Politics 2007 Archives

*Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg on the complete and total vindication of President Bush and other opponents of public funding for embryonic stem cell research.

*Spitzer's DMV strikes again:

Arno Herwerth, a 21-year veteran of the New York Police Department, said he requested the "GETOSAMA" plates earlier this month to send a political message. He said he was surprised to hear, after receiving the plates, that the DMV wanted them back.

In a Nov. 15 letter to Herwerth, the agency cited a regulation prohibiting plates that could be considered "obscene, lewd, lascivious, derogatory to a particular ethnic group or patently offensive."

Oh, really - offensive to whom?

*Of all the planted-question issues with the debates (see here, here and here), this video of Obama unwittingly giving away that he knew a questioner is perhaps the funniest.
It's like something out of Matlock.

*Hillary throws stones from a glass house:

Clinton closed out her Sunday with an appeal to voters in Bettendorf to caucus for her, but earlier in Cedar Rapids, she took Obama to task over his health care plan and disputed his claim he doesn’t take lobbyist money.

When a reporter asked whether she is suggesting Obama has “issues of character, the New York senator said, "I'm going to let voters make that decision but it’s beginning to look a lot like that. It really is."

For those of us old enough to remember the Clintons and their surrogates arguing incessantly that character is wholly irrelevant to the presidency and that campaigning on such issues is a sign of being defeated on the issues - heck, go back and watch "The American President," their propaganda movie devoted to this theme, albeit while re-casting the facts in the most favorable possible light - this is hilarious, as is this:

Clinton said she wanted to win the caucuses — and, next year, push the state into the Democratic column in the general election.

"I want a long term relationship," she said. "I don't want to just have a one night stand with all of you."

*And, for a little humor, this, via Ace. We've all been on the other end of conversations like this, though perhaps rarely quite so graphically.

When I looked at the long list of tax hiking Democratic Governors back in the spring, I gave an incomplete grade to Maryland's new Democratic Governor, Martin O'Malley, not out of any illusions about whether he was anything but a standard-issue tax-and-spend liberal but simply because he hadn't done anything yet.

Well, no need to wait longer for the verdict. E.J. Dionne, predictably, hails O'Malley's billion-and-a-half dollar tax hike, passed earlier this week:

Facing a $1.7 billion budget deficit, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley -- who offered the above observations in an interview -- led the legislature this week to approve $1.4 billion in taxes and $550 million in spending cuts. It's been a long time since we've seen that kind of balance from the federal government.

At the same time, the legislature extended health coverage to 100,000 residents and approved new money for transportation, education and cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay. . . .

The final budget package contains its share of questionable concessions to this group or that. The middle class bears more of the burden of the tax increases than O'Malley had hoped. The income tax hike for those earning over $500,000 a year -- the rate goes from 4.75 percent to 5.5 percent -- is a modest step in the right direction.

Julia Roberts designs Armani bracelet for World AIDS Day. Mother Theresa should have been so virtuous.

As if he hasn't had enough stumbles, NY Governor Eliot Spitzer is now considering breaking outright his campaign promise not to raise taxes, which he previously bent rather severely with proposed business tax hikes and aggressive sales tax enforcement against Native Americans. He's apparently pondering an income tax hike:

Governor Spitzer is considering a proposal to raise income taxes on wealthier New Yorkers, according to a labor-backed political party that is pushing for the increase....

Support for a tax increase is coming from one of Mr. Spitzer's firmest backers, the Working Families Party, a grassroots operation financed by a coalition of labor unions and community groups....

Party leaders have not finalized details of the plan, but they are expected to call for raising the income tax rates of New Yorkers earning at least $200,000 to $500,000 a year.

This is on top of Spitzer's new plan to tax Internet sales and new MTA fare hikes. Because really, the first thing people think of in New York is that taxes are so low and the business climate is so friendly...

Mark Cuban challenges Bill O'Reilly to debate him with Keith Olbermann as the moderator. Via Hot Air.

Apparently Gov. Corzine intends to go forward with his stem cell plan even after the voters rejected it.

Democrats nationwide have been operating on the assumption that taxpayer funding for stem cell research is endlessly popular with the voters (for all the talk of "banning" research on embryonic stem cells, remember that nobody has advanced a serious proposal to make such research illegal; the issue is whether to spend taxpayer money on it despite the substantial moral/ethical objections of a significant number of taxpayers).

Yesterday in New Jersey, that theory was put to the test, and appears to have gone down in defeat before what is usually accounted as a liberal Northeastern electorate:

Devastating anti-Hillary ad put out by John Edwards:

Via Stop Her Now.

