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Friday, February 27, 2004
Get Ready
Did people have a right to be cynical about the Republican's motives for having their national convention in New York in 2004? Didn't "GOP officials insist they will not politicize Sept. 11 during the festivities" ?
Well, apparently, the Republicans have found the temptation too good to resist, if this story in the Hill today is any indication:
“The entire format and actual physical setup could be radically different,” one GOP insider commented. “They might not even have a podium, or maybe a rotating podium or even a stage that comes up from underground. It would be like a theater in the round, with off-site events that are part of the convention.”
The source, a veteran official of past GOP conventions, said the 50,000 delegates, dignitaries and guests would watch off-site events on giant TV screens. “Now, we’ll go to the deck of the USS Intrepid as the U.S. Marine Corps Band plays the National Anthem,” he said, pretending that he was playing the part of the convention chairman.
“Or, and this is a real possibility, we could see President Bush giving his acceptance speech at Ground Zero,” he added. “It’s clearly a venue they’re considering.”
I'd love to see Karl Rove defend that.
More Hunting
I'll let this speak for itself:
THE NATION
Scalia Took Trip Set Up by Lawyer in Two Cases
Kansas visit in 2001 came within weeks of the Supreme Court hearing arguments.
By Richard A. Serrano and David G. Savage, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the guest of a Kansas law school two years ago and went pheasant hunting on a trip arranged by the school's dean, all within weeks of hearing two cases in which the dean was a lead attorney.
The cases involved issues of public policy important to Kansas officials. Accompanying Scalia on the November 2001 hunting trip were the Kansas governor and the recently retired state Senate president, who flew with Scalia to the hunting camp aboard a state plane.
Two weeks before the trip, University of Kansas School of Law Dean Stephen R. McAllister, along with the state's attorney general, had appeared before the Supreme Court to defend a Kansas law to confine sex offenders after they complete their prison terms.
Two weeks after the trip, the dean was before the high court to lead the state's defense of a Kansas prison program for treating sex criminals.
Scalia was hosted by McAllister, who also served as Kansas state solicitor, when he visited the law school to speak to students. At Scalia's request, McAllister arranged for the justice to go pheasant hunting after the law school event. And the dean enlisted then-Gov. Bill Graves and former state Senate President Dick Bond, both Republicans, to go as well.
Scalia later sided with Kansas in both cases.
In a written statement, Scalia said: "I do not think that spending time at a law school in which the counsel in pending cases was the dean could reasonably cause my impartiality to be questioned. Nor could spending time with the governor of a state that had matters before the court."
"When a case is on the docket before a judge, the coziness of meeting privately with a lawyer is questionable," said Chicago lawyer Robert P. Cummins, who headed an Illinois board on judicial ethics. "It would seem the better part of judgment to avoid those situations."
Added Monroe Freedman, who teaches legal ethics at Hofstra University: "A reasonable person might question this, and that's the problem." He said Scalia "should have rescheduled the trip until after" the cases were over.
Other experts noted, however, that no one who met Scalia in Kansas was a named litigant in the two cases, in contrast to the trip with Cheney, who is the appealing party in the upcoming energy task force case.
Scalia said that if Supreme Court justices were prohibited from taking such a trip, then they "would be permanently barred from social contact with all governors, since at any given point in time virtually all states have matters pending before us."
Scalia said he accepted an invitation to the law school "sometime before October 2000."
"I had worked for a couple of years on getting him to come here. And he asked whether there was any good hunting," McAllister said. "He said he had hunted turkey and deer, but not pheasant, so that was appealing."
In the spring of 2001, the high court voted to hear both Kansas cases, and they were set for argument that fall. McAllister said he called to alert Scalia that he would be arguing the two Kansas cases before the court at about the same time as the justice's scheduled trip.
McAllister said Scalia responded that he would come as scheduled, and that he would not accept a speaking fee and would pay for his own hunting.
On Oct. 30, 2001, two weeks before the trip, McAllister and state Atty. Gen. Carla Stovall appeared before Scalia and the other Supreme Court justices in the case of Kansas vs. Crane.
After Scalia returned to Lawrence, McAllister said, the dean and others associated with the law school took the justice to dinner.
Two weeks after hosting Scalia, the law school dean was back in Washington to argue on behalf of Kansas in a case called McKune vs. Lile. That case tested whether Kansas could force sex offenders to confess all their past sex crimes as part of prison treatment.
