Boehner: Ix-Nay on That Eform-Ray!
Strictly from a political standpoint, I'm disappointed that the House Republican majority chose Ohio Rep. John Boehner to succeed Tom DeLay as majority leader, rather than Missouri's Roy Blunt. A man who left his wife of 30 years to dally with a tobacco lobbyist, whom he later married, Blunt's standing as a Republican literally in bed with Big Tobacco would have been a Democratic admaker's shimmery dream brought to life.

From a policy standpoint, though, I guess Boehner's about as good as we could hope from this collection of miscreants, troglodytes and fanatics. He's generally been a solid vote for greater resources and more flexible programming on federal workforce development and job training policy, my area of professional focus, and the (otherwise despicable) Rep. Peter King of Long Island pointed out last week that as an Ohioan, Boehner might generally be better disposed toward urban and economic issues than DeLay was or Blunt would have been.

But the reason the caucus chose him rather than Blunt pretty clearly was their fear of Abramoff-related voter rage this November, and their wish to present a different face to the country. In that sense, while Boehner might come across as less blatantly evil than dead-eyed DeLay or the baleful Blunt, he's sending signals that on the meat, he won't be very much different:

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has begun shifting his party toward an alternative lobbying reform package that stresses disclosure of lobbying contacts rather than the virtual ban on gifts and privately funded trips proposed last month by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).

In an interview yesterday, Boehner emphasized that he has no plan to change lobbying rules and will not draft one until he can reach a broad consensus with House Republicans, possibly at a retreat on Maryland's Eastern Shore next week. But he was quick to say the proposals that Hastert and House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) put forward are not the Republican Conference's plan.
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...Boehner will emphasize the immediate disclosure of contacts between lobbyists and lawmakers, allowing the voting public to decide whether those contacts are proper. And he will tackle what many Republicans see as the root of the lobbying problem -- the ease with which lawmakers can dole out millions of dollars in favors through pet provisions in spending bills.

Boehner said he endorsed only "in concept" a bill by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) that would make every such provision -- or "earmark" -- subject to challenge on the House or Senate floor.
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[H]e added, "members need to understand what's happening in the world. They need to understand what's happening with industry. That won't happen if they're locked up in a cubbyhole here in the Capitol."

Boehner called for the disclosure of any meal or gift from a lobbyist within 24 hours, both by the lawmaker and the lobbyist.

"If you can't go out and justify a $60 meal and see it in the press, then maybe you shouldn't go," he said. "But if you can, go ahead and do it, and let the world see what that relationship was. I think that's a far smarter way to go about this."

Maybe it's me, but this sounds like Boehner wants to incorporate the principle of "Don't ask permission; beg forgiveness" into law. No congressman is going to be deterred from shady doings by the prospect of disclosure; public shame doesn't work in the Age of Rove.

Consider: someone like Josh Marshall could rail all day about how Congressman Mephisto (R-TX) disclosed on a government website that OmniMegaCorp, where his wife works as a $400,000-a-year press flack, has paid for every bite of food he's eaten since 1983, and link to a Common Cause study that found that the distinguished gentleman has slipped clauses into legislation that have fatted Omni's bottom line by tens of millions. But will Mephisto's constituents even hear about it? Not likely; local media may or may not seize upon the story, and will make that decision--which you need to actuate the whole "shame" concept--based on factors beyond anyone's control. Perhaps if his opponent has sufficient resources, s/he will run a few campaign ads. But given that he's probably in a gerrymandered district, it won't be easy to raise the money to start with; donors like to support candidates with a legit shot to win.

And even if the word does get out, it's still far from assured that consequences will ensue. Inevitably, Mephisto's critics will be smeared as partisans, and a Scaife-funded think tank will produce another study proving the Congressman's direct lineage from Charlemagne.

If we believe the behavior in question--in this case, over-fraternization of public servants with lobbyists--either materially worsens public policy or erodes the public's trust in their elected officials, we should ban it. A cynical call for mere "disclosure," knowing that such information very likely will no more register than the proverbial fart in a windstorm, does nothing to reform the system.

Tragedy, Aisle 1. Farce? Aisle 2.
Two articles this morning nicely illustrate the state of things in American politics. First is Michael Kinsley on slate.com, pointing up again the Democratic Party's unfailing aim at its own feet, and how the broad contours of the political culture serve to enlarge the target.

It seems to be time once again to play Kick the Democrats. Everyone can play, including Democrats. The rules are simple. When Republicans lose elections, it is because they didn't get enough votes. When Democrats lose elections, it is because they have lost their principles and lost their way. Or they have kept their principles, which is an even worse mistake.

Democrats represent no one who is not actually waiting in line for a latte at a Starbucks within 150 yards of the east or west coastline. They are mired in trivial lifestyle issues like, oh, abortion and gay rights and Americans killing and dying in Iraq, while the Republicans serve up meat and potatoes for real Americans, like privatizing Social Security and making damned sure the government knows who is Googling whom in this great country. Just repeat these formulas until a Democrat has been sent into frenzies of self-flagellation, or reduced to tears.
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...Obviously the party that has lost the White House, both houses of Congress, and now the courts needs some new ideas and new energy. But it seems undeniably true to me—though many deny it—that the Republicans simply play the game better. You're not supposed to say that. At Pundit School they teach you: Always go for the deeper explanation, not the shallower one. Never suggest that people (let alone "the" people) can be duped.

I think Kinsley (perhaps intentionally) fails to acknowledge that everybody knows the Republicans "play the game better." But this might be so in part because Democrats--the activists, at any rate--have a pronounced aversion to "the game." The Alito confirmation is a classic case study of this. Liberals are enraged and despondent at the thought of this toadying careerist, with his decades-long record of right-wing activism and absolute deference to corporate power and the notion of a dictatorial executive, sitting on the Supreme Court until 2030. So they push for a filibuster that's almost certainly doomed to fail--and then the punditariat seizes upon that failure as further confirmation of liberal weakness. (And in the case of Bull Moose, whom I'm expecting to rejoin the Republicans by the end of this year at the outside, it's a sign of character failings as well.)

So the dilemma for Democrats is whether to acquiesce to Alito's confirmation--thus alienating the activists whose time, money and enthusiasm are absolute necessities for any hope of Democratic wins in 2006--or to stage the doomed filibuster attempt and invite the sure mockery of the media boobs.

While the Democrats dither, the Republicans in power continue to transform the country, in its character and the application of its Constitution, into something nearly unrecognizable. This outstanding Newsweek piece details internal Bush administration clashes over the notion of presidential power in wartime. What bothers me most about it is that, yet again, we see dedicated public servants all but run over by the ideologues in power and their functionaries--yet again, mostly operating out of the office of Super Dick Cheney.

Feb. 6, 2006 issue - James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed. Comey's farewell speech, delivered in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, contained all the predictable, if heartfelt, appreciations. But mixed in among the platitudes was an unusual passage. Comey thanked "people who came to my office, or my home, or called my cell phone late at night, to quietly tell me when I was about to make a mistake; they were the people committed to getting it right—and to doing the right thing—whatever the price. These people," said Comey, "know who they are. Some of them did pay a price for their commitment to right, but they wouldn't have it any other way."
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These Justice Department lawyers, backed by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president's eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men.

Newsweek's take on the story is a lot more optimistic than my own. The last line of the story reminds me of the conclusion of every PowerPuff Girls episode: "...thanks to a few quietly determined lawyers, a healthy debate has at last begun." But let's go back to Kinsley's assertion, that Republicans play the game better. While polling remains ambiguous on public support for wiretapping, the media story is already solidifying: "Americans will trade some civil liberties for greater security against terrorism." The panel on yesterday's Tim Russert show--all right-wing operatives, by the way, aside from the senile David Broder--said so themselves.

Last Tuesday night I saw the author Taylor Branch speak in Philadelphia, supporting the newly released final volume of his three-part Martin Luther King, Jr. biography, At Canaan's Edge. Branch recalled how the civil rights activist Diane Nash took the blame for the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover and others within the government who opposed racial progress and tried to destroy its champions. "Hoover was our fault," Branch remembered Nash saying--and he went on to suggest the same could be said of us with the Bush administration today. I am forced to agree.

Fist-Pumping Rock Meets Advanced Logistics
Annie and I saw Broken Social Scene this past Thursday night at Webster Hall. It was a fantastic show; perhaps the best compliment I can offer is that they played a handful of songs from their latest record that we didn't like based on the studio versions, but loved in the performance. The whole presentation was much more theatrical than your average club-rock gig, with complicated lighting programs for every song and what sometimes looked like dramatic interpretation on the part of the performers.