Matt Labash's Weekly Standard profile of GOP political operative Roger Stone is one of the funniest, most fascinating things you are likely to read about a practitioner of politics at its most bare-knuckeled (the man has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back). I'd be here all day if I started to excerpt it, so I'll just say: read the whole thing.

*As the comments to this post noted, the Bush Administration is obviously producing good economic news to distract the media from the progress being made in Iraq.

*I find your lack of conservatism disturbing.

*I'm no Obama fan but this T-Shirt sold to benefit his campaign is pretty clever.

*Definitely not safe for work.

The ant-war wackos who tried, and failed, to throw Joe Lieberman out of the Senate now have to live with the fact that Lieberman is free to say what he thinks - and whatever his sorrow-not-anger shtick, I suspect he is relishing being a thorn in the side of his former party's presidential contenders.

Lieberman is dead right about the irresponsibility of Senators who voted to deny the role of Iranian units in arming terrorists:

"I thought it was so direct, factual, based on evidence the U.S. military has given us of the involvement of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in training and equipping Iraqi extremists who… have been responsible for the killing of hundreds of American soldiers."

Chuckling a bit, apparently in disbelief, Lieberman asked, "How can you vote against a request that the administration impose economic sanctions on a group that the U.S. military has presented us ample evidence is a terrorist group killing American soldiers?"

Remember the scene in Wedding Crashers where Owen Wilson tells a woman he's trying to seduce, "You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts"?

Read everything Michael Gerson says to yourself in Wilson's voice and imagine he's saying it to get a girl in bed. It makes so much more sense that way.

Congressional Democrats have been discovering, after 12 years out of power, that actually governing is a lot harder and less fun than griping from the cheap seats; but as long as George W. Bush is in the White House, they retain a convenient scapegoat for the gap between their rhetoric and reality.

Democratic governors, the numbers of which have proliferated in recent years, have no such luxury; having sold the pie in the sky, they actually have to bake it. I've been warning of this since the spring in regard to tax hikes, and Eliot Spitzer's disastrous illegal-immigrant-driver's license plan is only one of many other examples of Democratic governors reminding people why there were so many Republican incumbents in the first place.

Add now the Chicago Tribune to the list of the disenchanted, to the point of arguing that the Rod Blagojevich era demonstrates why Illinois needs a mechanism to recall a governor:

If there is one thing we have definitvely learned from the whole Scott Beauchamp episode, it's that Franklin Foer is a cretin.

Relatedly, we have also been reminded of one of the central lessons of the Plame affair: nepotism and secret-keeping don't mix.

I've written previously here and here about NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's foolhardy and politically disastrous plan to give driver's licenses to illegal aliens, and NY Senator Hillary Clinton's evasive response to questions about the plan that "I know exactly what Governor Spitzer's trying to do and it makes a lot of sense, because he's trying to get people out of the shadows" and "it's unfortunate that too many people are using this to demagogue the issue," wink, wink, while, as Jim Geraghty notes, sending her chief strategist out to argue that the families of illegal immigrants "may be the most powerful political force in the country," nudge, nudge.

But just because a Clinton takes a non-position doesn't mean it can't change, and the NY Post's veteran Albany correspondent, Frederic Dicker, reports that a panicked NY Democratic Party is planning to throw Spitzer under the, er, steamroller - and some believe that Sen. Clinton may end up getting on board with that effort:

Top Democrats fear that Gov. Spitzer's controversial plan to grant driver's licenses to illegal aliens has endangered their party's candidates across the state -- and even threatens the presidential prospects of Hillary Rodham Clinton, The Post has learned.

A half-dozen senior Democrats told The Post that Spitzer's licensing plan is producing what one called "a mass exodus" away from the party's candidates that may lead to unexpected losses in November's local elections.

They are also warning that growing voter unhappiness with Spitzer on the licensing and other issues - illustrated in several recent polls - could carry into next year and end the Democrats' hope of winning control of the GOP-dominated state Senate.

"The driver's-license issue is a killer for us in the suburbs," a senior party strategist said. . . .

+++

Another senior Democrat predicted that Sen. Clinton, who has repeatedly refused to say whether she backs Spitzer's plan, would soon be forced to reject it.

"The immigrant license issue is one of the most politically dangerous in the nation, and Hillary will have to come out against it," the Democrat said.