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Not the Sharpest Tool...
This speaks for itself:
PRESIDENT BUSH: Here's what we're going to do. I will make a statement. [Georgian President Saakashvili] will make a statement. I will then call upon an American correspondent to ask a question. The President will call upon a Georgian correspondent. We'll have two questions per side.
[snip]
PRESIDENT BUSH: Thank you. Hold on for a second. Deb, we're going to --
Q What do you think about --
PRESIDENT BUSH: Hold on. Will somebody translate --
PRESIDENT SAAKASHVILI: It's in English.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Pandora's Box
Two random thoughts:
First, there's a group that is asking all Colorado lawmakers who believe that marriage is a sacred institution that needs to be protected from same-sex couples to sign a pledge that they themselves have not committed or will not commit "the top threat" to the institution of marriage: infidelity. Henry Hyde should be happy that this pledge only includes lawmakers in Colorado so far, as there's no exception for "youthful indiscretions."
Second, speaking of youthful indiscretions, does the White House really want to make an issue out of what John Kerry was doing 30 years ago, in 1971? I mean, I thought they were pretty happy to avoid having to deal with those questions back in 2000. But if they want to get into it, I'm sure people will be interested in having the President elaborate what he meant when he said "When I was young and irrresponsible, I was young and irresponsible." The National Guard story shows that press may have more cahones this time around.
Are we talking blow? Are we talking horse? We know that there was one DWI, in 1976, at age 30. And that was after he had started to calm down. What else could be out there? Larry Flynt is licking his lips already. Indeed, is it possible Bush suffered irreversible brain damage as a result of the chemical ingested during his reckless youth? If so, it could explain a lot.
Oh, baby. Bring it on.
It's A Good Thing?
I've been following the Martha Stewart trial a bit, in part because I find it interesting, in part because I grew in the same town in Connecticut that Martha lives, and in part because I used to work with two of the prosecutors, including S.D.N.Y. Criminal Division head Karen Seymour.
Henry Blodget, disgraced former Internet analyst, is covering the trial for Slate, and, for a non-lawyer, he's written some very interesting pieces on the case, probably the best coverage of the trial I've seen in print.
His column today describes a great cross-examination by the prosecution (the one prosecutor in the case that I don't know), and is worth a read.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
We Report, You Decide
Compare
"He (i.e. the president) signed up for dangerous duty. He volunteered to go to Vietnam. He wasn’t selected to go, but nonetheless served his country very well."
Marc Racicot
NPR Interview
February 23rd, 2004
with
RUSSERT: Were you favor of the war in Vietnam?
BUSH: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
RUSSERT: But you didn't volunteer or enlist to go.
BUSH: No, I didn't. You're right.
Meet The Press
February 8th, 2004
and
"I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."
George W. Bush, 1990
as quoted in The Houston Chronicle
May 8th, 1994.
(Credit to Josh Marshall.)
Self-Loathing?
Headline in today's Washington Times: Bush Attacks "Partisan Anger."
But isn't Bush's attack on that anger an example of that anger?
How Far Right is the Far Right?
Well, as expected, Bush has endorsed a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Putting aside the merits of putting an amendment in support of discrimination in the Constitution, I think people need to take a close look at the language in the proposed amendment.
The amendment that Bush now says he supports, introduced by Rep. Musgrave (R-CO), states that:
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
What are "the legal incidents thereof" that gay couples would be denied? Well, things like the ability to be with a partner and make decisions during a medical emergency, the ability to keep a house that has been shared for many years when one partner dies, and access to health insurance.
This language also suggests that civil unions, designed to provide "the legal incidents" without the label of "marriage" would also be banned as well. The President suggested today that state legislatures should be left to define "legal arrangements other than marriage," suggesting that such an amendment would do nothing to stop states from allowing civil unions for same-sex couples, when just the opposite conclusion appears plain from the text of the amendment. (Andrew Sullivan apparently has the same take on this issue.)
Once again, the President is taking an extreme position to appease the far right and trying to make it look more moderate to appeal to the majority of Americans. We'll see if the media lets him get away with it.
Monday, February 23, 2004
Don't Forget Grimace!
First, there was the comment by Bush's top economist that "outsourcing" jobs abroad was "probably a plus for the economy in the long run."
