Month: September 2005

I Fear Huckabee and Other Blogger Laments

Along with MSNBC’s Tom Curry, CNN’s Jackie Schechner, the NYT’s Matt Bai and a sprinkling of party operatives and interest group reps, The Note attended a regular meeting of the Internet Left at Townhouse Tavern in Dupont Circle on Sunday. Here is what we took away:

1. Mike Huckabee instills fear.

2. Hillary Clinton provokes scorn.

3. Russ Feingold inspires passion.

4. And John Edwards’ early focus on poverty — coupled with Elizabeth Edwards’ statement of support for Cindy Sheehan — is getting him a second look from this crowd.

How typical that the Kewl Kidz at The Note need to attend a DC gathering of bloggers to find out what the Internet Left really thinks. Bloggers’ defining characteristic, after all, is that they write down every single passing political thought right on these here internets for everybody to see.

Or do they? This fear of Huckabee thing had me stumped. I haven’t heard anything about it, but then it’s always possible that the Internet Left is an exclusive club that someone such as I wouldn’t know about. I thought I did. I even get the e-mails. I spend neurotic amounts of time scouring the blogs for the latest news and here I find out that there’s a whole level of insight that apprently exists only at the elite personal Internet Left level.

So, left to my own out-of-it devices, I resorted to the outsider’s friend, Mr Google, and I find out that Mike Huckabee is running for president (or acting a lot like he is, anyway.) Here’s an editorial from the September 16, Arkansas Dem Gazette:

Having watched Mike Huckabee in action for nine years now, it’s clear the man has his priorities straightest when times are worst. The highlights of his career tend to coincide with lowlights: the day Jim Guy Tucker wouldn’t leave the governor’s post, the aftermath of 9/11, the ice storm, the 40 th anniversary of the Central High Crisis . . . .

Each time, Mike Huckabee stepped up. Big time.

How does he do it? It’s a simple formula, really: Do what’s right and worry about the bureaucratic red tape later. Or to quote Governor/still-Reverend Huckabee:

“What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do? I’ll tell you what he’d do. He would try to make sure these needs were met.”

This guy’s running for president and he appears to have all the rhetorical gifts of George W. Bush without the gravitas (although he did successfully manage Arkansas’ response to 9/11 and the 40th anniversary of the Central High Crisis Crisis so he’s a proven leader. Big Time.)

Ok. I’m on board with the Inner Internet Left’s fear of Mike Huckabee. Dear Gawd, save us.

Atrios has more today on the Karl Rove official fan club and fluffing society, otherwise known as The Note. This one’s a killer:

The press and the Democrats are still demonizing Karl Rove’s involvement in anything and everything, expressing shock and horror that a deputy White House chief of staff with wide-ranging applicable experience is helping to oversee the Katrina response.

Were the Kewl Kidz still tugging on their thongs at Club Med when the whole “Man Called Brownie” thing came down? Apparently so, or these astute observers of the political scene would notice that the optics of Bush putting his primo political advisor in charge of a massive reconstruction job might just look a little as if he’s putting politics over competence — again. But hey, there’s no margin in taking on the Rovester, at least if you want to be invited to insider fetes where the great man freely speaks his mind off the record:

Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political advisor and deputy White House chief of staff, spoke at businessman Teddy Forstmann’s annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend. Here is what Rove had to say that the press wasn’t allowed to report.

On Katrina: The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government…

On The Anti-War Movement: Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally…

On Bush’s Low Poll Numbers: We have not been good at explaining the success in Iraq. Polls go up and down and don’t mean anything…

On Iraq: There has been a big difference in the region. Iraq will transform the Middle East…

On Judy Miller And Plamegate: Judy Miller is in jail for reasons I don’t really understand…

On Joe Wilson: Joe Wilson and I attend the same church but Joe goes to the wacky mass…

In attendance at the conference, among others were: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Moonves, Tom Freston, Tom Friedman, Bob Novak, Barry Diller, Martha Stewart, Margaret Carlson, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Norman Pearlstein and Walter Isaacson.

We have the president’s top advisor and political machine builder speaking before this group of media elites, all of whom are sworn to secrecy. We hoi polloi wouldn’t know anything about this if it weren’t for a wee whistelblower who told Arianna. Can we all see the problem here folks? (Hint: it ain’t partisanship.)