Of course, it's easier to add such flourishes when you've got literally 15 performers. While the specific number--and the alignment of who was playing what--shifted from song to song, BSS generally used two seated drummers, three or four guitarists, two bass players, and a keyboard. About half the songs also featured a 3-5 person horn section, and then other folks shaking maracas or other percussion instruments.

And this--even more than the great songs and strong performance--is what I find most impressive about Broken Social Scene. I played seriously, or semi-seriously, in three bands between when I was 15 and 21. The first one began as a cover band playing Jewish youth group events and had five or six guys. The latter two were both power trios, featured about 90 percent original songs, and performed out and about in Philadelphia and Providence. My main songwriting partner in both of them was a very good friend whom I saw just about every day. And it was still damn hard to align schedules for sufficient practice and really refine the sound.

Live performances brought a new set of difficulties. You worried about the mix and going out of tune. God forbid someone broke a string; the other two would try and transform into Martin and Lewis, and in any event it would be five minutes before the rock resumed. Now imagine all these problems with more than a dozen players. While there were some complaints late in the show about not hearing themselves in the monitor, and the mix sounded muddy to me on a few (not all) of the songs, by and large the show kept a brisk pace and you could hear it all.

Finally--and I have to admit this was never a major issue for any band I played in as a kid--there's the simple question of how you make any money with 14 or 15 players. The tickets were $25 each; of course I paid another $12 or so above that for the dubious privilege of buying them online, but that's what hapens when Monty Burns owns the means of distribution. Webster Hall's cut was doubtless significant too, and the band seemed less than thrilled with the venue--possibly because of the high cost (the audible techno dance floor below the stage didn't thrill them either; at one point the cranky vocalist stopped in mid-song to bitch about it). Then think about the cost of accommodations, a sound guy--and he has to be good, with all those inputs, and the feeding and boozing of all those performers. I can't imagine how they even meet expenses, much less clear any money.

And yet the songs are tight, the enthusiasm is evident, and these people have been doing this, albeit off and on, for at least five years. They're clearly either freaks or fanatics.

Hey Dems: Use This



Seriously.

Elephantiasis of the Executive (Part I)
I don't think it's attracting all that much attention yet, but the battle lines are being drawn for what I think is a sorely needed debate about the Bush administration's executive power grab in the context of the war on terror. Since Arlen Specter's (probably innocuous) thinking-out-loud about impeachment on one of the Sunday morning blabfests last weekend, we've heard from Al Gore--who gave a blistering speech about the implications of Bush's wiretapping argument--standing alongside libertarian/right-wing nut Bob Barr... and now, some of the leading figures of the Republican movement, including Grover Norquist, David Keane of the American Conservative Union, and Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation.

The banner they've united under--and please take a moment to appreciate the severe cognitive dissonance this is causing me--is "Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances."

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances (PRCB) today called upon Congress to hold open, substantive oversight hearings examining the President's authorization of the National Security Agency (NSA) to violate domestic surveillance requirements outlined in the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, chairman of PRCB, was joined by fellow conservatives Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR); David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, in urging lawmakers to use NSA hearings to establish a solid foundation for restoring much needed constitutional checks and balances to intelligence law.

"When the Patriot Act was passed shortly after 9-11, the federal government was granted expanded access to Americans' private information," said Barr. "However, federal law still clearly states that intelligence agents must have a court order to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans on these shores. Yet the federal government overstepped the protections of the Constitution and the plain language of FISA to eavesdrop on Americans' private communication without any judicial checks and without proof that they are involved in terrorism."

These guys, especially Norquist, have spent virtually their whole adult lives (and in some cases going back into childhood) as the unmatched champions of Party over Country. And if you read down further into the press release, it's clear that they are far from spoiling for a fight with the administration that's done so much to advance their dreams of total partisan ascendance. Finally, the group (or at least this release) is silent on the larger questions of executive overreach that I'd like to come back to in a later post. Nonetheless, it's striking and encouraging that there are evidently some principles that the Republican Ultras will stand up for.

On the other side, of course, is the administration; its usual echo chamber on the right (Fox news, the warbloggers, etc), scary think tanks like the Claremont Institute, and a few people who evidently just believe in virtually unlimited executive power. People like the Bull Moose, who excoriates the "Bob Barr Democrats" while comparing George W. Bush to Franklin D. Roosevelt as presidents who "admirably" expanded the power of the office to fight mortal threats to the country.

I often read the Bull Moose as a political/policy thinker of great talents who makes compelling points in the service of ultimately indefensible, sometimes borderline-incoherent arguments. Worse, like all too many bloggers, he overreacts to personal attacks and probably goes further on the page (or screen) than he really intends. In this entry, he's at pains to make distinctions between the "great liberal" FDR, and Bush, who "has unfortunately too often practiced the politics of division and plutocracy." And almost buried within the bombast and attacks on "the impeachment left," he writes, "There should be a reasoned and rational discussion about the balance of security and liberty during wartime." Who can argue with that? Of course, he fails to make the obvious point that "reasoned and rational discussion" is not a very prominent feature of Rovian politics.

All that said, Bull Moose offers one point I find very hard to argue with in light of the larger conversation about checks, balances, and how the Constitution is supposed to work:

If the Moose had his druthers, we would have divided government with different parties controlling the Presidency and the Congress. Neither party should be trusted with complete control over government - genuine checks and balances are a virtue. In fact, America was operating quite well from '96 - '98 before the Delayicans along with the Veep's new buddy, Mr. Barr, advanced impeachment.

As a matter of reality, he's probably right that we must rely on competing party interests, not institutional ones, to ensure the balanced, slow-moving but prudent and consensus-driven government the Founders envisioned. Which is where I'll hopefully pick this up next time. (No promises, of course...)

The Progressive's Paradox
Not much on the blogging front recently, I know. I think part of it is that I don't much feel like writing about politics these days, as it all seems to circle back to one philosophical dilemma I can't seem to figure out.

Though I'm clearly far, far closer to the Democratic mainstream than I am to the Republicans, to the core of my being I resist the idea of being a down-the-line, 100 percent partisan. Sites like Daily Kos increasingly strike me as not much less shrill and reflexive than their counterparts on the right; and like the reactionaries, the loudest and proudest on the left seem to have little notion of the public good that goes beyond "when our side wins." Obviously with some exceptions, there's an intellectual laziness and a willingness to accept received wisdom that I don't think advances the public interest. And the specific issues that most seem to energize "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" aren't the issues I believe to be most important, or even the ones that I think government should concentrate its powers on.

To take a somewhat abstract example, I wonder how the bulk of active Democrats, the sort of people who regularly visit sites like dKos, would respond to this question: if you could snap your fingers and make it so, would you rather pass a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing for all time the legal position decided in Roe v. Wade, or change the country's economic laws and norms such that private sector workers' wages (which have remained largely stagnant since 2000) were guaranteed to rise in some proportion to the profits of their employers (which have skyrocketed)? To me, it's a no-brainer: economic justice is a principle, while Roe is a single Supreme Court ruling (and one of questionable legal reasoning at that). And the goal of distributing prosperity in a more equitable fashion carries demonstrable positive externalities--makes a greater contribution to those overriding national priorities of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--that far outweigh whatever is gained through imposing one view by fiat. And, not less importantly, I don't think you could find a large segment of the population opposed to the notion that when a business venture thrives, its employees should partake in its success.

I'm not saying that reproductive rights aren't worth defending, or that I don't support the outcome of Roe: they are, and I do. But casting a decision in marble is emphatically not the same thing as winning an argument. You can only do that through debate and persuasion. As a progressive--hell, just as a pragmatist thinking about how representative government works in a society committed to pluralism and respectful of diverse opinions--I believe there has to be some process of convincing, not just compelling. It logically follows, then, that nobody has all the answers and no party or faction has a monopoly on vice or virtue; there's no one-size-fits all prescription for governance.

But here's my problem. While I'd like to take issues and elections on a case-by-case basis, and to see policy made from an empirical basis and toward utilitarian ends, the current politically dominant faction in our country is comprehensively partisan and almost totally ideological. The Karl Roves, Grover Norquists, Dick Cheneys, Tom DeLays and Pat Robertsons aren't interested in sober, deliberative, substantive policy debate. They don't believe in responsible governance, and seem to disdain the notion that it's even possible: how else can you appoint so many "Brownies" or staff the Iraq Provisional Authority with former College Republicans and campaign drivers? They aren't at all concerned about the dangers of partisanship: they know exactly what they want and spit on the notion of compromise. (Norquist: "Bipartisanship is date rape.") They are absolutely sure of their own virtue and correctness--a worldview that leads to personal hubris (the Abramoff scandal) and policy disaster (Iraq).