It's clear that certain areas of the country, certain politically important areas, have lost manufacturing jobs during Bush's reign. And those jobs aren't coming back. So how is Bush going to show job growth to people in states like Michigan and Ohio, where those losses have been particularly acute?
Well, in that same report as the "outsourcing comment," there's now there this nugget:
Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles?
That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the United States economy.
The latest edition, sent to Congress last week, questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should be reclassified as manufacturers. No answers were offered.
In a speech to Washington economists Tuesday, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said that properly classifying such workers was "an important consideration" in setting economic policy.
Counting jobs at McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food enterprises alongside those at industrial companies like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch, akin to classifying ketchup in school lunches as a vegetable, as was briefly the case in a 1981 federal regulatory proposal.
But the presidential report points out that the current system for classifying jobs "is not straightforward." The White House drew a box around the section so it would stand out among the 417 pages of statistics.
"When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a 'service' or is it combining inputs to 'manufacture' a product?" the report asks.
"Sometimes, seemingly subtle differences can determine whether an industry is classified as manufacturing. For example, mixing water and concentrate to produce soft drinks is classified as manufacturing. However, if that activity is performed at a snack bar, it is considered a service."
Here's Rep. Dingell's response to Bush:
I am sure the 163,000 factory workers who have lost their jobs in Michigan will find it heartening to know that a world of opportunity awaits them in high growth manufacturing careers like spatula operator, napkin restocking and lunch tray removal.
Dingell goes on to state:
I do have some questions of this new policy and I hope you will help me provide answers for my constituents:
Will federal student loans and Trade Adjustment Assistance grants be applied to tuition costs at Burger College?
Will the administration commit to allowing the Manufacturing Extension Partnership to fund cutting edge burger research such as new nugget ingredients or keeping the hot and cold sides of burgers separate until consumption?
Will special sauce now be counted as a durable good?
Do you want fries with that?
Finally, Dingell concludes by noting that Commerce Secretary Evans announced the creation of a new Assistant Secretary for Manufacturing last September, but, now five months later, the position has yet to be filled:
I do, however, know of a public official who would be perfect for the job. He has over thirty years of administrative and media experience, has a remarkable record of working with diverse constituencies, and is extraordinarily well qualified to understand this emerging manufacturing sector: the Hon. Mayor McCheese.
Domestic Bliss
I went to a John Edwards event on Friday at a community college in Maryland. His stump speech was exactly as advertised and he's very impressive in person. I had one critique though, and I'm surprised his advisors haven't discussed this with him.
There was no mention of terrorism or national security at all. The closest he came was to criticize Bush for acting unilaterally in Iraq and hurting our international standing. But considering inexperience in that area is already his weakness, I'm surprised that he wouldn't counter that a little bit with some strong rhetoric.
That being said, he'd be an unbelievable asset to the Kerry ticket as VP, since Kerry clearly has that national security experience and could benefit from Edwards' down-home populism. One website already has that idea.
Red State Mania
First, the Democrats pick up a House seat in a district where Bush won 57% of the vote in 2000 when Ben Chandler won in Kentucky a week ago.
Now the Democrats have an excellent chance to pick up another seat thanks to Rep. Janklow pulling a Laura Bush, and running over a pedestrian. (And this isn't some crazy-Ann Coulter-esque commentary -- Laura really did kill someone years ago. You can look it up.)
But enough diversions -- Stephanie Herseth, who lost a close race to Janklow in 2002, is running again in a June 1 special election. She's a great candidate and has a long history in South Dakota politics -- her grandfather was governor.
Personal aside: I went to college with Stephanie, although she was a few years ahead of me. She was the head of our College Democrats when I was a freshman and was a great leader back then.
So if anyone is interested in a candidate to support, she's a great one.
(And it would be nice to pick up another seat in a Red State!)
Philly Cream Cheese?
As is so often the case, Bob Somerby makes some great points today in his incomparable Daily Howler (His column, located here, should definitely put on your daily reading list, as his media critiques are often right on the money).
