Politics

by Charles

About six weeks ago I wrote about the apparent Democratic policy of being the "No Party" instead of the "Better Ideas Party".  Well, the results are in.  The strategy is failing.  The Christian Science Monitor wrote the following about a poll conducted by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg:

Some 43 percent of voters said they had warm feelings about the Republican Party, while only 38 percent had positive feelings about Democrats. "Republicans weakened in this poll … but it shows Democrats weakening more," Greenberg said. He attributes the decline to voters’ perceptions that Democrats have "no core set of convictions or point of view.

Read more

by hilzoy

Last night, word began to circulate around the blogs that Lawrence O’Donnell , an MSNBC political analyst, had identified Karl Rove as the person who leaked Valerie Plame’s name. Today, O’Donnell confirmed that he said this:

“I revealed in yesterday’s taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine’s emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source. I have known this for months but didn’t want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury. (…)

Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an ‘It’s Rove!’ story and will probably break it tomorrow.”

And now the Newsweek story is out:

“The e-mails surrendered by Time Inc., which are largely between Cooper and his editors, show that one of Cooper’s sources was White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, according to two lawyers who asked not to be identified because they are representing witnesses sympathetic to the White House. Cooper and a Time spokeswoman declined to comment. But in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed that Rove had been interviewed by Cooper for the article. It is unclear, however, what passed between Cooper and Rove.

The controversy began three days before the Time piece appeared, when columnist Robert Novak, writing about Wilson’s trip, reported that Wilson had been sent at the suggestion of his wife, who was identified by name as a CIA operative. The leak to Novak, apparently intended to discredit Wilson’s mission, caused a furor when it turned out that Plame was an undercover agent. It is a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of an undercover CIA official. A special prosecutor was appointed and began subpoenaing reporters to find the source of the leak.

Novak appears to have made some kind of arrangement with the special prosecutor, and other journalists who reported on the Plame story have talked to prosecutors with the permission of their sources. Cooper agreed to discuss his contact with Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide, after Libby gave him permission to do so. But Cooper drew the line when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked about other sources.

Initially, Fitzgerald’s focus was on Novak’s sourcing, since Novak was the first to out Plame. But according to Luskin, Rove’s lawyer, Rove spoke to Cooper three or four days before Novak’s column appeared. Luskin told NEWSWEEK that Rove “never knowingly disclosed classified information” and that “he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA.” Luskin declined, however, to discuss any other details. He did say that Rove himself had testified before the grand jury “two or three times” and signed a waiver authorizing reporters to testify about their conversations with him. “He has answered every question that has been put to him about his conversations with Cooper and anybody else,” Luskin said. But one of the two lawyers representing a witness sympathetic to the White House told NEWSWEEK that there was growing “concern” in the White House that the prosecutor is interested in Rove. Fitzgerald declined to comment.

In early October 2003, NEWSWEEK reported that immediately after Novak’s column appeared in July, Rove called MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews and told him that Wilson’s wife was “fair game.” But White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters at the time that any suggestion that Rove had played a role in outing Plame was “totally ridiculous.” On Oct. 10, McClellan was asked directly if Rove and two other White House aides had ever discussed Valerie Plame with any reporters. McClellan said he had spoken with all three, and “those individuals assured me they were not involved in this.” “

TalkLeft has a summary of earlier reporting on the Plame investigation.

Read more

by hilzoy

Via TPM, a story from the (San Diego area) North County News:

“Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and a Washington defense contractor continued their silence Tuesday about allegations that the Escondido Republican’s relationship with the contractor may have influenced Cunningham to use his clout to help the company obtain millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. (…)

When a Congressional representative has strong reason to believe that a House member may have committed an ethics violation, any House member may request that the ethics panel investigate the matter. To date, no Congressional representative, Republican or Democrat, has filed such a request pertaining to Cunningham.

While Republicans may have partisan reasons for not asking the House Ethics Committee to investigate Cunningham’s ties to the contractor, Democrats have no such excuse, said Naomi Seligman, deputy director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“If Democrats are all about ethics and integrity, how can they not file a complaint?” she asked.”

Josh Marshall is furious:

“Now, I’ve talked to various knowledgable folks. And the reasons are several. The ethics committee is shut down. So there’s no point in filing a complaint. That’s one of the main excuses. But the real reason seems to be this — and the word comes down right from the House leadership: the Democrats don’t want to start filing ethics complaints against the Republicans because they’re afraid the Republicans will turn around and do the same to them.