And a large portion of what they do is designed to perpetuate their faction's control on political power. Rove tells the president that "we can run on the Iraq war", flip-flops on the Department of Homeland Security, and draws up vicious attacks on the patriotism, war service and personal integrity of veterans like Max Cleland and John Kerry (and, let's not forget, John McCain). Cheney again and again posits a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. DeLay re-redraws the Texas congressional map, not to foster competitive elections but to maximize the number of solid Republican seats. He and Norquist conceive and implement the K Street Project to more solidly tie the lobbyist community to the Republican Party, ensuring a two-way flow of campaign money and favorable legislation. Robertson and his ilk whip up Christians into a permanent righteous rage by demonizing gays, feminists and secular humanists, and mobilize them to vote a straight Republican ticket.

Now obviously, this Partei Uber Alles worldview doesn't hold with every Republican--though the guys currently in charge certainly seem to want it that way. McCain often has put principle (from fiscal responsibility to the torture issue), and process (campaign finance reform), ahead of party interests. Snowe, Collins and Chafee all seem to vote on issues rather than just follow their leadership (and get viciously attacked for it by rank and file right-wing activists). There are others. I devoutly hope that one day they'll regain the upper hand in their party, restoring the GOP to its one-time vision of fiscal conservatism and healthy distrust of big, intrusive government in all aspects of public life.

But unless and until that happens, how does one resist the current mutant strain of Republicanism? Is the answer to ape its methods and look for our own Roves and Norquists? Do we really want to build a Democratic Noise Machine? If we distrust ideological "solutions" and consider blind partisanship a bad end unto itself, I don't think we can do those things. I'm certain that we can't do them with the total commitment they demand.

So I'm stuck.

Postscript: the site to which I link in the Roe parenthetical above actually has a quotation that sums this up with much greater elegance and brevity than I've managed here:

"The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment."
--Bertrand Russell

Guess that's why he got the big bucks...

DeLay and Delayism
A beautiful day here in Brooklyn just got even brighter:

WASHINGTON - Embattled Rep. Tom DeLay on Saturday abandoned his bid to remain as House majority leader, clearing the way for leadership elections among Republicans eager to shed the taint of scandal.

In a letter to rank-and-file Republicans, DeLay said, "I have always acted in an ethical manner."

At the same time, "I cannot allow our adversaries to divide and distract our attention," the Texas Republican wrote.

DeLay is battling campaign finance charges in Texas and was forced to step aside temporarily as majority leader last fall after he was charged in his home state. He has been trying to clear his name and, until Saturday, resume his leadership role.

In a separate letter to Speaker Dennis Hastert, DeLay said he intends to seek re-election to his House seat in November "while I work to clear my name of the baseless charges leveled against me."

DeLay's about-face came amid growing pressure from fellow Republicans who were concerned about their own political futures in the wake of this past week's guilty pleas by lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
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DeLay acted hours after a small vanguard of Republicans circulated a petition calling for leadership elections and citing DeLay's legal problems as well as his long ties to Abramoff.
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"The developments with Abramoff have "brought home the fact that we need not just new leaders but a course correction," Flake said.

Rep. Heather Wilson (news, bio, voting record) of New Mexico, a perennial election-year target of Democrats, said she did not want DeLay to return as majority leader.

And GOP Rep. Jim Ramstad (news, bio, voting record) of Minnesota said, "It's clear that we need to elect a new majority leader to restore the trust and confidence of the American people."

It puts me in mind of the great scene toward the end of "GoodFellas," where Henry Hill is in the police station and the cops are checking out the evidence confiscated from his mistress's apartment. One cop sticks his finger in the caked white goop on a kitchen scale, brings it to his mouth, tastes it, and smiles wolfishly. Off-camera, his partner says to Henry, "Buh-bye, dickhead."

But let's not overdo it just yet. I'm guessing the recent polling that found Democrats with a record 49-36 advantage in generic congressional balloting has something to do with this. Also, it certainly doesn't mean that DeLay won't still be twisting arms and calling shots on key votes, as he continued to do after formally stepping down from his leadership post. (Though one would hope that the money he previously commanded--see below--in doing so has dried up enough to shrivel his powers.) And I'd still feel better about the party's chances to capitalize politically on DeLay's woes if leading Democrats connected the shit policy emanating from Congress to the systematic pay-for-play system that Hot Tub Tom has created (with lots of help from people like Abramoff, Norquist and Ralph Reed) over the last ten-plus years--though this could be my white-boy wonkitude and politically irrelevant reform fetish getting in the way of a dispassionate political judgment. (But then, ya gotta go with what ya know.)

Finally, Josh Marshall--who's been The Man on this story for years now--is absolutely right that a Congress producing "DeLayism without DeLay" really offers little more, aside from aesthetic value, than what we've seen since the mid-'90s. His hope is that the collatoral damage done by these scandals, and their impact in waking up the press that there's a very compelling story here about how our government functions, has rendered this impossible:

One of the great questions of the last decade is how congressional Republicans managed to maintain such unprecedented party discipline. The standard answer is that that's how Tom DeLay earned his nickname 'The Hammer', by squashing anyone who threatened to get out of line. Only that's not really quite how the House GOP Caucus functioned. Notwithstanding the reputation DeLay liked to cultivate, he worked a lot more with Carrots than Sticks. And that means money. Lots and lots and lots of money. A lot of it unaccountable money; a lot of it 'don't ask where it came from' money; but lots and lots of money, and as long as you were there with the caucus on the important votes, a lot of it would be yours.

You can't understand the K Street Project or the sort of slush fund Jack Abramoff was running without understanding that Tom DeLay had built a very effective patronage machine -- one that organized a great deal of the money in the city in the hands of the political leadership.

Most people now think that the Abramoff indictments effectively end any realistic hope for DeLay to reclaim the leadership. So the question is whether you end up with DeLayism without DeLay -- the same money and machine, just under a new boss.

On the one hand, you have acting Majority Leader Roy Blunt, who ants to push DeLay aside and claim the post for himself. But Blunt is a DeLay Man through and through, part of the machine in every way. On the other hand, you've got rebels who just don't think the GOP can get out from under these scandals without a real change in leadership and direction.

That's the fight the Post article talks about. But a big part of what's happening now isn't just which leadership slate takes over the House GOP Caucus. At a deeper level, the Abramoff scandal may do so much damage to the machine DeLay built -- by knocking out key leaders, exposing illegality and 'legal' corruption -- that whomever comes out on top may not be able to run the place with anything like the party discipline DeLay managed during his years in power.

At the risk of getting all metaphyiscal, though, let me suggest another trememndous benefit of DeLay's resignation from the leadership (and hopefully his retirement or defeat as he runs for another term this year). As regular readers know, my great fear throughout the last three years especially, since Republicans retook the Senate and imposed one-party rule with unmatched partisan fury, was that the political immune system the Founders bequeathed was under potentially fatal attack from the virus of Republican hyper-partisanism.

I don't think it's too much to say that the explicit objective of people like Karl Rove, Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist was to subjugate the system of checks and balances designed to produce utilitarian governance--to overthrow the sentiment James Madison expressed in The Federalist No. 51 when he wrote "Ambition must be made to counter ambition." In the one-party context, so long as goods--money, power, prestige--were spread around in an effective way, there was much less risk of a president vetoing legislation that served little purpose other than rewarding interest groups. Or the Senate rejecting judicial appointments made to advance a specific and articulated ideological agenda that might transgress the Constitution. Or, for that matter, the Supreme Court invalidating legislation or placing restrictions on the power of the executive. The whole Republican project was to align partisan ambitions, lubricating differences with a big campaign check here, a sinecure there, a symbolic gesture somewhere else, and a steady stream of policy that rewarded friends and punished enemies.

The ultimate check, though, rests with the voters. Someone evidently made a determination that holding onto DeLay raised an unacceptable risk of eroding the power base that makes "DeLayism," which is as good a name for this whole arrangement as any, possible in the first place. But while the most odious champion of that system has been knocked down (not even out), we have to keep in mind that the assault on Constitutional governance continues.