But Bob's column today, which focuses in part on the media treatment of Teresa Heinz Kerry, made me realize something interesting, and potentially very important, concerning the 2004 race. Somerby quotes a 1995 Boston Globe article about Heinz Kerry by John Robinson:
ROBINSON: [Her work at the Heinz foundation] has earned Heinz the title of “Saint Teresa,” as she was called in a W magazine profile, and which has now stuck. It was the first reference Pittsburgh Mayor Thomas J. Murphy made of her when he was interviewed for this story and, from the point of view of many in Pittsburgh, “saint” may not be an elevated enough title.
“Teresa did not have a connection to Pittsburgh except through marriage,” Murphy said. “Her life was mostly in DC. But she committed herself, and she’s been extraordinarily active. She’s revamped the foundation, making it more vital to this community.”
“She’s like our national treasure here,” added Tom Foerster, Allegheny county commissioner.
Some people I know have expressed their concern about Teresa, and whether she would be a negative for Kerry in the general election. I've generally understood her to have an extraordinarily impressive philanthropic resume, but have not thought much else about it (I've only seen her interviewed on TV once.)
My reaction upon reading this snippet, however, was that if attitudes haven't changed that much since 1995 (and it's certainly possible that they have), Teresa could be a HUGE asset to Kerry. Why? Because everyone agrees that Pennsylvania is a crucial swing state in November and if Teresa is that well known and respected (let's not forget that her first husband was a Senator there for many years), it could be a huge advantage to Kerry. I've thought that the Rendell election to Governor and other polls I've seen recently makes Pennsylvania a more Democratic state than it was four years ago, such that Kerry was going to win Pennsylvania anyway, but this tidbit makes me even more confident.
What would this do the electoral math? Well, it makes things interesting. First, Illinois is solidly Democratic and there's no way that Bush will carry it in November. Michigan is viewed as a swing state but there's realistically, especially after the steel tariff flip-flop and the manufacturing jobs lost, no way that Bush will win there this year. That leaves Pennsylvania among the big industrial states that Bush had hoped to snatch away from the Democrats in '04. If that doesn't look possible, Bush may find himself playing more defense in, say, Ohio with its massive manufacturing job losses, and the electoral map looks better and better for Democrats. I've said it privately, so now I'll go on the record publicly: I think Ohio will be a crucial state in this year's presidential election.
Now the Democrats need to gear up for the oncoming assault to Kerry by the Bush Ad machine. However, I'm wondering how on earth the Bush campaign burned through $45 million already. People criticize Dean for burning through his $41 million so fast, but no one says anything about Bush, who got NOTHING for his money so far. If this rate of return continues, Democrats will be just fine by July.
Unsafe at Any Speed
Ralph is running. And even after the past four years, he still maintains that there is no difference betweeen the two parties. What an egomaniac. I thought it was interesting that a day after Nader said that presidential historian Michael Beschloss was on Imus this morning saying that this election would provide some of the starkest choices between Republicans and Democrats on the issues in over 30 years.
So I made a couple of phone calls this morning to ensure that I was taken off the Public Citizen mailing list. (The woman there tried to argue with me that Nader had nothing to do with the organization, but conceded, upon questioning, that he had founded the organization.)
That being said, and the fact that I will never support any organization associated with Ralph Nader ever again, I don't think Ralph will do as well this time around. First, of all, and perhaps the most significant, is the fact that he won't have the Green party apparatus to get him on the ballot in 50 states. It is both expensive and time-consuming to get on the Presidential ballot and I wonder how many state ballots he will actually be on in November. A friend quite accurately pointed out to me this morning that Nader will probably be able to get REPUBLICAN signatures easily, but Democratic signatures will be hard to come by. Is that what Ralph wants his legacy to be?
Secondly, I think a lot of Nader voters have realized what an absolute disaster Bush has been and some even recognize their own culpability in that. That's why you don't see people like Michael Moore supporting Nader this time around. He will have a much harder time getting votes. The Democratic party is incredibly united with one goal: defeating Bush. A vote for Nader clearly goes against that.
Finally, Moore might still have an impact, and I'm not referring to Michael. Roy Moore, Mr. Ten Commandments, is apparently seriously considering running for president with the Constitution Party. I think this could have more impact than a Nader candidacy because the Constitution Party has the party apparatus to get on the ballot (and may already be on the ballot) in most states. Bush's recess appointment of Bill Pryor to the 11th Circuit, while red meat to his base, supposedly greatly angered Moore, because Pryor, as Attorney General of Alabama, refused to support Moore's crusade.
