Politics 2004 Archives

Allahpundit and HuffPo take differing looks at Manhattan state court trial judge Justice Ira Gammerman's decision (the text of which is here) dismissing some parts of Dan Rather's complaint against CBS. Note that under NY state procedure, the decision on a motion to dismiss a complaint (i.e., without hearing the evidence) is immediately appealable, and given the amount of money and ego involved it would not surprise me if one or both sides appealed.

As an economic matter, the decision is mainly a victory for Rather; Justice Gammerman allows him to seek substantial breach of contract damages for CBS "benching" him after March 2005, under a contractual provision the court reads as essentially allowing liquidated damages designed to cover that purpose, by requiring CBS to then immediately pay Rather his salary due through November 2006.

More significantly, in terms of the evidence that can be introduced (and, presumably, the remaining source of his punitive damages claims), the decision also allows Rather to argue that (1) CBS owed Rather a fiduciary duty and breached it (the decision is unclear as to whether the breach is the decision to bench Rather or a broader theory involving making him retract and apologize for the Rathergate story) and (2) Viacom, CBS' parent, improperly and tortiously interfered with Rather's contract with CBS by forcing its subsidiary to bench and fire him. The judge held that it was a factual issue whether Viacom acted in its own economic interests by sacking Rather, which under NY law is a defense to a tortious interference claim.

The more politically explosive parts of the suit - dealing directly with Rather's claim that he was defrauded and effectively defamed by CBS making him apologize for the story when he really didn't want to - were thrown out on statute of limitations grounds and for failure to show damages, so really neither side can claim any vindication on the merits.

The net result of this is that, while Rather gets to pursue the money he feels is owed to him, it may be difficult for him to get a Bush-hating Manhattan jury to rule on his claim that the story was true after all. But whether he can get the court to hear evidence on that point depends in large part on the contours of the remaining claims, and whether he ends up surviving summary judgment (CBS is vowing to get a later ruling that there's insufficient evidence to send these claims to a jury) on any claim that goes beyond "after they benched me they didn't give me enough to do" to "they shouldn't have benched me because I was right." As much money as is involved in the former, it's only the latter that anyone will care about.

Dignity. Integrity. Duty.

Aw, heck, why not just blow it all on fancy airplanes?

Sen. John Kerry broke spending limits by nearly $1.4 million during his 2004 presidential bid, including some funds spent on customizing his campaign jets, a Federal Election Commission draft audit concludes.

The FEC could rule that Kerry's campaign must reimburse the government. Because his general election campaign was taxpayer funded, Kerry would have to pay back the U.S. Treasury.

Much of the disputed money was spent on customizing jets used by Democratic presidential nominee Kerry and his running mate John Edwards, according to auditors.

As I've done in the past, I'm creating brand-new categories for the new year. You'll now go to Baseball 2005 for new baseball entries, Politics 2005 for new politics entries, War 2005 for new war entries, and Law 2005 for new law entries (the Law category hadn't needed an overhaul last year). I'll shortly be updating the link to baseball-only posts at the top of the page as well to send you to Baseball 2005.

Happy New Year!

This Powerline item is a classic fisking (link via Instapundit).

(Also posted in The Corner after I emailed this to Jonah Goldberg - Welcome, Corner readers!).

For all of Josh Marshall's huffing and puffing about the effort to expose how Joe Wilson got picked for the Niger trip, it's worth taking a little trip in the Wayback Machine to what Marshall had to say on July 8, 2003, less than a week before Bob Novak's now-infamous column identifying Wilson's wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, as the person who picked Wilson:

The Mad Hibernian's post on Friday on Michael Crichton's new book questioning "global warming" and similar environmental dogmas (which followed on this powerful speech by Crichton last year denouncing global warming theories) prompted some interesting comments and links. Now, I'm no expert on the subject myself, but I did think it was worth repeating here something I said in the comments to that post. I'm very skeptical of hearing "global warming" discussed as if it is a single concept, like "the earth is round." Basically, "global warming," as I understand its popular meaning, is really three different concepts:

1. The earth has, for some period of time, been getting warmer.

2. This past warming trend is not a random or cyclical phenomenon but is a trend that will continue into the future unless interrupted by human intervention.

3. The past trend and its continuation into the future are the results of specifically identifiable human activities, i.e., carbon emissions.

It is entirely possible to believe #1 without believing #2 and #3, or even to believe #1 and #2 without believing #3. Beware of anyone who tries to use evidence supporting just one of those propositions to convince you of all three.