Ney, DeLay, and Doolittle
Some years ago, I think during the last campaign finance debate, I remember reading how these three names, all leading opponents of reform, seemed so perfectly to sum up the Republican position on pretty much and all positive government action. (Disclaimer: this might have been Josh Marshall's joke, more pithily expressed.) Turns out, though, that in a development Dickens might have scripted, they're all potential targets of the Jack Abramoff investigation. Ney, who's clearly a dead duck, and multiple-trial man DeLay you knew about, but salon.com also notes the involvement of Rep. Doolittle (among many others):

Recent reports suggest a long lineup of members of Congress and family who still face scrutiny, including DeLay and his wife, Christine, Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., and his wife, Julie. Dozens more lawmakers, including leaders from both parties, supported the initiatives of Abramoff's clients and were later rewarded by political contributions. All but six of the top 20 recipients of campaign contributions from Abramoff's clients are Republican.

Of course, this last factoid will be spun differently in publications and by pundits less sympathetic to progressive politics. But I actually believe the bipartisan nature of the scandal, however limited or broad it might be, can work to Democrats' advantage. How better to differentiate themselves from the ruling Republicans than by showing a willingness to root out corruption and punish the guilty whatever the letter after their title and name? Democratic partisans commonly bewail the seeming mystery of why the public generally agrees with them on policy issues, but puts their opponents in office: one reason, I think, is that they don't sufficiently differentiate themselves. Already, polling seems to show that the public doesn't see corruption as a Republican problem; they see it as a government problem. Prominently hanging a couple dirty Democrats out to dry--regardless of how good they might be at fundraising--could really help here in terms of which party deserves to be trusted with power.

...

Happy new year to all. You'll notice some new links and sidebar organization here, the first of several changes to the site. It's now possible to link to single posts, in case you want to forward anything of value I stumble onto here, and in terms of content/subject matter I expect my new work role as a contractor/freelancer will influence what we're talking about. Hopefully these changes will be for the best.

One change I'm looking forward to is a new occupant in the New York governor's office as of next January. Today, the lame-duck--and just generally lame--George Pataki gave his final "State of the State" address. For those of you who aren't New Yorkers, Pataki has so totally checked out of his current job that he spent the eve of the NYC transit strike trying to make friends and raise money in New Hampshire; the buffoon actually thinks he can mount a serious campaign for president. In advance of today's address, I was joking with colleagues that Pataki's presidential fever might derange him sufficiently to mention ethanol--the corn-based fuel that Iowa caucus hopefuls always find so compelling--in his speech. Per the Times, so help me, he really did!

The Good Bureaucrat
I'll briefly interrupt my holiday blogging hiatus--as if I ever really need a pretext--to point out a Times editorial today about a rare Republican appointee who has shown professionalism and a loyalty to country above party: Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Of course, he's retiring this week, so this could prove a mere blip in the general pattern of Brownies and Manns.

Often, what Mr. Holtz-Eakin said wasn't what his bosses wanted to hear. He went on record in 2003 saying that President Bush's tax and spending plans would do little or nothing for long-term economic growth. One report issued under his leadership showed that Mr. Bush's tax cuts heavily favored the wealthiest Americans. Another debunked the politically potent but false contention that the estate tax hurts farmers.

By going where the facts and figures led, Mr. Holtz-Eakin also protected his agency, which may be the last bastion of neutral government analysis in Washington. To succeed him, Congressional leaders need a top economist who has a reputation to protect and is a superb number cruncher, fluent communicator of complex issues and good manager.

Given the new raft of obscene tax cuts for Bush Pioneers now on the table, I half-expect them to just synthesize a clone from Arthur Laffer's nose hair or something. Paul Krugman's recent characterization of congressional Republicans as "tax cut zombies"--mindlessly shambling after more, forgetful or indifferent as to why they thought cuts made sense in the first place, much less what their effects might be in the current context of decent macro growth and scary debt accumulation--is all too apt, and I fully expect a (very late) Night of the Living Capital Gains Cuts coming soon to a Capitol near you.

A Few Thoughts on the Transit Strike
So here we are, back to normal in the city, and people are trying to determine what it was all about. Was anything accomplished, other than great inconvenience to the city's seven million commuters?

There were cultural, legal, economic and citizenship aspects to this labor action and its consequences; the more I think about it, the more interesting it really is. Probably a book is in here for someone. I don't really want to spend much time dwelling on the cultural/racial aspects to this: yes, you've got a bunch of white MTA members in suits on one side, opposed by darker-skinned union leaders speaking in accented English. Did that influence perceptions and press coverage? I'm sure it did, but I'm much more skeptical that it really meant anything extra in either the breakdown of talks or the eventual resolution. Similarly, I think we can dismiss the legal angle: the Taylor Law is little more than a club with which to beat public employee unions, and I would be very surprised if the fines imposed on the TWU as a result of their "illegal" strike are actually assessed. They're leverage, window dressing. And as I'll note below, they're arguably counterproductive in terms of resolving the actual issues.

It's the economic and "citizenship" (for lack of a clearly better word) aspects that really interest me here. A week ago I didn't have much sympathy for the strikers: the work I do has made me very aware--perhaps overly aware--of how closely related are educational attainment and earning power in this economy. The transit workers, most of whom I believe aren't college-educated, earn an average wage considerably higher than the city mean, with much more generous benefits including the pension that ultimately proved the sticking point in negotiations. Who were they, I figured, to stand athwart a macroeconomic trend that shifts the burden of retirement security to the worker?

As I thought about it more, though, I became disgusted by my own position. What I'd half-articulated was that the union should, in effect, lie back and enjoy it as a corrupt agency that logically shouldn't even exist moved to take away compensation they'd fought for. To put it another way (a way that's been put pretty widely, for the little that's worth), why should they have it better than the rest of us who are doing without pensions?

The answer, of course, is "because they can." And the reason why they can is because they're organized. Public sector unions comprise much of what's left of the American labor movement; those of us who believe we need to re-unionize the workforce, particularly among the less-skilled who have next to no individual bargaining power, damn well shouldn't be encouraging the current remnants to roll over. Particularly when the Authority they're battling has a terrible track record of dishonest bookkeeping and no accountability.

I'm not inclined to get into the specifics of the proposals kicked around between the two sides, others than to note that MTA's last pre-strike offer on wages was barely enough to keep up with projected inflation. If you were negotiating with an employer who admitted to a $1 billion surplus, you'd probably want more too.

So that leaves us with the citizenship question: was it simply a dick move to strike in the last week before Christmas? Critics of the union, from Mayor Bloomberg to many of the posters here, point to the pain and inconvenience inflicted on the city and/or its low-income workers. This is an unarguable point, and one the union leaders claim not to have taken lightly. Many of these same critics, at the link above and elsewhere, have said that their issue isn't with the union's demands, but rather with the action they took.

The problem is, I'm not sure what else they could have done. A commentator on NY1 yesterday made a great point about the above-mentioned Taylor Law: if you obey it as a public employee union, you've got no leverage to push for a settlement. I couldn't believe this hadn't occurred to me before: the NYC teachers and cops have both gone years recently working on expired contracts. Individuals in very difficult and very important jobs went without raises, changes to work conditions, anything even that might have indicated the city took them seriously. How many cops took retirement, how many teachers left for suburban districts or the private sector during those periods? The union got its nose bloodied and might face some fines, but they've also moved the ball dramatically on getting their deal. Perhaps the problem is with the Taylor Law, not the strike.

A final thought. New Yorkers are tough, and they surely hated the inconvenience of the strike for what it cost them personally. But despite the rantings of the tabloid papers, a large majority ultimately didn't blame the union:

According to an exclusive NY1 poll, 41 percent of New Yorkers think both the MTA and the Transport Workers Union are to blame for the strike. About 27 percent solely fault the MTA while 25 blame the union for the walkout.
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The poll does find, though, that 54 percent of New Yorkers think what the union wants is fair compared to 36 percent who do not.

Emphasis mine. It's a heartening notion that New Yorkers might value the idea of a fair shake for workers as much as a more-convenient commute.

The End of Welfare Reform as We Knew It
I really am going to write about the NYC transit strike soon. My problem has been that, as when one watches a Cowboys-Redskins football game or a Marlins-Braves diamond contest, I want both sides to lose; and while the strike has been a terrible imposition on millions of my fellow New Yorkers (including my wife, who needed two hours to get from Prospect Heights in Brooklyn to the Columbia campus today), for me it's meant the cancellation of meetings and a chance to watch Battlestar Galactica all day on Sci-Fi yesterday, with probably a matinee of the Harry Potter flick this afternoon... but I do think the strike brings into focus some very important issues about both the changing nature of employment and the profoundly fucked up budgeting/policymaking process on the state and federal level which has led the TWU and the MTA to fight over a pie that should be much bigger than it is.

