The Crossed Pond

So, Kerik had a nanny problem, then he had a corruption problem, now he has a potential Federal felony trial problem. Does this mean that Giuliani has a Kerik problem? John McIntyre at RCP thinks that it might well, pointing out the NYT story that Giuliani knew about some of Kerik’s problems back in 2000, before appointing him Police Commisioner, employing him at Giuliani partners, or supporting Kerik for the position of Homeland Security Secretary.

Like the McCain turncoat story I posted about yesterday, I don’t have any particuarly accurate way to judge what does and doesn’t have legs so far as political harm is concerned; it depends on context, events and further releases of information. The Kerik-NYC sleaze issue was, however, one of the things I wondered about in an earlier post, a few weeks ago and it look at least as if it might have potential. Could be an interesting couple of weeks, particularly if at least one of Giuliani’s opponents guns for this.

Bob Novak’s latest Inside Report has a bunch of interesting stuff.

Apparently, Steny Hoyer’s threat to stop the recent GOP success with Motions to Recommit (that I mused on here here) has been met by John Boehner with a threat to obstruct appropriations, described as a “legislative meltdown”. That should be worth watching, if the Republicans go for a money showdown with the Democrats while the Democrats are heading toward an Iraq money showdown with the administration (although the edge might be a bit off that now we hear that the war can go until July without additional funds).

CIA director Michael Hayden has apparently been accused of currying favour with Democrat Representatives with an eye to a step up under a future Democratic President. Not so sure I buy that; it seems to me that playing nice with a Democrat Congress has clear benefits to the CIA Director, given the rough ride the CIA has had.

Sens. Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell apparently opposed a porkbusting motion of Sen. Coburn’s, in order to bolster Sen Norm Coleman, who’s facing a tough battle in Minnesota in 2008 (possibly against Al Franken). Coleman has to be an early Democrat target, being as he only won a tight race against an ancient Walter Mondale following the debacle of the Wellstone Memorial back in 2002.

Lastly, in the land of the apparent has-beens, John and Theresa Kerry are hawking their environmental book book and pushing it to #139 in the Amazon rankings (that link currently has it up to #35, however) and Arlen Specter is announcing that he’ll run again in 2010.

UPDATE: Corrected amazon rankings.

Well, if Fred Barnes is representative (and I fear that he may be), perhaps to John McCain.

I’m a McCain guy myself, so I should perhaps be pleased to read pro-McCain stuff, particularly at a time when it’s been pretty sparse, but I fear that embracing the neo-cons would be to swallow a poison pill. He’s not one of them: indeed, his long-ignored call for more troops was not really an endorsement of neocon policy nor of Bush’s ‘Democracy for the World’ vision, but a recognition that the situation was very important. McCain wants to get elected and, thus, is liable to take support where he can get it, but I don’t think there’s many votes in embracing Barnes and his ilk. Ironic that ‘conservatives’* don’t like him when he is pretty solidly a conservative himself and that neocons, in whose number he should not be counted, have been pushed for some time towards acknowledging him as their best friend, at least amongst those with prospects.

*When people are talking about the ‘conservatives’ that don’t like McCain, they are generally including, in that group, the socon loonies, rather than followers of the One True Path of Conservatism as exemplified by me, and me alone.

Louis Theroux (see, for example, this or any of the other clips of him on youtube) went to Topeka, Kansas, to meet and film the Phelps family, proud leaders and congregation of the Westboro Baptist Church. I wish I was there in the UK to watch it.

I believe that there may be some folks hereabouts who know some of the Phelps family.

Another post just flagging some other site’s stuff, but dailykos has some pretty good stuff today. A couple posts worth checking out.

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So, one of the ‘high value’ Guantanamo detainees has claimed that he was tortured into confessing. Well, he would say that, you might reply, if he’s a highly-trained terrorist, and you’d be right. Of course, he’d also say that if he were innocent and tortured until he confessed to things he didn’t do. Consequently, how can a hearing to decide whether he is a highly-trained terrorist or an innocent use the confession, when there is a strong suspicion that torture has been used for at least ‘high value’ detainees? In this case, the hearing is to decide whether the person in question is an enemy combatant and he claims that he was, hmmm, tortured until he confessed to being an enemy combatant. There’s a pretty obvious problem here

Even if we were to support the “torture is OK sometimes, like in the ‘ticking bomb’ examples” stance, we have to accept that once we are using it, trials or hearings for the sort of people we might use torture on become at best pretty fraught; it certainly raises legitimate doubt as to the worth and honesty of these closed-door hearings. You can’t torture your cake and eat it too.