Well, as promised back in late October, it's time to award the 2004 Bedfellow Awards. The Bedfellow Awards are named in honor of the comic strip "Bloom County," in which Senator Bedfellow was defeated on the strength of an election-day headline, "WARNING: VOTING FOR BEDFELLOW MAY CAUSE HERPES". Although the award gives special points for attacks that are false and/or unfair, the simplest definition of a Bedfellow Award nominee is a news story that (1) comes out shortly before the election, and (2) has a much larger impact on the election than it would have if it had come out earlier.

I solicited nominations, although I didn't get a whole lot of them. You can see some of the nominees here and a very early candidate here as well as in the post linked above and its trackbacks. Let's run through the awards:

1. Overall Winner: Osama bin Laden

Political experts will debate endlessly which candidate it helped and whether it had much of an impact one way or another (Kerry says it cost him the election), but there's no question that the big, knock-everything-else-off-the-front-page surprise story of the campaign's last weekend was the emergence of OBL himself from his gopher hole with a video message aimed directly at the American people and obviously timed deliberately to influence the election. (I'll leave aside here as well the debate over whether he was actually trying to help Kerry or just to show he could influence an American election as his minions had in Spain). The story, once out there, was a legitimate story, which is why I'm giving the award to bin Laden himself rather than the news media or the candidates, who had no choice but to react to it.

2. Anti-Bush Winner: The Al-Qaqaa Explosives Story

This was a favorite nominee, and it would have been an even more outsized story if CBS had succeeded, as planned, in sitting on the story until the Sunday before the election (instead, because the NY Times broke the story a week earlier, 60 Minutes had to settle for a story attacking the Bush Administration over the sufficiency of equipment for the troops in Iraq). The explosives story got more heat and less light than it would have earlier in the campaign because there was so little time to get to the bottom of the thing.

3. Anti-Kerry Winner: The Dishonorable Discharge

On November 1, the New York Sun's Thomas Lipscomb finally broke through Kerry's long stonewall on the circumstances of his discharge from the military, but the day-before-the-election timing wound up making the story a late hit. Of course, unlike late hits against Bush, this one got ignored and buried.

4. Senate Race Winner: The Kentucky Senate Race

Nasty, nasty, nasty, full of allegations of whispering campaigns, the most late-hit-filled and under-the-radar campaign of the year turned out to be the Kentucky Senate race, with Democrat Dan Mongiardo openly challenging the mental competence of Republican righty Jim Bunning, and Bunning accused of a whispering campaign to convince voters that Mongiardo was gay.

I didn't get enough nominations or pay close enough attention to pick a House winner, but the latest of the late hits had to be the attack on Louisiana Republican Billy Tauzin III for a citation for trespassing and illegal hunting of nutria, a kind of rodent.

Anyway, there were plenty of candidates from this year's presidential elections. Feel free to suggest additional honorable mentions in the comments and trackbacks.

*Great, great column by Tom Friedman on the radicalization of Iraqis under sanctions. Friedman often infuriates; he's right about diagnosing problems but responds by suggesting daft solutions. This one's more on the diagnosis side. (Link via Geraghty).

*A fine primer on Ukrainian history from a Ukrainian friend of LT Smash. If you've studied Russian history, as I did in college, some of this will be familiar, but there were also things here that were new to me or that I'd long forgotten.

*You'll want to head over to Soxblog, where pseudonymous blogger James Frederick Dwight (you really shouldn't need to think too hard on the origin of his pseudonym) is tearing apart a sloppy New Yorker piece comparing hospitals and clinics that treat cystic fibrosis (start here and scroll up for followup posts, including his discussion of my initial reaction to the piece, which was that it sounds like something drafted by the plaintiffs' bar).

*Yes, the Onion's Iraq Alert System just killed me. (Link via Simmons' Intern).

*Victor Cha, a Georgetown professor who advocates a "hawk
engagement" strategy regarding North Korea, will assume the post of Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

*You can look at this chart here and argue, as these Berkeley professors do, that the results on this graph show that the 2004 vote in Broward and Palm Beach counties were a suspicious outlier, but isn't the far more logical inference that the 2000 count in Broward and Palm Beach is the suspicious outlier? Gee, does anyone remember any controversy over the vote-counting methods used in Broward and Palm Beach in 2000? I wonder if the results would look less anomolous if you used the Election Day 2000 counts in those two counties rather than the figures that were generated a month later.

*The Gift That Keeps On Giving, Part LXVIII.

*Ann Althouse on Nancy Pelosi's horrible facelift/plastic surgery.

Jim Geraghty maps out the possibilities for CBS News after the final report comes out on Ra^thergate:

CBS could go one of three routes from this point. One, they could try to clean up their act, stop behaving as if their job is to drive President Bush from office, cover viewpoints beyond the left, and attempt to break up the groupthink that has calcified their news judgment.

