and used to being the center of its own insulated universe, its members eventually come to believe that how the Senate "works" is really how the world ought to be run!

Given the prominence he is still being afforded in his own party, Senator Biden has also convincingly demonstrated why the democrats are no longer fit to govern.

Need further proof that the Democratic Party is not yet ready for prime time? John Kerry was grooming this man to be our next Secretary of State!

So now North Korea claims to have nukes

Everyone needs to keep their shorts untied and wait to see how this plays out. Past history at least strongly suggests that North Korea has been following the Saddam Hussein playbook; convincing the world that it has nukes, even though it may not have them, or if it does have them, in a form not capable of doing much of anything with them.

This is not to say that NK shouldn't be defanged; but time is on the side of the allies. And unlike in the Middle East, NK isn't infecting any of its neighbors with its militancy.

The most unfortune part about the scenario now playing out is that, as in Iraq, isolation will hurt the people of North Korea first, and its despicable leadership cadres last. But just as generals should never fight the last war, we all shouldn't be so sure that NK will have to play out as did Iraq.

History has a lot of other examples of people overthrowing their oppressive overlord masters, without outside assistance, and we may just see that happen here in the very near future.

Surely somewhere in NK there are still marketplaces with meathooks.

Am I missing something here?

A recent Washington Post article, by two “staff writers,” lamented a predicted drop in the stock market, as retiring seniors flood the market with stocks and bonds to raise cash for their retirement consumption.

"In the next two decades, as elderly populations swell throughout the developed world, retirees will begin withdrawing their savings, selling their financial holdings to raise cash and potentially glutting the world with stocks and bonds. Richard Jackson, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' global aging initiative, called it "the great depreciation scenario." Germany's Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging dubs it the "asset meltdown hypothesis." "

So what’s exactly the problem? That stock prices would be low, just as young workers were investing for the long haul? That it would be a buyer’s market? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Retirees want to raise cash and so they need to sell? Young workers are establishing their retirement accounts so they want to buy? So what’s the problem? According to the Post'S "staff writers:”

That would not be an auspicious environment for young investors opening personal accounts to replace a portion of their traditional Social Security benefits. Unspoken though is, why wouldn’t it be just that?


Worse, say the naysayers, to keep market prices up we’d have to rely on (gasp) THE THIRD WORLD.

"If there isn't an alternative source of demand for those assets, you're going to have a tremendous slowing of growth," said Jeremy J. Siegel, a University of Pennsylvania finance professor who just completed a book on the subject. "The only way to save the financial markets is very rapid growth in the developing world."

Again, it is very difficult to understand what the problem is about this. But isn’t that exactly who we are relying on now, without a problem? And isn’t there every indication that third world demand for our goods and services, including our stocks and bonds, will continue to be high, particularly so long as alternative markets (like Russia and China) continue to maintain themselves as highly uncertain places in which to park an investment.

But count on the Washington Post types writing here to find a dark cloud within that silver lining!

According to some accounts, the non-Kurdish Sunnis in Iraq have been shocked, shocked by the low non-Kurdish Sunni voter turnout in the recent elections. Apparently they had not believed the nay-says and dead-enders in the western press, who are their strongest supporters, and who were telling us all that the elections would never succeed because Sunni turnout would be so depressed by terrorism.

That the Sunnis still have options is perhaps the strongest proof yet of how ingenious has been our plan in Iraq (you know, the one the Dems keep saying that we've never had). Rather than recoil in despair as a result of having blown it so bad in this round of elections, and even though they now realize that they have misjudged everything about the election (a realization to which the Dems have yet to admit), the Sunnis still are not yet out of the end game.

This is because, as best I can tell, there are at least four more full elections between the beginning and the end of the Iraqis taking full ownership of their own liberation. Thus, if the Sunnis blew it in this election, as apparently they did, they will have every opportunity in at least two more elections in which not to blow it.

And any of the other factions that did participate in the most recent election, and that therefore have a seat at the table, can still choose to let the Sunnis in, if they deem it in their self interest to let them in. Which means that if the Sunnis behave themselves they likely can still get a seat at the table where the new constitution is being drafted. And after all, everybody learning to behave themselves seems to be what this whole process is about.

In an obvious attempt to recover her footing, Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal today defended her earlier and hostile critique of the Bush inaugural address.

Her defense is utterly unconvincing. Her original reaction to the address indicated that she had neither listened to nor read the address before reacting to it.