Today’s installment comes from the Fish and Wildlife Agency, whose job is to oversee policy decisions on endangered species and other wildlife, and the hack in question is Julie A. MacDonald, appointed by Bush to be the deputy assistant secretary. She’s being investigated because she sent internal agency documents to industry lobbyists, generally ran roughshod over agency scientists, and all in all decided that her job was to protect industry (or her personal interests) over, you know, the stated mission of her agency.

MacDonald tangled with field personnel over designating habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird whose range is from Arizona to New Mexico and Southern California. When scientists wrote that the bird had a “nesting range” of 2.1 miles, MacDonald told field personnel to change the number to 1.8 miles. Hall, a wildlife biologist who told the IG he had had a “running battle” with MacDonald, said she did not want the range to extend to California because her husband had a family ranch there.

More in the article. Good stuff.

Dr. Paul will be on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” tonight (Friday night). Too bad I don’t have HBO. Or cable. Or internet access. Sigh.

Filler: Ron Paul campaigning in New Hamsphire:

His campaign website (the ones I’ve linked to before were the exploratory committee): http://www.ronpaul2008.com/

One of the things I love about lewrockwell.com, or just reflective libertarians generally, is their willingness to follow their ideology as far as logically seems fair.

To that end, here is an interesting piece unpacking the case made in the headline. It follows in a time-honored line of lewrockwell.com articles arguing in against drunk driving laws, beginning with Lew Rockwell’s seminal piece Legalize Drunk Driving.

Now, I think you can easily take all this too far. I also don’t know that I would abolish drunk driving laws myself; or that Lew would, for that matter, were he given the pen (n.b. I could be wrong). However, these articles are interesting to read purely as a thought exercise. How much should the government be in the business of criminalizing things for being potential precursors to criminal act? How much human behavior can be ascribed to cost-benefit economic analysis (as a behaviorist, I say “most, if not all”). How often are moral assumptions more knee-jerk than they are thought out (not that they’re wrong, mind (important disclaimer); but how many views do you hold that you’ve never really thought of/through before, or thought of only in a recursive way?).

Before I quit drinking (three years ago today, ironically, after a few years worth of fits and starts), I was generally pretty vigilant about not driving under the influence, but I still nabbed myself two DUIs in my early twenties and probably drove under the influence a lot more than I’d like to admit. So, none of this is to glamorize drunk driving (and, working with plenty of drunks to keep myself sober, I see first-hand the wreckage of drugs and alcohol more than most, I’d reckon).

Still, it’s an interesting argument to have with yourself, precisely because it shakes, even if just a little bit, the foundational knee-jerk assumption most of us have (even those enlightened ones of us, like Adam), that things that are bad ought to be illegal. Or, at least, it requires you to put more thought into supporting that than just taking it at face value. Which, really, is a standard you should hold yourself to before strongly taking on any opinion. Good read, in any case, both of them.

I’ve wondered for quite a while what it takes to get an issue into the public consciousness. Whatever the answer is, it apparently isn’t ‘considered debate of a complex issue’. The people who have been ramping up the coverage of Global Warming and our part in it have, in fact, achieved a large part of what they were aiming to do, as Clive Crook points out in this really very interesting article in National Journal. What next?

It seems to me that the nature of politics in the US is that populism works, that the strategies for exploiting popular sympathies are well-known and that they involve the political equivalent of plenty of shouting. And, sometimes, literal shouting. However, once sufficient momentum is achieved, the shouting can stop; the hill* has been crested, or will be, and the time to enter some second strategic phase has come. The argument about whether the issue is real is largely over; the issue now is how big a problem it is and what to do about it.

This has implications for people of all political persuasions. As I wrote some time ago, conservatives need at some stage to recognise the consensus and work to shape it, lest they end up under it. The individuals who have been raising the profile of global warming need to calm down or, ideally, step right back and let the quieter business of planning remedial action occur; sure, they might feel the need to wave a warning fist if they feel that things are going awry, but they aren’t doing their overall cause any favours if they keep up the continual angry shouting and demonstrating. The issue is over the top now and doesn’t need to be pushed with anything like the same vigour.

*And the Hill. And the other Hill.

Wait, she’s going to be a cabinet member now?

Edit: The inimitable Laura beats me to the punch, plus she, like, says stuff to boot. More here.