Two, they could define themselves as the left-of-center news channel, and aim for the blue state audience. Instead of trying to prevent bias, they could embrace it, and make it part of their brand identity. "CBS News: The channel that progressives prefer."

Three, they could define themselves as the tabloid news channel, rushing things to air without checking, and intentionally eroding their standards for accuracy in the name of being first. They could be one part supermarket checkout line tabloid, one part Drudge, one part Wonkette, one part British Fleet Street scandal sheet.

The third is obviously somewhat tongue in cheek, especially for a deep-pocketed broadcast network. I agree that CBS can and should make a clear decision as to which way the Evening News goes: try to build a new reputation for evenhandedness, or embrace the Left the way FOX has embraced the Right. On the other hand, the departure of Rather, who after all brought this story on himself in his capacity as a 60 Minutes II correspondent rather than as Evening News anchor, offers a third way: start splitting the brand, letting 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II go their way as crusading liberal newsmagazines, while attempting to play it straight on the Evening News. This can work in the newspaper business - the Wall Street Journal has had success with both a highly ideological opinion page (which hires its own reporters) and a news section with a high reputation for evenhandedness and balance. Would it work in TV? If CBS tries to rebrand itself as a network that distinguishes between a balanced newscast and an openly left-wing newsmagazine, of course, the network would have to decide which side of the line they want to dominate the morning show, the coverage of big events like the conventions (where FOX, for example, has prospered by stacking its panels with conservative commentators who draw in right-leaning viewers). Splitting the two sides makes some sense: while the Evening News has floundered in the ratings, 60 Minutes remains healthy and can profit by enlarging its reputation as a vocal critic of all things Bush (although they might do well to stop shilling books sold by Viacom).

I've also got an outside-the-box suggestion for Rather's replacement: CNN Headline News anchor, technology reporter and former Tech TV anchor Erica Hill. Hill would bring a number of advantages to the anchor position. First, and most obviously, she's drop-dead gorgeous, better-looking than most of the actresses on CBS' prime-time schedule, let alone in the news business. That never hurts in the ratings department, and before you gripe about looks as a job qualification, remind me again why Brian Williams is succeeding Tom Brokaw, and why John Roberts has been mentioned as a replacement for Rather: first and foremost because they are big, good-looking guys with reassuring voices. Let's not pretend otherwise.

But there are other women on TV who could look good reading the news; what's additionally noteworthy about Hill is her background as a tech reporter. If you've seen her reports on CNN, she clearly comes off as someone who understands and enjoys new technologies and, frankly, spends a lot of time on the internet; she's been reporting for months on the influence of blogs and the internet on campaigns. That's precisely the fresh perspective towards newsgathering that CBS badly needs. I don't know how smart she is - her bio says she's a summa cum laude graduate of BU, which is nothing to sneeze at - but she comes off as intelligent on the air, which is important.

Granted, there would be internal resistance at CBS to bringing in someone with minimal experience (she can't be more than 30 years old, and looks younger than that), although again, the CNN bio does say she anchored the now-defunct Tech TV's on-air coverage all day on September 11, which is a real baptism of fire for any anchor. And maybe shaking things up would be a good in itself, sending a message that the way things have always been is part of the problem and bringing in someone not so set in her ways that she can't take the program in new directions. In any event, part of CBS' problem, even above and beyond bias, is age: Rather and Bob Schieffer and Mike Wallace . . . these guys are fossils, and whatever their other virtues they can't be expected to connect with younger viewers or change with the times. Maybe CBS, with an older-skewing audience, is happy with that dynamic, but it's unsustainable long-term. A young, fresh-faced anchor would change all that. With Brokaw leaving, there will be a window of opportunity for a new anchor to capture market share if CBS can make a splash. Erica Hill in Dan Rather's chair would make a splash.

UPDATE: You can catch a flavor of Hill's style with her online "Hot Wired" columns at CNN.com here (from January, discussing campaign blogs), here (marveling that she could survive a few days without internet access) and here (discussing procrastinating online).

And the Democrats wonder why they lost even normally Democrat-friendly states like New Mexico:

Democratic legislators too often seem hostile to suburban concerns, and indifferent to the aspirations of those who would like to buy a home and a small green place to call their own. In Albuquerque, for example, planners working for the local Democratic regime advocated banning backyards, an essential part of the middle-class family lifestyle. One even told a local developer that his having four children made him "immoral." A small--and probably extreme--example? Undoubtedly. But it speaks to a stereotype that Democrats have been battling for years now: that they disdain suburbia and the families who live there. It is long past time for Democrats to start undoing that perception.

