Heidi Patriot

Game Change: The Movie

2012-01-14T08:45:00.000-05:00

JUST IN TIME for Super Tuesday comes HBO's Game Change, starring Ed Harris as a convincing John McCain and Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin. Sorry folks, Tina Fey had her hands full with 30Rock, and anyway, Julianne Moore reportedly brings in an even better performance. (Moore spent months with a voice coach to get the peculiar Palin cadence down right.)

The program is scheduled to air in March, right around the time the Republican primaries start to heat up again after a February lull. (That is, provided Mitt Romney hasn't completely sewn up the nomination by then by squashing his opponents in the upcoming races in South Carolina, Nevada and Florida.)

Director/executive producer Jay Roach, who also did 2008's Recount, says both McCain and Palin declined to cooperate. Although based on John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's comprehensive (all be it gossipy) book on the 2008 presidential race, Game Change the Movie focused only on the Republican side of the race, and does not deal with the other half of the book -- the perhaps more interesting duel between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic nomination. That, anyway, is another movie on its own.

Draft Hillary?

2011-10-11T20:26:00.000-04:00

Obama may need her if he wants to win, and have a successful second term.

Smiles all around.

LAST YEAR HILLARY CLINTON announced that she would be stepping down from her post as Secretary of State when President Obama completed his first term in office. Yet rumors continue that Obama, to save his presidency and get re-elected, will somehow bring her onto the ticket in 2012 as his running mate.

Dramatic switcheroos like this are cherished fodder for pundits and politicos, but rarely if ever do they actually happen. In early 1992 speculation was rampant that President (G.H.W.) Bush would dump Dan Quayle as his veep for the far more popular Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell. This indeed probably would have saved Bush's presidency, but out of loyalty to Quayle and confident of victory, Bush did not take this drastic step. He lost that November.

A Clinton vice presidency could be the shot in the arm the present administration is in desperate need of. It is ironic to think of Clinton in this light, given the criticisms lobbed at her during the 2008 primary campaign -- that she was a miserable manager and a stale politician who if she won would end up just a rehash of the Bill Clinton days, with all its drama and fuss. Now, quite in contrast, she is viewed almost as an elder statesman, a mature voice in an increasingly disorganized administration.

The easiest way to effect this change, as the stories would have it, would be for Clinton and Biden swap roles. Biden has always wanted to run the State Department, and this would be his chance. He would be freed of the limitations of the White House, where he would always play second fiddle to the president. For Clinton, this would give her options for the future: she could go down in history as the first female vice president and leave it with that, or she could opt to use the vice presidency as a platform for a run for the White House itself, something she has all but ruled out now. A win-win all around?

Is America really failing?

2011-10-10T09:25:00.000-04:00

Or is this just another repeat of the late 1980s?

FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW, there have been rounds and rounds of hand wringing about the decline of America, prompted in part by the seemingly never-ending economic crisis, in part by the property market correction, in part by the ramp-up of the Republican nominating convention....

Recently in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik dissected some of this talk. It was in part history lesson -- remember the 1980s, when Japan was going to buy Manhattan? -- and in part a philosophical discourse on the rise and fall of nations. His critique of the new Thomas Friedman/Michael Mandelbaum book That Used to be Us made some particularly good points about where we are, and where some think America should be.

As Gopnik puts it, Friedman and Mandelbaum argue that the country shares the same basic goals, but are frustrated by a system that prevents bold, innovative decisions from being made. As much as some of us might not like it, Gopnik points out that actually a lot of Americans don't share the same basic goals.

The reason we don't have beautiful airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks, it's that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to build a better terminal. They hate fast trains and efficient airports for the same reason that seventeenth-century Protestants hated the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome when they saw them: they were luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised. Friedman and Mandelbaum wring their hands at 'our' unwillingness to sacrifice our comforts on behalf of our principles, but Americans are perfectly willing to sacrifice their comforts for their ideological convictions. We don't have better infrastructure or decent elementary education exactly because many people are willing to sacrifice faster movement between our real cities, or better-informed children, in support of their belief that the government should always be given as little money as possible.

This overstates the situation. A lot of our problems with long-term thinking have to do with leadership and how decisions are managed. And some of it too has to do with the NIMBY/SIMBY paradox in our society, which seems build into the present political discourse. (That's Not-in-my-back-yard -- i.e., yes we need a dump, but we don't want it near our home -- Spend-in-my-back-yard -- i.e., we hate spending, unless it is for things that subsidize our local comforts, like the federal government propping up an antiquated military system program because of the jobs it generates in a key congressional constituency.) And we shouldn't underestimate the power of lobbies and interest groups.

The reason there isn't today a light-rail system connecting downtown Hartford -- one of the laggards in a region where small cities have been undergoing a renaissance -- to its airport 10 miles or so north isn't just because people didn't want to spend money. It also has to do with the powerful construction interests, who, working in sync with the state's Department of Transportation, ten years ago ran an all-out campaign against light-rail, and in support of more roads, despite the fact that the line had the support of the cities it would have served, and despite the fact many urban planners say roads have strangled Hartford and more highways is exactly not what Hartford needed. So it isn't always high-mannered ideological opposition that prevents these projects, but the messy form of democracy we practice. There are ways through the thicket, through leadership and coalition-building, but in the present, polarized, partisan morass we find ourselves in, it is hard to see our way through it.

Both sides overstate their points -- Friedman and Mandelbaum by sounding like frustrated liberals intent on imposing "their" correct solution on a country too stupid to recognize it for themselves, and Gopnik by sounding like a frustrated academic intent on arguing that the country is too ideological to ever think forward. Both are flawed, but with the present leadership - Republicans and Democrats -- it is difficult to see a different way forward.

France first country to recognize new Libyan regime

2011-03-10T07:25:00.000-05:00

The United States is certainly not number one on this front.

YESTERDAY, FRANCE BECAME the first country to recognize the new regime in Libya, something this column had been urging the United States to do.

The United States had its opportunity to lead, and it failed (again). Inexplicably, the White House just can't seem to wrap its hands around the situation in the Middle East. It is a missed opportunity of major proportions. But now, at least, maybe the U.S can act, feeling like they have a bit of "ground cover."

How the U.S. can help Libya

2011-03-06T18:07:00.001-05:00

Recognize the new government in Benghazi. Now.

LIBYA IS NOW pretty much in a state of civil war. Anti-Qaddafi forces have seized most of the main population centers in the east of the country around Benghazi, as well as many of the principle oil facilities. Qaddafi, bottled up in Tripoli with an additional base of loyalists in his home city of Sirte, has been struggling for over a week, with the assistance of Taureg mercenaries from Mali and other external, rented forces, to push back the tide. His latest effort, an attempt to oust rebel forces from Zawiyah, 25 miles west of Tripoli, resulted in a bloodbath but even then he apparently still failed to take back the city.

Meanwhile, the world is looking on, uncertain of what to do. Some in the U.S. and U.K. continue to push for a no-fly zone, and U.S. naval vessels are parked in the Mediterranean. However, NATO's Secretary General stated that any alliance intervention would require UN consent. The UN Security Council already passed one resolution calling for a cessation to the fighting, but getting Russia and China to sign on was hardly a foregone conclusion, even when Libya's own UN delegation repudiated Qaddafi and practically begged the Security Council to approve intervention.

President Obama has called Qaddafi illegitimate and called for him to go after all the mayhem and death he has wrought, yet the U.S. is not really able to do anything more than stay on the sidelines as long as any action in support of the rebels requiring UN acquiescence, such as a no-fly zone, would be rejected by Russia and China. Obama's options seem limited. So what can the U.S. do at this point?

Recognize the Benghazi-based government

While there are no easy answers, one option is for the United States to shift its recognition from the now de-legitimized Qaddafi government to the "Free Libya" National Council based in Benghazi and headed by the former Qaddafi Minister of Justice Mustafa Abdel-Jalil.

There are compelling arguments for this course of action. For one, rebel forces now appear in control of at least two-thirds of major urban areas, containing at least a majority of the country's population. In addition, most of the country's key diplomats, including most of Libya's delegations to the UN in New York and Geneva, have rejected Qaddafi and called for his ouster. Then there are of course Qaddafi's bloody actions against his own people.

Recognition of the new government would help remove the last vestiges of legitimacy from Qaddafi's rule. It would pave the way for bilateral assistance by the United States and other like-minded countries, helping to shift the balance of power from Qaddafi's increasingly insane and suicidal rule and establishing clear support for a new, democratic government. It would also provide justification for refusing to seat Qaddafi-loyal replacement delegations at the UN and other Libyan embassies around the world. Most importantly, it would be the most tangible, yet least invasive, form of assistance -- that wouldn't taint the anti-Qaddafi movement as U.S. or western stooges the way an overt military intervention could.

This approach is certainly not without its risks, but the situation in Libya is fast turning into a bloodbath. This new National Council has a degree of legitimacy, but its grasp on power is tenuous. It is also uncertain how democratic a post-Qaddafi regime would develop, particularly one self-birthed in blood while the world stood by watching. If the United States, the United Kingdom, and others want to support the democratic aspirations of the Libyan people, waiting on the sidelines is not an option.

Subsidies are government intervention

2011-01-19T20:10:00.006-05:00

They skew America's way of life in harmful ways, yet they remain sacrosanct.

Thank you, Big Government, for my cheap subsidized junk food.

THERE ARE NO GREATER HYPOCRITES than those people who criticize "big government" and "government intervention" on the one hand, yet are ready to throw themselves in front of a bus to protect their precious local subsidies on the other. In how many states do you hear the same caustic refrain about how "un-American" and downright "Communist" the Obama administration is for trying to get children to eat better -- which, in fact, it does through public awareness rather than legislative fiat -- while judging their elected officials by the success of their efforts to bring back federally backed subsidies for their local industries.

Here's a news flash: pork isn't just federal outlays for a local courthouse named after the sponsoring senator, or a bridge to nowhere. Subsidies are, in fact, a far more lethal form of pork to the nation's economy than the dribble of money (wasteful as it is) for politicians' local glory projects. So while the new Republican leadership of the House of Representatives has repudiated, sometimes half-heartedly, fat-laden line-items in the annual budget, it would be refreshing to see them also attack the economic and lifestyle-skewing subsidies that litter every appropriations bill that is emitted from Congress and then signed by the president.

You don't get much redder than Louisiana these days. It's a state where the Democrats trend to the right of nearly any northeastern Republican elected to state-wide office. And few other states in the country can match the vehemence with which the average Louisianan goes at President Obama for (among a long list of things) un-American, socialist experiments to change our way of life.

But challenge their sugar subsidies, and you'd think the sky was falling. Because apparently sugar subsidies aren't un-American socialist experiments to change our way of life. Yet subsidies like those on sugar, corn, and other treasured commodities that generally go into processed foods have had a far greater effect in changing our eating habits, and driving up the obesity rates in children and adults alike, by making cheap, processed foods more affordable than the wholesome and healthy products, the mere mention of which turn the average southern voters beet-red.

In 2008, at about the same time Republican presidential candidate John McCain was making an argument against these types of subsidies as fiscally irresponsible, Republican wunderkind Governor Bobby Jindal was strongly urging Louisiana's congressional delegation to "stop any effort to undermine our sugar industry." Isn't that pretty interventionist?

Because of the effects subsidized sugar has on the rest of the economy, the number of jobs destroyed by sugar subsidies since 1980 actually exceeds the number of sugar farmers in the United States. Another factoid: according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. sugar industry employs approximately 60,000 people; industries in the U.S. using sugar employ over 950,000, yet the rising price of sugar is driving these companies overseas or out of business. It gets worse. The General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates that sugar subsidies cost the American taxpayer $1.9 billion in inflated prices, all the while allowing a small group of sugar farmers to become wealthy because supply restrictions have handed them near-monopolistic power. This centrally planned, supply restriction-based system is a decades-old problem, an example of the "Soviet-style" policies that you won't hear Republicans like Bobby Jindal or hard-right Louisiana Senator David Vitter (or, for that matter, Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu) complain about.

If the new Republican Congress is serious about cutting pork and stopping government excess, let's start by eliminating these subsidies. Let those family farms in red and blue states alike figure out ways of being competitive without the mind-numbingly expensive agricultural subsidies that seem to be one of the few unifiers joining mid-Western Democrats and Republicans in Congress. How about stopping corn subsidies -- and ending the corn syrup subsidies that contribute significantly to the fattening up America's youth? If the federal government did away with all these destructive subsidies, maybe America's health care system wouldn't be under such pressure -- because we wouldn't have so many sick, obese, diabetes-riddled Americans in need of (subsidized) assistance.

Now that would really put pork in its place. But let's not hold our breath.

A free pass to irresponsible rhetoric?

2011-01-18T11:38:00.003-05:00

Whether or not there was a direct tie between the Giffords shooting and increasingly strident rhetoric is not the point. The point is that irresponsible political elements create an environment where violence for political means is implicitly condoned.

And the debate continues....

IT WAS GREETED WITH odd relief when news broke that the intended assassin of Representative Giffords was mentally unstable and not, as initially suspected, motivated purely by political bile. Suddenly criticism of the inflammatory rhetoric increasingly utilized by certain media and politicians was deemed "unfair" and discourse reverted quickly back to "business as usual." You would think that no lessons were learned from the January 8 Tucson shootings.

Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times on January 10 that "when our politicans and media loudmouths act like fools and zealots, they should be held responsible for being fools and zealots. They shouldn't be held responsible for the darkness that always waits to swallow up the unstable and the lost."

This is nonsense. Absolving the nation's punditry and politicians -- on the right or the left -- of responsibility for influencing the public is absurd. Their goal is to influence, and some indeed do this through increasingly inflammatory rhetoric. The Glenn Becks, Bill O'Reillys, and, yes, the Keith Olbermanns, of this world keep ratcheting up the speech, casting agreement with their viewpoints as an existential necessity for America to continue.

In the partisan, segmented media climate of 21st century America, pundits aren't really trying to win over the other side (though they do try to appeal to the undecideds, to some extent); rather, they are very much trying to stir up their bases, and the language they use, increasingly militant and at times strewn with violent imagery against opposing viewpoints, is disturbing and irresponsible, regardless of whether it is within their constitutional rights. Period.

President Obama explicitly stated in his comments at the memorial service in Tucson that right-wing rhetoric was not responsible for the shooting. But nonetheless, he went on to say that it would be an appropriate moment to pause for reflection on how we engage in our political discourse.

It may be correct to say there was no direct relationship between increasingly incendiary political rhetoric and the Tucson shootings, but that doesn't mean we should discard any correlation whatsoever. Correlation demands a greater degree of introspection than sound-bite America seems to be able to master, since unlike a causal relationship, it isn't as immediately apparent. But to deny that this recent wave of political acrimony is not harmful, and even acceptable, is the absolute wrong conclusion to draw.

Inflated rhetoric only entrenches belief systems, putting up roadblocks to discovering common ground and finding reasonable and balanced solutions to the serious problems our nation currently faces. It also encourages ignorance and stifles innovation by getting people all caught up in partisan groupthink at the expense of practical policies. It is the bane of our current political system, undermining efforts by responsible figures from both the Democratic and Republican parties to help us emerge from our current, dire economic situation.

This is the lesson we need to draw from Tucson -- not that inflammatory rhetoric is not guilty, and therefore we should continue on as before, but rather that with free speech comes responsibility. Having an inalienable freedom (of speech or anything else) doesn't mean we should take advantage of that hard-fought right at every turn for short-term gain.

Rep. Giffords one of only two Democrats in Palin's "crosshairs" to be re-elected

2011-01-09T09:09:00.001-05:00

A dubious honor at best.

I'm just gonna make a small change to my website....

IT WILL HOPEFULLY end up only an unsettling coincidence, and up to now it has gone unnoticed. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was one of only two Democratic incumbents on Sarah Palin's infamous "crosshairs" map to achieve re-election in November.

Of the remaining 19 on the list, three retired (one, Brad Ellsworth of Indiana, to run an unsuccessful bid for Senate), one was defeated in a primary (though the party lost the seat in the general election anyway), and 14 lost in the general election. The only other incumbent from Palin's list to be re-elected was Nick Rahall of West Virginia.

For Palin, who quickly yanked the "crosshairs" map off her Facebook page and website the evening of Giffords's shooting, this must be unsettling.

Courtesy: www.Sarahpac.com (removed on Saturday, January 11 following the Arizona shootings).

And here is the full list:

Vic Snyder, Arkansas-2 - declined to run for re-election
Ann Kirkpatrick, Arizona-1 - defeated
Harry Mitchell, Arizona-5 - defeated
Gabrielle Geffords, Arizona-8 - won (48.7%, to 47.2% for Republican Jesse Kelly)
John Salazar, Colorado-3 - defeated
Betsy Markey, Colorado-4 - defeated
Allen Boyd, Florida-2 - defeated
Suzanne Kosmas, Florida-24 - defeated
Brad Ellsworth, Indiana-8 - declined to run for re-election (ran and lost for Senate)
Baron Hall, Indiana-9 - defeated
Earl Pomoroy, North Dakota-At Large - defeated
Charlie Wilson, Ohio-6 - defeated
John Boccieri, Ohio-16 - defeated
Kathy Dahlkamper, Pennsylvania-3 - defeated
Chris Carney, Pennsylvania-10- defeated
John Spratt, South Carolina-5 - defeated
Brett Gordon, Tennessee-6 - declined to run for re-election
Tom Periello, Virginia-5 - defeated
Alan Mollohan, West Virginia-1 - defeated in primary (Republican won general election)
Nick Rahall, West Virginia-3 - won (55.1%, to 44.9% for Republican Spike Maynard)

The consequences of vitriol

2011-01-08T23:35:00.005-05:00

An assassination attempt on Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords forces a debate on the uncomfortable nexus between the Republican party and the rhetoric of the far-right.

Rep. Geffords (D-AZ). She remains in critical condition. At least six others died in the shooting.