Which brings me to today's subject: how right-wing Senate Republicans ended the welfare reform debate today with a Trojan-Horse provision to a budget bill. Big Swinging Dick Cheney cast the tie-breaking vote this morning on a measure that, per the Times, "imposes the first restraints in nearly a decade in federal benefit programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and student loans." But it also rewrites the country's public assistance policy, which has been stalemated in debate over the long-pending reauthorization of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. (I referenced this the other day in my discussion of the Patriot Act.) New Donkey explains:

[W]ith relatively little notice, our Republican buddies have also sought to pull off a back-door maneuver that could unravel the consensus supporting welfare reform... there's been a deadlock in the Senate over the administration's demand that work requirements for welfare recipients be increased without additional money for child care assistance, and the Democratic position (most notably promoted by Sens. Evan Bayh and Tom Carper) that the tighter work requirements will fail without the child care resources that make it possible for single mothers to go to work (a smaller group of Democrats oppose increased work requirements altogether),

So now the GOPers are using the budget bill, which can't be filibustered, to simply impose their position on welfare on the Congress and the country, even though some of these provisions were not in either the House or Senate version of the bill.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an outstanding social policy research organization, has the gory details. Essentially, this action does the following:

• Forces states to herd more public assistance recipients into work, while extending only $1 billion in new assistance for childcare. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that to meet the much higher work participation requirements the law imposes, states would need $12 billion in new childcare funding. Already in New York--one of the most generous states in the country for providing supports to low-income working mothers--we've got several hundred thousand kids in need of child care going without it.


• Imposes crippling unfunded mandates on the states. Long gone, evidently, are the days when Newt Gingrich's newly empowered Republican majority pledged not to pass legislation driving state expenditures without allocating federal resources to help pay the freight. This was, in my opinion, the single best thing the Republicans in Congress did in their now 11 years in the majority; it's been under assault for awhile in measures like homeland security and No Child Left Behind, but this seems to render it an utterly dead letter.


• Standardizes and nationalizes policy that states previously had been largely free to set in response to local conditions. Federalism--the idea that policymakers "closest to the ground" know better what best suits their communities than their counterparts in Washington--seems to be another one of those principles that Republicans once honored but have discarded when they didn't get the results they sought. Under welfare reform as passed in 1996, states had tremendous flexibility to set policies in response to local needs and conditions. Some states, like New York, went out of their way to support low-income working families, figuring that their commitment didn't end when the individual left the welfare rolls. Others (not New York, especially) were more lenient in setting what activities counted as "work-related," which made things easier on disabled aid recipients and afforded greater access to the education and training activities that gave participants their best shot to permanently emerge from poverty. That's gone now. Given the nature of the mandates, states that don't focus on "maximum engagement" are assured of losing federal programs dollars.

There's so much wrong here, I'm having trouble writing about this coherently. And that's even before getting to the fact that these cuts are designed in part to defray the cost of yet more tax breaks for the super-rich investor class.

But, as usual for me, this really comes down to both values and investment strategy. These changes represent a kick in the teeth to families trying to lift themselves out of dependency. Since 1996, welfare reform has done two things above all else: it shifted millions of Americans from public assistance to the low-wage workforce, and it concentrated the truly unable to work on what was left of the rolls. The latter group are essentially society's dependents--the mentally ill, the disabled and infirm. While it's important to keep engaging with them, trying to migrate as many of them as possible into the workforce, they shouldn't be the focus of policy.

The first, much larger group--those now working but still very much on the economic margin--should be our focus. How can we stabilize their finances? How can we help them build assets--savings, education, home ownership? What tools can we give them to advance in their careers, earn more money, pay more taxes, more fully integrate into our economy and society? While I don't think any state, or any think tank or advocacy group, would claim to have the answers to these questions, we've made some progress, and improved a lot of lives. We've substantially been able to make policy that reinforces shared values: the Earned Income Tax Credit, a bipartisan favorite, rewards work. Individual Development Accounts provide public or private matches to the savings of low-wage workers. Programs like New York's Wheels for Work directly put public resources behind the efforts of low-wage workers to stay on the job.

All that is now imperiled, because Senate Republicans used procedural chicanery to end an argument they couldn't win on the merits. Merry Christmas, working poor America.

Ladies and Gentlemen...
Mr. Bill Moyers. This from a speech last May--the best articulation I've ever seen of the empty symbolism that now passes for patriotic sentiment:

Apparently there was apoplexy in the right wing area, particularly when I closed the [NOW] broadcast one Friday night by putting a flag in my lapel and said--well, here's exactly what I said. Here's a copy of what I said: "I wore my flag tonight, first time. Until now I haven't thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans. Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustain me, whose armed forces protected me and whose ideals inspired me. I offered my heart's affection in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother's picture on my lapel to prove her son's love. Mother knew where I stood. So does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15th. So what's this doing here? I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo, the trademark--the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On most Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it's the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official labels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's Little Red Book of orthodoxy on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread.

"But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapel while writing books and running web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks, even as they call for spending more on war.

"So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks. or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the 'Coalition of the Willing.' I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government, and it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that war, except in self defense, is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country."

What I love about Moyers is that, more than anybody, he's been the chronicler of and tribune against the right-wing assault on the American system itself. With NOW, he marvelously documented both causes and effects; he also tried to raise the level of conversation, and was scrupulously fair about incorporating perspectives with which he clearly disagreed. I remember watching one night when he had on David Keane of the American Conservative Union. After the substance of whatever they were discussing, Keane closed by saying something like, "I don't think you're treasonous or un-American, Bill. Just wrong." Moyers left it at that.

But this commitment to full debate didn't do it for the current ruling powers of Occupied Washington. As is now well known, they tried to drown out Moyers and bury NOW in a sea of right-wing noise. In this incredible speech given recently at an anniversary celebration for the National Security Archive, Moyers finally told his side of the story.

Once upon a time--four years ago to be exact--PBS asked me to create a new weekly broadcast of news, analysis, and interviews. They wanted it based outside the beltway and to be like nothing else on the air: report stories no one else was covering, conduct a conversation you couldn't hear anywhere else. That we did. We offered our viewers a choice, not an echo. In our mandate, we reached back to the words of Lord Byron that once graced the masthead of many small town newspapers: "Without, or with, offence to friends or foes," he said, "I sketch your world exactly as it goes."
...
We reported real stories and talked with real people about real problems. We told how faraway decision-making affected their lives. We reported on political influence that led to mountaintop removal mining and how the government was colluding with industry to cover up the effect of mercury in fish on pregnant women.

We described what life was like for homeless veterans and child migrants working in the fields. We exposed Wall Street shenanigans and tracked the Washington revolving door. We reported how Congress had defeated efforts to enact safeguards that would mitigate a scandal like Enron, and how those efforts were shot down by some of the same politicians who were then charged with investigating the scandal. We investigated the Deputy Secretary of the Interior, Steven Griles, a full�18 months before he resigned over conflicts of interest involving the oil and mining industries for which he had been a lobbyist on the other side of that revolving door. We reported on those secret meetings held by Cheney with his industry pals and attempted to find out who was in the room and what was discussed. We reported how ExxonMobil had influenced the White House to replace a scientist who believes global warming is real.

We won an Emmy for the hour-long profile of Chuck Spinney, the Pentagon whistleblower who worked from within to expose graft and waste in defense spending. And the blog, Dailykos.com, speculated that it was our interview with Ambassador Joe Wilson, two weeks before the invasion of Iraq and months before Robert Novak outed Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, that first outraged the administration. "An honor I dreamed not of."


None of this escaped the attention of the Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, a buddy of Karl Rove and the designated driver for the administration's partisan agenda for public broadcasting. Tomlinson set out, secretly, to discredit our broadcast. He accused us of being unfair and unbalanced, but that wouldn't wash. We did talk with liberal voices like Howard Zinn, Susan Sontag, Sister Joan Chittester, Isabel Allende, Thomas Frank and Arundhati Roy. But we also spoke with right-wingers like Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Cal Thomas, Frank Luntz, Richard Viguerie, Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and then his successor, Paul Gigot.

What got Tomlinson's goat was our reporting. After all, we kept after his political pals for keeping secrets, and over and again we reported on how the big media conglomerates were in cahoots with official Washington, scheming for permission to get bigger and bigger. The mainstream media wouldn't touch this topic. Murdoch, Time Warner, Viacom, GE/NBC, Disney/ABC, Clear Channel, Sinclair--all stood to gain if their lobbying succeeded. Barry Diller appeared on our broadcast and described the relationship between the big news media and Washington as an "oligarchy." Sure enough, except for NOW with Bill Moyers, the broadcast media were silent about how they were lobbying for more and more power over what Americans see, read, and hear. It was left to one little broadcast, relegated to the black hole of Friday night, to shine the light on one of the most important stories of the decade.