Which brings me to this very intriguing article in this week’s LA Weekly. Read it all, but this passage was particularly on point:

If big media look like they’re propping up W’s presidency, they are. Because doing so is good for corporate coffers — in the form of government contracts, billion-dollar tax breaks, regulatory relaxations and security favors. At least that wily old codger Sumner Redstone, head of Viacom, parent company of CBS, has admitted what everyone already knows is true: that, while he personally may be a Democrat, “It happens that I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.”

I don’t know how many of you have worked for a corporation, but those of you who have know what that means. If you want to make it in a big organization you listen when the big bosses say things like that.

Whoever wrote that little blurb on The Note about Karl Rove (this past week-end’s marquee entertainment for all the movers and shakers in Big Media) knows that his or her corporate bosses believe that Republicans are better for business — and they will appreciate any employees who recognise that corporate priorities are career makers. None of this has to be stated out loud. Any ambitious journalist who wants to sit at Tom Friedman’s table knows what to do without even being told. Indeed, he knows what to do without even consciously thinking about it. It’s the way the world works.

And as for the people listening to Uncle Karl regale them with delicious little tidbits about which they can only talk to other privileged establishment players and courtiers, well let’s just say that I cannot help but laugh out loud at the notion that they are committed to truth — or even reality. Indeed, it seems to me that we are living in entirely different worlds. They are not custodians of democracy, they are insider usurpers of it.

This is not to say that blogs are the answer to our woes. I recognise that blogs (such as Time’s blog of the year just today) are living in an echo chamber of a different sort — as do many of us on the left. But, I think we are, or have been, a populist voice which is at this point a very necessary counterpoint to the effete, arid babble of the insider cognoscenti. There is, at least, some fresh air to breathe in the blogosphere.

Peter Daou has written an extremely interesting piece that speaks to this today in which he reveals some of his travails as someone who tried to explain the emerging power of the netroots to the staid strategists of the Kerry campaign. Among other things, he concluded that blogs need to engage the mainstream media and the party structure in order to influence the conventional wisdom.

Should we conclude, then, that the inability of bloggers on the left and right to alter or create conventional wisdom means that they have negligible political clout? If the netroots can’t change CW without the mass media and the political establishment, and if the mass media and the political establishment can change CW without the netroots (which seems undeniable), then isn’t the blog world a relatively powerless echo chamber? The answer, of course, is no.

Bloggers can exert disproportionate pressure on the media and on politicians. Reporters, pundits, and politicians read blogs, and, more importantly, they care what bloggers say about them because they know other reporters, pundits, and politicians are reading the same blogs. It’s a virtuous circle for the netroots and a source of political power. The netroots can also bring the force of sheer numbers to bear on a non-compliant politician, reporter, or media outlet. Nobody wants a flood of complaints from thousands of angry activists. And further, bloggers can raise money, fact-check, and help break stories and/or keep them in circulation long enough for the media and political establishment to pick them up.

Consequently, bloggers, though unable to change conventional wisdom on their own, are able to use these proficiencies and resources to persuade the media and political establishment to join them in pushing a particular story or issue.

The blogosphere is full of calls to arms and polemics and analysis all of which are, to varying degrees, politically empowering. I’ve often said that we are the heirs to the revolutionary war era’s pamphleteers, only in electronic form and I proudly number myself amongst them. But, like Peter, I think that the blogosphere’s most important purpose at this point in its very new history is to serve as a check on the insular journalistic elites that make up the corporate media hierarchy and the DC beltway press. And I think we already do this in a couple of different ways, neither of which were invented by bloggers but which were made possible for the masses to participate in by technology.

I realize that he is long out of fashion and probably politically incorrect to evoke in these conservative times, but I think that bloggers can be, at our best, the heirs to IF Stone, who famously said that the Washington Post was an exciting paper to read because “you would never know on what page you would find a page one story.” Like Stone, we are always looking for the page one story that’s buried on page 15. Our capacity to use collective energy to scour newpapers and other publications for the small details that can lead to a bigger story is one of the innovations of blogging. We are using the modern investigative tools at our disposal to follow up on the “shirt tail hanging out” as he used to call it — the little detail that leads one to delve more deeply into the story and get to the larger truth. Technology, of course, is key — but so is the aggregate energy of thousands of individuals putting it to work.