NO ONE HAS CONFIRMED the reason why Jared Lee Loughner shot 18 people in a Safeway in northern Tucson today, critically injuring Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and killing at least six others, including a nine year old girl and a federal judge. But fingers are already starting to point at the crescendo of rhetorical bile from the right wing.

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, in a press conference after the shooting, strayed from his report on the details of the case to bemoan the vitriol that had infected political discourse, saying "that may be free speech, but it does not come without consequences." Calling the congresswoman "one of the nicest human beings ever put on this earth," he said "it's time to do a little soul searching about the rhetoric we hear on the radio, how our children are being raised....Arizona has become the capital -- we have become a mecca -- for racism and bigotry."

The assassination attempt will inevitably shine a spotlight on extremist rhetoric, and in particular the invective thrown at the congresswoman and others by the commentariat of the far right, first and foremost Sarah Palin. Ms Gefford's vote on health care put her quite literally in Palin's crosshairs. The map posted on Sarah Palin's Facebook page in March 2009, in which the districts of select Democrats such as Geffords who voted for health care were marked with a crosshairs symbol, is certain to come under intense scrutiny in coming days.

As Sheriff Dubnik stated, words have consequences. While no one should say Sarah Palin wanted Congresswoman Geffords or any of the other Democrats on her map actually killed, her rhetoric has power among her following, and she has to start understanding that with that power comes responsibility. If it actually spawned this terrorist attack then the country is in for a serious reckoning.

Somehow, the language of hate has become acceptable in today's politics, as if that side of the debate is so correct that it needs to prevail at any cost. Orators such as Palin, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and others have poisoned the national discourse, shifting it from a discussion of honest differences into an existential battle for the country itself. This with-us-or-against-us vitriol (for there really is no better word for it) comes with a high cost. Ms Palin's map will now haunt her for a long time, as it should.

A final word about the election in Connecticut....

2010-11-13T08:34:00.003-05:00

The very blue state of Connecticut.

OK, ENOUGH HAS BEEN written here about the election in Connecticut. Yes, it remained the bluest state in the Union, at least in terms of Democratic victories on November 2. All five of the Congressional seats were retained, despite serious threats in two of them. Christopher Dodd's Senate seat was won by Richard Blumenthal despite a strong, self-funded challenge by millionaire wrestling CEO Linda McMahon. The governorship was (barely) prised from the GOP, and the Democrats made a clean sweep of all major state-wide elected offices. True, the party lost its supermajority in the State House, but honestly, losing a supermajority is a small price to pay for gaining the governorship.

And these victories came despite a supreme demonstration of political incompetence by the outgoing Democratic Secretary of State, Susan Bysiewicz, who was formerly one of the state's most popular Democratic politicians but who may have effectively destroyed her future electoral prospects with a series of missteps and misstatements on and immediately after Election Day.

Jason "The Greek" Paul provides an interesting analysis of the election results, based on turnout figures, in the New Haven Independent. The gist of his analysis is that these election results track well with the results in 2004, when Connecticut went for John Kerry by a similar margin to Blumenthal's victory over McMahon this year, and that Governor-elect Dan Malloy won by 5,000 votes essentially because turnout in more urbanized areas (traditionally strongly Democratic) was up 15 percent while in more rural parts of the state, turnout remained flat.

In the end, though, it will always appear that the largest city in the state saved Malloy. With everything but Bridgeport counted the day after the election, Republican nominee Tom Foley was leading by a little under 2,000 votes, give or take. Even the GOP must have realized, however, that once those votes were counted that lead would not hold.

Susan Bysiewicz should resign

2010-11-07T23:03:00.004-05:00

Connecticut's Secretary of State might not bear all the responsibility for the Election Day debacle in Bridgeport, but she certainly made a mess of things afterwards.

Praying for the election to be over.

SUSAN BYSIEWICZ used to be a rising star in Connecticut's Democratic firmament. The three-term Secretary of State, first elected in 1998, was considered a front runner for the party's gubernatorial nomination in 2006 and 2010, though she demurred, most recently in favor of a run for Attorney General. Her bid for that office collapsed ignominiously in May when the state's Supreme Court unanimously deemed her ineligible to run for the office because she failed to meet the statutory requirement of having practiced law for at least ten years.

It is hard to imagine how things could have gotten much worse for Ms Bysiewicz, one of the state's most popular politicians. Her chance to run for governor squandered, her bid for Attorney General thrown out, the only substantial duty left for her to execute was the supervision, as Connecticut's most senior electoral official, of the November 2 polls, before handing over to her successor in January.

Things didn't turn out so well on November 2, unfortunately. By 1PM on Election Day, things had started going sideways in Bridgeport, the state's largest city and second-poorest per capita after Hartford. Polling stations began reporting they were running low on ballot papers, and then the wrong replacements were delivered in some locations and in others they simply decided to photocopy the ballot papers, which in most places is considered an invitation to fraud. Countless voters, many of them minorities, turned around and left in frustration. Eventually, more of the correct ballots were delivered, and a judge ordered the polls in twelve locations to remain open two extra hours, but by then a lot of damage had already been done. Eventually it was revealed that the city of 140,000, with over 60,000 registered voters, had only ordered 21,000 ballot papers for this election.

While most other races were sorted out before Bridgeport's results were tallied, the outcome of the dead-heat gubernatorial contest between Republican Tom Foley and Democrat Dan Malloy was held in suspense for two days. Bysiewicz's behavior only added to the chaos.

First, she denied any responsibility for the problems, saying fault rested solely on the shoulders of the Bridgeport registrar of voters (although her office knew they didn't order enough ballots). Then, summoning the spirit of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris from 2000, she declared Malloy to be the winner after an "unofficial" account by some 3,500 votes, though she refused to release the "unofficial" numbers this judgement was based on. And to make matters worse, because she wouldn't return the calls from Malloy's Republican opponent, he was compelled to call into a talk show she was on to ask his questions. Although it now appears Malloy won by some 5,000 votes (out of 1.1 million cast) Bysiewicz's backs and forths have presented Foley with fodder for a challenge if he decides to pursue one.

The problems in Bridgeport might not all rest at her feet of her office, but her office did not catch the problem ahead of time, and she personally made matters far worse over the course of the week. For these failures, and for helping mar the legitimacy of the gubernatorial race in particular, she should take the symbolic step of resigning. It would be a refreshing demonstration of responsibility, and would provide a telling contrast to the Republicans' blatant partisanship in the aftermath of the presidential election in Florida a decade ago. Her career is already in tatters. It isn't too late -- yet -- for her to finally start setting an example.

A New London body-slam for Dick?

2010-10-16T09:16:00.001-04:00

It's Linda in a box after the last Connecticut Senate debate.

Black and blue: the New London debate was a bruiser. (Credit: AP)

THE POLLS ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE. But one thing is certain -- with less than three weeks to go before election day, Dick Blumenthal retains a lead in the race to replace Chris Dodd in the Senate. Despite a barrage of attack ads from his opponent Linda McMahon, he has retained a lead of between five points and 11 points in the polls. And this is with McMahon having outspent him 16 to one.

The debate in New London was the feistiest of their battle, perhaps because they knew it would be their last opportunity to face off. McMahon tried, but ultimately failed, to rattle the Attorney General, who this time threw some hardballs of his own, including accusing McMahon of accepting a tax credit for job creation when she had actually fired ten percent of her work force in 2009.

In one of the more memorable moments of the debate, Blumenthal accused McMahon of compelling wrestlers to sign "death clauses", contractual provisions for wrestlers absolving her company from untimely deaths in the course of their work. He also dipped into populist territory by attacking her for off-shoring jobs related to her wrestling empire.

While Blumenthal lingered after the debate to talk to journalists, the clearly flustered McMahon disappeared without comment. Her media access has also been curbed, given the unintended consequences of earlier press availabilities where she made statements, on issues such as the minimum wage and deficit reduction, that later required amending.

McMahon may finally have peaked. Her rising negatives -- which, according to Quinnipiac, have topped fifty percent -- have been her greatest Achilles heel in recent weeks. Add to that her weaker base of support within her own party, and Blumenthal's overwhelming advantage among women (in a state where registered female voters outnumber males), and the likelihood of a sudden surge in the next few weeks seems all the more unlikely.

This isn't stopping McMahon though. Recognizing the need to drive up Blumenthal's fairly low negatives, she has released yet another barrage of "liar" television ads attacking him for his mischaracterizations of his Vietnam service. These smack of desperation at this point, given how these have failed to resonate in the past. At this stage in the game, she may just be throwing good money after bad at this point.

The real issue for 2010: redistricting

2010-10-12T16:57:00.000-04:00

Every ten years the country gets carved up into new Congressional districts. Each time around, partisans become more sophisticated in their methods.

The original Gerry-mander, in Massachusetts circa 1812.

WHILE HOUSE AND SENATE races are certainly far more interesting stories for the punditry during this campaign season, the races for the state governors and legislatures are what could end up defining the political landscape, at least in the House of Representatives, for the coming decade.

The United States is one of the few democracies in the world that allows the states to determine for themselves how to carve up their allocation of House seats. The Economist, which has touched on this issue on several occasions in the past, featured a leader in its October 9 edition commenting on this problem. In 2002, The Economist featured a piece on redistricting entitled "How to rig an election". Among the examples cited were Iowa, which has a panel of civil servants propose district lines without consideration to incumbency or other partisan factors, much as the process works in other develope democracies with district-based electoral systems. The effect of non-partisan redistricting in Iowa and Washington state, which follows a similar model, was more competitive House races per capita in those states.

Technology enables the "election grab"

In 2003, Jeffrey Toobin wrote a piece in The New Yorker, "The Great Election Grab", about how technological developments such as new and detailed marketing software aids state legislatures in carving out seats in ways that best advantage the state’s ruling party. Texas in 2003 is an excellent example. In 2000, Democrats controlled the state House, and Republicans the Senate. The result was deadlock on redistricting. A panel of federal judges came up with a compromise plan. However, when the Republicans took the state House in 2002, they pushed through a new redistricting plan off-cycle. (Georgia did something similar.) Legal challenges to this off-year redistricting were shot down by the Supreme Court.

In 2003 in Texas, the Republicans used this increasingly complex marketing software to “ghettoize” Democrats into the highest-concentration districts possible, while spreading a less concentrated Republican majority over as many as possible. This increasingly sophisticated software drills down to the sub-zip code level not just registered party members or campaign contributors, but also extrapolates political affiliations or leanings based on consumer tendencies such as what magazines they subscribe to, what credit cards they hold, and what shops they frequent.

This strategy doesn’t come without the risks. Creating a slew of districts with a bare majority means there is less buffer room if the calculations are a bit off or a chunk of voters defects. So, for example, a Republican congressman who was formerly in a district with a 75 percent Republican majority, may find himself more vulnerable if redistricting opts to spread that 75 percent out a bit and create a new district with more Democrats and, say, a 55-60 percent Republican edge.

The benefits, though, outweigh the risks. In Toobin's New Yorker piece, he cites the fact that although Bush and Gore evenly divided the vote in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in 2000, in the 2002 elections (after redistricting) the Republicans controlled 51 of 77 of those states' combined seats in the House.

The protected incumbents

Both parties do this, and gerrymandering of districts is nearly as old as the Republic, but the technology has made it easier and easier to create "safe" districts. Sometimes, the parties even cut deals to protect as many incumbents from both sides as possible. (New York is one example.) In California, not one of the 50 challengers running against incumbent representatives got more than 40 percent of the vote in the 2002 congressional elections, this despite the political ferment the state was going through at the time -- a froth of voter anger that led to the recall of the Democratic governor, Gray Davis, the following year.

Having parties basically redrawing districts seems inherently unfair in a democracy, and of all the electoral reforms the United States could enact, this is one of the easier ones, and could have the effect of significantly increasing the number of competitive House seats. Currently, only Arizona’s redistricting is completely beyond the reach of politicians. In six other states, there are various systems in place that do not involve the legislature actually drawing the districts, although they still generally require some degree of approval by the state governments.

It's up to California now...

Interestingly, California, with its 53 number of House seats (few of which ever change hands), has a referendum on the ballot this year to decide whether to hand redistricting responsibilities to an independent citizen redistricting commission. If it passes, it may set an example for the rest of the country.

On ABC's This Week, McMahon on the defensive...again

2010-10-12T03:13:00.003-04:00

All tangled up: Linda's tepid responses on female violence had her wrapped around the axle Sunday.

LINDA McMAHON WAS on the defensive yet again this week during her interview on ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour that aired on Sunday, October 10. Amanpour pressed her to repudiate stunts on her shows that humiliated women, such as one case where a woman in the ring was ordered onto all fours and told to bark like a dog by McMahon's own husband, Vince. In response, McMahon warbled a bit about how her company's programming used to be racier, but was now PG. When asked if she would advocate curbing depictions of women being humiliated or abused, McMahon fell back on the old, though somewhat garbled, stand-by: "I do believe in the First Amendment rights and content."

McMahon also tried digging herself out of a hole she got into with her response to a question about how she would lower the budget deficit. In addition to seeming to endorse cuts to defense spending and curbs on social security, she cited a hiring and wage freeze on federal workers, though she admitted it would be more symbolic than anything else, since the amount saved by such a freeze wouldn't make a significant dent in the deficit. She also pressed for a return to 2008 spending levels to start, saying this is how she would have handled such a crisis as a CEO.

Now, while it is true the government has grown in the past ten years since 9/11, there have been a few good reasons. This kind of canard is the perfect, meaningless red meat to throw at the Tea Party crowd, since government workers are an easy target, even though freezing their wages might not make a difference to the deficit. Of course, when you remember that those faceless bureaucrats actually include border police, transportation security, federal agents working the anti-terrorism beat, etc., that kind of puts a different perspective on things. Unless just those positions are exempted....

Blumenthal sitting pretty

2010-10-09T12:20:00.003-04:00

As McMahon seems to be peaking.

Dick has something to be happy about.

DICK BLUMENTHAL HAS been through the ringer during this election. Republican Linda McMahon has thrown everything and the kitchen sink at the Connecticut Attorney General in their vitriolic battle to replace Chris Dodd in the U.S. Senate. But it appears, with solid debate performances by Blumenthal and some ill-timed and poorly formulated comments by McMahon, the wrestling executive may finally have peaked.

As recently as two weeks ago, the race had tightened to the point where prognosticators were preparing to write off the Democrat. The months of negative ads were taking a toll on his approval numbers, and his campaign's reply was tepid at best. Then, finally (and after a lot of urging), the Attorney General began punching back, issuing a series of hard-hitting rebuttal ads rebutting McMahon's misrepresentations of his record and attacking hers.

The first debate, on October 4 in Hartford, may have proved a turning point for Blumenthal. He gave a stronger than anticipated performance in what has been increasingly being characterized as his final chance to turn things around. McMahon, meanwhile, performed adequately, but somehow seemed to fall a bit flat.

Three non-partisan polls conducted after the first debate -- by CNN/Time, Fox/POR-Rasmussen, and Rasmussen Reports -- now have Blumenthal up by double digits, a complete turn-around from the Quinnipiac poll released on September 26 that had the candidates separated by only three percentage points, and a Rasmussen poll released that same day that had them apart by five points. Significantly, McMahon appears to have passed the 50 percent disapproval mark, a serious and potentially lethal issue for her candidacy.

Back to "Solid Democrat"

So strong has Blumenthal seemed to rebound, Rasmussen has shifted the Connecticut Senate race from "leaning" to "solid" Democrat. The candidates faced off for the second time in Norwalk on October 7, again without any major gaffes. Sans a significant game-changer in their final debate, there is no reason to believe Blumenthal's rise in the polls will abate. McMahon may finally be realizing that you really can't just open your checkbook and buy a Senate seat -- at least not in Connecticut.

Two Connecticut Democrats face stiff House races

2010-10-09T11:29:00.005-04:00

Though Courtney, DeLauro and (probably) Larson appear safe.

Courtney has Peckinpaugh on the ropes.

WITH ALL THE DRAMA OF CONNECTICUT'S hard-fought Senate race, the battle over the state's five seats in the House of Representatives has not received a lot of attention -- until now.

Murphy and Himes in tight races...

Newly released polling data by CT Capitol Report indicates that the Democratic incumbents are at risk in at least one, if not two, Connecticut seats. The seat that appears most at risk at the moment is the 5th district, covering the northwest of the state. Long-time Republican Congresswoman Nancy Johnson was ousted by State Representative Chris Murphy in the Democratic sweep of 2006. Now it appears Murphy is being given a run for his money by Republican Sam Caliguri, who holds a slender lead, 49.7 percent to 44.3 percent, in polling released this week.

Meanwhile, 5th district Congressman Jim Himes appears to be locked in a close race with Republican State Senator Dan DeBicella. The CT Capitol Report poll has Himes at 49 percent with DeBicella within the margin of error at 47 percent; a more partisan poll released by DeBicella's campaign on September 30, meanwhile, had the two in a dead heat at 42 percent apiece.

...but Courtney is leading by 14 percent

What's even more interesting, the 2nd, district, which has traditionally been one of the tightest races in the country, appears to be a safe Democrat hold, at least for the moment. The incumbent, Joe Courtney, continues to hold a commanding lead over the Republican candidate, former newscaster Janet Peckinpaugh.

According to CT Capitol Reports most recent polling, Courtney is leading Peckinpaugh 55 percent to 41 percent. Poll director Matthew Fitch explains that "much of Courtney’s success in this poll is due to him being able to do what fellow incumbents...have not: make the race more than a straight referendum on President Obama. While supporters of Obama back Courtney by a wide 90-8 margin, Courtney is also getting slightly over 20 percent of those voters who disapprove of, or are unsure about, Obama’s job performance. In a district where the President’s approval rating is close to 50-50, that higher level of support from Obama opponents is worth a five point swing in both directions and turns what could be a relatively close race into a comfortable lead for Courtney.” Fitch also added that Courtney is trouncing Peckinpaugh among women voters, by 62 percent to 32 percent in a district where 55 percent of the voters are female.