What finally sent Tomlinson over the edge and off to the ramparts, however, was a documentary we did about the people of Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. The Morgan Knitting Mill there had just laid off more than a third of its workforce-- the last of 25 textile mills that sustained the townspeople after the demise of the coal industry. The jobs were going to Honduras and China. Our report told how free trade agreements like NAFTA had encouraged companies to lay off American workers, produce goods more cheaply abroad and then import the goods back here. We showed how the global economy contributes to the growing inequality in America, with the gap between the rich and poor doubling in the last three decades until it is now wider than in the days of the Great Depression.

Those are the facts--"reality-based" reporting--that caused Tomlinson to tell The Washington Post that what he saw was "liberal advocacy journalism." Well, if reporting what happens to ordinary people because of events beyond their control, and the indifference of government to their fate, is liberalism, I plead guilty.

Tomlinson was now on the warpath. In secret (his preferred modus operandi ) he hired an acquaintance out in Indianapolis named Fred Mann to monitor the content of our show. What qualified Fred Mann for the job has been hard to learn. His most recent position was as director of the Job Bank and alumni services at the National Journalism Center in Herndon, Virginia, an organization that is administered by the Young America's Foundation, which is, in turn, affiliated with the rightwing Young Americans for Freedom. The foundation describes itself as "the principle outreach organization for the conservative movement" and has received funding from ExxonMobil and Phillip Morris, among others. But the trail to Mann went cold there. Several journalists have tried telephoning or emailing him. I tried four times just this week to reach him. One enterprising young reporter even left notes for him at an Indianapolis Hallmark Store where Mann frequently faxed data to Tomlinson. No luck. I guess we'll have to wait for Robert Novak to out him.

Fred Mann never got around to writing his full report, but when members of Congress pressed Tomlinson to show them the notes from Mann, it turns out that he had divided NOW's guests into categories, with headings like, "Anti-Bush," "Anti-business," and "Anti-Tom DeLay." He characterized Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, who departed from Republican orthodoxy to question the Iraq war, as "liberal," which must have come as a quite a shock to the senator.

During all this I sought several times to meet with Tomlinson and the Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I wanted to ask them first-hand what was going on and to discuss the importance of public broadcasting's independence. They refused. I invited Tomlinson more than once to go on the air with me, with a moderator and format of his choosing, to discuss our views on the role of public broadcasting. He refused.

But all the while he was crudely pressuring the President of PBS, Pat Mitchell, to counter NOW. And he himself was in direct contact with Paul Gigot, the rightwing editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, to bring to PBS a show that Gigot had hosted on the cable business network CNBC until it was cancelled for lack of an audience. So the Journal Editorial Report came to PBS, with the Wall Street Journal, that fierce defender of the free market, accepting over $4 million of taxpayer dollars courtesy of Ken Tomlinson.

The emails between Tomlinson and Gigot during this time reveal two ideological soul mates scheming to make sure "our side," as they described themselves, gets "an absolute duplication of what Moyers is doing." But as the record will show, Gigot's show was nowhere near what NOW with Bill Moyers was doing. We were digging, investigating, and reporting; they were opining. We were offering a wide range of opinions and views; they were talking to each other. The participants on Gigot's broadcast were his own staff members at the newspaper whose editorial pages are the Pravda of American journalism, where the Right speaks only to the Right. To be blunt about it, we had more diversity of opinion on a single broadcast than Gigot had all year or than he has ever tolerated on his own editorial pages. Reporting? You have to be kidding. In their private exchange of emails Tomlinson informs Gigot that he doesn't really need to do field reporting. Gigot agrees, and goes on to say that he finds such reporting not only a waste of time and money, but "boring" [I'm not making this up: the editor of the editorial page of a great American newspaper finds field reporting "boring."] So it is that ideologues like Gigot can hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality.
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Gigot has now taken his show to FOX News, where such tactics will find a compatible home among like-minded partisans. "Our side" turns out to be the great Republican noise machine. A couple of days after that announcement, the Wall Street Journal published a thoroughly disingenuous editorial, obviously written by Gigot, defending Kenneth Tomlinson and their own involvement with him, while taking potshots at the Inspector General of CPB who had investigated the whole mess at the request of members of Congress. The editorial compared him to Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau.

But in a final triumph of reporting and evidence over ideology and spin, the Inspector found that Tomlinson had committed multiple transgressions: he broke the law, violated the corporation's guidelines for contracting, meddled in program decisions, injected politics into hiring procedures, and admonished CPB executive staff "not to interfere with his deal" with Gigot. The emails show Tomlinson bragging to Karl Rove, who played an important role in his appointment as chairman, about his success in "shaking things up" at CPB. They also confirm that he had consulted the White House about recruiting loyalist Republicans to serve as his confederates in an organization that had been created in 1967 to prevent just such partisan meddling in public broadcasting. (Thanks to Tomlinson and his White House allies, the new President of CPB is the former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. She arrives under a cloud that only her actions can dispel. We shall see.)

Curiously, Gigot's Wall Street Journal editorial conveniently failed to mention that the emails between himself and Tomlinson indicate Tomlinson perjured himself under oath, before Congress, when he said he had nothing to do with the agreement that landed Gigot at PBS. Fact is, they worked hand-in-glove. As I just mentioned, Tomlinson told his own staff not to interfere with "his deal" with Gigot. There's even an email in which Tomlinson says to Gigot, after they have been plotting on how to bring the proposed Gigot show to fruition, "Let's stay in close touch."

Neocon Fantasy Camp
I had to listen to Bush's speech tonight, as Fox pushed back Family Guy to show it and, well, I didn't really want to get up. Besides, every time he gets in front of the cameras I figure there's about a 1 percent chance he'll just resign--and not necessarily at the start of the speech, but maybe in the middle. Maybe mid-sentence: "Saddam Hussein's regime maintained interest in and capability to start reconstituting its arsenal of deadly... ahhh, you know what? Fuck this. I quit. I'm going home. It's too fucking hard and I don't really care all that much."

But actually watching this thing, I think he honestly fails to understand that the two goals he repeatedly points toward in Iraq--a soverign nation-state with popularly sanctioned government, and a strategic partner and ally for the U.S. in the region--are simply incompatible.

These people, for a lot of reasons, will not choose to be on friendly terms with the United States. (They probably won't even choose to be on friendly terms with each other; the Kurds want their own state, and the sectarian divisions will prove stronger than the West-imposed "national identity" of Iraq. They don't think of themselves as a country any more than three people in a horse costume might think of themselves as a horse.)

But when they look at America--the country that sent money and weapons to help keep Saddam in power over them for decades; then encouraged a revolt against Saddam; then did nothing as he crushed the revolt; then imposed sanctions that helped kill hundreds of thousands (and suggested that hideous cost was "worth it") and visited upon "the Iraqi people" infinitely pain and suffering than they did Saddam--they are not going to see a friend. They certainly are not going to see a model to emulate. The goals of our grand state policy toward Iraq have shifted over time, but the means have always been the same: to use and abuse "the Iraqi people". Whatever our policymakers' actual intentions are (oil? military bases? honestly to spread democracy and self-determination?), those on the receiving end of them aren't assuming the best.

Given that there is no tradition of "civil government" among Muslims, in the sense of governance without an explicit religious sanction, it's a pretty safe bet that Iraq ultimately will elect something like an operational theocracy. I guess there is some chance (but not much of one, given the great differences in historical experience) Iraq--again, assuming such a state continued to exist at all--could eventually turn into Turkey. It's much more likely--because of oil, ethnicity and a similarly fraught history with the United States--that they'll turn into something like Iran. Again, it's possible that the two Islamic states, given their own recent and very deadly war, will become rivals and in some sense balance each other out (in which case we could have two Islamist powers seeking the Bomb--also not a great scenario). It's also possible that their common interests and shared Shi'a majorities will bring them together in partnership.

But what's absolutely not possible is for a secular, pro-Western government to organically emerge, with true popular support. It's not coincidence that the U.S. chose first Chalabi, and than Allawi, for leadership of the post-Saddam Iraq: They were the closest to this ideal they could think of. In Chalabi's case that meant a proven liar and con man, who turned out to be even worse than we'd thought. In Allawi's case, it meant presenting a known CIA asset, who had turned after actually being allied with Saddam at one point, as the best match for this American ideal of an Iraqi leader.