And I also think we change the dialog in a way that’s too subtle to measure but is vital nonetheless. While we were unable to influence the media prior to the Iraq war, our arguments, honed over the course of two years of non-stop writing, analysing and fist shaking, meant that when the tide of public opinion began to turn, the media and at least some members of the public had an understanding of events that they wouldn’t have had if we had not been screaming into the void. I believe that the concentration of words that had been pushed into the ether helped opinion to move faster than it would have otherwise. And it prepared the press to finally admit what they saw with their own eyes when confronted with the Katrina cock-up.

Like Stone, who was an early skeptic of Vietnem, the bloggers of the left, operating outside any party hierarchy and completely outside the establishment, were the earliest off the mark on the debacle that has become Iraq. We were skeptical because we weren’t immersed in the conventional beltway wisdom that said we had to support the war. Unlike those who were angling for jobs or social approbation or credibility among the beltway elites, we just said what we thought. There is value in that.

We outsiders can probably be the worst cynics around — but I would say that when it comes to power, we are far more likely to be right than wrong. As Stone said, “If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words: Governments lie.”

For structural reasons as much as anything, the blogosphere is filling a void that IF Stone’s retirement left unfilled during those long years in which the right built up its media infrastructure. We are telling the truth as we see it. That’s not to say that it is always a pure and clear reflection of reality. But it is, at least, authentic and sincere which is something that one cannot say about the media elite or the climbers who aspire to it. There is value in that too.

In other blogging news:

EvolveTV, which many of my readers have asked me about about, and about which I knew absolutely nothing, is done teasing and has announced its intentions. It looks to be a lot of fun — a streaming TV show featuring all your favorite bloggers like Atrios, Kos, Juan Cole, PZ Myers etc. Check it out.

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Boondoggle Part Deux

Yesterday morning a friend sent me the following article from the Wall Street Journal:

After Katrina, Republicans
Back a Sea of Conservative Ideas
By JOHN R. WILKE and BRODY MULLINS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 15, 2005; Page B1

Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond.

Some new measures are already taking shape. In the past week, the Bush administration has suspended some union-friendly rules that require federal contractors pay prevailing wages, moved to ease tariffs on Canadian lumber, and allowed more foreign sugar imports to calm rising sugar prices. Just yesterday, it waived some affirmative-action rules for employers with federal contracts in the Gulf region.

Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction. Yesterday, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would offer sweeping protection against lawsuits to any person or organization that helps Katrina victims without compensation.

“The desire to bring conservative, free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot,” says Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who leads the Republican Study Group, an influential caucus of conservative House members. “We want to turn the Gulf Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a federal city where New Orleans once was.”

Many of the ideas under consideration have been pushed by the 40-member study group, which is circulating a list of “free-market solutions,” including proposals to eliminate regulatory barriers to awarding federal funds to religious groups housing hurricane victims, waiving the estate tax for deaths in the storm-affected states; and making the entire region a “flat-tax free-enterprise zone.”

Members of the group met in a closed session Tuesday night at the conservative Heritage Foundation headquarters here to map strategy. Edwin Meese, the former Reagan administration attorney general, has been actively involved.

Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R., Kan.) said that the plans under development “are all part of a philosophy of lowering costs for doing business.” He said southern Louisiana,Mississippi and Alabama offer a “microcosm” where new ideas can be applied to speed the rebuilding.

The proposals to cut taxes and waive regulations come after Congress quickly approved $62.8 billion in federal spending for the Gulf Coast, and is expected to approve further spending that will push the price tag above $100 billion.

Some of the proposals are attracting fire from Democrats. “They’re going back to the playbook on issues like tort reform, school vouchers and freeing business from environmental rules to achieve ideological objectives they haven’t been able to get in the normal legislative process,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D., Ill.)

In response, Democrats are pressing for other proposals that suit their ideology. Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois has suggested creating a national emergency airlift program so that U.S. airlines can help evacuate Americans from areas before a natural disaster strike. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu unveiled a plan that would, among other things, preserve victims’ Medicaid health coverage, provide $2,500 education grants to displaced students and give victims a 180-day extension on outstanding loan payments.

Trial lawyers were quick to attack the bill the House passed yesterday on a voice vote to limit lawsuits against volunteers saying it prevents airlines, hospitals, stadiums, and bus companies from being held accountable for misconduct or negligence. In a statement, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America said, “If a nursing home resident evacuated from New Orleans to a nursing home in a neighboring state dies of untreated, infected pressure sores, the out-of-state home would be protected.”