DeLauro safe, Larson probably so

Of the remaining two seats, Rosa DeLauro seems the safest, holding a 20-point lead over her rival Jerry Labroiola in the 3rd district surrounding New Haven. While there has been some new speculation as to the vulnerability of John Larson, the 3rd ranking House Democrat, in the 1st district, it seems unlikely that he is in any danger. Recent polling has him at 52 percent with his Republican opponent, Wethersfield businesswoman Ann Brickley, at 45 percent, however, a far cry from his previous 20-plus point victories over rivals in recent races.

Larson's campaign has disputed the poll findings, and the National Review political reporter Jim Geraghty wrote on his blog on October 7 that Larson is probably safe, although given Larson's enormous margins of victory in previous races, "he's a useful indicator of just how much ground the Democrats have lost, and how quickly."

Connecticut gubernatorial nominee's inglorious stint in Iraq

2010-10-05T18:07:00.004-04:00

Tom Foley's disastrous adventure in Iraq is not a record to run on.

Saddam's Republican Palace, briefly home to Tom Foley.

OF ALL THE BADLY DESIGNED AND EXECUTED plans to emerge from Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon regarding Iraq, economic reform -- in which U.S. government experts were sidelined in favor of Republican ideologues -- ranks pretty high up on the list. And for a few months in 2003, the front man for this operation was none other than Connecticut Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley.

Foley doesn't like to dwell on the past, although he cites his Iraq service in his biography along with his reward ambassadorship to Ireland as somehow qualifying him to become the Nutmeg state's chief executive.

Other pundits have already gone through the now very public record of Foley's activities in Iraq, given the treasure trove of information in books such as Imperial Life in the Emerald City (by Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran) and Fiasco (by the New York Times's Tom Ricks). But the role Foley played in the debacle that become post-2003 Iraq bears repeating, for it is a record so steeped in arrogance and incompetence it cannot help but have a bearing on the current election.

Chandrasekaran's account is perhaps the best, and one of the most accurate. Based on hundreds of interviews while on the ground witnessing the occupation, he wrote one of the most readable, and tragic, accountings of the missed opportunities and utter incompetence of the U.S. occupation in immediate post-conflict Iraq. This is the account as described in Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

"I don't give a shit about international law."

A former Harvard classmate of the president's, and one of his major donors, Foley joined the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the Department of Defense-run entity that essentially took over running Iraq after the U.S. deposed Saddam Hussein. Within days of arriving in August 2003, Foley informed a contractor working on economic policy in Iraq that he intended to "privatize all Iraq's state-owned industries in thirty days." When the contractor cited the fact that international law prohibited an occupying power from undertaking such activities, Foley response was "I don't care about that stuff. I don't give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to the president that I'd privatize Iraq's businesses." He then ended the conversation by telling her they should go get a drink.

Look, no hands! The bungled non-reopening of the Baghdad Stock Exchange

Foley assigned a 24-year old who had been skipped over for a White House job to remake the Baghdad Stock Exchange. In the process, he sidelined an experienced army reservist named Thomas Wirges who had been working the issue and had been a stockbroker in an earlier incarnation. At the time, the Iraqis just wanted to get the exchange, which had been looted during the immediate post-conflict chaos, up and running. The Iraqi management of the exchange was asking, essentially, for three things -- a blackboard, cellphones, and a new location. The pre-conflict exchange had not been electronic, and there would be plenty of time to modernize the exchange over time. For the moment, the immediate challenge was to just get it opened.

Wirges developed a two-step plan to reopen the exchange, and then make structural and regulatory changes to address concerns about corruption. Foley is said to have endorsed the plan and promised Wirges a "high-level person from the New York Stock Exchange or the Securities and Exchange Commission to advise the project." Instead, Foley decided to place 24-year old Jay Hallen in charge of the project. Wirges was dismissed (Foley: "It is no longer your project") and Hallen became project manager. Wirges later commented in a Washington Post article about the utter lack of qualifications of the team that was brought in, stating that "they were put in positions of authority they had no clue about."

Over the course of the next several months, Hallen -- who had no experience whatsoever in financial markets -- decided, with Foley's blessing, not to reopen the exchange, but instead to redesign it to create the most modern, best model of a stock exchange the region had ever seen, complete with a computerized trading system, board of directors, Iraq's first SEC, licenses for brokers, etc., etc., etc.

As Chandrasekaran described it, Hallen became infected with the same misplaced ambition as the rest of the CPA. Hallen (a non-Arabic speaker in his twenties, pretty much fresh out of undergraduate studies at Yale) began firing Iraqi employees of the exchange wholesale, nominated a new board of governors, and hand-picked two "trusted" Iraqis (principle qualification: they spoke English) to run the exchange's day-to-day operations. (Unfortunately, the two he selected were Sunnis who were viewed with distrust by the other Iraqis at the exchange -- another decision Foley, as his supervisor, rubber-stamped.)

The Iraqis, for their part, were growing increasingly impatient with the delays, and became alarmed at what had become a very high threshold to meet before the exchange could be reopened. In putting this inexperienced, though eager, political appointment in charge of such a sensitive project, Foley undermined his own stated goal (and that of the U.S. government) of increasing the role of the private sector in the recovery of Iraq's economy as quickly as possible.

Eventually, Hallen even clashed with own his hand-picked board. The Iraqis couldn't understand why this person, in their eyes essentially a child, was ordering them around in their own country. They hired back the employees Hallen fired, and quarreled with him over the management of the exchange. They ditched the idea of the computers, acquired dry erase boards on their own, and began moving forward with the reopening as Hallen stomped his feet on the sidelines. The stock exchange finally opened, but not until two days after Hallen left the country in June 2004, and over a year after Wirges first laid the groundwork for its speedy reopening. Another opportunity, just one of dozens, missed because of sheer incompetence and poor decisions. This ineptitude delayed U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq and, along with the other bunglings of the occupation, cost the lives of countless servicemen.

Meanwhile, Foley takes credit on his campaign website for having "designed and stood-up a new, modern stock exchange to provide equity pricing and liquidity for domestic companies and to support company ownership by Iraqi's [sic]."

"Not the right fit"

By the time his prodigy Hallen left in the summer of 2004, Foley had already been gone for several months. In January, after only little over four months, CPA head Paul Bremer decided that Foley had to go. He wasn't "the right fit" for the job, and he was irritating the Iraqis at a time when the United States was trying to hand things over and extract itself from the complexities of running Iraqi institutions.

Unfortunately, as a friend of the president, Foley couldn't just be shoved onto the next plane back to Kuwait. Instead, a soft landing was prepared for him. Foley was to travel around the world with former Secretary of State James Baker, helping him urge other world governments to forgive Iraq's debt. He also became President Bush's campaign chair in Connecticut for the 2004 presidential election. Thus, the distinguished Iraq career of Tom Foley came to its inglorious end.

A record Foley still cites with pride

Foley cites his record in Iraq on his campaign website and has strongly defended it in the past. His accounting to Rick Green, a Hartford Courant political blogger, is about as self-congratulatory as these things come. He continues to boast about how, in the span of seven months, he and his team rewrote Iraqi commercial law, restructured the banks, and -- yes, again -- "designed and stood up a modern stock exchange."

His exaggerations did not go unchallenged during the Republican primary. Both of Foley's principle opponents, R. Nelson Griebel and Lieutenant Governor Michael Fedele, criticized him for overstating his record of accomplishments.

In the current general election contest between Foley and the Democratic nominee, former Stamford mayor Dan Malloy, the issue of Iraq rarely comes up. That is unfortunate, because Foley's disastrous run in Iraq speaks volumes about his lack of qualifications to hold the most important job in Connecticut.

A Blumenthal surge?

2010-10-05T02:56:00.001-04:00

It may be too early for that, but his strong debate performance Monday and encouraging poll numbers indicate he may have finally found his pace.

Blumenthal, McMahon face off in Hartford on October 4. (Credit: Hartford Courant.)

BOTH CANDIDATES HAD a lot to lose in the first Connecticut Senate debate of 2010, and both managed to avoid a game-changing gaffe. So from that perspective, the first face-to-face match up between Democrat Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and Republican businesswoman Linda McMahon was a tie.

Blumenthal, though, had more to lose going in. He has finally begun to find his voice in this campaign, and from that perspective, he prevailed in the expectations game. This was make-it-or-break-it time for the Attorney General, and he responded with ease and frankness to most of the questions lobbed at him, while coming down on McMahon for her ambiguous statements on the state minimum wage (she denies saying she advocates lowering it, though she stumbled answering a question about it last week) and her business practices as the head of World Wrestling Entertainment.

McMahon, on the other hand, needed something to bring her over the top, to finally knock Blumenthal into second place after gradually eating away at his polling numbers over the past nine months via a relentless negative campaign fueled by her personal fortune. And on Monday night, Blumenthal failed to oblige her. She had a go at him (courtesy of a question from the panelists) about his misstatements about his service during the Vietnam War -- also the subject of a brand-new 30-second campaign spot basically calling the Democrat a liar -- but this was all hashed out, and the damage done, in May. Voters, ultimately, that this was a non-issue and moved on. (Sixty percent of Connecticut voter indicated this issue would not sway their vote.)

In the face of these facts, this new volley from her camp smacks of desperation. The pre-debate barrage seemed like a last-ditch effort to take away a final chunk of Blumenthal's base of support, but his base is pretty solid. The Republicans will continue to throw everything and the kitchen sink at him, but it finally appears these tactics, despite the seemingly limitless reservoir of funds to underwrite them, may have finally hit a wall.

A pre-debate shot in the arm for the Democrats

While recent Rasmussen and Quinnipiac polls indicating the race has tightened further, the latest pre-debate polling, by the Democratic-affiliated but widely respected polling organization PPP, depicted a much wider race on October 4, with Blumenthal ahead 53 to 41 percent over McMahon. Their explanation for this result was manifold.

For one, Blumenthal's favorability is 53 percent to 39 percent -- the exact opposite of McMahon's, which puts her negative rating over the dangerous 50 percent mark. In addition, 41 percent of Connecticut voters say they are Democrats, with 28 percent claiming Republican affiliation and 31 percent "independent." The Democrats are basically a unified party, and Blumenthal is tied with McMahon 45 percent to 45 percent with independents.

In addition, Blumenthal has made marginally more successful inroads in wooing Republicans than McMahon has with Democrats (15 percent of Republicans indicate they would support the Democrat, versus 11 percent of Democrats who would support McMahon). While a double-digit lead seems an outlier, PPP is a respectable outfit and their poll seems to indicate that Blumenthal may have staunched the hemorrhaging, and McMahon may have discovered the upper limits of the negative tactics she has pursued.

Stripped of the two-page fliers trashing the AG's record, the campaign came down Monday night to the two candidates, head-to-head, focused on the issues. And on that front, while McMahon gave a wholly respectable performance, Blumenthal came out on top.

Murkowski's poll numbers climb...

2010-10-02T16:50:00.002-04:00

But as a write-in, she still faces an uphill battle.

Murkowski facing an uphill slog....

WHEN LISA MURKOWSKI declared her write-in candidacy for Senate on September 17, it was clear she faced an uphill battle. Getting people to write her name on the ballot posed a challenge only a handful of candidates nation-wide have been able to overcome in the last half century.

Some polls indicate that she has begun to surge ahead in the Alaska Senate race -- with one showing Murkowski actually taking the lead. The type of poll, though, becomes very important here. As Mark Blumenthal discusses in some detail on Huffingtonpost.com, polls have a difficult time registering the support of a write-in. Automated polls like Rasmussen (which had Murkowski trailing at 27 percent, well behind Republican Joe Miller and two points ahead of Democrat Scott McAdams) can have a lot of difficulty capturing a write-in candidate's support levels. Likewise, how you ask the question in a poll administered by live people can also make a significant difference.

Blumenthal cites polls from Alaska pollster Ivan Moore in which he first does not mention Murkowski at all, but records her name if the respondent provides it unprompted. There, Murkowski earns 18 percent, behind both Miller and McAdams. Then, Moore prompts the respondent by mentioning that Murkowski is running. There, she earns 44 percent support, about eight points ahead of Miller and a whopping 30 percentage points ahead of McAdams. Blumenthal calls the 18 percent Murkowski's "floor" and 44 percent her "ceiling." The likelihood is she will garner somewhere between the two on election day. With historical precedents few and far between, it is hard to determine. The one example Blumenthal cites, of the independent gubernatorial candidacy of Democrat Charlotte Pritt in West Virginia in 1992, had Pritt coming in on election day pretty close to her "floor" rather than her "ceiling."

Regardless of the polling one way or the other, the fact remains that the likelihood of an independent write-in candidacy prevailing over a party-endorsed candidate, whose name actually appears on the ballot, is still pretty low. Murkowski has a long road ahead of her over the next five weeks to retain her seat.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the country...

2010-09-25T17:13:00.001-04:00

By re-entering the race, Lisa Murkowski just guaranteed the Alaska Senate seat would go to the Tea Party candidate.

Ready the knife: Palin and Murkowski in happier days.

IT WAS ALWAYS AN UNLIKELY place for a Democratic pick-up. Alaska has trended Republican for years, despite the occasional (conservative) Democratic governor and the narrow upset victory of Anchorage mayor Mark Begich over long-time incumbent Senator Ted Stevens in 2008.

That said, Alaska isn't the most far-right state either, and moderates of both parties have done well there in the past. So when Lisa Murkowski was ousted as the Republican nominee in a fit of Tea Party pique in August, that race suddenly began to look a tad more competitive for the Democrats. The Republican who bested Murkowski, Joe Miller, is not as well-known as Murkowski, and is prone to making worryingly extremist comments. If it weren't for the avalanche of publicity he received from his endorsement by Sarah Palin, he would probably still be an obscure attorney from Fairbanks.

The Democrats seemingly chose their candidate, Sitka mayor Scott McAdams, out of a hat, figuring that Murkowski would win the Republican primary and that they wouldn't have a shot. When Miller won the nomination, it looked like the seat might actually be in play. Polling right after Miller's victory indicated he led McAdams by 50 percent to 44 percent, with a 4.5 percent margin of error. Rasmussen moved the race from solid to leaning Republican.

Skip ahead a few weeks to September 17 when Murkowski announced she would run as a write-in candidate. Forget that no write-in candidate has won office in Alaska since it became a state, and that the last senator to be elected successfully as a write-in was Strom Thurmond in 1954.

Although factoring a write-in candidacy into prognostications is extremely complicated, polling released by Rasmussen on September 21 indicated that while Murkowski may be able to chip a bit off of Miller's lead, it is McAdams's candidacy which is really harmed by her re-entry. Miller appeared to have around 42 percent support in the latest poll, with Murkowski at 27 percent and McAdams just behind her at 25 percent. (This result bears a surprising resemblance to another three-way, the Rubio-Crist-Meek race in Florida.)

Fears that Murkowski's re-entry would split the Republican vote appear, for the moment anyway, unfounded. In fact, more than two-thirds of her support appears to be coming from people who a few weeks ago were leaning towards McAdams. (One should note, however, that a different poll -- one reportedly used by Murkowski in calculating her decision to her re-enter the campaign -- had her leading Miller by six points as a write-in.)

Still, Murkowski is almost certain to be forced to relinquish her seat after November 2. By re-entering the race, she is basically handing the seat to Miller. If she truly felt, as she has said, that he would damage Alaska's interests, she could exit the race and either keep quiet or endorse the Democrat. All she is doing now is muddying the waters and playing the role of spoiler.

To understand Connecticut's Senate race, you have to understand Connecticut

2010-09-25T11:22:00.002-04:00

The Nutmeg State is more complicated than it appears.

Rockville: Just one of many hard-hit mill towns in northeastern Connecticut. (Courtesy: city-data.com)

MATT BAI PROVIDES a brilliant write-up of the Connecticut Senate race in the September 26 New York Times magazine entitled The Great Connecticut-Country-Club Crackup. As a native of Trumbull, he understands the state better than a lot of the commentariat, and his description of its many complicated dimensions is an insightful piece of journalism.

His description of how the spectacle of a wrestling magnate running for Senate came about:

"...This is Connecticut, my home state, where the business of campaigns and governance used to be a predictable, serious affair, the province of mostly estimable public servants who worked their way up through town councils or local party machines. Sometimes called the Land of Steady Habits, Connecticut was never a place for garish campaigns and outsize characters with bank statements to match.

"Until recently, the closest thing Connecticut experienced to an overturning of the political order, at least in modern times, was the revolt over a state income tax in the early 1990s. So incensed were the voters then that they replaced their moderate [third-party] governor, the former longtime senator Lowell Weicker, with a more conservative career politician, a three-term congressman named John Rowland....

"That, however, was before Rowland and a small cadre of other Connecticut officeholders were hauled away to prison on corruption charges; before Democrats ousted Joe Lieberman from the party only six years after they nominated him for the vice presidency; before the politicians in Hartford blew a hole the size of Long Island Sound in the state budget." (By the way, the Rowland scandals were even weirder than Bai describes. One of those arrested actually accepted a bribe in gold coins which he subsequently buried in his back yard.)

Another little understood point that Bai drives home in this piece is how diverse the state really is, and how severely impacted it was by the de-industrialization of the 1970s:

"[In the 1980s] the manufacturing decline that was beginning to erode the nation's economic base, along with the "white flight" that began in the 1960s, hollowed out Connecticut's cities and weakened its governing establishment. Outsiders tend to think of Connecticut as a collection of wealthy suburbs and rural horse farms....That side does exist, particularly on the 'gold coast' that runs along the southwest edge of the state, where many hedge-fund managers and movie stars live. And yet much of the state is heavily industrialized, or at least it was until the 1970s...."