For the two cornerstones of Bush's speech about Iraq to be true--that we are building both a self-governing and eventually pro-U.S. government--is, based on everything we know about these people and this part of the world, almost unimaginable. This shouldn't be news to anyone in a position of power. So here's my questions: does he, in his proud cocoon where news is brought by loyalists, debate is unwelcome and dissent is not tolerated,really believe it, and is basing policy thusly? Or is he so cynical that he (or whoever is making the decision) thinks both no one will come out and strongly argue that what he proposes is impossible, and/or that by the time events prove him wrong, nobody will call him on it?

But there was a happy postscript. After the speech ended, as the other networks trotted out their Russerts and (I'm guessing) Stephanopouli, Fox switched right back to "Family Guy," in its entirety. The urge to make money, in this case by broadcasting a show with values and a viewpoint it's safe to say that Fox News does not share, trumped the urge to show their bubbleheads in post-ejacaulatory languor over Bush's speech. God bless America!

L'etat, c'est Bush
I'm not sure which notion is more disturbing: that President Bush doesn't understand why people are bent out of shape about revelations that he personally approved domestic spying, or that he gets it and simply doesn't care. In his radio address today, Bush acknowledged that he had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists and sympathizers after the 9/11 attacks, and had reviewed and reauthorized the policy every 45 days since then. (I imagine Bush applied the same level of deep thought and serious consideration to these reviews as he did when considering clemency pleas for the Texecution of the Week during his tenure as Governor of Texas.) But he didn't answer the more important question:

Mr. Bush did not address the main question directed at him by some members of Congress on Friday: why he felt it necessary to circumvent the system established under current law, which allows the president to seek emergency warrants, in secret, from the court that oversees intelligence operations. His critics said that under that law, the administration could have obtained the same information.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Friday that "there is no doubt this is inappropriate" and that he would conduct hearings to determine why Mr. Bush took the action.

The president said on Saturday that he acted in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks because the United States had failed to detect communications that might have tipped them off to the plot. He said that two of the hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, "communicated while they were in the United States to other members of Al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn't know they were here, until it was too late."

To anyone but the totally credulous, the reason why he didn't bother to obtain the warrants should be very clear: This administration does not recognize the legitimacy of any limit on its powers. Big Swinging Dick Cheney has made it very clear that he believes the executive branch has near-absolute freedom of action: its powers justify (to name but a few) changes to the U.S. policy on torture, deceiving Congress about the real cost of a prescription drug benefit, and illegally reallocating hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars from Afghanistan military operations to Iraq. Checks and balances are just as "quaint" as the Geneva Convention. In this particular instance, the one imaginable rationale for not getting the warrants--that the court doesn't act quickly enough--is proven false on first glance by Josh Marshall.

This principle of executive power--and, of course, the unending drive to put up political "wins" on the board--trumps all else for the Bush administration, including, evidently, national security considerations. (Again, this is no news coming from the folks who outed a covert intelligence operative working on WMD issues to "push back" against criticism of the Iraq War.) Yesterday, the Senate refused to end debate on the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, with a few libertarian Republicans joining Democrats led by Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin citing civil liberties concerns that weren't sufficiently addressed in the bill's language. Feingold--the lone Senator to vote against the Act in 2001--has proposed a three-month extension to the current law so debate can continue; Senate Republicans, led by Bush ass monkey Bill Frist, have rejected this outright. Why? So Bush can make statements like this one:

The terrorists want to attack America again and kill the innocent and inflict even greater damage than they did on Sept. 11 - and the Congress has a responsibility not to take away this vital tool that law enforcement and intelligence officials have used to protect the American people... The senators who are filibustering the Patriot Act must stop their delaying tactics so that we are not without this critical law for even a single moment."

Extensions of legislation while Congress continues the discussion are utterly commonplace. To give one example on an issue I follow professionally, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families law that "ended welfare as we knew it" in 1996, originally expired more than four years ago. While the reauthorization debate has dragged on, Congress has extended the current law for three months at a time, something like 14 times now. On the Patriot Act, Bush could ensure that we are "not without this critical law" whenever he wants; presumably he believes that the current iteration of the Act is better than nothing. But he'd rather push for absolute victory, risking our security in the process, than compromise. The mind reels.

A final note: The Rude Pundit, who might soon be joining the restructured AIS blogroll, has a very succinct take on Bush's position regarding the surveillance (and from which I stole this post title:)

Here's Bush's vicious radio talk today, where he mentioned 9/11 about nine times, in haiku form:

L'etat c'est moi, 'kay?
Once you accept that, you fucks,
We'll all get along.

The Undeserving Poor?
Here's an important piece in the Washington Post today about the silence of our most prominent religious groups on pending federal budget cuts aimed at the poor:

When hundreds of religious activists try to get arrested today to protest cutting programs for the poor, prominent conservatives such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will not be among them.

That is a great relief to Republican leaders, who have dismissed the burgeoning protests as the work of liberals. But it raises the question: Why in recent years have conservative Christians asserted their influence on efforts to relieve Third World debt, AIDS in Africa, strife in Sudan and international sex trafficking -- but remained on the sidelines while liberal Christians protest domestic spending cuts?

Conservative Christian groups such as Focus on the Family say it is a matter of priorities, and their priorities are abortion, same-sex marriage and seating judges who will back their position against those practices.
...
Jim Wallis, editor of the liberal Christian journal Sojourners and an organizer of today's protest, was not buying it. Such conservative religious leaders "have agreed to support cutting food stamps for poor people if Republicans support them on judicial nominees," he said. "They are trading the lives of poor people for their agenda. They're being, and this is the worst insult, unbiblical."

At issue is a House-passed budget-cutting measure that would save $50 billion over five years by trimming food stamp rolls, imposing new fees on Medicaid recipients, squeezing student lenders, cutting child-support enforcement funds and paring agriculture programs. House negotiators are trying to reach accord with senators who passed a more modest $35 billion bill that largely spares programs for the poor.

At the same time, House and Senate negotiators are hashing out their differences on a tax-cutting measure that is likely to include an extension of cuts in the tax rate on dividends and capital gains.
...
Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, said the government's role should be to encourage charitable giving, perhaps through tax cuts.

"There is a [biblical] mandate to take care of the poor. There is no dispute of that fact," he said. "But it does not say government should do it. That's a shifting of responsibility."

The Carpetbagger, where I read about this piece, points out that Focus on the Family devotes a lot more space and emphasis on their website to urging repeal of the Estate Tax, an assessment that only affects the very rich and would seem to be more central to the Club for Growth or ATR than an ostensibly values-focused group. And Focus actually seems to denigrate the Food Stamp program, which is among those currently under attack in Congress. (Carpetbagger somehow fails to mention what I presume is the other big priority: stopping that insidious War on Christmas. What's more important than indulging the persecution fantasies of a majority group that holds near-total power? But I digress.)

I'll readily grant that this looks like hypocrisy, and I think the point Jim Wallis makes--that this bunch has agreed to support policies that hurt the poor in return for promises to put social-issue reactionaries on the bench--is spot on. But I'm more interested in how it is that so many people of faith, many of whom do extensive charity work in their own communities (and through their churches in particular), can support measures that redistribute wealth upward. In my opinion, this is distinct from skepticism about government being "not really capable of love," or even being not really capable of running programs well (a point one AIS reader has made from time to time). It's tantamount to a values determination that capital gains tax cuts are more important than income supports for the working poor.

Aside from the hard-to-prove (or disprove) argument that they're simply unaware of the debate, the best explanation I can think of--irony notwithstanding--is that these voters share the social Darwinism of the Grover Norquist/Stephen Moore branch of the Republican Party. Just as they see homosexuality as a choice that arises out of one's inner moral lack, perhaps they blame the moral failings of the poor for their poverty. Why the obvious disconnect between this worldview and the actual language of the Bible–-where poverty seems to get a lot more ink than homosexuality, and those who suffer its effects come in for mercy, not scapegoating--doesn't trouble them, I'm not sure. And how they square this with whatever friends, neighbors, family members and fellow congregants who have lost it all to economic dislocation, medical catastrophe or other forces out of their control (but not necessarily out of the government's), I haven't the foggiest. But the Tony Perkins quote in the Post article above comes across as almost Clintonian, doesn't it?

As for what the cuts mean in the secular world, check out this recent Times guest op-ed, by a colleague of mine in the NYC wonkosphere, and this excellent recent American Prospect piece on what these actions communicate about Republican priorities. The latter article does a superb job making both a moral and an economic case against this set of cuts. In that these programs support the upward aspirations of low-income working families--and that pending demographic and economic changes will demand that we get the most value out of every working American--the cuts are wrongheaded disinvestments in the workforce. And on values, the authors rightly conclude that the cuts "betray the deepest commitment conservatives claim to honor: hard work." Democrats would be wise to pick up both threads, which run through pretty much the entirety of Bush/Cheney/DeLay/Norquist policymaking.