H/T Geraghty. Stay tuned.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's plan to document the undocumented by giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens has been yet another fiasco for the Empire State's unpopular new governor, bleeding his support even among Democrats who are in the country legally and leading other Democratic officials to keep their distance. But what does New York's junior senator, running now for President, think of the state's unilateral effort to hijack federal immigration policy? Up to now, Hillary Clinton has been quiet on the subject, but in an interview she finally had to answer the question:

I think it's important to bring everybody out of the shadows. To do the background checks. To deport those who have outstanding warrants or have committed crimes in the United States, and then to say to those who wish to stay here, you have to pay back taxes, you have to pay a fine, you have to learn English, and you have to wait in line. And I hate to see any state being pushed to try to take this into their own hands, because the federal government has failed. So I know exactly what Governor Spitzer's trying to do and it makes a lot of sense, because he's trying to get people out of the shadows. He's trying to say, "O.K., come forward and we will give you this license."

But without a federal policy in effect, people will come forward and they could get picked up by I.C.E. tomorrow. I mean, this can't work state-by-state. It has to be looked at comprehensively. I agreed with President Bush and his efforts to try to approach this. He just didn't have the political capital left by the time he actually got serious about it.
And it's unfortunate that too many people are using this to demagogue the issue, instead of trying to solve it: you know, people in politics, people in the press, and there's a kind of unholy alliance.

Spitzer's camp immediately rushed to claim this as support:

"We are gratified that many state leaders understand the security value of bringing people out of the shadows and into the system," said spokeswoman Christine Anderson.

The NY Times and NY Daily News, however, recognized this for what it is: a typically Clintonian effort to have it both ways without answering the question and taking some responsibility for the answer. What else is new?

Whenever you think unhinged political rhetoric has reached its lowest possible point in this country, Fortney "Pete" Stark (D-CA, of course) manages to burrow to a new low, this time in debating the SCHIP bill:

From George Will's column today:

SCHIP is described as serving "poor children" or children of "the working poor." Everyone agrees that it is for "low-income" people. Under the bill that Democrats hope to pass over the president's veto tomorrow, states could extend eligibility to households earning $61,950. But America's median household income is $48,201. How can people above the median income be eligible for a program serving lower-income people?

Incidentally, though there are some very significant differences, Will also notes that Hillary Clinton's 401(k) proposal does contain some crucial concessions to the Right's longstanding arguments for Social Security reform:

Clinton's idea for helping Americans save for retirement is this: Any family that earns less than $60,000 and puts $1,000 into a new 401(k)-type plan would receive a matching $1,000 tax cut. For those earning between $60,000 and $100,000 the government would match half of the first $1,000. She proposes to pay for this by taxing people who will be stoical about this -- dead people -- by freezing the estate tax exemption at its 2009 level.

A conservative case can be made for something like Clinton's proposal. It is a case for reducing the supply of government by reducing demand for it, and doing so by giving people ownership of enlarged private assets as a basis for their security. It is a case for raising the nation's deplorable saving rate and simultaneously encouraging the nation's economic literacy and temperance by giving more people a stake in equities markets.

George W. Bush made this case in his advocacy of personal accounts financed by a portion of individuals' Social Security taxes and invested in funds based on equities and bonds. When he proposed this, Clinton stridently opposed him, and not just because she thought it would undermine Social Security's solvency and political support. She also said it was a dangerous gamble that would make retirement insecure by linking retirement savings to the stock market. Echoing a trope from Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, she said investing retirement funds in the stock market was a "risky scheme."

Today her Web site calls her proposal a way to save for "a secure retirement." After an undisclosed epiphany, she belatedly recognizes that 401(k) funds invested in equities are a foundation for security.

Of course, Clinton - as usual - is proposing this in addition to Social Security (while she has been suggesting that Social Security taxes be raised, as well as estate taxes and all the various other things she proposes to pay for with new taxes), and like many Clinton plans it involves careful slicing and dicing of the economy via "targeted" tax cuts. Still, the movement is in the right direction.

The great strategic error that Bush made in 2005 on the Social Security battle was in many ways a reprise of the WMD fiasco in the run-up to the Iraq War: he banked on the wrong arguments and gave short shrift to the better ones. Bush tried to argue that personal, semi-private* accounts were necessary to fix Social Security's projected shortfalls. The problem is, we are already in a hole on Social Security benefits that are owed without the ability to pay for them under current tax/benefit policies, and the personal-accounts system would do nothing to make the hole smaller; all it would do is stop digging new holes for the future. That's a great virtue of the proposal - it would make the system perpetually self-financing, rather than financed on a Ponzi scheme footing of using current receipts to pay current benefits without any necessary connection between the two - but Bush oversold the extent to which it could pay for the massive unfunded debts we already have.

*Semi-private in that the accounts are subject to private control and ultimate ownership; they would still be part of a mandatory government program.