This combination of political and economic change is what has led the state to serve as the backdrop for one of the most interesting Senate races this year -- between a quintessential insider, long-serving Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, and a mavericky newcomer to the political scene, North Carolina native and wrestling CEO Linda McMahon.

As Bai observed McMahon's primary victory speech in August, he found himself asking "when, exactly, did genteel Connecticut become Louisiana? And if politics could get this weird here, then what did that mean for the rest of the country?" Good questions.

A cheap -- and really stupid -- shot in the North Carolina 2nd district House race

2010-09-25T07:53:00.000-04:00

The GOP candidate tries to link her opponent to the "Victory Mosque" at Ground Zero.

THERE ARE SOME PRETTY WACKY campaign ads out these days, but this one, from the House race in North Carolina's 2nd district, takes the cake.

Fear-mongering is a useful tactic when trying to unseat a popular incumbent. Exploiting 9/11 for political purposes is hardly unusual -- a lot of politicians are doing it. And Fort Bragg does fall in the district's borders, so maybe this is a cheap attempt to win military votes. Still, this ad -- with its amateurish, elementary-school graphics, over-emoted narration, and hopelessly simplistic script, is probably one of silliest of this campaign cycle. Hopefully the voters of the 2nd district will see it for what it is.

Dick starts punching back

2010-09-18T12:37:00.001-04:00

But is it too late?

FINALLY RICHARD BLUMENTHAL is punching back. After weeks of near silence in the face of an onslaught of withering attacks by Linda McMahon in the Connecticut Senate race, the Democratic candidate issued a new 30-second response to many of the charges leveled at him, plus threw a few punches of his own. Finally, his campaign may be finding its footing.

Still, McMahon has managed to do a lot of damage, overcoming a double-digit lead by Blumenthal earlier in the race and in the process. Political prognosticators have been speculating that a race this close in a state as blue as Connecticut could easily tilt towards the Republicans because of the sheer enthusiasm and motivation of their voter base. Emily Bazelon of Slate was almost despondent this week (again) on Slate's political podcast in describing what she sees as the lethargy of the Blumenthal's campaign. The respected Cook Political Report moved the match-up to the "toss-up" category this week, although Nate Silver of the New York Times' respected political blog FiveThirtyEight believes the recent polling numbers aren't as bad for Blumenthal as some have made them out to be.

With six weeks left before Election Day, the Democrats don't have a lot of room for error. McMahon still has millions of her personal wrestling fortune to spend and is still on the attack, having discovered a winning formula. Blumenthal needs to pursue a more aggressive strategy, and pull out some strong debate performances in October, if he is going to prevail come November 2.

The (Tea) Party continues....

2010-09-15T07:15:00.002-04:00

Mike Castle follows Lisa Murkowski as the Tea Party puts another "RINO" out to pasture.

Castle breached: the seemingly unbeatable Delaware Republican candidate is now out of the race for Senate -- and the Republicans have a wider moat to cross to take control of that body in November.

ANOTHER UPSET IN THE Republican primaries has taken place, this time in the September 14 race in Delaware, where the state party's preferred candidate, former governor and nine-term congressman Mike Castle was defeated by the Tea Party-based choice, Christine O'Donnell, by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. Meanwhile, the Tea Party also scored a victory in New York, where the state Republicans' favored choice, former Representative Rick Lazio, lost his bid to be the party's nominee for governor.

Whereas Tea Party victories in more reliably Republican states like Utah, Alaska and Kentucky did not necessarily hurt the Republicans' efforts to retain those seats, O'Donnell's win over Castle makes it much more likely the Democrats will retain that seat, which Vice President Biden held until 2008.

Castle was leagues ahead of the Democratic nominee, New Castle County executive Chris Coons. In the last poll done by Rasmussen, on September 7, Coons was 11 points behind Castle, but he led O'Donnell by exactly the same margin. O'Donnell lost by a large margin to Biden in 2008, though she has tried to argue (inaccurately, and oddly) that she still won in two of Delaware's three counties. (She actually lost in all three.)

The Republicans are in a tailspin over Castle's loss. Winning in Delaware was critical to the party's strategy for taking control of the Senate in November, and an anonymous source told the Washington Post that the party's national senatorial committee would now be "walking out" of the Delaware race. Former Bush advisor turned political prognosticator Karl Rove told Fox News that "there's just a lot of nutty things that [O'Donnell's] been saying that simply don't add up. I'm for the Republican, but I've got to tell you, we were looking at eight to nine seats in the Senate. We're now looking at seven or eight. In my opinion, this is not a race we are going to be able to win."

Connecticut Senate race widens...or tightens...or widens...or tightens....

2010-09-15T01:33:00.002-04:00

Our lead is about this big....

THERE'S A LITTLE BIT of something for everyone in the latest flurry of polls out on the Connecticut Senate race. On September 10, Rasmussen issued its latest poll indicated Democratic candidate and state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal had crossed the 50 percent threshold for the first time in months, and had finally begun to widen his lead a bit again.

In their data, which included for the first time "leaners" (those who don't indicate a preference when first asked, but answer a follow-up question about who they support) Blumenthal had a 53-to-44 percent advantage over Republican wrestling magnate Linda McMahon. Perhaps just as importantly, McMahon's unfavorable numbers were hovering at just under 50 percent, a dangerous position for the underdog challenger.

It took less than a week for the McMahon campaign to find a measure of solace in another set of numbers. Quinnipiac University's new poll released on September 14 is showing the candidates separated by only six points (51 to 45 percent), another indicator that while Blumenthal is holding the lead, McMahon continues to erode his support. The poll also had McMahon's negatives at a more manageable 41 percent. Interestingly, 42 percent of McMahon's supporters said their vote for her was "mainly against Blumenthal;" only 53 percent said their vote was for McMahon. Only 22 percent of Blumenthal's supporters said their vote was mainly against McMahon, versus a strong 73 percent who said they were voting for Blumenthal.

When asked if Blumenthal could bring change to Washington, 45 percent of respondents said yes and 48 no -- the exact same numbers McMahon received. Another interesting nugget: while the race is pretty much tied among men, women are trending heavily (56-to-41 percent) for Blumenthal (a sign McMahon's signature "SUV moms" ads may not be having all the traction her campaign hoped for).

Still, Obama's approval numbers in the state are down, which could be a drag on Blumenthal, and Connecticut voters are almost evenly divided about which party they want to see in control of the Senate after the election. If this trend-line were to continue -- and the debates between the two candidates have yet to take place -- the Connecticut race could soon become a dead-heat.

Meanwhile, not to be discouraged, the Blumenthal campaign issued its latest fundraising e-mail citing the Quinipiac poll as "positive news" but also invoking another poll, by "Hamilton Campaigns," claiming Blumenthal had a 53-to-39 percent lead. Why the discrepancy? Maybe because, unlike non-partisan outfits like Rasmussen and Quinnipiac, Hamilton does polling for campaigns, and has a long roster of (overwhelmingly Democratic) clients. Their poll showing a 14-point Blumenthal lead might be considered an outlier at the moment.

With his Koran-burning threats, a random preacher defiles a solemn day

2010-09-11T11:02:00.015-04:00

Marking 9/11 by threatening to burn the Koran dishonors the memories of those who died that day nine years ago.

(Courtesy: http://www.artsjournal.com)

THIS WHOLE STORY about the (now-cancelled) Koran burning that was being organized by this random, crazed so-called voice of God in Florida is simply shameful. That this so-called preacher, leader of a flock of a few dozen, could garner so much publicity and put in harm's way our soldiers serving overseas with this disgusting display, defies reason. And now he is in New York, this rural snake-oil salesman somehow transformed by the 24-news cycle into a self-ordained representative of the victims of 9/11. It is hard to think of a word more appropriate than "disgraceful" to describe this week-long media-inspired melodrama.

The issue is simple. You cannot commemorate 9/11 with a display of hate. It is disgusting, a bastardization of everything that America represents and everything we hold dear. Christians in this country would be appalled by a mass burning of Bibles. Does it happen? Sure, it probably does somewhere. But that doesn't make it right. And for any so-called Christians who support this wing-nut, here's a news flash: the whole eye-for-an-eye thing was supposed to have been replaced by "turn the other cheek" and "treat your neighbor as you would yourself" back about 2,000 or so years ago.

We have already made a mess of our post-9/11 efforts to woo the Muslim world. The hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, the Abu Ghraib fiasco, the failure to stabilize Afghanistan after a strong showing there in 2001-2002....all have put paid to that. But we are trying to make right -- that isn't a partisan position, but a broad view that spans the political spectrum.

The last thing this country needs -- and the last thing our soldiers overseas need -- is some meglo-maniacal crackpot putting our troops' lives in further jeopardy through a cheap publicity stunt. Maybe what he is proposing isn't illegal, but it is a disgrace, it is fundamentally anti-American and anti-patriotic, and worst of all, it besmirches the memory of those whose lives - including Christians, Jews, and yes, Muslims -- were lost in New York, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania nine years ago today.

Can a country with disparate electoral systems run fair national elections?

2010-09-11T06:56:00.008-04:00

With different states opting for different election methods, disparities could start having effects on outcomes.

FEW PEOPLE ARE aware that Nebraska actually divided its electoral votes in the last presidential election. Since 1992, the state has had a system whereby whichever candidate wins the most votes in each congressional district wins that district's one electoral vote; the candidate with the most votes state-wide also takes the two remaining "at-large" electoral votes. Barack Obama won the congressional district surrounding Omaha, and took that single electoral vote; John McCain won the other two congressional districts, and took those two plus the two state-wide electoral votes.

Only Maine and Nebraska distribute electoral votes in this manner. 2008 was the first time that either state split its electoral allocations. (Maine's system, in place since 1972, has yet to result in divided electoral votes.) The rest of the states employ the winner-take-all system for allocating electoral votes, regardless of the winner's margin of victory.

Nebraska and Maine are small states, with, respectively, five and four electoral votes each. In a tight race, the fact that they operate under a different system could have an effect. But generally speaking, their different allocation system amounts to a footnote in general elections.

But what if...?

Not so if a group called Californians for Equal Representation had succeeded in getting the citizens of that state to agree to the Presidential Election Reform Act in 2007, which would have copied the system followed in Maine and Nebraska.

The problem with the initiative was two-fold. First, from a legal perspective, some legal experts argued it could be unconstitutional for such a measure to be passed by referendum, since Article II of the Constitution stipulates that a state's electoral votes are to be allocated in a manner specified by the "legislature". (There is a debate whether the Framers meant the actual state legislature, in which case this would be a violation, or if they were referring to the state's law-making system, where perhaps a referendum would qualify.)

Second, from a political perspective, this would have resulted in a large state with 55 electoral votes that has trended reliably Democratic in most recent presidential elections to divide its votes, while more Republican states with some Democrat-leaning districts, like Texas, would not. For example, if this law had passed before the 2004 elections, George W. Bush would have won 22 electoral votes to John Kerry's 33 in California; in the winner-take-all system in place, Kerry won all 55. Californians for Equal Representation had alleged links to the state Republican party, and even erstwhile Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger equated the measure with "dirty pool."

Ultimately, the act's backers failed to get it on the ballot by 2008, so it was never put before the California voters and its constitutionality remains untested in the courts.

States as electoral Petri dishes

The flip side of this is that the states are also excellent testing grounds for more minor reform and tinkering. For example, in Nevada, where the Senate race between Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican/Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle is considered a dead heat right now, the deciding factor could come down to a little known voting option unique to that state: "None of these candidates." As Nate Silver recently explained in his New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight, in Nevada, you can vote for "none of the above," whereas in the other 49 the only way to express that view is not to vote.

"None of these candidates" actually has had an effect in Nevada elections in the past: it garnered a larger share of the vote than the spread between Dole and Clinton in 1996, for example, and also was larger than the margin between Reid and his Republican challenger John Ensign in Reid's 1998 re-election bid. If past is prologue, disenchanted voters who would not vote for Reid but who could not stomach casting a vote for Angle could follow the same strategy. Reid may be counting on this, although his campaign does not discuss strategy.

Louisiana, on the other hand, employs an open primary system where all candidates, regardless of party, run on election day. (It is basically the same as a European run-off system.) If no candidate (for Congress, Senate, or state-wide office) wins more than 50 percent of the vote on election day, whoever the top two voter-getters were head into a run-off a month later to determine the victor. Georgia uses a similar run-off system if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote.

The benefit of a system like this is that candidates cannot stray too far from the mainstream in Louisiana (which, admittedly, is fairly right-of-center anyway). Unlike in other states, where Congressional or Senate candidates only have to worry about getting the most votes (and can therefore pander to their bases) candidates in Louisiana have to keep in mind they may be required to broaden their voter base in a run-off. Louisiana temporarily did away with this system for selecting congressional candidates from 2008-2010, but has decided to return to it.

Meanwhile, California and Washington are now implementing a similar variant that focuses on blanket primaries whereby voters can choose from all party candidates before the election. The general election would then be a contest between whichever two candidates received the most votes in the primary, regardless of party affiliation. So theoretically two Republicans, two Democrats, or two Green Party candidates, could face off against each other in either state's general election.

If Minnesota had used a run-off system in 2008 like that in Louisiana, it would not have taken the state six months to seat their new senator. Franken and Coleman both got around 43 percent of the vote; they would have automatically gone into a run-off, rather than go through the agonizing, months-long recount and court battles.

This state electoral experimentation, and variation, is a useful way to test modest changes and gently introduce reforms to the notoriously tradition-bound American electoral system. However, the risk remains that if some states go too far too fast, the disparities will skew the results, particularly when it comes to presidential elections. Lacking a nation-wide compact on reform, this state-by-state playing around the edges can get the country only so far.

Most Americans take voting for granted unless there is some crisis, like in the 2000 presidential election, that suddenly brings the illogic of the electoral college system to the forefront. Talk of reform, generally the terrain solely of election wonks, is always mooted once the storm passes. The many options to make the system fairer, and more consistent across the country, are viewed as too complicated, and requiring too much coordinated (and non-partisan) legislative activity on the part of the states to carry out. A constitutional amendment to address the problem seems a long shot. If 2000 didn't prompt one, it is hard to imagine what could.

The Senate: Deliberative or debilitative?

2010-09-11T00:56:00.001-04:00

Sen. Charles Sumner (MA) being attacked on the floor of the old Senate chamber by Rep. Preston Brooks (SC) on May 22, 1856.

GEORGE PACKER normally covers foreign policy for The New Yorker, but when Ryan Lizza, the regular New Yorker Washington correspondent, took some time off recently, Packer agreed to fill in. His recent piece on the Senate, The Empty Chamber, elicited an enormous response in what is normally a fairly sleepy time in our nation's capital.

Packer's normal beat is foreign affairs; war in far-off lands has been his primary focus for most of the past decade. (His book on post-2003 Iraq, The Assassin's Gate, is one of the best books about the botched American intervention against Saddam.) So viewing U.S. political institutions through his unique lens makes for a fascinating read. That said, the Senate is not the Iraqi Council of Representatives, and it is hardly teetering as close to the edge as many of the more partisan senators interviewed for the piece made it seem.

End of the moderates...?

It is true that over the past decade, the more moderate Southern Democrats and Northeastern Republicans who helped lubricate the deal-making process in the Senate have been turfed out, proving to be easy pickings as the country began to more neatly divide into "blue" and "red" states. More most of the 1990s and up through the 2006 election, for example, the Congressional delegation from Connecticut was pretty much evenly split between both parties, and the voting records of all were not terribly dissimilar.

The last vestiges of this tradition are evident in New England, where both (female) Senators are among the three remaining so-called "moderate" Republicans the Democrats consider deal-makers when they try to overcome Republican filibusters. (Ironically enough, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who won the late Senator Ted Kennedy's seat in an upset earlier this year with considerable Tea Party support, is considered the third moderate.)

...or just another political cycle?

One thing Packer might be lacking is some perspective. Politics is cyclical, and to say that things have never been so bad would be to overlook the Bork hearings in the late 1980s, waves of "moderate purges" from the Senate in 1994 and 2002, and the near-complete blockage of Bush judicial nominees in the first half of this decade -- by the Democrats, courtesy of the filibuster, incidentally. At least it hasn't gotten to the point where lawmakers are beating each other with canes on the Senate floor, as it did when Senator Sumner of Massachusetts was beaten to within an inch of his life (all be it by a member of the House) in 1856 over the slavery issue.

According to Washington Post columnist David Broder, Mitch McConnell gave a full-throated defense of the Senate in a breakfast meeting hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in August. His key point was that the Senate tends to be at its best when the party ratios are close -- "say 55 to 45 -- rather than as lopsided as they have been during Obama's first two years." McConnell argued that a closer split facilitated deal-making in the center, and a larger ratio tended to force moderates to tack closer to the party line (exhibited by Senator Collins's withdrawal of support for health care reform). And these concerns are legitimate. In this election year, the most vulnerable Republicans have been those targeted in their own primaries, condemned for their willingness to deal with members of the opposite party (thus becoming the dreaded "Washington insider").

It is pretty apparent the Senate will either change hands, or at least that party ratio will become less lop-sided, following the November 2 election. Whether that will lead to political paralysis or more deal-making remains to be seen.

National punditry weighing in on Connecticut Senate race

2010-09-10T03:33:00.005-04:00

Once considered a safe Democratic bet, the Nutmeg State contest is attracting national attention -- and concern from the left.

Blumenthal and McMahon (Credit: The Washington Times)

MORE COMPARISONS between the "Swift-boating" of John Kerry and the wringer Linda McMahon is putting Richard Blumenthal through in the Connecticut Senate race, this time from September 3rd's Slate Political Gabfest.

With Rasmussen now adding the West Virginia race to its list of toss-ups, that makes eight Senate contests that are considered virtual ties. Seven of those seats are currently held by the Democrats. Add to that the five seats the Democrats have already pretty much had to write off to the Republicans (Arkansas, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and North Dakota, plus Delaware presuming Republican Congressman Mike Castle gets the nomination in the September 14 primary there) and the Democrats appear in serious danger of losing control of the upper house. (Incidentally, Sarah Palin injected herself into the Delaware race on September 8, endorsing Castle's Tea Party primary opponent Christine O'Donnell.)