Dan Quayle once said, “The future will be better tomorrow.” This is a stupid lie, just like everything else Dan Quayle said. The future will be worse than anything we can imagine. We know this because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states, “Everything will get worse and worse until everybody dies.” We are doomed. (more…)

Simply put: this is the best piece of 2008 campaign journalism yet written. Michael Crowley of The New Republic asks the question: why is Hillary Clinton unwilling to apologize for her war vote? His answers: because she sincerely believed in it, because it was consistent with her ideology, and because if she’d been President, she might very well have done exactly the same thing. (more…)

“But, critically, judges shouldn’t be in charge of stripping obsolete rights from the Constitution. If the courts can simply make gun rights disappear, what happens when the First Amendment becomes embarrassing or inconvenient? It corrodes the very idea of a written Constitution when the document means, in practice, the opposite of what its text says. The great beauty of the Constitution is that unlike, say, the treaties that form the European Union, you can actually read it. You can see how its language embodies principles that still animate the day-to-day operation of American political life. When that is no longer the case, American democracy suffers; it gets unmoored from its source of legitimacy.

So, if we disagree with the Founders, we should say so–and invoke that provision of the Constitution they specifically designed to let us give voice to our disagreements with them. The Bill of Rights is sacred, but it is not so sacred that we should prefer lying to ourselves about what it actually says, rather than changing it as our needs shift.”

-Benjamin Wittes in The New Republic, arguing for the repeal of the second amendment. I’m not a fan of gun control. I am very much a fan of judicial restraint.

For those without TNR access, the entire article is available at the excellent second amendment website Of Arms and the Law.

Some of you may recall that Gates of Vienna issued a call for conservative bloggers to attend the Department of Justice’s initial “First Freedom Seminar” today. The call was issued (and later echoed by Michelle Malkin) under the somewhat melodramatic heading “Counterjihad Volunteers Needed in Kansas City.”

I did in fact attend the event. As a result, you will have noticed, the US was not transformed today into a brutal Islamic dictatorship writhing in the vice-like grip of Shar’i'a law.

So, clearly, I succeeded. (more…)

The Hill has a story about McCain flirting with a switch to the Dems in 2001. Now, I don’t have anything against that; the GOP was already on the slide into the mire and ‘party loyalty’ isn’t something I greatly value in a politician. I can’t see that this is going to do McCain any good at all, however, given that he stayed in the GOP, is running again and has made a fair amount of effort to try and woo the party faithful.

I don’t want to be one of those people that prophecies doom when a piece of news has broken, because what doesn’t and doesn’t have legs depends in part on how the candidate and his opponents handle it (the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ farrago illustrates that). It does look to have the potential to screw McCain with the very people that he has trying to win back, though; I guess that he will try to pin it on his strategist, John Weaver.

Oh, and he should have switched sides, or at least become an Indepedent who voted with the Dems to establish who was the majority.

I didn’t have high hopes for the Democrat-controlled House because I don’t have great faith in the Democrats and because I think that the House is pretty much broken in any case. There has been some success for the minority of late, however, which is a Good Thing in principle (although that doesn’t say that the successes they have had are ones I favour).

The use of Motions to Recommit, combined with the Democrats adoption of pay-go, is the key to GOP success in this. After Republicans last night used the trick to add a legal shield for mass transport passengers that report suspicions relating to terrorism Steny Hoyer, MD-5, threatened to rejig procedures to stop Motions to Recommit from working as they have been.

Now, I am entirely against the proposed legal shield because I am opposed to exempting individuals from the consequences of their action; if there is a problem, the legal system needs fixing, not the application of further populist patches that make the system less consistent and coherent than before. However, the fact is that the minority got to effectively amend a bill and get it through with Democrat support, which is a healthy thing legislatively, even if the place is full of populist whores that never saw a piece of legislation too bad to vote for if they could spin it to morons (but that is a wider problem). Now, I think that Hoyer has a point in that there is not enough consideration or debate over the Motions to Recommit, but the solution shouldn’t be to further screw the minority, for all that that’s the House way of business historically. There has to be a way to balance debate with votes that aren’t pushed through on a strict party line. I’m not holding my breath, however.

This is another (rather unpredicted, by all accounts) benefit from pay-go, which ought to encourage more considered debate. The vote-winning strategy, however, is probably to crush the minority and deliver pressies to the majority’s electoral constituentcy; hopefully, they’ll keep pay-go while they do it.

Allow me to repeat my habitual disclaimer: I am not an economist. I am numerate and interested.

The claims on the Democrat budget plan presented by either side are pretty uninspiring. Much of the print media isn’t very helpful, either (presumably based on an assessment of the ability of their readers to do their sums). Yesterday, AP’s headline, was “Democrats predict sizeable budget surplus“, although the story does mention the fundamental underlying assumption that the ‘Bush tax cuts’ beloved of Larry Kudlow will expire and also mentions that the Dems don’t intend to let them all expire. Today’s AP headline explicitly makes that point. Rep. Paul Ryan, WI-1, ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, makes the ‘biggest tax increase in American history’ claim in his press release, Bob Novak adds historical and personal details and Rep John Carter, TX-31, finds time to criticise “pay-as-you-go as well. Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post provides some more measured analysis pointing out the highly contingent nature of the projections and identifies the insidious AMT as one of them (it’s probably the best of the articles I read, but that’s damning with faint praise).