They apparently want the ‘truce’ of the late 1990s back in force.

And just so we’re clear, it’s awfully hard to think of anything more pathetic than that. (…)

The Republicans are running a wildly corrupt Congress — particularly on the House side. And the Democrats are so shorn of power that they couldn’t even manage to be very corrupt if they tried. After all, this kind of corruption is about selling access and power. And the Democrats have no access or power!

So how is it exactly that the Democrats should be afraid that the Republicans are going to be able to give as good as they get if there’s an ‘ethics war’ in the House when that is the case. Some are just scared. Others, particularly some of the veterans, don’t want to clamp down too much because they’ve spent ten years out of power and they don’t want all the fun to be over if and when they finally get back in the saddle.

If elected Democrats aren’t able or willing to take a stand against the cash-n-carry legislative ethos of Tom DeLay’s Washington they’re simply not doing the job anyone sent them there to do. And they should be replaced too.”

What he said. To be clear: I blame everyone who has not filed an ethics complaint on this one, Democrat or Republican. But while I can, sort of, understand what the Republicans might be thinking, without particularly liking it, I have no idea at all in what universe this is not an obvious thing for Democrats to do. It is, for them, both right and politically expedient. And they should do it now.

You can find your Representative’s email address here. Whether your Rep is a Democrat or a Republican, write and ask him or her to refer Cunningham’s case to the House Ethics Committee. If this isn’t exactly the sort of case the Committee ought to be investigating, I don’t know what is.

Read more

by Charles

I’ve always been a fan of Condoleeza Rice.  Part of it has to do with her background and part has to do with her smarts, temperament, grace and charisma.  She reminds me a little of Margaret Thatcher, but better looking (sexist alert).  Another item in the plus column is her performance as Secretary of State.  Just in the last week, she has on multiple occasions lived up to the standards of the second inaugural address.  Let’s recap.

Read more

by hilzoy

A few months ago, I wrote a post about Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham and his propensity for saying completely nutty things like this:

The Congressional Leadership (in 1992) “ought to be lined up and shot”

About protesters against the war in Vietnam, “I would have no hesitation about lining them up and shooting them,” he said. “Those people should be shot for what they did to us over there.”

Bill Clinton was a KGB dupe

Some members of Congress “will tell you openly that they’re both Communist supporters and socialist supporters” who want “your kids and my kids … to fall under a socialist, Communist regime”.

A rectal procedure he had undergone was “just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank.”

Now, via Talking Points Memo, I find that Rep. Cunningham seems to have some ethics problems above and beyond those revealed in the quotes I just cited. From an article in the San Diego Union Tribune:

“A defense contractor with ties to Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham took a $700,000 loss on the purchase of the congressman’s Del Mar house while the congressman, a member of the influential defense appropriations subcommittee, was supporting the contractor’s efforts to get tens of millions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon.

Mitchell Wade bought the San Diego Republican’s house for $1,675,000 in November 2003 and put it back on the market almost immediately for roughly the same price. But the Del Mar house languished unsold and vacant for 261 days before selling for $975,000.

Meanwhile, Cunningham used the proceeds of the $1,675,000 sale to buy a $2.55 million house in Rancho Santa Fe. And Wade, who had been suffering through a flat period in winning Pentagon contracts, was on a tear – reeling in tens of millions of dollars in defense and intelligence-related contracts. (…)

Congressional and political watchdog organizations expressed concerns, saying the circumstances raise questions about whether the transaction might constitute an illegal campaign contribution or even an official bribe.

“This doesn’t look good at all,” said Larry Noble, director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “It doesn’t look like something that was on the up and up.”

“The potential conflicts here are enormous,” added Brad White, director of investigations for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. (…)

Asked if he and Wade were friends, Cunningham answered, “No more than I am with (Qualcomm founder) Irwin Jacobs or (Titan Corp. founder) Gene Ray or any of the other CEOs.”

Nobody would equate MZM, which is headquartered in the trendy Dupont Circle area in Washington, with San Diego-based giants Qualcomm and Titan. Nor would anyone equate Wade with Jacobs or Ray. Wade was a Pentagon program manager before launching MZM in 1993, and he struggled to get contracts as recently as three years ago.