This makes the race in Connecticut -- currently the only Democratic-held Senate seat in Rasmussen's "leaning Democrat" category -- all the more important.

Here is what New Haven-based Slate political commentator Emily Bazelon had to say about the Connecticut race:

Emily Bazelon: I am chattering about Linda McMahon and Richard Blumenthal. They are running for for Senate in my home state of Connecticut, and, you know, what keeps striking me is that Linda McMahon is on the attack. She knows that she has to catch up in the polls, she has just oodles and oodles of her own money to spend, and she clearly relishes being on the attack. And Richard Blumenthal, as far as I can tell, is playing dead. And its not like there isn't ammunition for him....

The media is actually really interested in the fact that a couple of relatively young wrestlers who were involved with the WWE, which was the McMahons' wrestling empire, have died in a very untimely fashion in the last month, and there's been some digging around, about steroid use, about other deaths of WWE wrestlers, and yet Blumenthal has stayed totally quiet on the subject and I just -- what is he waiting for? How close in the polls does she have to get before he takes her on?

John Dickerson: Well, isn't it usually the case that you let the media do the work for you, and if they don't -- if it doesn't -- if they don't do it --

EB: If it doesn't take? But while the media does this, she is catching up. She was 17 points behind him earlier in the summer and now she's fewer than ten points behind.

David Plotz: You obviously haven't watched enough WWE. He's like, totally waiting, he's like, he's like, it looks like he's going to be tapped out there and then all of a sudden --

EB: All right, you're giving him a lot of credit.

JD: Well, this is also, no, no, this is -- this is the problem a lot of people had with John Kerry, in a slightly different context, not defending himself against the Swift-boat stuff. You know, the media didn't do the work for him, or, even if the media did, it's the candidate's job to prosecute it.

EB: I just feel -- I have no evidence for this -- but I feel like Blumenthal just must be thinking: "This woman has a yacht called the 'Sexy Bitch.' How can she possibly get elected Senator in my prim and proper genteel state?" But she can.

Blumenthal v McMahon: Proof of life?

2010-08-30T17:58:00.011-04:00

The Blumenthal campaign finally starts hitting back.

IT ISN'T MUCH, but at least it's something: Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's campaign -- or, more precisely, the Connecticut Democratic State Central Committee -- is finally responding, though a bit indirectly, to the deluge of negative mailers spewing forth on a daily basis from Linda McMahon.

In two recent ads, the party is turning the focus back onto McMahon. One mocks the enormous quantity of negative mailers her campaign has been deluging the state with. A second one hits at allegations that, while head of World Wrestling Enterprise, McMahon ignored the health concerns of her wrestlers and denied them proper medical treatment.

McMahon has practically plastered the state with negative flyers, and until now, Blumenthal's response has been to rely on a lot of personal appearances and a series of feed-good ads about people he has helped over the course of his career. (To be fair, the incredible disparity in financing has a lot to do with this -- McMahon has pledged to spend up to $50 million of her own money, and Blumenthal has just over $3 million in the kitty right now.) With these ads, the state's Democratic party succeeds in mocking McMahon while lobbing the more serious charge that she is basically trying to use her millions to buy the Senate seat being vacated by Chris Dodd.

The question at this point is whether Blumenthal can maintain his slight edge in the polls -- seven percent, according to the most recent Rasmussen poll, for the next several weeks, or if McMahon's battle of attrition will continue chipping away at his advantage. Already the race was downgraded from "solid Democratic" to "leaning Democratic" by Rasmussen. With Washington state, Wisconsin, California and several other normally Democratic stalwart Senate races in the "Toss-Up" category, throwing Connecticut into that category as well would portend a rout for the party in November.

Blumenthal starts punching back

2010-08-29T16:28:00.007-04:00

After weeks of seeing himself Swift-boated by his Republican opponent, the Connecticut Senate candidate is starting to fight back - but on his terms.

The latest Blumenthal ad, courtesy of http://richardblumenthal.com.

DICK BLUMENTHAL, the Connecticut Attorney General, has taken his share of hits over the past month or so in his Connecticut Senate race against former World Wrestling magnate Linda McMahon. Now, he is starting to hit back -- a bit.

At any other time, Blumenthal, who has served in the attorney general job for nearly two decades and is one of the most familiar names in Connecticut politics, would have coasted to victory. But these are not ordinary times, and Linda McMahon is no ordinary candidate. She has millions of her own dollars at her disposal and has already said she is prepared to spend up to $50 million to buy the seat. As of August 20, she had over $22 million in hand (after spending nearly $450 per vote to win the Republican primary earlier in the month) to Blumenthal's $3 million and change.

That money has been put to good use in August as she has Swift-boated Blumenthal relentlessly. What McMahon has managed to do is turn this into a referendum on Blumenthal's character, and her withering attacks -- including a series of ads that weave subtle (and not so subtle) criticisms into chats between two SUV moms driving around suburban Connecticut -- have indeed taken a toll. Blumenthal has seen his polling numbers dip below 50 percent for the first time since he announced his candidacy. The latest Rasmussen poll from August 13 have moved the Connecticut race from "solid" to "leaning" Democrat and have Blumenthal at 47 percent and McMahon right behind him at 40 percent.

Blumenthal has held his fire up to now. He can't really afford to go after McMahon before Labor Day, with his finances in such dire shape, and in addition, he has gone on the record several times insisting he wanted to run a positive race. His ads to date have been soft-pedal feel-good stories about average Connecticut citizens who say he has helped them over the years -- genuinely nice, and perhaps effective in a non-competitive AG re-election race, but hardly what is needed to rebut the McMahon campaign's onslought. On August 20, Blumenthal finally released an ad refuting many of McMahon's critiques, while sticking to the positive tone that has been the hallmark of his campaign thus far.

Connecticuters, while not necessarily embracing negative campaigns that went for the jugular, have tended to demonstrate an appreciation for campaigns laced with irony and humor. (Then-Attorney General Joe Lieberman ousted Senator Lowell Weicker back in 1988 by a whisker, in part erasing Weicker's seemingly insurmountable lead with a series of clever, snide negative ads like one comparing the incumbant to a lazy, sleeping bear.) This race is taking a definite turn for the negative, however. With so much national attention on this race, though, and the balance of control in the Senate at stake, it is hard to see how Blumenthal can remain competitive much longer if he or his surrogates don't start taking on McMahon more forcefully.

Seriously, a future senator? McMahon kicking a staff member on air during an appearance on her wrestling show.

If Blumenthal can be Swift-boated, it seems McMahon could be Titanic-ed with her crotch-kicking, sex-simulating and exploitative TV antics designed to draw youth into the "sport" of entertainment wrestling (see above), her ostentatious displays of wealth during this period of economic hardship (for example, the family's 47-foot yacht the "Sexy Bitch" which is docked in Boca) and accusations of her neglect of the health and well-being of her wrestler employees during her much-touted tenure as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. McMahon also boosts of having created 500 jobs in Connecticut during her tenure as head of the company -- a mere fraction, however, of the jobs created or saved by all of Blumenthal's efforts for the state over the years.

Now all of that is something we need to see two SUV moms shaking their heads and grimacing about while they tool around the neighborhood.

One Republican stands apart in the Kagan nomination vote

2010-07-30T10:19:00.003-04:00

Lindsey Graham deserves kudos for putting principle before politics.

THE WASHINGTON POST'S Dana Milbank provided an excellent account of the Senate Judiciary Committee's July 20 vote to recommend confirmation of Elena Kagan as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Given the fairly banal hearings, the vote was foreseen as a predictable event, a right-up-the-party-seam roll call with Democrats endorsing and Republicans opposing. However, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina decided to make sure the vote was anything but business as usual.

Senator Graham -- who first gained prominence as a member of the House of Representatives and one of the prosecutors in the impeachment trial of President Clinton -- has increasingly positioned himself as a thoughtful, though still at heart conservative, senator, in an age when decorum has been fast breaking down and the faultline between the two parties has rarely been more prominent. He is not, as some pundits have claimed, a maverick in the mould of his friend John McCain. Quite the contrary, Graham is not the impulsive, authority-bucking rebel that McCain once cast himself as, but rather has begun to serve as a voice of reason and conscience in an increasingly divided, partisan, and hamstrung Senate.

So when he cast the only Republican vote in favor of Elena Kagan in the July 20th vote, both parties took notice. "I think there's good reason for a conservative to vote yes, and that's provided in the Constitution," he lectured the Committee, causing more than a few slumbering journalists to stir. "The Senate should have a strong reason for the denial of confirmation -- to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from family connection, from personal attachment, and from a view of popularity." Kagan had passed these tests, Graham went on.

"No one spent more time trying to beat President Obama, except maybe Senator McCain," Graham continued, pointing out that he even voted absentee in his own re-election race to remain on the campaign trail. "President Obama won, and the Constitution in my view puts a requirement on me as a senator to not replace my judgment for his...It would not have been someone I would have chosen, but the person who did choose, President Obama, I think chose wisely."

Rare words coming from a politician from the other side of the aisle these days. Democrats, who tied several of President Bush's appointees up in knots during the last administration, took note as well, with Senator Durbin of Illinois admitting that he was reflecting now on some of his votes in the past and that "perhaps his statement suggested there was a better course for many of us to consider in the future."

Ironically, one of the failed Bush appointees to the federal appellate bench, Miguel Estrada, is a close friend of Elena Kagan's. Democrats prevented a hearing on his nomination and it eventually had to be withdrawn. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can be singled out for blame -- the partisanship that has characterized these appointment battles has been building at least since the Bork hearings, but both sides' cooperation will be required to ratchet things back down again.

The Rubber Room -- New York City v the teachers union

2010-07-30T04:33:00.004-04:00

Teachers deserve protections, but so do students and taxpayers.

Teacher purgatory: a rubber room where suspect teachers are kept for years while their cases are under review.

ABOUT A YEAR AGO, The New Yorker's Steven Brill published a fascinating piece on the battle between New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), led by Randy Weingarten. Over the course of the research, Brill came across the fascinating story of what the New York school system does with its misfit toys. Over 600 burned out, tenured teachers, accused of a wide range of offenses including misconduct, molestation, etc. basically idle away their days in a "rubber room" -- one of six Temporary Assignment Centers interspersed throughout the city.

Cases cannot be resolved until review by an arbitrator, and the process can take two to five years. Some have been clocking into the rubber room at 815 AM every morning and clocking out again at 315 PM -- and collecting their full paycheck -- for in some cases years. They fight over who gets the comfiest recliner, what shows to watch on the television, and chastise New York Mayor Bloomberg for his education reform efforts.

Brill's description of the facility speaks volumes. "In a windowless room in a shabby building...in Manhattan...there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others are standing around chatting. Two are fighting over a folding chair."

The fact that the state of New York is spending millions of dollars each year maintaining teachers in a holding pattern while arbitration in their cases becomes more and more protracted is an appalling example of waste. Brill's account of the power of the UFT to constipate the system to benefit what are often incredibly egregious cases of teacher incompetence or abuse -- passed out teachers in classrooms, for example, or sheer incompetence -- highlights the need for a recalibration of our priorities. Teachers have the right to protections, but so do students, and so does the taxpayer who is underwriting these expenses. Brill shines a spotlight into a fascinating, dark crevice of New York's hamstrung education system.

The Case of Phoebe Prince

2010-07-30T03:34:00.010-04:00

Slate digs deeper into a case of bullying that resulted in the suicide of a Massachusetts teenager -- earning kudos and jeers in the process.

South Hadley High School, focus of the latest debate on bullying.

EMILY BAZELON, known for her occasionally shrill, usually lucid, and generally entertaining ruminations on Slate's popular podcast the Political Gabfest, has been working on a fascinating series of articles on the suicide of a high school student in South Hadley, Massachusetts earlier this year. What really happened to Phoebe Prince? The untold story of her suicide and the role of the kids who have been criminally charged for it tells the story of a troubled teenager, a school (and parent) culture unwilling or unable to combat bullying, America's broken system of mega-high schools, and an ambitious and overreaching prosecutor's office, among many other things. The series is fascinating and well worth the read.

The student, Phoebe Prince, had recently moved to the States from Ireland, and hanged herself after allegedly being bullied at South Hadley High School in the bucolic Berkshire foothills of western Massachusetts. In a pretty unprecedented move, five of her fellow students have been charged with bullying -- which might not sound like a big deal, but actually is now a serious criminal charge in Massachusetts with potential prison time. One of those five, along with another student, have also been charged with statutory rape.

Much has been written about this case, particularly in the state's largest paper, the Boston Globe, mostly emotional coverage of the tragedy covering the charges against the six students but not looking very deeply into the case. For all the hand-wringing, there has been very little analysis of what actually happened. Mostly, the coverage has been a knee-jerk reaction to the tragedy, rather than a real in-depth look at what was going on in that high school.

Bazelon has been working this story for months. In the process, she has faced enormous, and frankly unjustified, criticism that in researching this piece she was somehow punishing the victim. We can't solve the problems in our schools if we don't take the time to tease apart cases like this and find out what exactly happened. Bazelon and Slate should be commended.

Afghan WikiLeaks are no Pentagon Papers

2010-07-30T02:51:00.006-04:00

The "revelations" this week are nothing new, and add nothing to our discussion of Afghan policy.

IT IS HIGHLY ENTERTAINING when the two biggest papers in the country run contradictory headlines about the same story. On the front page of the July 27 edition, The New York Times ran its piece on the leak of thousands of pages of classified U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan, Document Leak May Hurt Efforts to Build War Support. The New York Times called the document leak a "detailed account of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations portrayed." Of course, The New York Times would describe it as such. It was one of three media organizations, along with The Guardian of Britain and the German weekly Der Spiegel who WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hand-picked to run the story.

The less fortunate Washington Post, to the contrary, ran two stories downplaying the leaks -- WikiLeaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war and Is WikiLeaks the Penatagon Papers, Part 2? Parallels, and differences, exist. The Post of course had its own slant -- it wasn't one of the three WikiLeaks chosen ones.

The best analysis of this ridiculous story -- spotlighting the worst of what has become of print journalism today -- was in the non-print Slate, which often is a voice of reason in an increasingly shrill, commercialized, and partisan media climate. It couldn't have stated it more clearly. Not the Pentagon Papers. It rightly identifies this as a tempest in a teapot, a hyped-up mid-summer PR stunt that is trying to convert a stack of dated, unorganized, and in some cases, hopelessly over-classified, reports, some over six years old, into a far more revelatory treasure trove than it actually was. And The New York Times of course had every interest in making it that way. Who reads the paper at the beach?

Although, as usual, the White House might have handled it a bit better (attacking Julian Assange directly is probably not the most useful reaction), the point they have made is fundamentally accurate: these documents tell us nothing new. First, anyone with access to a military SIPR or other government classified internet access could have gotten their hands on these reports, most of which appear to be anodyne snapshots -- storyboards, in military parlance -- of incidents that occurred. Other documents in the "treasure trove" -- as WikiLeaks self-promotedly called it -- unmask that the Pakistan ISI has been helping the Taliban and that the Afghan government has links to opium warlords. And we didn't know that already?

This does nothing to further the debate on our Afghanistan policy as we reach the one-year point after which President Obama's surge is supposed to start withdrawing. It doesn't harm things either. Basically, this pile of anecdotal reports from 2004 through early 2009 -- about as different from the organized, 7,000-page three-volume secret history of the Vietnam conflict that was the Pentagon Papers -- reveals that when President Obama took over the leadership of the country our Afghanistan policy was at sea because we had taken our eye off that ball to focus on Iraq. It confirms that by 2009 a new look at Afghanistan was needed, and that is exactly what has happened.

This was a PR stunt, pure and simple, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of the way the U.S. military works will recognize there is nothing new here. Julian Assange is no Daniel Ellsberg, and The New York Times should know better. We need to continue to have a real debate about Afghanistan, but we don't need this useless chaff gumming up that discussion.

The Tea Party's Dirty Underbelly

2010-03-23T03:54:00.003-04:00

The movement may not be inherently racist, but it is riding a dangerous tide by trying to capitalize on all strands -- including the most extreme -- of anti-establishment sentiment.

Disgrace: Racism intermingled with anti-tax and anti-health care protests at a Tea Party rally in Washington in September 2009. (Credit: www.newscorpse.com)

BY MANY ACCOUNTS, the Tea Party rally at the Capitol building on March 20 had all the hallmarks of their recent activities -- crowds of seemingly "average" concerned Americans from all different corners of the country, intermingling with what could charitably be called fringe activists of multiple bents. Some were racist (witness those that lobbed the "n-word" at several black congressmen passing by); others were homophobes (who shouted "fag" when Barney Frank appeared).

Jesse Jackson observing Tea Party protesters at the Capitol on March 21.

This is the incongruity -- and ultimately, the potential danger -- of the Tea Party movement. In a piece entitled "The Movement" in the February 1 New Yorker, writer Ben McGrath explains the perils if liberals underestimate, and ultimately dismiss as off-the-wall, the entire movement.

However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate the genuine, grassroots frustration of the average Tea Partier with the radical and often bilously discriminatory far right. While many Tea Party activists express concern over the use of racist epithets at their rallies, others are all too prepared to tolerate them. The incorporation of so many varying strands into one movement -- it is at once anti-health care, anti-tax, small-government, anti-corporate, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti et. al -- that it is hard to discern a coherent mission.

The real peril is that the voicing of legitimate political and economic grievances, for which there must always remain room in America, could end up providing the cloak of legitimacy to some very unsavory views. It is becoming too easy to throw "Stalin" and "Hitler" at President Obama, as it has become frighteningly tolerant at these rallies for perfectly acceptable protest posters to intermingle with what are in essence crudely racist slurs on the President's African-American heritage.