The bill’s chief sponsor, Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, said in a statement that the legislation removes the “threat of legal fear that stands between many willing and able Good Samaritans and the victims of Hurricane Katrina.” The bill does permit lawsuits for injuries that were caused “by willful, wanton, reckless, or criminal conduct.”

Some conservatives expressed concern about the growing reach of the reconstruction effort. “Everyone is attaching their own agenda to this,” said William A. Niskanen, a former Reagan White House economic adviser now at the libertarian Cato Institute. “It’s being seen as a test of the conservative agenda, from enterprise zones to school vouchers and the repeal of labor laws, and these ideas deserve careful thought,” he said. “But [the massive spending] could also create expectations that we can do this every time a disaster hits.”

Some of the proposals are unlikely to win quick passage. But congressional tax-writing committees hope to approve legislation within days to offer $5 billion in
tax relief and other aid to residents of areas hit by the storm. The legislation would, among other things, let victims withdraw money from retirement accounts without penalty, give tax incentives to those who house evacuees and give companies incentives to hire displaced workers.

Republicans, meanwhile, say they will also press for a new round of energy concessions, including incentives to rebuild and expand offshore drilling and clear the way for new refineries that were dropped from a 500-page energy bill that passed last month.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton of Texas and Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman James Inhofe are working on bills that would encourage refineries to build new plants and expand existing ones by rolling back environmental rules and making it easier for refineries to navigate regulatory channels in Washington.

Republicans hope Hurricane Katrina prods Congress to approve a second energy
bill this fall that includes several provisions that were dropped from the first bill.

The National Petrochemical & Refineries Association would like lawmakers to reduce the depreciation period from 10 years to five years in order to stimulate investment. Some refineries are talking about reviving an effort to get liability protection for producing the fuel additive methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE. Both were dropped from the earlier energy bill at the insistence of Democrats.

Then last night Bush gave a speech which many liberals are lauding, and conservatives are decrying, as a capitulation to liberal ideals. They seem to be convinced that our man Bush has had a change of heart and is going to spend lots of money on big government programs to help the poor. And, by gosh, he even admitted that the history of racism in this country had contributed to African American poverty. Praise Jesus! He’s seen the light.

I missed the speech last night but I was on the road and tuned into KTALK shortly , the liberal talk radio station here in LA shortly after it was over and heard Johnny Wendell, whom I usually quite like, saying that he hadn’t heard a politician say anything like this in 30 years. And he thought that it was such good news that we should give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt. It just proved that the era of Republican small government conservatism was over and liberalism was back, baby!

I was confused. I had read that article in the morning, after all. Then I came home and fired up the creaky computer and saw that Karl Rove was in charge of the rebuilding effort. Ah.

Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” pushing the slogan of the very liberal Children’s Defense Fund as one of his signature issues (No Child Left Behind.) He’s always used liberal rhetoric and programmatic boilerplate to sell himself as a “new kinda Republican.” It’s just that being kinder and gentler has been out of fashion since he donned the codpiece after 9/11. There is nothing new in this. And it is in no sense some sort of capitulation. Republicans have been stealing liberal rhetoric for some time now, particularly when it comes to pretending to care about people they really don’t care about. Gingrich showed that hard edged conservative rhetoric is deeply unpopular. People want to hear their leaders pretend to care, even if they don’t. Karl Rove knows what works — and they know that the dipshit pundits love it when a Republican says it because anything counter-intuitive becomes “bold” and “politically courageous.”

And, I thought we all understood by now that there is no relationship between what the Republicans say and what they do.

The model we should look at is the Coalition Provisional Government in Iraq. That too was going to be a bold and courageous experiment in laissez-faire wet-dream governance. Instead it was the biggest boondoggle in history with more than 8.8 billion dollars officially unaccounted for and undoubtedly tens of billions more wasted on fraud and corruption. Bush’s base, by which I mean corporate America, did very, very well. They will undoubtedly do well in Boondoggle Part Two as well.

I cannot believe that any liberal in the country would take George W Bush’s word about anything at this point, but apparently we all haven’t learned our lesson yet. I’m not sure what it will take, to tell you the truth. But for those of you who believe he has somehow capitulated to liberal ideals, I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine from an African nation whose funds have been frozen ….