But in 2003 and 2004, roughly around the time of the house transaction, MZM’s fortunes began to soar. In fiscal year 2003, it received $41 million in defense contracts. Since then, MZM has added tens of millions of dollars in additional contracts, including a $5 million sole source contract to provide interpreters in Iraq.

In 2004, MZM had $66 million in revenues, according to Washington Technology magazine, which put the relative corporate newcomer on its 2005 list of “Top 100 Federal Prime Contractors.” “

So: a struggling defense contractor buys the home of an influential member of the House Appropriations Committee’s Defense Subcommittee, almost immediately puts it back on the market at the same price, and takes a $700,000 loss. By an amazing coincidence, he begins to get lucrative defense contracts at the very same time. Chalk another one up to synchronicity!

Personally, I think Rep. Cunningham should have been voted out of office years ago, on the grounds that anyone who thinks it’s OK to say that his political opponents should be lined up and shot has no place in our government. But if this accomplishes the same thing, I won’t complain. I will, however, note that it is just wrong to give defense contracts out for any reason other than the quality and pricing of the contractor, especially in time of war. We really need the best interpreters we can find to support our troops in Iraq, and anyone who would seek to influence such a contract for personal gain has done something much worse than giving, say, a highway contract to his brother-in-law.

Read more

[A few updates below.]

Congressman Lamar Smith of (R-Texas) has just introduced the Patent Reform Act of 2005.  It is the most significant change to the U.S. patent laws since the 1952 Patent Act, and it will have a major impact on how patents are examined, issued, and enforced.  Because patent law is a very much inside-baseball game, however, I fear that a lot of the nuances in the debate will be lost on the general public.  My goal on this blog is to de-mystify the debate as much as possible, and to give our readership my best view on what patent reform means in a practical sense.

Here are the broad outlines of the proposed reform: 

Read more

By Edward

I feel like such a fool. I mean, here there’s been a war raging and I didn’t truly realize it. Oh, I heard the folks insisting we’re at war, practically pleading with me to understand what’s at stake and why we must unite in the fight, but I chose to ignore the signs, preferring my haze of denial to the harsh light of hard choices. Clearly now, though, it’s impossible to deny what’s undeniable: we are at war.

What makes it all the worse, is that all through the 2004 presidential campaign, we were repeatedly told we’re at war. One candidate stood above the rest, going to great lengths to try and rally all sides across the nation around the cause, just to be scoffed at by his critics. That candidate, of course, was John Edwards, and the war that’s raging is a class war of epic proportions. The joke is, not only are the middle classes enabling the superwealthy to shock and awe the hell out of them, even the merely wealthy are voting against their own interests, and in doing so ensuring a new oligarchy rises to untouchable heights unimagined in any other time in the life of the American Dream:

Read more

by Charles

Daniel Okrent started this tempest in his fare thee well column in the New York Times, with this sentence:

Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.

Okrent must have known the response he would get from this sentence, and he was brave for doing so.  Not surprisingly, Dr. Krugman responded forcefully in the Times’ public editor web journal:

Mr. Okrent has so far offered only one example that, if true, would have justified his all-out attack on my ethics.

Krugman initially responded to the only example he thought was "significant", then later responded to Okrent’s specific example [sentence updated].  Leaving aside the notion that one sentence in a column with thirteen separate numbered topics constitutes an "all-out attack", Krugman does have a history of fitting his data to his politics.  The liberal economics professor may consider the other criticisms a picking of the nits, but when you’re a columnist in the most prominent newspaper in the country, those nits aren’t so small. The fellas at QandO have been on a roll lately, and Jon Henke demonstrates how Krugman has sliced and diced in the "significant" example.  Dale Franks hit Krugman on stagflation, and Henke provides a coup de grace in this detailed follow-up.  Tom Maguire writes about his walk down memory lane with Krugman.  Andrew Samwick adds a few observations, concluding with this:

Any time spent reading Krugman in search of an informed, liberal economist’s point of view is time that could be better spent reading Brad DeLong’s blog.

Read more

by hilzoy

According to Merriam-Webster, ‘conservatism’ means:

1 capitalized a : the principles and policies of a Conservative party b : the Conservative party
2 a : disposition in politics to preserve what is established b : a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change
3 : the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change

This is a view I can respect, even when I disagree with it. Changing institutions can often have large unintended consequences, and a generally cautious attitude towards changing them often makes sense to me. To quote a passage from Chesterton that Sebastian cited recently:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

So why aren’t more Republicans taking a conservative position on the nuclear option?

Read more