The Tea Party is not an actual party steered by one body and therefore able to take any form of centralized policy decision. But the participants have a choice: do they support a clean, very American and very acceptable vehicle for protesting according to their constitutional rights, or rather are they prepared to provide legitimacy to the most radical, racist, extremist and un-American of messages? In a movement as amorphous as this, it is ultimately up to the individual to decide who he or she is prepared to stand beside.

Bibi throws Biden under the bus

2010-03-14T15:29:00.011-04:00

The Israeli announcement of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem, made during the Vice President's visit to announce the re-start of peace talks, prompted more of a reaction than Netanyahu may have bargained on.

Ease up on the booze: Biden and Bibi during the Vice President's visit to Israel. (Credit: AP)

THE MARCH 14TH New York Times op-ed page featured "Driving Drunk in Jerusalem," Tom Friedman's castigation of, and warning to, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, after the Israeli government basically tossed Vice President Biden (a stalwart Israel supporter throughout his Senate career) under the bus during his visit to that country last week. In what has to be about the biggest humiliation to the United States by Israel in quite some time, the Israeli Interior Minister announced another expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem on the second day of Biden's trip there -- a visit that was meant, in part, to restart the stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

According to Friedman (who admittedly enjoys writing woulda-coulda-shoulda pieces on American foreign policy), Biden missed a golden opportunity -- he should have "snapped his notebook shut, gotten right back on Air Force Two, flown home, and left the following scribbled note behind: 'Message from America to the Israeli government: Friends don't let friends drive drunk. And right now, you're driving drunk.'"

Biden did not walk out, though he was 90 minutes late to a dinner with the prime minister as he and his traveling party fumed and deliberated over the appropriate reaction. ("Condemned" was the word he opted for in describing the U.S. view of the move.) In a 45-minute phone call, Secretary of State Clinton used similarly blunt language with the Prime Minister, calling Israel's behavior "insulting." The Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. was also summoned to the State Department, where the Deputy Secretary delivered a similarly strong message.

Netanyahu was compelled to issue an apology and announce the launch of an investigation -- not into the actual settlements (which the U.S. opposes) but the timing of their announcement. Meanwhile, the Israeli press is abuzz over the controversy, claiming relations between the two countries have reached their nadir.

An Iraqi success at the polls

2010-03-13T01:06:00.006-05:00

in spite of coverage to the contrary...

A elderly Iraqi sporting a purple finger that indicates he voted. (Courtesy: AFP/Daily Mail)

ON MARCH 7, IRAQIS came out in droves to vote for a new parliament that will hold office for the next five years. This is good news for Iraq, and good news for the Obama administration. Despite the muddled reporting -- both media and military -- in the wake of the election, the fact is Iraq conducted a relatively peaceful vote in which all three dominant groupings -- Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurd -- took part.

A relatively good, clean election

Turnout was strong by recent Iraqi standards, at over 60 percent. What is more significant is the consistency of the turnout country-wide -- it was at least 50 percent in every one of Iraq's 18 provinces, with a high of 80 percent in the tiny far-north, Kurdish-majority province of Dohuk and a low of 50 percent in Shi'a-dominated Maysan province just north of Basra. In Anbar province, where a boycott in Janary 2005 drove turnout down to around 2 percent, an estimated 62 percent of the population came out. It was the strongest sign yet of the growing confidence of Iraqis in the ability to affect change through the ballot box.

Just days before the election, Western media was predicting low turnout and a debacle at the polls. The Economist, normally a respected source of reporting for this blog, demonstrated once again its myopia on Iraq when it claimed -- much to the surprise of those who have actually toured the country -- that "few candidates have the courage to go out and bid for [the public's] votes," "expectations of ballot-stuffing are widespread", and that turnout would likely fail to reach 50 percent. But a very vibrant campaign, waged in traditional (posters, rallies) and more modern (text message, Facebook) manners, was taking place country-wide for the 30 days preceding the election, and the election mechanics functioned well. Perhaps by setting expectations so low, the relatively decent showing Sunday looked even better by comparison.

The system worked. The polling organization in place in Iraq produced a credibly organized and efficiently run electoral exercise. The Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), with assistance from the United Nations and the USAID-supported grantee IFES, ran an efficient operation. Technical hiccups, when they came up, tended to stem from an overzealousness to combat, rather than tolerate, bias or partisanship. Opportunities for fraud in the voting and tallying process were limited by the safeguards built into the process.

The debate about election day violence

The main issue that marred reviews of the election was the unseemly debate between the U.S. military and the press regarding election-day violence. The U.S. military went into spin overdrive on the evening the polls closed, with General Odierno basically debunking every significant allegation of violence.

It is true that violence, though it occurred, was not all-pervasive, and while it may have had the anecdotal effect of scaring away voters in line at certain, specific polling stations, if the insurgents' goal was to impugn the credibility of the election by frightening people away en masse, it failed. Incidents in Baghdad in particular garnered a lot of press and attention, since the majority of the 40 deaths from violence on election day occurred in that province. Nevertheless, turnout in Baghdad topped 50 percent. (Estimates place it at between 53 and 54 percent). But this extreme dismissiveness was insulting, both to those who lost loved ones in the attacks, and to those who braved the noise and violence to remain in line and cast their votes despite their fears.

So determined was it to demonstrate "success" in Iraq, the U.S. military decided to downplay in the extreme all security events on election day. The commanding general insisted in the press that "no mortars were fired" on election day, despite the fact that his own brigade commanders were contradicting this on the ground. He also dismissed reports of building explosions in Baghdad, telling journalists they were getting their information from "sources that don't necessarily give out accurate information."

Why did the U.S. military decided to set so high a bar on success? The fact that 40 people died is tragic, but by Iraqi standards, not as high as was expected. Even acknowledging the incidents on election day, the event could have been called a success. The fact was, peace was maintained, and it was maintained mainly because of the effective response of the Iraqi, not U.S., security forces. But downplaying the real incidents, and then accusing those reporting these incidents of irresponsible journalism, only succeeded in snatching a defeat from the jaws of a relative victory.

Challenges remain....

It would be wrong to claim that just because Iraq held a relatively successful electoral event all is well. The biggest immediate election-related challenge remains political interference, particularly the barring of candidates accused of "Ba'athist ties" from running. The commission that decided which candidates to bar is run by Adnan Chalabi, himself a candidate. Chalabi, who once enjoyed the benefaction of the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, is now widely believed to be in the pocket of Iran. The commission, long defunct but suddenly resurrected, is itself of questionable legitimacy, a legacy of the now much-maligned "de-Ba'athification" decision by former U.S. occupation overseer L. Paul Bremer.

Chalabi's efforts to use his position to bar opponents with alleged ties to the Saddam era drips of political opportunism, and appears designed to incapacitate the main opposition (and non-sectarian) alliance, Iraqiyya. Although dodging a Sunni boycott in the March 7 election, Iraq could still face electoral questions if a new round of candidate bans announced post-election, affecting replacement candidates, goes into effect.

One step forward...

No one ever doubted that the creation of a new government would be a challenge. Many predict the process could take months. But in Iraq, it is important to measure progress in steps, not miles. The electoral exercise in early March was one successful step forward in what remains a long walk towards stability.

Ending the filibuster?

2010-01-11T14:51:00.007-05:00

The supermajorities required under this parliamentary rule may, in fact, be unconstitutional.

Mr. Smith goes to Washington: Jimmy Stewart read his own filibuster in the good ole days.

THE THREAT OF A FILIBUSTER hangs like the sword of Damocles over the Obama administration's current legislative package, threatening health care reform and a whole host of other nascent laws. One reason the president has been in such a rush to pass legislation in his first two years is because he knew he might never again have the 60 votes necessary in the Senate to override this rule, which has mutated into the requirement for a supermajority in order to keep the legislative process moving through the upper house of Congress.

In The New York Times, attorney Thomas Geoghegan takes direct aim at the filibuster, claiming that because of it, "the Senate, as it now operates, really has become unconstitutional." As he effectively argues in his piece, the Founding Fathers actually stipulated the specific circumstances when supermajorities were to be required -- in the enactment of treaties, for example, which require two-thirds of the Senate to ratify. The filibuster has become a de facto supermajority all its own -- suddenly, rather than requiring a simple majority vote, 60 votes are required to guarantee enactment of legislation.

The Senate already is a weighted-vote body, in the sense that regardless of the population, each state gets two votes. There is no filibuster provision in the Constitution. Rather, this is a rule that has morphed over time to provide for a way to end debate. Hardly sacrosanct, one could actually argue it is the ultimate politization of the Senate, completely contrary to that envisioned by the drafters of the Constitution. And the situation seems to only become worse over time.

We already have a system of checks and balances; the filibuster, rather than an additional democratic check, has become the means to gridlock. The Supreme Court could well visit this issue at some point in the future, but why wait? Regardless of the benefiting party, if it is not in the Constitution, and it is only hamstringing democracy, then is deserves to be discarded.

Why direct democracy doesn't work

2010-01-09T22:45:00.006-05:00

Not in Switzerland....

ON THE FACE OF IT, putting controversial issues directly into the hands of the electorate appears to be the fairest way of taking the pulse of the voting masses and determining whether or not to pass certain laws. On the face of it. There are plenty of good reasons, however, why referenda actually undermine, rather than promote, good governance and accountability.

Some countries have traditions of throwing issues before the voters frequently -- Switzerland is the probably the best example. The referendum is such a fundamental part of Switzerland's "direct democracy" model it is hard to imagine eliminating it. Yet as even small countries like Switzerland become more ethnically diverse, questions arise about whether it is permissible to allow a majority to take decisions that affect a minority. The recent decision of the Swiss electorate to ban minaret construction is a case in point. (Critics have likened this to the ban on conspicuously religious synagogue buildings in Europe in the 1930s.)

A more troubling example comes from another small, European (but non-EU) country: Iceland. Last week, that country's president, Olafur Grimmson, vetoed a law that had been passed which would have granted $5.4 billion to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in compensation for the stunning collapse of several of Iceland's largest banks in late 2008. The compensation scheme, although unpopular with the Icelandic electorate, was seen as a prerequisite to the start of talks for Iceland to enter the EU, which is viewed as about the only way to rescue the country from total economic implosion. Now, the issue must go to a referendum; if the people decide, as expected, to reject the settlement, the likelihood of EU membership -- and salvation from desperate financial straits -- seems unlikely.

California demonstrates the perils of passing along difficult decisions to a divided electorate. The budget of the eighth-largest economic entity in the world (larger than Canada or Spain) is hamstrung, largely because of a 1978 referendum capping property taxes and requiring a super- majority to pass tax increases. In addition, the rights of minorities (to marry, in the case of gays; to get basic services, in the case of immigrants) have been removed by narrow majority votes. In short, the referendum has become a special interest of its own, replete with lobbyists and money and the corruption those can bring. Leaders elected to take hard decisions with long-term consequences have been side-lined by short-term interest groups and majorities are ruling on the rights granted to minorities -- concerns voiced by James Madison in the Federalist papers at our nation's founding.

Certainly, there is room for direct democracy in America (and elsewhere), but as The Economist quite rightly pointed out this week, it is no replacement for responsible governance. Those who advocate more direct democracy, so-called "power to the people", could be simply exporting California's chaos to the rest of the nation.

The Ten Greatest Mistakes and Missed Opportunities of the Noughties

2009-12-28T10:57:00.007-05:00

So close, yet so far: if this had only lasted, the decade may have turned out very differently.

(Source: www.wikimedia.com.)

AS THE FIRST DECADE of the 21st century comes to a close, everyone is drawing up their best and worst lists for the "noughties" (in British, or the '00's, or 2000-09, in American parlance). Here is our take of the ten greatest mistakes, and missed opportunities, of the past decade.

1. The collapse of the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks, August 2000. So many of the recent reviews of the past decade tend to focus on events of the past couple of years, but it is important to note that the decade started off pretty badly. In our opinion, the greatest failure, the greatest missed opportunity, resulting in the worst consequences for the world overall, was the failure of President Clinton's Camp David peace talks between the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the summer of 2000. The failed talks were the collective responsibility of Arafat (who had enormous difficulty shifting from liberation guerrilla activist to pseudo-head of state); Barak (whose impetuousness, erratic nature and quest for quick results pushed the peace process too far too fast); and Clinton (who simply didn't see to it that the staff work for the summit was teed up sufficiently ahead of time). In any event, the failure of these talks precipitated the second intifada and another round of bloodletting in Israel and Palestine that would have repercussions for the rest of the decade, and represented a significant setback in the quest for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

2. The U.S. presidential elections, November 2000. Whether or not you were rooting for Bush or Gore, the presidential election of 2000 laid bare the vulnerabilities of the American electoral system and for the first time thrust the decision for the selection of the head of one branch of federal government into the hands of the judicial branch. The aftermath was a missed opportunity for the country to enact true electoral reform.

3. The failure to heed the warnings of 9/11, Summer 2001. The 9/11 Commission reviewed ad nauseum the failures of both the Bush and Clinton administrations to take sufficient preventative actions to head off the 9/11 attacks. In addition, the failure of the FBI and CIA to cooperate led to missed opportunities to intercept the hijackers before they launched the attacks.

4. Iraq -- and its consequences on Afghanistan, 2003-? This one is obvious. There was no existential threat from Iraq. It was fabricated by senior-level Bush administration officials in their drive to remake the Middle East and oust Saddam. In the process, we may well have lost Afghanistan. In addition, by thinking we could wage a "war lite" in Afghanistan in 2001-2002, then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld failed to deploy sufficient troops to get the job done there and let Osama bin Laden slip through our fingers at Tora Bora. He failed to heed that lesson when he tried to win Iraq on the cheap 18 months later.

5. Reality TV shows, entire decade. Reality shows really took off in the '00s -- it seemed like every time you turned a channel you were inside someone's bedroom, or spying on them crying while competing to be either the biggest loser, the bachelor, the bachelorette, the traded spouse or the real housewife of Orange County (or New Jersey, or Atlanta, or....) These do nothing to stimulate us intellectually; rather, they tap into a base curiosity about the private lives of others, the latent voyeur or voyeuse in all of us. With the advent of hundreds of cable TV options and round-the-clock television programming, television producers discovered they could mine this rich vein and they have with relish. The result: a mother lode of trash over the decade -- Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Michael Jackson, Jon and Kate Plus Eight, etc., and then a treasure trove of wannabes, culminating in 2009 with the Heene family "six-year old in a runaway blimp" hoax and the White House gate-crashing Salahis.

6. Iran's nuclear weapons program, particularly 2005-present. By acting earlier, we might not have found ourselves face to face with what now appears to be a successful Iranian program to develop nuclear missile technology. And by removing the Iraqi regime in 2003, we upset the balance of power in the Persian Gulf, freeing the Iranians from concern over their former enemy Saddam and handing Iran an invitation to play a dominant and unchecked role in the Middle East. With its influence expanded to Lebanon and Hamas, as well as to reliable allies like Syria, Iran is now a greater force to be reckoned with.

7. Losing Pakistan. The Bush administration, in its facile, Manichean foreign policy, extended blind support for President Musharraf long after he had become delegitimized in the eyes of the Pakistani electorate. The U.S. has also tolerated Pakistan's refusal to focus on its contribution to the resurgence of the Taliban. In doing so, we did Pakistan no favor. By abetting Pakistan as it continued to contort India into its sole existential threat, they ignored the home-grown extremists that may prove the country's ultimate undoing. Pakistan has dug itself into a very deep hole, with us providing some of the shovels, and the prospects for extricating it from this are grim as the decade comes to a close.

8. Missing out on the next green revolution. Climate change. Climate change. Climate change. Tom Friedman has been tooting this horn for years, pretty much since 9/11. His argument, in his New York Times columns as well as his recent book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, is that the U.S. stands to miss out on the next green revolution. By continuing to foster a dependence on oil, we fuel the warming of the planet, and cede to others the lead we could be taking in the new green economy. His pessimistic assessment is that if we fail to take advantage of the opportunities this new environmental economy provides, we cannot continue to sustain our economic growth and high living standards into the 21st century.

9. The real estate bubble and economic crisis, 2007-2009 (we hope). Like many problems of the noughties, the real estate bubble that ultimately detonated into economic crisis in 2007 and 2008 finds its roots in the Clinton years. The fire, however, was greatly fueled by the blast of oxygen given it by the Bush administration as it implemented its "look, no hands" economic policy that advocated the government completely abdicating any role in taming speculators, and by the enormous deficit racked up, caused by the massive Bush tax cuts and the huge leap in spending after 9/11 (and particularly when we invaded Iraq).

10. Extraordinary renditions and torture. The legal gymnastics required to legitimize these techniques were audacious, and the debacles this policy helped to generate did lasting damage to the already tarnished U.S. image in the world. The Obama administration has taken significant steps to make amends for these policies; what is so disturbing is how strong the support for these measures continues to be, particularly from the right wing. No policy did more to bring the U.S. down from the heights of solidarity with the rest of the world following 9/11.

Mis-reacting to Northwest Flight 253

2009-12-28T08:13:00.008-05:00

The government needs to take appropriate measures to prevent a repeat of the incident -- and not just react for reacting's sake.

Flight 253 on the runway at Detroit airport. (Source: NY Daily News)

THE CHRISTMAS DAY flight of Northwest 253 was apparently the most recent target of a terrorist attack. Not some grand, sick 9/11-scale effort, but more the homemade, Richard Reid variety, an effort by what appears to be a loner extremist to detonate an amateur explosive strapped to his leg and bring the plane down on its approach to Detroit's airport.

Within minutes, it seemed, the manic 24-hour news cycle spun into action, with reporters demanding to know what our government was doing to prevent this sort of thing from happening. And the no-drama Obama administration obliged almost instantly, imposing another series of all-too-familiar "measures" to demonstrate they were "taking action" to protect the homeland.