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Brownie’s Brotherhood

When the argument about civil service protections first surfaced during the intitial debates about the Department of Homeland Security, a lot of us knew that the danger was that the department would become a dumping ground for political patronage jobs. That’s one of the ways a party builds a successful political machine. (You need to have a way to reward your loyal ground troops — the government contracts and tax loopholes don’t get out the vote.) Indeed, it was the creation of the civil service that succesfully reduced the dominance of the political machines at the beginning of the last century.

As poor little Brownie shows, this presents serious problems for government efficiency. Working on campaigns or in a press office does not qualify someone to run a large department or give them any expertise in anything but politics.

MPetrelis over at DKos* has unearthed this little gem of an example. Meet Matt Mayer the “Acting Executive Director, Chief of Staff, and Senior Policy Advisor for the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness (SLGCP) in the Office of the Secretary in the Department of Homeland Security (Homeland Security).”

Guess what Matt’s department does?

SLCGP is the primary office responsible for terrorism preparedness in Homeland Security. SLGCP provides training, funds for the purchase of equipment, support for the planning and execution of exercises, technical assistance and other support to assist states and local jurisdictions prevent, plan for, and respond to acts of terrorism. SLCGP also is the primary point of contact for state and local governments with Homeland Security.

Mayer is a young Republican lawyer who graduated from law school in 1997 and worked on redistricting issues in Colorado in 2000. Colorado Governor Owens appointed him to a Judicial District Nominating Commission in 2001.

Somewhere along the line Mayer hooked up with a rising politician named Rick O’Donnell and ran his losing campaign for congress in 2002. Shortly thereafter, O’Donnell was appointed to run a state regulatory agency where Mayer worked as his Deputy. On February 1st, 2004 Matt Mayer became the Acting Executive Director, Chief of Staff, and Senior Policy Advisor for the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness (SLGCP) in the Office of the Secretary in the Department of Homeland Security.

Matt Mayer is no Brownie, but he had almost no experience before he took on a huge role in the Department of Homeland security. His resume is a thing of padded beauty.

This article, which mentions Mayer’s start date, discusses the brain drain at DHS as political appointees were brought in in 2004. It isn’t only FEMA.

*My information is a bit different from the original DKOS diary. I can’t account for why the news stories he cited say what they say, but it’s clear that Mayer went to DHS in 2004, not 2005.

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Who’s Sorry Now

Kevin Drum, noticing the pundits’ amazed tone yesterday, asked last night whether it was true that Bush accepted blame less often than other presidents and noted that Clinton didn’t step up for anything but Lewinsky and that was after months of prevaricating.

I don’t think it’s that other president’s accept blame more often, although some, like JFK, famously did and enhanced their popularity by doing so. The reason why it’s so amazing is that Bush has presided over a terrorist attack on US soil and an intelligence failure of epic proportions in Iraq and has not only failed to take even one iota of responsibility, but actually rewarded the people who dropped the ball. It’s the scope of his errors that sets his unwillingness to take responsibility on a different level than other presidents.

There are many ways that presidents admit responsibility besides publicly issuing the big mea culpa. Clinton fired people and withdrew nominations and did many things in response to public outcry. He changed course when it was clear things weren’t working and announced it publicly. Bush, on the other hand, goes out of his way to pretend that he is “staying the course” even when he has quite obviously changed it. His unwillingness to even admit a small change in policy is absolute. His stubbornness on more petty matters such as his insistence on installing John Bolton at the UN just reinforces the fact that he is not only incapable of admitting a mistake or taking responsibility for his administration’s failures — he will use raw political power to get his way even when he’s clearly wrong.

The response to Katrina is just the latest in a series of epic mistakes. And the shock isn’t that he’s finally admitted that he, as president, bears some responsibility for the failures of this latest cock-up — it’s that it’s the first time political conditions have been such that he was required to do so.

It would appear that after hearing four years of “we could never have imagined” and “if we’d known we would have moved heaven and earth” and “stuff happens” people finally (if temporarily) awakened to the idea that these guys are fuck-ups. His approval ratings were sliding so precipitously that they obviously felt they had to try to stop the bleeding in some novel new way — letting buck stop (sort of) at the president. It may very well be too late though. The cumulative effect of all those excuses and stubborn refusals to admit wrongdoing may be overwhelming now.

This speech Thursday night had better be good.

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Hack Diplomacy

Someone (Josh Marshall?) put out the call the other day for examples of other federal departments filled with political hacks. I’ve just noticed a doozy, featuring my favorite uber-operative, Jim Wilkinson.