The Puzzle of Gene McCarthy
As you've probably heard by now, former Senator Eugene McCarthy, Democrat of Minnesota, died this week at age 89. McCarthy to me was, not exactly a hero, but one of the more fascinating, compelling and ultimately frustrating American politicians of the modern era. He was a great believer in democracy and open engagement with the public, and an unapologetic snob and elitist. His political roots were in the populist Democratic Farmer-Labor party and he came to prominence as a champion of the midwestern aesthetic and heartland sensibility, but he spent the last several decades of his life, long after his political career effectively ended, in and around Washington, DC. Though he obviously wanted to be thought of as a statesman, a transcendent figure above the realm of grubby politics who trafficked in ideas, he undercut himself and compromised his own stature by working against his party's presidential nominee in 1976 and 1980, and often seemed more interested in his poetry and other pursuits than whatever was current in public life. And in his signature political moment of 1968, when he raised the standard for peace in Vietnam and tried to elevate a debate on the imperial presidency and America's role in the world, he activated the passion and dedication of millions of young idealists--while making it transparently clear that he himself would never fully commit to the political fray.

But as personally fascinating and contradictory as McCarthy was, in my opinion his political and historical significance was as the tribune of American liberalism who tested and ultimately defined its practical limits and the far boundaries of its strength. An Adlai Stevenson supporter through the 1950s who had made an impassioned plea with his fellow Democrats for Stevenson in 1960, McCarthy had cool relations with the Kennedys through the abbreviated JFK presidency; one theory I remember reading was that McCarthy, who had attended seminary as a young man and seriously considered a life in the priesthood, viewed them as insufficently Catholic. But through his Senate career, he had been a close ally of Lyndon Johnson, and in 1964 he pushed hard behind the scenes to be chosen as Johnson's vice-presidential running mate. When he lost out to fellow Minnesotan Hubert H. Humphrey, McCarthy began to turn against the president; by 1967, he was among the leading critics of the Vietnam War. As a cadre of Democratic activists led by a New Yorker named Allard Lowenstein began searching for a prominent national Democrat to oppose Johnson in the 1968 primary contest, McCarthy indicated his interest.

The man the activists wanted, of course, was Bobby Kennedy, who brought a much more compelling personal backstory as well as greater prominence and political heft. Kennedy hated Johnson and deplored the course of the war, but didn't believe he could win and feared the consequences, for his party and his subsequent career, of a break with the administration. McCarthy, who probably should have had the same concerns, evidently did not; by all accounts, he was bored in the Senate. One of the mysteries of the man is just how the factors of personal pique, ambition, and idealism added up in his decision to run against Johnson. With virtually no institutional support within the party and even less hope of victory, he declared toward the end of 1967.

If McCarthy had fared as poorly as was universally predicted then, the last 38 years of American history might have developed rather differently. But his campaign caught unexpected fire in New Hampshire, fueled by the tireless efforts of his college-age volunteers, the uncharacteristically maladroit political work of the Johnson administration, and--perhaps most important--the national trauma of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which while a military failure for the Vietcong and North Vietnamese put the lie to the administration's claims that victory in Vietnam was imminent. McCarthy won 42 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote and a majority of the state's delegates to the Democratic National Convention to be held that summer; within a few weeks, Robert Kennedy had joined the race, and Lyndon Johnson had dropped out of it.

The ensuing three-way race for the presidential nomination between McCarthy, Kennedy and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who ultimately won it, not only split the Democrats and cost them the 1968 election--nealy half of those who supported McCarthy or Kennedy, millions of otherwise-solid Democrats, stayed home in November as Humphrey lost an exceptionally close race to Richard Nixon--but opened up cleavages in the party that I don't think have ever been fully closed. Humphrey, a classical liberal who had great institutional support but limited popular appeal, was perceived (somewhat unfairly) as Lyndon Johnson's surrogate; I believe the meme that Democrats have no core principles substantially began with Humphrey. McCarthy, though, was arguably the originator of a different, but no less harmful, liberal conceit: the supremely arrogant and condescending figure who would have it his way, or not at all. After Kennedy's assassination in June 1968, he had a second chance to capture the public imagination; he passed it up, staying mostly silent. At the disastrous Chicago convention, he refused to work the delegates. After the convention, he essentially disappeared, writing about the World Series for Life magazine before offering an exceptionally tepid endorsement of Humphrey. He left the Senate two years later, and then commenced an increasingly pathetic series of half-assed quadrennial runs for the presidency--the last time, in 1992, when he was 76.

I sometimes think the one political trait Americans find truly unforgiveable is indifference, or the perception of it. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both won two terms in the White House, despite being detested by large segments of the electorate, because they projected as driven men. The individuals they defeated never demonstrated the same drive: think of George H.W. Bush looking at his watch in a 1992 debate, or John Kerry letting the Swift Boat attacks go unanswered for months in the summer of 2004. Gene McCarthy demonstrated a variant of that kind of passivity, at a time when the stakes were probably much higher. Personally, I find a lot to admire in McCarthy's stated view that he was merely the standard-bearer for a popular movement, who should not and would not campaign as a personality (much less against someone else's; McCarthy deplored the idea that his campaign was a manifestation of the "Dump Johnson" movement--though of course it was). But it showed an ignorance of how American politics worked then, and works now--or, more likely, an unwillingness to accept and operationalize that understanding. It's not difficult to argue that McCarthy's commitment to principle helped facilitate the serial tragedies of recent American history, from the additional seven years in Vietnam that followed the 1968 election to the subsequent, and still ongoing, war against the notion of activist, progressive government itself. His hated rival Robert Kennedy, though derided as opportunistic and unprincipled, came on as a fighter; if he'd lived, I believe the many compromises he might have made nevertheless would have added up to a much greater liberal legacy. Sometimes a willingness to engage and commit outweighs every other consideration.

Republicana
We saw Syriana last night. Good movie, though it was about as narratively far from its source material, Robert Baer's CIA memoir See No Evil, as one could possibly imagine. In terms of its muddy morality, the film reminded me of those movies they made thirty years ago in which there was no real protagonist, at least not in any sense of having a character to cheer for. George Clooney's CIA agent probably comes the closest, but anybody who dispenses death as casually as does his Bob Barnes (the fictional surrogate for Baer, who retired from the intelligence service in 1997) can't really be viewed as heroic in a movie like this, where the viewer has to invest a certain level of thought and discernment. Stripped of the geopolitics, Barnes is essentially a government hit man: we see him take out an Iranian arms trader in the opening minutes of the film, and later he's tasked to kill a reformist Arab prince whose views are deemed harmful to American interests. He fails to do so, but that's a far cry from a principled refusal to try.

The rest of the film is populated with Texas oil men, government functionaries, political fixers, ambitious young guys on the make, and the poor bastards who actually do the work of petroleum production that makes fortunes thousands of miles away. Among other luminaries, the cast includes Chris Cooper, as the owner of a mid-sized Texas-based energy company that's about to hit the big time through a merger, and William Hurt, as a former CIA colleague of Barnes who's retired into a lucrative consultancy. But watching Cooper in particular, I started to think of how art can, and maybe should, imitate life...



Is that freakin' creepy or what? Same dead eyes, same slimy hair. But at least Cooper presumably can get out of character, so to speak.

So I now think we should cast the entire gang of ideologues, crooks and well-dressed looters currently running the country. Sticking with Syriana, I think William Hurt could play a damn fine Karl Rove... if he gained 30 pounds of so, anyway. I'll not put up the side-by-side here because, well, I don't really want to look at Rove, unless it's seeing him in an orange jumpsuit or head-to-toe denim, in hand and leg restraints. Maybe Nick Nolte as Rumsfeld? Alfre Woodard as Condeliesalot Rice? James Cromwell as Radical Cleric James Dobson is a "slam dunk"... and speaking of which, how about Chazz Palminteri as George Tenet (possibly portrayed only in flashback)?

But I can't figure out who in Hollywood, if anybody, has the sheer malevolance to portray Citizen Dick Cheney. Richard Dreyfuss played a cartoonishly evil Republican in either "Dave" or "The American President"--after countless half-viewings on TNT and TBS, those two flicks kind of run together for me--but his heart didn't seem to be in it.

Any ideas, for any of the remaining uncasted miscreants?