The facts, please

A few important facts: first, the very nature of the attack -- not a bomb in luggage or an attempt to overtake the plane, but another one of these do-it-yourself thrown-together jobs -- says a lot about what can and cannot get onto a plane these days. It should have been easily detectable with either a pat-down, image-scanning device or "puffer" machine -- all of which should have been available in Amsterdam. We cannot bring the threat level to zero, but we have brought it down to a pretty low level. Whatever steps we now take have to be designed specifically to address this remaining threat.

The second important fact: in all the crazed, sensationalist reporting of the attempted attack in the U.S. media, one key point seems to have been omitted. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallah, the man who tried to blow up the flight, boarded the plane at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam -- not in the United States. TSA regulations, which govern airport security screening in the United States, have not been called into question. It is the Dutch, and perhaps broader European, authorities, who should be scrambling to explain how this man was permitted on board with a homemade bomb basically strapped to his leg. If there is any issue for the U.S. government, it is probably about how effectively it liaises with overseas airport authorities to guarantee the safety of U.S.-bound flights. But in overseas airports, TSA does not have the lead.

The one area where the U.S. really may have failed to act was in failing to revoke Abdulmutallah's visa after receiving a credible tip he might try to launch an attack. (For more on that, see below.) A legitimate point but one that should not obscure the real issues here.

Reacting for reacting's sake?

The government's reaction, perhaps better described as "mis-reaction", is concerning. No in-flight movies lest you pull up the little map showing where the plane is? Your lap must be "open" during the whole flight? (What does that mean? It sounds vaguely pornographic.) Not allowed to go to the bathroom the last hour of the flight? (OK, we are used to that -- it was in effect on every flight into Washington for years after 9/11, but still....)

While the Northwest 253 incident should serve as a wake-up call that we need to continue to take security precautions seriously, the Obama administration should not be reacting for reacting's sake. The steps need to address whatever security failure permitted this man to get on the plane in the first place. Anything else is just cheap PR. Didn't we learn any lessons from the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq (which was justified, at least initially, as a preventative war to protect Americans' security)?

The U.S. media, in their lust for higher ratings, are demanding to know what the U.S. government is doing to protect American air transportation, and the Obama administration, so far, has taken swift action to tighten security at U.S. airports in response. We cannot let the 24-hour news cycle dictate the agenda, nor should we get succor from kabuki-theater measures taken to make it appear our government is taking swift action. Let's not forget that the mistake in this case didn't apparently originate on America's shores.

But on the issue of visas...

The one area where the U.S. government did, apparently, err, was in failing to revoke Abdulmutallah's visa when his father first came to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria to express concern his son might be planning an attack. The government has said it did not have sufficient evidence to justify withdrawing the visa. In fairness to the Embassy, many third world countries have "poison-pen" cultures where people, for whatever reason, anonymously (or not so anonymously) contact embassies to impugn the reputations of visa recipients. We don't know what, exactly, the father told the Embassy. But the State Department needs to be more prepared to revoke these visas, something it isn't always prepared to do quickly or without incontrovertible evidence. It certainly isn't easy to get a visa, so why should it be so sacrosanct once issued?

Gay honor killing shines spotlight on Turkey

2009-12-02T13:22:00.003-05:00

Soul-searching in Turkey as prospects of EU membership continue to fade

Ahmet Yildiz, 1982-2008 (Source: www.pembedergi.com.)

IT TOOK 16 MONTHS for the Western press to discover the tragic murder of Ahmet Yildiz, but perhaps it is better late than never. Yildiz, a gay 26-year old Turkish man, was murdered in the summer of 2008 by his father in what has apparently become the first publicly exposed gay honor killing in Turkey.

Yildiz's father Yahya travelled over 600 miles from the family's home village in southeastern Turkey to hunt down his son and shoot him five times, killing him in cold blood as dozens of neighbors looked on. The father, whose trial in absentia began this past September, has been on the run. According to a cousin, the father warned Ahmet to return to his home village for counseling and to get married, but Ahmet refused.

Gay honor killings are not unheard of in Turkey; what is unusual is the public nature of this one, reflecting the liberal-conservative cultural cleavage that has widened in the country in recent years. A local court in Istanbul attempted to shut down the country's leading gay rights group last year, and the prosecution of this case has been highly controversial. Few witnesses would agree to testify. The outcome of the trial will say a lot about which direction Turkey is prepared to go.

Twenty years on, commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall

2009-11-09T13:34:00.008-05:00

The Berlin Wall comes down, November 9, 1989. (Credit: www.europa.eu)

TWENTY YEARS AFTER the fall of the Berlin Wall, it can be easy to forget what it once symbolized -- the possibility of cataclysmic war between East and West, a fissure separating freedom and oppression, a scar gauged through the middle of Europe. We tend to take for granted the inevitability of the Wall's demise, but the events that resulted in the opening of East Germany in November 1989 were hardly premeditated.

In Schabowski Shrugged, Slate writer Michael Mayer describes the series of misunderstandings, miscommunications and missteps on the part of several East German authorities actually resulted in the border between East and West Germany opening up on the evening of November 9. It is a story of confusion within the East German leadership, of a Communist party spokesman who failed to read all of his talking points before appearing before the press, and of the chain reaction of events that followed, culminating in the decision of a handful of East German border guards to stand down in the face of a swelling crowd who had heard they could travel freely to the West for the first time in nearly thirty years. The rest is history.

Today, the division of East and West is a memory, but the Cold War is not a conflict that should be forgotten and its end not taken for granted. History is often written by the lucky, and the world experienced a lot of luck twenty years ago today.

Another disgrace, this one closer to home

2009-11-04T14:49:00.004-05:00

In a close vote, opponents of same-sex unions succeed in knocking down Maine's marriage equality legislation.

Or...maybe not....

ONCE AGAIN, A REFERENDUM was used to knock down legislation in support of same-sex unions. This time, though, it was in the heart of New England, long at the forefront of gay rights in America. Maine's voters, by a close margin, voted to reject the legislature's same-sex marriage act on Tuesday. For gay rights advocates, it was deja vu. Just one year ago, victory celebrations in California to mark the election of President Obama were tempered by the approval of Proposition 8, which shot down that state's marriage equality legislation. And so the battle continues.

It has been a year of amazing progress on the gay marriage front -- Massachusetts and Connecticut were joined by Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire in legalizing same-sex unions. Maine's legislature also agreed, although the law in that state requires a referendum if enough people demand it. Referenda are a classic way of taking responsibility for legislating away from elected representatives and throwing red-meat issues to the populist hordes; basically, the group with the strongest emotions on a given issue will come out and can shoot down anything. The majority is often ambivalent unless directly impacted, regardless of whether or not they actually agree with the pack. There's a reason why many countries see the referendum as a threat to democracy rather than an example of it.

For gay marriage advocates, it was a day to regroup and assess. It was a blow, particularly since it happened in the libertarian heartland of New England. Certainly, progress on marriage equality has been slow, but it does continue. As always, though, it is a few steps forward, then one back.

Disgrace

2009-11-02T12:19:00.004-05:00

The Obama administration reverses itself on two key policies -- and leaves the Muslim world wondering what it really stands for.

You win! (Credit: Reuters)

IT HAS BEEN, QUITE SIMPLY a disgraceful week for American foreign policy. Two major decisions, in particular, demonstrate a lack of resolve that is unfortunately becoming all too familiar in this administration. On both Israel and Afghanistan, the United States has beat a hasty retreat from previously staked out positions, disingenuously attempting to characterize these climb downs as anything other than spineless collapses of principle.

The first capitulation came when Secretary of State Clinton praised Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Saturday for making an "unprecedented" offer to stop construction of most -- but not all -- settlements -- and then called on the Palestinians drop their demands and resume peace talks. This is a reversal from the president's earlier call for Israel to cease all settlement construction as a critical step towards peace. It also comes on the heels of another Middle East policy debacle, when the U.S. joined Israel in October to pressure the Palestinian government of President Mahmoud Abbas to drop its endorsement of the Goldstone Report, which strongly condemned Israel (and Hamas) for human rights violations during the fighting in Gaza at the beginning of the year.

President Abbas gave in to the American pressure and withdrew his endorsement of the report, only to reverse himself in the face of Palestinian outrage. In the process, the moderate Fatah leader's poll numbers, which had been steadily climbing for months, collapsed. It was almost as if the U.S. (or at least Israel) wanted Hamas to gain some ground in the run-up to possible Palestinian elections in early 2010. Why else would the U.S. implement such a ham-fisted policy? Could it really be so out of touch with the Palestinian street? Or does Prime Minister Netanyahu see a benefit in a weakened and divided Palestine, riven between Gaza and the West Bank? Meanwhile, a newly invigorated Israeli government continues to engage in settlement construction, including the expansion of settlements in the Jordan Valley designed to surround Palestinian territory and disconnect it geographically from Jordan and the rest of the Middle East. Brilliant.

The second reason for dismay is the United States's endorsement of Hamid Karzai's re-election after Karzai successfully drove his opponent in the now cancelled second round Afghan presidential vote, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, out of the race by refusing to take steps to combat the rampant fraud that plagued the first round. Rather than pressurize Karzai into taking steps to clean up the electoral process -- starting with the dismissal of the partisan chief election commissioner -- the U.S. complimented Abdullah on his decision to step aside and promptly congratulated Karzai on a clean win.

"We...look forward to working with him, his new administration, the Afghan people and our partners in the international community to support Afghanistan's progress towards institutional reforms, security and prosperity," read the U.S. Embassy statement. No bother that a major reason the country is lurching towards anarchy is the rampant corruption propagated by Karzai and his family; nor does it seem to matter that the basic prerequisite of any successful counter-insurgent strategy, a credible, legitimate government, is utterly lacking in Afghanistan today. (Karzai's brother just last week was exposed as a suspected drug trafficker on the CIA payroll -- something suspected, but not confirmed, for years now.) Afghanistan's democratic farce -- and the endorsement of it given by the U.S. -- is a disgrace through and through.

A matter of time: the Russian elite's penchant for expensive wrist ware

2009-10-28T00:02:00.002-04:00

This Blancpain only cost $10,000.... (Credit: The Guardian)

PUBLIC RADIO INTERNATIONAL's daily news program The World broadcast a very interesting story by Moscow correspondent Alex Gallifent on October 26, "Wristwatches of the Russian Elite", about an investigation into the cost of the timepieces worn by prominent Russian politicians. The segment discussed an unusually critical investigative piece by the Russian business daily Vedomosti about the cost of wrist ware brandished by some of Russia's most prominent politicians.

According to the article, President Medvedev's $32,000 Breguet Classic Moonphase falls actually on the low end of the cost spectrum. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is partial to $10,000 Blancpains -- which he hands out as gifts, like chocolates, on visits to the countryside. Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov sports a Bovet Fleurier Minute Repeater worth approximately $300,000 -- this by the leader of one of the poorest regions of the country, where the average per capita income is somewhere in the neighborhood of $600. Interestingly, Kadyrov's most recent income declaration lists only a small apartment in the Chechen capital, a Lada, and an annual income of just under $120,000.

Governors in Russia make out extremely well in the timepiece department -- Samara regional governor Vladimir Artyakov was seen wearing a $223,000 DeWitt, and St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko, who earned a mere $58,000 in 2008, owns a $26,200 Harry Winston (which apparently accounts for about half her income).

The most expensive watch was sported by the deputy mayor of Moscow, Vladimir Resin, who was seen wearing a DeWitt La Presse Grande Complication with a value estimated at a stunning $1.03 million.

As PRI put it, quoting a prominent watchmaker's website, "a watch is not merely a method of telling the time, it is a silent statement of your values." Apparently so.

Red-state meltdown: bigotry (and stupidity) raise their ugly heads in Louisiana, South Carolina

2009-10-27T15:02:00.005-04:00

Interracial marriage refusnik: Louisiana justice of the peace Keith Bardwell.

(Credit: CNN)

WHAT IS UP WITH THE RED STATES THESE DAYS? First there's the utterly disturbing story of a Louisiana justice of the peace who refuses to marry an interracial couple. According to the (now married) couple, Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell of Tagipahoa Parish said he could not marry them, expressing concern for any children born to the couple, since "most interracial marriages don't last." Pretty appalling stuff. Nearly every senior politician in the state, including its Indian-American governor, Bobby Jindal, felt compelled to demand his ouster.

Yes, that was nearly every politician. Louisiana's Republican senator, David Vitter, was less willing to damn Bardwell's bigotry; while apparently somewhat more lenient when it comes to soliciting prostitutes, the once-again devout Roman Catholic family man hesitated to criticize Bardwell, initially ducking the question of whether he supported the justice's removal. Perhaps Vitter is concerned coming out against Bardwell too strongly could hurt him with the Bubba vote come re-election time next year?

In any event, removing a Louisiana justice of the peace is proving rather complicated. The state Supreme Court needs to undertake an investigation to consider revoking Bardwell's license, and process that could take months. In the meantime, interracial couples should perhaps think twice before trying to tie the knot in Tagipahoa parish.

Then, we have the two Orangeburg, South Carolina Republican officials forced to apologize for stereotyping Jews as "penny pinchers." In their defense, they thought they were actually giving Republican Senator Jim DeMint a compliment when they defended his fight against budgetary waste by opining in The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg that "there is a saying that Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and dollars taking care of themselves." At least they were compelled to apologize.

As Baghdad political impasse drags on, twin bombings kill 150

2009-10-26T00:04:00.011-04:00

Two bombings in Baghdad kill over 130 people. (Credit: AFP/Getty)

OCTOBER 25 WAS a bad day in Baghdad -- perhaps the worst in two years. One-hundred fifty people and counting were killed in twin car bombings in front of the Justice Ministry and Baghdad Provincial Government buildings in central Baghdad. The bombings come on the heels of -- and top in terms of casualties -- another horrific twin attack, in August, that decimated the nearby Foreign and Finance ministries.

All this is occurring in a crucible of new concerns about political instability resulting from the failure of the Iraqi parliament to agree on a legal framework to hold elections which are due by the end of January 2010. For a good overview of the issue, see the backgrounder by the Institute for the Study of War.) The main bone of contention holding up agreement is the issue of local elections in the disputed region of Kirkuk, an area Saddam worked to cleanse of its Kurdish majority in a program of "Arabization" in the 1980s and 1990s. Ancillary issues include the way parties and candidates will be elected (so-called "closed list" versus "open list") and if people will vote for representatives country-wide, or from their province (a single constituency versus province-based multi-member districts).

After the fall of Saddam, Kurds began returning; now, the Arab, Kurd, and Turkoman populations cannot agree on how to hold elections in a way that balances the competing interests. The Kurds claim justice is on their side as they seek to undo the ethnic cleansing of the Saddam period; the Arabs and Turkomans worry they will be driven out of a place many have called home for generations. This is not, however, just a pure human rights issue; underlying the whole dispute is the fact that Kirkuk sits on vast, untapped oil reserves. So vexing a dilemma has Kirkuk become resolution has been kicked down the road repeatedly since the first nation-wide post-Saddam elections in January 2005. Now, it has finally come home to roost.

According to press reports, the U.S. military is increasingly concerned that failure to pass an election law could result in postponed elections -- and delayed withdrawal of U.S. troops. A recent report in The Cable alleges that the departments of State and Defense are quarreling over the extent to which the U.S. should press for resolution of the election law dispute, with the military urging for more aggressive engagement to impose a resolution if the parties cannot overcome this impasse. This follows reports earlier this fall of a rift between U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill and the U.S. military commander in Iraq General Ray Odierno, accounts vehemently refuted by Hill.

Iraqis are expert at this political game of chicken. Posturing of this nature has preceded every election since 2005. It is not particularly pleasant to watch, and there is always the possibility the parties will miscalculate and create a real disaster, but imposition of a resolution is really not in the cards. Though firm nudging (particularly of the Kurds) may be required, the United States is simply no longer in any position to force a solution on recalcitrant parties. It would only waste credibility and compromise the position of honest broker the U.S. is seeking to transition to. As painful a process as it might be, the Iraqis have to figure this out for themselves. The ham-fisted U.S. interventions of the early years after Saddam's ouster offer numerous lessons on the unintended consequences of trying to stage-manage Iraqi politics.

NYT journalist describes captivity in lawless frontier of Pakistan

2009-10-25T14:38:00.006-04:00

Rohde being held at gunpoint by the Taliban, early 2009.

JOURNALIST DAVID ROHDE'S escape from the Taliban after over seven months of captivity is a compelling read. In a six-piece feature in this week's New York Times, the Pulitzer prize winning journalist recounts his harrowing abduction in the mountains of Afghanistan, along with his driver and interpreter, in November 2008. They were then taken to Waziristan, which Rohde describes as its own Islamic emirate within the state of Pakistan.

It is interesting timing that Rohde's story has appeared the same week Pakistan appears to be finally cracking down on the lawless radicalism that it has permitted to take over most of its western frontier with Afghanistan. Whether the government -- and military -- of Pakistan have the wherewithal to see this operation through to its conclusion is yet to be seen. The Pakistani intelligence agency and large segments of the military cannot manage to shake the paradigm of India as its greatest existential threat. In the meantime, it has permitted a cancer to grow within that has pushed the whole country to the precipice. Rohde and his fellow escapee were so afraid of the potential treachery of the military they even considered trying to get over the border into Afghanistan rather than flee to a nearby army base.

Another interesting observation made by Rohde is that the Taliban took every opportunity to exaggerate and fabricate civilian casualties by U.S. and foreign forces, and use this to inflame an already disaffected local Pakistani youth from which it drew considerable support. Rohde's ability to capture the tribalism at play, the sheer radicalism of the true Taliban believers, and the utter lack of control Pakistan exerts over large swathes of its territory, makes this series well worth the read.