Here’s some backround on Jimbo from last fall:

Jim Wilkinson (James R. Wilkinson), who served as General Tommy R. Franks’ director of strategic communications, is deputy national security advisor for communications as of December 2003. Wilkinson “will craft long-term messaging strategy for the National Security Council” and report to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and White House communications director Dan Bartlett.[1]

Prior to his return to the White House, Wilkinson briefly served as director of communications for the Republican National Convention, which will take place in New York City Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, 2004. “His office, on the 18th floor over Madison Square Garden, is furnished with the essentials: leather-bound Bible, Yankee cap, Fox News on the flat-screen TV. … His task: establish a communications center in the core of the media capital of the Western world.”

“Mr. Wilkinson is bringing the lessons about access and message that the Bush administration learned in Gulf War II–where he helped to manage the program of embedding reporters in combat units–to the home front. … As for talent, he had General Tommy Franks; now he’s got [New York] Governor George Pataki.”

“Formerly a political operative, Mr. Wilkinson was put in the position of feeding, informing and calming the most motivated media army in the world in Qatar. There, inside the massive telecommunications studio assembled by the U.S. Army and the Bush administration, he earned both the enmity and admiration of various parts of the worldwide press during war in a technologically superb and informationally sparse desert press center. … ‘It was an unprofessional operation,’ said Peter Boyer of The New Yorker, who said he landed an interview with General Franks only by going around Mr. Wilkinson to the Pentagon.”

“Jim Wilkinson has gone from politics to war and back since he worked for George W. Bush in Florida during the 2000 election, and his journey is a mark of the administration’s utilitarian approach to marketing war, politics and the Presidency. ‘He’s a man who prefers to work behind the scenes,’ said the spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Jim Dyke. He’s also got as pure a Republican pedigree as you can wish, and an edge honed in the bitter partisan wars between Bill Clinton and the Republican House leadership.

“Mr. Wilkinson grew up in East Texas and attended high school in Tenaha, population 1,046, then gave up plans to become an undertaker to go to work for Republican Congressman Dick Armey in 1992. Mr. Armey soon became House majority leader; his communications director, Mr. Wilkinson’s mentor, was Ed Gillespie, now chairman of the R.N.C.”

“Wilkinson first left his mark on the 2000 Presidential race in March 1999, when he helped package and promote the notion that Al Gore claimed to have ‘invented the Internet.’ Then the Texan popped up in Miami to defend Republican protesters shutting down a recount: ‘We find it interesting that when Jesse Jackson has thousands of protesters in the streets, it’s O.K., but when a small number of Republicans exercise their First Amendment rights, the Democrats don’t seem to like it,’ he told the Associated Press.

“For his troubles, Mr. Wilkinson was made deputy director of communications for planning in the Bush White House, and was among the aides who set up the Sept. 14, 2001, visit to Ground Zero that redefined George W. Bush’s Presidency. During the Afghan war, he managed ‘Coalition Information Centers’ in Washington, D.C., and London, as well as in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Qatar, he became the point man on the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch and delivered the most memorable and sellable quote of Gulf War II: ‘America doesn’t leave its heroes behind,’ he told reporters at a late-night briefing.”

He was also a member of the famous Iraq Group and one of the authors of the White House paper called “A Decade of Defiance and Deception,” (which is not, as you would naturally expect from the title, a short history of the Republican congress.)

I first noticed Wilkinson when I read Michael Wolff’s great article in the New York magazine and he described a barking freakshow of a white house flack strutting around the desert in a uniform:

The next person to buttonhole me was the Centcom uber-civilian, a thirty-ish Republican operative. He was more full-metal-jacket in his approach (although he was a civilian he was, inexplicably, in uniform – making him, I suppose a sort of para-military figure): “I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don’t talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning.” And: “A lot of people don’t like you.” And then: “Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.” And too: “This is fucking war, asshole.” And finally: “No more questions for you.”

Imagine my surprise to find our old friend Jim kicked upstairs again to a much more important position in this second term. He’s a senior advisor to the Secretary of State. I guess since they moved Bolton out to the UN they needed another Florida Recount hit man to catapault the propaganda.

Pat Robertson has no need to call for a nuke on Foggy Bottom. Between Wilkinson and Hughes, the State Department will be turned into FEMA in no time.