Oh, and to repeat a point we Republicans keep making: you take the people who abort their children, and we'll take the families with four kids, and we'll see in a generation which of us has more voters.

One last spleen-venting legal case for the day:

A California teacher who teaches his fifth-grade students with the aid of primary source documents like the Declaration of Independence has been ordered by school administrators to stop using such artifacts of American history because the material contains references to God.

I heard about this one during the significant amount of time I spent stuck in traffic on I-95 over the holiday weekend, while flipping past Sean Hannity’s radio show. Not considering that the most reliable source and more than a little skeptical, I decided to check it out and, lo and behold, The Smoking Gun had the documentation, including the teacher’s complaint.

Politically, this is an example of Democrats needing to better police their fringes. I can’t imagine that the mainstream of that party is really opposed to the Declaration of Independence or shares such absolutist hostility to religion, but the cumulative effect of stories like this, fairly or unfairly, pushes a lot of otherwise undecided people into the Republican camp. It’s hard to get anyone to trust their children to people who think the ideas of people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are unfit for public schools.

This Nicholas Kristof column in last Wednesday's NY Times, denouncing the "Left Behind" series of novels popular among evangeical Christians, rather perfectly captures a misunderstanding of religious tolerance that is found too often on the Left, and one I've dealt with before. Here's Kristof:

The "Left Behind" series, the best-selling novels for adults in the U.S., enthusiastically depict Jesus returning to slaughter everyone who is not a born-again Christian. The world's Hindus, Muslims, Jews and agnostics, along with many Catholics and Unitarians, are heaved into everlasting fire: "Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and . . . they tumbled in, howling and screeching."

Gosh, what an uplifting scene!

If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hatemongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard.

[snip]

I accept that [the authors] are sincere. (They base their conclusions on John 3.) But I've sat down in Pakistani and Iraqi mosques with Muslim fundamentalists, and they offered the same defense: they're just applying God's word.

. . . [I]f I praise the good work of evangelicals - like their superb relief efforts in Darfur - I'll also condemn what I perceive as bigotry.

See, here's the problem. Kristof isn't just asking the authors of these books to allow for people of other faiths to practice their own faiths in peace; he's demanding that the authors change what they themselves actually believe to be the Word of God. That's not a plea for religious tolerance; it is, in fact, religious intolerance, as Kristof is saying that the beliefs of these Christians are so offensive to him that they must be branded as "bigotry" and driven from public expression.

Let me put this another way to explain why the comparison to radical Muslims is so offensive. I have no problem with people who believe that God is going to send me to Hell for being a Catholic. They believe their thing, and I believe mine. I have a major problem with people who think that they, rather than God Himself, should send me there. It is right and proper and necessary to denounce religious extremists who are unable to accept the peaceable coexistence of people of different religions, who call for earthly violence and political opression against those of different faiths. But to demand that people give up the tenet of their faith - a central one in many faiths - that says that they are following the one and only path to salvation, that's what Stephen Carter has referred to as demanding that people treat "God as a hobby" rather than taking faith seriously. While it may in some circumstances be rude to say it, I wouldn't want to live in a country where people could not feel free to profess that theirs is the only true faith; such a country would be one in which no one really believed in anything at all.

The "Left Behind" guys aren't asking that anyone be harmed in the here and now; they are content to wait for Jesus to take care of that. By failing to distinguish between the two, Kristof shows that he still views religious beliefs as something that can be bent to the needs of human society rather than the other way around. Which is to say, not religion at all.

*Patterico has a tremendous idea: Senate Republicans should introduce a non-binding resolution of support for each of the filibustered judicial nominees, so as to put on the record the fact that they would be confirmed if granted a floor vote. Would the Democrats filibuster this as well, so as to prevent the public from finding this out? (Link via Bashman).

*If you liked my marginal vote analyses, Patrick Ruffini has a map that captures a lot of the same type of stuff in graphic form. I take it that some of the swing towards the Democrats in Montana may have been aided by the victory of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate there.

*Speaking of cool charts, check out this piece with its charts of blog activity during the campaign.

*This "Email of the Day" to Andrew Sullivan pretty well captures the Democrats' image problems.

*Two more from Ruffini, who's on a roll: first, this:

President Bush carried 97 of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties, most of them "exurban" communities that are rapidly transforming farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan areas.

The counties with the most population loss (from people picking up and leaving) voted for Kerry 68.6% to 30.4%.