The Democrats are clearly picking the good news from their budget plan; surpluses, if not too large, are a positive thing and are a topic the Democrats have long been talking about when trying to cover the Clinton years in vivid glory. I don’t think that anyone expected them to renew all the ‘Bush tax cuts’, although I doubt they’ll do much to directly hurt the average taxpayer (if that taxpayer is in line for a big inheritance or has lots of shares, however, that’s a different matter). Furthermore, Rep Ryan’s claim that:

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Another Sully-inspired post, but he briefly takes a look at the question. One of the early lines of attack against Obama is that he stands for nothing, he has no platform or no policy ideas, that he is, in Yank Crank’s words, an “empty suit”.

Greg Sargant takes that on directly, but my (and Sully’s) question:

What is it that Rudy Giuliani is running on? Anybody have any idea what he stands for, what he plans or hopes to do with the office of the president? Obama’s at least given specifics. Giuliani, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t directly advocate anything. I’ve been assuming that he’s just a neocon cipher, in the absence of evidence to the contrary (and with a fair bit of circumstancial evidence that supports it). But it’s hard to say, isn’t it? Obama gets crap for his thin record, but he does HAVE a record on national policy issues. Rudy won’t even weigh in on stuff for which he does presumaby HAVE a record (US Attorneys, for one).

It’s a valid question. He is, after all, the frontrunner both in the primary and in the general. He’s the presumptive next president of the United States of America.

Via Jonah Goldberg’s post at Corner, this story about a piece of low-class impersonation of the then-dying, since died, Cathy Seipp. It was a nasty thing to do and not an action for which I can think of an obvious defense. Some people just aren’t decent people.

There is something in the article, though, which is pretty misguided, to wit:

Legal observers say that the Seipp-Stein spat demonstrates how the Internet-using public still hasn’t figured out the boundaries of good taste and what the reasonable expectations of privacy are in a world where seemingly every other person keeps his personal thoughts in online journals that can be accessed by anyone with a computer.

Yeah, if you’re waiting for the ‘internet-using public’ to work out the boundaries of good taste so that this sort of stuff doesn’t happen, you’re going to be disappointed and not in the ‘we sold our house for 5k under the asking price’ sort of way but more the ‘you’re going to have to amputate my what?’ sort of way. The reasons can be succinctly expressed:

• People aren’t always nice. You will recognise this as the link to the title.
• There are lots of people on the internet. Really. Oodles of them.

Given that it appears that from amidst the masses precisely one person has posted impersonating the dying Cathy Seipp to make a spiteful dig, and most of us will get to die without anyone doing it at all, I am unconvinced, firstly, that there is a serious problem at all and, secondly, that there is an article in this. There is, of course, definitely an article about whether there is an article in this. Oh yes.

The other point relates to how people react to this and is along the lines of what I said in this post. There are lots of people on the internet and some of them aren’t nice (the observant will recognise that what I have done here is to reorder my two points from above); if your expectation is that no one will do offensive stuff to hurt you, you’re screwed (technical term). Furthermore, when the people in question are doing this to cause hurt and anger, exactly what is gained by delivering that very response to them? Is there some idea that you can be so much more hurt and angry than they expected that they’ll crumble under your onslaught of pain?

Cathy Seipp sounds like she was a decent person. Eliot Stein sounds like he isn’t. Getting upset at bad people doesn’t make them good, it’s often what they want.

UPDATE: Quoting this, Mona Charen pins this sort of thing on the Left, because it’s a short, straight line from profanity to spitefully impersonating dying people.

In other “rampant politicization of every aspect of government” news, via The Gavel.

General Services Administration (GSA) chief Lurita Doan went before Congress today and, similar to Monica, didn’t seem to remember much.

What she doesn’t remember includes a national teleconference of GSA managers she convened for a briefing from White House political staffers on how they could best use federal government resources to help “our candidates” in 2008 — a presentation that included a list of the Top 20 targeted Democrats for 2008.

The GSA, of course, is an office full of ideally independent civil servants, whose job it is to reward government contracts. Doan is responsible directly for billions of dollars in government awards. Everytime a private company bids on a job for the government, the GSA is the agency they bid to.