Link via Kevin at Catch, who excerpts some precious Condi quotes from her interview with the CBS editorial board. I especially liked this one:

I always found – there was an argument, you know, was Iraq supporting al-Qaida and all of these things and you know, we could round and round those arguments. I think there is plenty of evidence that there is an al-Qaida presence in Iraq. But let me set that aside for a moment.

Yep. It all depends on what the definition of is, is.

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“What The Hell Do You Expect Me To Do About It?”

Do yourself a favor and check out BagNewsnotes’ analysis of what is now the iconic image of Bush during the Katrina crisis — staring out the window of AF One.

There is another picture and it’s truly creepy.

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Supreme Joke

Bob Somerby brings up something today that has bothered me for some time:

A caller to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal said that Roberts should be required to state his views on the case. As a general matter, we agree. But [Charles]Lane expressed a different view—a familiar view which has never seemed to make any real sense to us:

LANE (9/12/05): Well, the dilemma of this situation is that everybody wants to know this, everybody wants to know about it, and yet if Judge Roberts were to declare flatly at his hearing, “I would vote to overturn Roe. v. Wade,” the decision that established, or recognized, the constitutional right to choose abortion, he would then be in a position where he might have to recuse if such a case came to the Court later on because the person bringing the case could sday, “He’s already said how he’ll vote.” So in a way, Judge Roberts, just like many others who have come before the Court, face that essential dilemma.

But where’s the dilemma? Surely, Roberts knows whether he thinks Roe was correctly decided. If he thinks it was wrongly decided, he must know, as a general matter, what he thinks the decision should stand as a matter of “settled law.” (Indeed, he called Roe “settled law” in his confirmation hearing for the District Court.) Would Roberts have to recuse later on if he said what he thought about Roe? We can’t imagine why. As matters stand, sitting Justices like Scalia and Thomas have openly said, in prior rulings, what they think of Roe v. Wade; indeed, in a January 30 Post profile, Lane himself described Scalia as “an opponent of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.” Does anyone think that Scalia’s prior statements would force him to recuse in the future? The notion is completely absurd—and yet the logic is widely applied to Roberts, as Lane does above.

For years judges have been dancing around hot button issues in their confirmation hearings. I understand they do this for political reasons. But people seem to just blithely accept this notion and it’s never made any sense to me either.

John Roberts has repeatedly asserted today that he cannot answer questions about any cases that may come before the court because to do so would prejudge the case. He says, for instance.

“Let me explain very briefly why. It’s because if these questions
come before me either on the court on which I now sit or if I am confirmed on the Supreme Court, I need to decide those questions with an open mind, on the basis of the arguments presented, on the basis of the record presented in the case and on the basis of the rule of law, including the precedents of the court – not on the basis of any commitments during the confirmation process.”

So, he’s basically saying that he can only speak in the vaguest of terms about abstract legal issues because otherwise he would jeopardise his objectivity.

Now consider this dissent from Planned Parenthood vs. Casey by Antonin Scalia:

My views on this matter are unchanged from those I set forth in my separate opinions in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490, 532 (1989) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), and Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 497 U.S. 502, 520 (1990) (Akron II) (Scalia, J., concurring). The States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so. The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting. As the Court acknowledges, “where reasonable people disagree the government can adopt one position or the other.” Ante, at 8. The Court is correct in adding the qualification that this “assumes a state of affairs in which the choice does not intrude upon a protected liberty,” ante, at 9–but the crucial part of that qualification is the penultimate word. A State’s choice between two positions on which reasonable people can disagree is constitutional even when (as is often the case) it intrudes upon a “liberty” in the absolute sense. Laws against bigamy, for example–which entire societies of reasonable people disagree with–intrude upon men and women’s liberty to marry and live with one another. But bigamy happens not to be a liberty specially “protected” by the Constitution.

His views are exquisitely clear. Why then are we to assume that he can view any new case on this issue that comes before the court with an open mind?

Meanwhile, we are forced to believe that future Chief Justice John Roberts, whom Lindsey Graham just called one of the finest minds in our time, will not be able to keep an open mind if he tells the Senate where he actually stands on issues about which virtually every American has an opinion. What kind of silly kabuki is this?