Mmmmm, 2010 census. And Ruffini also has a link to this must-read analysis over at Kos' place:

A top Kerry staffer (one of five who had been with Kerry from the very start of his primary campaign and who claimed he talked with Kerry almost daily on the phone) told me: "To be blunt, this is a fat-cat top-down campaign. The campaign staff doesn't really get grassroots." Those were his exact words (I wrote them down because I was startled he would admit this--I haven't told ANYONE this quote because I didn't want it to get into GOP hands prior to the election). He did think a grassroots strategy was crucial, but he may have been among the very few Kerry staffers there at the time to think that way; he and one other staffer were pushing to get me hired and create a real grassroots strategy. He called me daily with updates. On the fourth day, he apologized that Mary Beth Cahill was concerned I could be a "Republican mole." He told her I had been a volunteer with the Dean campaign and that he trusted me based on our phone conversations, but that didn't prove anything to her. She couldn't imagine hiring someone who lived in California that she'd never met. Instead, she hired a former Emily's List staffer with experience sending direct mail to big donors, whom Mary Beth had worked with previously.

This, of course, echoes many of the things the GOP side was saying before the election. Did McCain-Feingold actually succeed in hamstringing Kerry? Then again, the turnout and exit poll numbers do suggest that Kerry's side didn't do so badly in turning out the Democratic base and swinging Nader voters; where they lost was in high GOP turnout and, perhaps most of all, the defection of something like 10% of the people who voted for Gore in 2000. You win them back with the message and the candidate, not by digging deeper at the roots. Plus, the Republicans have an advantage: new GOP voters tend to stay put in their homes with their children, whereas the Democrats' newly registered voters are often transients - college students, new immigrants - and even if you can still find them four years later, they may start to lean more Republican as they set some roots down, which means the Dems need to reinvent the wheel every four years with their register-young-voters push.

Dan Drezner notes another diplomatic triumph for the Bush Administration, as James Baker hammers out an agreement with Russia, France, Germany and others to forgive 80% of Iraq's debts.

I had to laugh at this exchange on CNN’s Sunday Late Edition between Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) and Wolf Blitzer:

SANCHEZ: …I believe that we made mistakes. The media certainly is not in our hands any longer, and, in particular, radio talk shows where that is completely in the opposition's hands, and they use it effectively against us.

BLITZER: But, Loretta, when you say the media -- when you say the media is not in your hands, are you saying that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN are hostile to Democrats?

SANCHEZ: No, that's not what I said. I'm saying that -- if you would let me finish -- that the majority of people are now receiving a lot of their information out of radio. And the radio isn't in the hands of the Democrats anymore.

Many years ago, the Republicans made a very effective play. They sat down. They made a strategy. They decided they were going to put big thinktanks around, that they were going to fund them. They decided that they would buy radio, that they would use that to talk to people. And people drive in their cars, they're listening to the radio all the time. They're getting a lot of information that way.

You know, networks are losing -- you know, they're getting less and less viewership.

The transcript doesn’t quite do justice to how depressed Sanchez sounded when she said “the media is not in our hands any longer.” But the interview did make me want to learn more about this sinister, so-called “radio” device and how the government can curb its pernicious influence.

Seriously, though, isn’t it overstating the case - and more than a little rude to Al Franken, who was on the very same panel – for a Democrat to say that radio is “completely in the opposition’s hands.” Comments like these would also seem to belie Sanchez’s claims.

Drum notes a program at Santa Clara University to give preferential treatment to male students and huffs:

I'm hopeful that the principled folks over at National Review will condemn this practice. And please: not just a desultory acknowledgment or two to prove you care. I expect a stream of outraged posts and crosstalk at least equal to the recent torrents about Arlen Specter, the lack of conservatives among humanities faculties, and the shocking tolerance of liberalism at the University of Chicago.

I'm counting on you, Cornerites. The eyes of the blogosphere are on you.

Well, if Drum wants us conservatives to say that preferences for less-qualified male students in university admissions are bad, he can relax; obviously, this kind of discrimination is not justified. But, in the Kleiman style, he wants instead to paint conservatives as hypocrites for not dropping what they are doing and writing what Drum tells us to write.

But he can't be serious; this is one isolated and possibly unique feature of one not terribly prominent university. To say that it is deserving of the same attention as the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee - a matter that affects the court system and legal reform issues as a whole - is unserious at best and disingenuous at worst. Even to compare this to conservatives' principled opposition to racial preferences misses the fact that the latter are pervasive, perhaps universal, in higher education admissions. That doesn't make one more or less wrong than the other, but it certainly suggests why the emphasis falls naturally on the more prevalent program. A little perspective would go a long way.

Ricky West reminds us, graphically, that a major focus of George W. Bush's budget-busting spending increases compared to Clinton has been in education spending, an area where he's been criticized relentlessly for not spending enough.