Her defense of her original review indicates that she is too stubborn to admit her mistake, and also contemptuous of this President and his White House. She also wants us all to remember that she worked for Ronald Reagan, and we didn't. Perhaps the most obvious proof that she is defending a critique of something that she now knows that the President never said is her feeble attempt to summarize what she contends that he said:

"To declare that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny
in the world, that we are embarking on the greatest crusade in the history of
freedom, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty
of every other nation--seemed to me, and seems to me, rhetorical and emotional
overreach of the most embarrassing sort."

But this is a gross distortion of what the President actually said. His address was really quite elegant in its simplicity, and Noonan ignores it. We are returning to our roots as a revolutionary country, that when given a choice supports freedom loving peoples everywhere they stand up for themselves, even as we continue to perfect our own version of democracy two hundred years after we began our own imperfect and uncompleted quest for that elusive goal.

Regarding fdoreign affairs, it is beyond fair debate that the President did not set us on some sort of Quixotic mission to free the world, as Noonan claims. He proclaimed only that we would no longer turn a blind eye to the oppressed of the world, and would support the freedom struggles of others, when others initiated them In doing so, he said, we would only be advancing the ideals upon which our own nation was founded:

“Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the
honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our
nation's security, and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the
United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and
institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending
tyranny in our world.”

But “seeking and supporting” the growth of democratic movements is not the same as initiating such movements ourselves. What the President is saying is that if you, seekers of freedom in other countries, seek to reform your own societies, the United States will support those efforts. That this was what the President was saying is reaffirmed unmistakably in at least four more places immediately following in his address:

“This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities.”

*
*
*

“America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal,
instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom and make their own way.”

*
*
*

“Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world. All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”

*
*
*

“The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know to serve your people, you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.”

Respectfully, the analysis of the address by the Peggy Noonans of the world just can’t be reconciled with the plain language of the document itself. It is not the President that got carried away with his rhetoric; its is the naysayers that thought they knew what the President was saying, without even listening to or reading what he said.

Having misrepresented to the public what the President said in his inaugural address in the first place, now that the President is reminding the Washington press corps of what he actually said, they accuse him of scaling back his ambitions.

President Bush yesterday characterized his Inauguration Day goal of
"ending tyranny in our world" as a long-term ideal rather than a new policy redefining U.S. relations with repressive governments, as he ratcheted back expectations of a more muscular approach to spreading freedom abroad.

Who will rid us of these meddlesome priests?

The President’s opponents in the media continue to ignore what the President actually said in his inaugural, which was that it would be the policy of the United States to support and encourage home-grown reform movements. In other words, in those countries where reformers are pushing for democracy and freedom, we would not ignore those reformers in favor of cozy relationships with the status quo.

The president did not say that the United States intended, as a matter of policy, to inject pro-democracy forces wherever we found them lacking, or run around the world liberating the oppressed wherever we could find them. Even his erstwhile friends, like Peggy Noonan, got this one wrong, because they did not listen to or read what he said, but heard or read only the screeching headlines about what he said.

The course the President committed us to is not a huge shift in policy at all, but more a change in emphasis. It does not mean that our foreign policy will now consist of seeking the release of every jailed dissident on the planet. It does mean, I suspect, that we will no longer align ourselves so openly and blithely with oppressive regimes.

Ironically, it appears to be, in a Republican sort of way, a response to the “why do they hate us” rhetoric the left responded to the 9/11 attacks with, way back when. And yet the President’s critics, exposing their insatiable anti Bush bias, still fault the President, now for focusing on exactly the concerns that the MSM contended had drawn the 9/11 attacks on the United States in first place.

That the President’s inaugural address was substantive and significant is verified by the fact that it has triggered such an ongoing and bitter debate, still going strong a week now after the address was first given.

The Washington Post reports this morning that the Bush administration is trying to bring civil service reform to the federal bureaucracy, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. "The Bush administration unveiled a new personnel system for the Department of Homeland Security yesterday that will dramatically change the way workers are paid, promoted, deployed and disciplined -- and soon the White House will ask Congress to grant all federal agencies similar authority to rewrite civil service rules governing their employees."

Once again, the Bush administration is ahead of the curve, and leaning forward hard. This sounds like a common sense reform that the politicos will have a hard time resisting, given that it is being sought first for Homeland Security. But if it is needed there and even more so if it succeeds, on what grounds other than to protect unions will anyone argue that we ought not to be implementing it everywhere? The reform also strikes at the good governance-distorting base of the current Democratic Party, namely public employee unions.

The concerns of some crtitics, that the motivational systems utilized in the private sector don't translate well where the public sector is concerned, is a canard. The private sector faces all of the same problems, and somehow gets the job done. There is no reason why the public sector can't do the same thing.