Clarence Thomas got around this by saying he’d never thought about these issues, which was absurd. I don’t think anyone thinks they can get away with that again. So they’ve created this ridiculous rationale that if prospective judges discuss their political philosophy, express their views on commonly discussed issues or even their views on a particular settled laws, they will be unable to keep an open mind when a related case comes before them. Indeed, Charles Lane said that they would have to recuse themselves!

As Somerby asks, does anyone think that Antonin Scalia believes that he should recuse himself from hearing any cases that Roe vs Wade may be a part of since he has clearly stated that it was wrongly decided in his dissents? Of course not.

Roberts certainly cannot discuss a specific case that is coming before the court.But there is no reason that he or any other judge can’t say publicly whether they believe a specific case was decided correctly or if they agree with the principles on which it was decided. That’s what judges do. Or so I thought. I guess now we must pretend that a person is a blank slate until the day she decides her first casepertaining to any issue, at which point she can express opinions freely ever after and still maintain objectivity.

I realize that this little misdirection makes it possible to pretend that we have confirmation hearings instead of anointment pageants, but it’s insulting nonetheless.

Roberts is obviously a very, very smart lawyer. He talked circles around everybody on the committee today. There is no doubt in my mind that he will craft beautifully reasoned, elegant decisions that will result in as much destruction of the last 75 years of social and economic progress as he can politically get away with.

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Report Confirms that Louisiana Took Necessary and Timely Steps

Pursuant to a September 7 request by Representative John Conyers to review the law and legal accountability relating to Federal action in response to Hurricane Katrina, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report today about whether the Governor of Louisiana took the necessary and timely steps needed to secure disaster relief from the federal government. The report unequivocally concludes that she did.

Congressman Conyers issued the following statement:

“This report closes the book on the Bush Administration’s attempts to evade accountability by shifting the blame to the Governor of Louisiana for the Administration’s tragically sluggish response to Katrina. It confirms that the Governor did everything she could to secure relief for the people of Louisiana and the Bush Administration was caught napping at a critical time.”

In addition to finding that “…it would appear that the Governor did take the steps necessary to request emergency and major disaster declarations for the State of Louisiana in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina. (p.11)” The report found that:

* All necessary conditions for federal relief were met on August 28. Pursuant to Section 502 of the Stafford Act, “[t]he declaration of an emergency by the President makes Federal emergency assistance available,” and the President made such a declaration on August 28. The public record indicates that severa additional days passed before such assistance was actually made available to the State;

* The Governor must make a timely request for such assistance, which meets the requirements of federal law. The report states that “[e]xcept to the extent that an emergency involves primarily Federal interests, both declarations of major disaster and declarations of emergency must be triggered by a request to the President from the Governor of the affected state”;

* The Governor did indeed make such a request, which was both timely and in compliance with federal law. The report finds that “Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco requested by letter dated August 27, 2005…that the President declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period from August 26, 2005 and continuing pursuant to [applicable Federal statute]” and “Governor Blanco’s August 27, 2005 request for an emergency declaration also included her determination…that ‘the incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of disaster.”

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Music City

Austin must be a swingin’ town right now. I want to go there and have a beer with Amanda and Twisty Faster and listen to some fineNew Orleans music.

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This is a good idea:

LOUISIANA NAACP PRESIDENT
CALLS FOR EVACUEES TO TAKE CONTROL
OF THEIR OWN DESTINY AND FORM
“SHELTER COMMITTEES”

Ernest L. Johnson, President of the Louisiana NAACP called today for Katrina evacuees in shelters to take control of their own destinies by forming SHELTER COMMITTEES.

“Each SHELTER COMMITTEE should elect a Chairperson and a Secretary and begin holding meetings, organizing, and working as a team for better treatment,” Johnson said. “In unity there is strength.”

Johnson called for each committee to begin writing down the name, telephone number, and next of kin of every shelter resident.

This contact information must be put into the FEMA database for evacuees to receive financial assistance.

Johnson urged each SHELTER COMMITTEE to send this information to 1755 Nicholson Drive, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70802, or to fax it to (225) 334-7491.

The Louisiana NAACP is airing public service announcements on radio stations that explain the process for bringing participatory democracy to the shelter system.

“The Louisiana NAACP is with you in solidarity,” Johnson said. “The NAACP will stand with all displaced people until each and every one return to a brand-new New Orleans.”

Poeple need to take some control of their lives when they are at the mercy of strangers. I suspect that a lot of them are going to find themselves in need of advocacy very soon. It would be nice if they had a system set up to advocate for themselves.

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