And further down the rabbit hole we go…

I was bemused when I heard that Justice Department official Monica Goodling was going to assert her Fifth Amendment Rights Senate hearings. It sounded like her lawyers were saying that she believed that the whole thing was going to be a stitch-up and that by talking to the committees, she was walking right into it. I am no expert on the legal niceties of when and why one can assert the right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination, although Reynolds Holding’s Time article at least seems informative (to me, as someone too ignorant to properly judge).

Presumably, the assertion of Fifth Amendment rights to avoid self-incrimination will make many Senators smell blood in the water, regardless of how Goodling’s lawyer portrays it. It also can’t be helpful to the administration to have a stream of its officials going there and asserting the right to avoid self-incrimination, because if television has taught us anything at all, only stone-cold guilty people like mafia dons and other undesirables assert those rights. If she isn’t the only one to do it, it’s going to look like there’s something criminal afoot regardless of the actual truth and I can’t see that the Libby comparison will be enough. “Boo hoo, the courts can’t be trusted to decide on whether I committed perjury so I won’t say anything” seems like a pretty weak argument, politically and legally.

John J Miller, writing for NRO, recounts the absurdity of banning legos in a Seattle school. I don’t entirely agree with the article; I read the source article and, excruciating as Rojas, I and most others with teaching experience find that sort of stuff, there was a lot more in it than Miller makes clear. However, he does nail it when he picks out one quote:

The children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.

The problem with what they did isn’t what the general things that they actually did; the problem is the underlying motivation for doing it, which will almost inevitably shape outcomes. On reading their article, it seems to me that they conducted a thoughtful experiment with potential to deliver genuine benefits to the kids. Miller’s concern is at least partly that the teachers in question were seeking to quell or even quash the kids’ instinctive kid behaviour, but if that bothers him, frankly, he’s missing what much of the purpose of sending kids to school actually is; a large part of the education process that isn’t direct acquisition of knowledge is about learning to moderate instinctive behaviour, and thank Christ for that.

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This is twice now that I’ve linked to Russ Douthat for a fertily intriguing post. Maybe I ought to put him on the blogroll or something.

Anyway, he has an article this week on why Fred Thompson is finding success (third with a bullet in the most recent polls), and why that’s not a sign of health for the GOP. Not just because it shows that the rest of the field…you know, the ones that are actually running and raising money…are weak, but because it belies a central problem with the dynamic that they all share, or rather suffer from.

Before I do it again, don’t let me forget to link the article.

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“I support the First Amendment right to carry and bear arms.”

- Rudy Giuliani, on Sean Hannity’s radio show.

Maybe I shouldn’t have laughed when Bush announced his bold initiative two years ago to put a stop to animal-human hybrids.

Scientists create a sheep that’s 15% human.

Second snarky remark: Well, this is one way for the GOP to close the demographic gap.

The Bulwer-Lytton contest invites participants to write bad opening paragraphs of fictional novels. This year’s winners are an impressive bunch.

Dizzy has noticed that at least once when releasing documents under the UK Freedom of Information legislation, the civil servant involved has, hoho, forgotten to turn ‘track changes’ off. For the benefits of British civil servants and other people who don’t know how to use MS Word, ‘track changes’ is used in the drafting process and keeps records of the changes that have been made. It is conventional to present a final document that doesn’t contain the records of all changes to it. For what are probably obvious reasons. Additionally, if you’re going to re-use a document to get its template, it’s even more important to ensure that ‘track changes’ is turned off, otherwise your final document will contain details from a completely different document. Which is often going to be what we call ‘a bad thing’ if, for example, the document that you used to get the template contained an internal memo from senior management.

George Will’s weekend article on public anger doesn’t go far enough, for my liking. I agree that getting spitting angry with this administration, or the last one, shows a lack of control that doesn’t advance any cause; it embarasses the people broadly on your side and it reinforces the resolve of the supporters of the administration because they can reassure themselves that they are standing against emotional lunatics. Both sides have these ‘heart on their sleeve’ types and they have a disproportionate effect on the perception of the broader strands of political thought in which they are embedded.

More generally, public displays of emotion just advertise the location of the levers with which you can be operated. That’s OK* if they are of the sort that pretty much all of us share; sadness when someone we care about dies, happiness when good things happen, etc. Where emotional outbursts are at best pointless, I think, is when the displayed emotions are extreme or peculiar to a subset of people. Nearly all of the time, strangers don’t want to know what you’re feeling. Most of the time, your friends don’t want to know what you’re feeling. Really, keep it to yourself.

*And by ‘OK’, I mean ‘not completely terrible’.

It’s Mark Steyn on the cricket murders!