Palestine: Within a garden of cynicism, a few shoots of hope

2009-09-09T05:43:00.006-04:00

Paving the way, or a road to nowhere? Palestinians repaving a road near Nablus. (Courtesy: USAID)

IT ISN'T A STAGGERING INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE to be cynical about prospects for peace in the Middle East. If past is prologue, there is little reason for optimism that an agreement can be sorted out any time soon that will provide for the independent Palestinian state that President Obama and others have now made a regular refrain in their foreign policy pronouncements. So when some signs of hope do come around, it is easy to dismiss them as inconsequential or even at odds with longer term goals.

This is the gist of the rebuttal to Tom Friedman's series of articles on Palestinian "green shoots" as laid forth in "Palestine: The Schism Deepens, by Nathan Brown, senior associate for Middle East peace with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Brown, a distinguished professor on Middle East issues at George Washington University, raises a lot of valid points about the problems facing a divided Palestinian Authority, with Fatah consolidating its control over the West Bank while Hamas is increasingly isolated in a ghettoized Gaza.

His broader point, that Prime Minister Fayyad's policies to improve the quality of life, coupled with security reform, are occurring without much-needed democratic reforms, is an argument long bandied about by democracy experts. Thomas Carothers, a leading expert on failed states and nation-building who is also with Carnegie, has long written on this broader policy dilemma, which has been around for years (think Bosnia, East Timor, Haiti....) yet rose to new heights of relevance with the Bush Administration's Drang nach Demokratie after 9/11.

It is isn't hard to pick apart Friedman's articles. They often skate blissfully atop the surface of the issue at hand and rarely does he indulge, even in his books, in detailed analysis of underlying issues. But the value he brings to the debate is in how effectively he explains them to the average pedestrian. And to be fair, there's really no way to armor-plate a 500-word op-ed piece from the legions of "experts" on the issue just waiting to pounce.

In his critique, Brown actually makes a few points which help underscore what Friedman is saying. For instance, he writes:

Fayyad's program is not new; it is only attracting a level of international diplomatic support that was generally denied earlier efforts. The earlier reform movement was sometimes supplied with funds and advice from international sources, but it was almost never given the high-level support and diplomatic muscle it needed. And that explains the efficacy of Fayyad's program in comparison with past failures.

Well, that's still a big change. Of course, we can pick through the ruins of post-Oslo efforts at peace to point fingers. But the good news here is that it sounds like the international community -- and the United States in particular -- is finally starting to get some things right, and that is a positive. If international support is what was lacking, it sounds like a valuable (and hard) lesson was finally learned.

Another, and perhaps more fundamental, quandary that Brown points to is how Fayyadism masks the absence of a longer term strategy for Palestine. Again, he is right in the sense that in the absence of an effective longer-term strategy, Fayyadlism has in essence become a substitute. However, with its emphasis on service provision and quality of life, it still demonstrates to Palestinians the role government can play in improving their lot, and in doing so it also shows that not every problem facing the Palestinians is the direct result of the Israeli occupation.

Some recent polling may be bearing this out. Though reliable polling is notorious difficult in this part of the world, there seems to be some serious traction for President Abbas and Fatah after years of decline. There are many things to attribute this to, but it still appears that the results in the West Bank are yielding some positive political gains for the present government there.

Fayyadism isn't as perfect as Friedman makes it appear, nor is it the magic bullet to solve all that ails Palestine. It demonstrates, however, that with the right degree of international support and a few qualified officials in the right positions, tangible improvements can be made which improve and give people more control over their lives, and surely that is worth something.

Hitting "Reset" in the West Bank

2009-08-31T07:20:00.013-04:00

Palestine's reset button, on the Israel-West Bank separation barrier. (Credit: www.woostercollective.com)

TOM FRIEDMAN recently visited Israel and Palestine (as President Obama now refers to it) and wrote several interesting pieces in the New York Times on what he deemed "green shoots" sprouting in the West Bank.

In "Green Shoots in Palestine", Friedman juxtaposes the grim findings in the recent UN Development Program's Arab Human Development Report with the signs of economic promise and stability emanating from Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, and other large West Bank towns.

The Arab Human Development Report is, indeed, a depressing read. In this first-ever report, over 100 Arab contributors conclude that a widespread lack of "human security" - defined by access to basic needs not just for survival, but for development -- is undermining development in the Arab world. Among the factors impacting human security in the Arab world is, first and foremost, environmental degradation, followed by unsustainable growth rates, lack of rights for women, lack of rule of law, economic mismanagement, and high unemployment, particularly among Arab youth.

Friedman remarks that in contrast to the report's glum findings, the West Bank under its technocrat prime minister, economist Salam Fayyad, seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance -- at least if you look back on where the West Bank was four or five years ago. The cornerstone of "Fayyadism", as Friendman calls it, is attaining legitimacy through provision of services and transparent administration. The U.S. government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has been a major contributor to this effort, supporting service-provision programming to several Palestinian ministries.

In the creatively named follow-on piece, "Green Shoots in Palestine II", Friedman describes the other major achievement helping stabilize the West Bank -- the professionalization of Palestinian security forces, which are gradually taking over more and more responsibility for law enforcement and security in major West Bank cities from the Israeli military.

This, again, is a U.S. project. Under the leadership of Lt. General Keith Dayton the United States has supported the training in Jordan of four 500-man battalions of the new Palestinian National Security Forces. As these freshly minted officers are deployed, Israeli forces have withdrawn to the outskirts of most major metropolitan areas; in addition, the Israeli government has also dismantled several of the dozens of checkpoints that have reduced the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank to a Swiss cheese of disconnected cantons over the past decade.

Again, the hope is that by demonstrating concrete benefits to the population, the government can appear more legitimate in the eyes of the population -- and nothing will make the Palestinian Authority appear more legitimate than improving the economy, providing much-needed services, and reducing the daily humiliations and disruptions of checkpoint searches.

Oddly, the Israeli government continues to insist publicly that the Palestinians must improve security as a prerequisite for peace. This is pure posturing, designed to rebut the Obama administration's demand for a cessation of settlement expansion. If the Israeli government truly doubted the Palestinians' increasing competence in security, there is no way they would have stepped back from the major cities. As is often the case in the Holy Land, rhetoric is no match for reality.

An end-of-summer reading list

2009-08-23T05:42:00.005-04:00

WITH THE SUMMER SLOWLY WINDING DOWN, here is a list of what we have been reading on the beach the past two months. The flavor is part Middle East history, and part U.S. foreign policy, with a biography and a couple solid fiction recommendations thrown in for good measure.

A World of Trouble, by Patrick Tyler, is one of the best books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to come out in several years, although its strengths lie more in its pre-Bush II analysis than in how things went even more completely off the rails afterwards. While there are few new revelations, Tyler does an excellent job of tracing the evolution of U.S. foreign policy in the region -- particularly towards Israel and Iran. One of the most interesting points is his overview of the missed opportunities of the Clinton years. He reminds us how thoroughly distracted President Clinton was by the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio over the course of 1998, at the very moment when his full attention was required to prevent the collapse of the peace process. A definite must-read for those interested in the Middle East. In spite of its heavy subject, it also works very well as an audio-book.

Continuing with the Middle East theme is A History of Jerusalem by Karen Armstrong. It is pretty hard to craft an objective history of Jerusalem, but Armstrong probably comes about as close as anyone. Anyone trying to understand the complexity of the current situation, and how the layers upon layers of history affect modern Jerusalem, should definitely take the time to read this marvelous book. It starts off a bit slow -- when the place was just a chunk of hardened and untillable rock settled by the ancient Jebusites -- but the pace picks up, and is well worth a bit of patience.

For domestic policy and presidential bio geeks, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, by Conrad Black, is an absolute treasure -- the best single-volume biography of FDR yet written. OK, Black is disgraced and in jail, but he still writes a mean U.S. presidential biography, particularly for a Canadian. His more recent (and equally long) tome about Richard Nixon was released in tradeback this year, but his account of FDR is particularly timely given the current economic travails and the health care debate. Weighing in at 1,134 pages plus notes, it is not light reading, but it still makes for a (relatively) fast and (extremely) compelling read.

And no summer reading list would be complete without a few fiction recommendations -- both in what I would call the "crime-lite" genre. In the Inspector Brunetti series, American writer Donna Leon captures what it is like to live in the city-museum of Venice. Her evocative look at the lives of real Venetians -- culture, cuisine, crime and corruption -- are nothing short of spectacular. Her most recent book is About Face (2009), but if you haven't read any of her works, start with the first, Death at La Fenice (1992), and work your way up. For years her editions only appeared in Europe because of a dispute with her original American publisher, but Penguin has released the entire series in the United States, leading to her "discovery" there. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli did an excellent piece on her, Donna Leon's Venice: A Tale of Two Cites, in 2007. (One word of caution: some of the American editions were renamed from their original British titles.)

Barbara Nadel does for Istanbul what Leon does for Venice. Equally gripping, and evocative of life in another classical city, Nadel's Inspector Ikmen series started in 1999 with Belshazzar's Daughter, about a murder in Istanbul's Jewish quarter. Nadel has written 11 Ikmen books, and a 12th is expected in 2010. Her grasp of the complexities of Istanbul society and culture open a door to a Turkey most tourists simply don't get to see.

One year later, lessons still to learn in Georgia

2009-08-08T15:07:00.004-04:00

Saakashvili remains defiant, and the conflict with Russia seems far from over.

Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili - unbroken, unbowed. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

EXACTLY A YEAR AGO this week, Russia and Georgia came to blows over the two breakaway Georgian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Though who actually started the fight remains a matter of intense debate, the clash sent Russian troops deep into Georgian territory -- to nearly the outskirts of Tbilisi -- and resulted in the recognition by Russia (and so far, only a couple other countries) of the two entities' independence.

Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has faced his share of challenges since. Behind closed doors, many European and American officials have blamed his reckless and bombastic behavior for triggering the crisis. Opposition politicians staged noisy and disruptive protests in the spring to agitate for his resignation, accusing him of transforming Georgia into a dictatorship. Over 100,000 Georgians are believed to have been displaced from their homes. And most significantly, Georgia is farther away than ever from regaining control over all of its territory.

In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post to mark the one-year anniversary of the confrontation, Saakashvili defended his commitment to democracy and reiterated his condemnation of Russia for, as he claims, its "long-planned invasion, aimed at toppling my government and increasing Moscow's control over our region".

On the same day in The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, two experts on Georgia called into question Saakashvili's commitment to democracy and wagged a finger at Washington for enabling his bad behavior. Mark Lenzi, Georgia country director of the International Republican Institute, and Lincoln Mitchell, an assistant professor at Columbia University and former country director for the National Democratic Institute, accused Saakashvili of backsliding on democracy, with negative results for democratic reform in the entire Caucasus and central Asia. "To regain the democratic initiative in the region and to help prevent future conflagrations, the United States must make clear to Tbilisi that - while it understands that Russia is a difficult neighbor -- Washington has higher standards for its allies and will no longer accept empty promises of democratic advancement," the two wrote.

The Obama administration so far appears to be adhering to President Bush's line. In a visit to Georgia last week, Vice President Joe Biden praised President Saakashvili's partnership with the United States, repeated America's commitment to the country's territorial integrity, and raised nary a peep about the challenges to democracy posed by Saakashvili's erratic behavior. Truly, it was a missed opportunity to give some hard but needed advice to a friend.

In battle over health care reform, truth goes on life support

2009-08-07T16:37:00.007-04:00

Monster versus mural: (above) Karen Ignagni, president of the health insurance lobby, is the face of opposition to health care reform in America. (Credit: Boston Globe); (below) Regina Holliday painting her health care mural in northwest Washington in tribute to her late husband, who lacked the coverage to diagnose his kidney cancer until it had spread to other organs. (Credit: Examiner.com)

REFORMING HEALTH CARE in the United States is a daunting challenge. The vested interests that benefit from the status quo are significant, and have ample resources at hand to launch an aggressive strike against any efforts at change. We saw these forces come out in all their glory in the 1990s during Hillary Clinton's ill-fated reform attempt, and we are seeing murmurings of it again today.

Part of the problem with reforming health care is that it represents, in many ways, an effort to extend rights to a minority. The majority of Americans -- some 80 percent or so -- have health care coverage of some sort, and while it is enormously expensive as a system, the cost isn't felt on an immediate level by the beneficiaries. The fact that America's system is incredibly expensive and wasteful doesn't impact on everyday life. Likewise, the inadequacies of today's health insurance programs are not felt until you face a serious illness. It is nearly impossible to quantify to the average American the cost to them of our present system, with its lack of preventative care and emphasis on invasive and excessive testing after symptoms are detected.

Extending health care is, in essence, asking the majority -- those with health care -- to extend this benefit to a minority. And so, if the majority is satisfied in the short term, the incentive for change, to help out the minority, is not terribly strong. This is the vein that interest groups like the America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), are seeking to mine. The miner-in-chief appears to be Karen Ignagni, the angry president of AHIP, who has made it her personal mission to prevent health care reform whatever the price.

This week, America has been shamed by the sight of town hall meetings across the country being disrupted, sometimes violently, by screaming crowds -- thugs, essentially -- egged on by the right-wing media, deployed to prevent lawmakers from explaining health care reform to their constituents. Some claim to be "non-partisan" although a close look into their backgrounds reveals party roots. Others don't even try to keep up the pretense of being merely "concerned citizens".

White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs this week likened these right-wing anti-reform legions to the "Brooks Brothers" riots in Florida, when the Republican Party and the Bush campaign deployed smartly dressed operatives to disrupt the recount of ballots in Miami-Dade County. Now the unions are sending out their own troops to fight back -- and we have the spectacle of fist-fights breaking out at normally placid summertime constituent meet-and-greets.

Meanwhile, Regina Holliday has undertaken her own form of protest. She recently started painting a mural on the side of a building in northwest Washington dedicated to her husband, who died in June of kidney cancer. When he first showing symptoms (blood in the urine, night sweats and fatigue) he had no health insurance. By the time he got medical coverage through his job as an assistant professor at American University in Washington, it was too late. The cancer had spread to other organs, and he passed away on June 17. Now, Holliday and her two fatherless children fact the prospect of loosing their own care when her husband's coverage expires at the end of August. The mural, which depicts her husband in the hospital, is her personal form of advocacy for reform.

Holliday believes that the only way for her family to get coverage is through the so-called "public option" being discussed in Congress. Under this plan, supported by the President, a government-run insurance program would be available to provide coverage for those who otherwise could not be covered. It is this option that Ignagli and other industry lobbyists have squarely in their sites. Holliday admitted in the Washington Post this week that only a small number of Americans need this option, though she believes she is one of them.

The disruptive groups breaking up town halls across the country are calling health care reform "socialism" and "communism", perhaps not realizing that our current system -- the costliest, per capita, in the world, as The Economist points out -- smacks much more of centralized planning than health systems in countries like Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, all of which manage to maintain market competition to keep prices down, while guaranteeing coverage for all citizens. (This, in comparison to the U.S., where competition is minimal, costs are staggeringly high, malpractice insurance is driving doctors out of practices, and coverage is rationed -- best care to those with the best plans.) What we already have is a mess, and the only people really benefiting are those who have learned how best to exploit the system as it stands -- the Karen Ignaglis of this world.

As for Holliday, she told the Washington Post she was willing to accept a reform package without the public-option, if that was the make-it-or-break-it issue. Even though that would probably mean she and her two young children would remain uncovered, it would be better, in her opinion, to take a step closer to reform, than to scupper the whole project. "We'll get it next time," she says.

Seven months into Obama, and still no leader for USAID

2009-08-06T14:57:00.006-04:00

Staffers at the U.S.'s principal development agency have so far been disappointed by the new administration.

THE U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (USAID) has seen rough times before. In the 1990s, the Republicans did their best to gut the development arm of the U.S. government. The Agency is still trying to recover from the personnel cuts it suffered during that period.

Workers at USAID had high expectations for the Obama administration. Many expected the new president to rescind the Bush-era decision to subsume many of its policy functions under the State Department. Some even hoped to see the Agency's administrator elevated to cabinet-level.

With the decision to nominate Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the likelihood of emancipating USAID from State reduced significantly. As First Lady, Clinton threw herself into development work and was a fan of the Agency, so the odds she would cut USAID lose were pretty low to start with.

Morale, however, has sunk to new levels as the Agency enters its seventh month without an Administrator. Most of the development experts who advised Obama during the campaign have ended up at the National Security Council, and it appears that the top job has become very tough to fill. Mrs. Clinton expressed frustration during a town hall meeting at USAID last month, stating that that the position had been "offered" but the most qualified people for the job found the clearance and vetting process "a nightmare" and pulled out of consideration.

The Cable is reporting today that the most recently favored candidate for the job, medical doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer, is now out of contention, and there are no other leading names being floated around inside the Beltway at the moment. All this comes too as Mrs. Clinton visits Kenya. The absence of a USAID director by her side, given the size of the American aid program to eastern Africa, has been conspicuous.

East Jerusalem evictions stoke U.S. ire

2009-08-03T15:43:00.017-04:00

Not a week after senior American officials depart, the Israeli government undertakes a controversial eviction in East Jerusalem.

SUNDAY WAS ANYTHING but quiet in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. According to the Christian Science Monitor, at 5AM, Israeli police stormed into two homes and evicted the families residing there. Some 54 Palestinian residents were removed from their homes, dragged into the street along with all of their belongings. The police then facilitated the takeover of the two buildings by religious settlers.

The evictions set off a firestorm of protest, with the U.S. leading the charge, along with Britain and the United Nations. For months, the U.S. and other countries had strongly urged the Israelis to resist taking this controversial action; the fact that it was done within a week of the departure of President Obama's special envoy, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Adviser, speaks volumes about the Netanyahu government's intentions. The U.S. administration was so incensed it took the unusual step of summoning the Israeli Ambassador to the State Department for a formal rebuke.

The dispute centers on the extremely thorny issue of property rights in the region, a consequence of numerous occupations and wars over the past 80 plus years. In 1948, after Israel's war of independence, East Jerusalem was controlled by the Jordanians, West Jerusalem by the Israelis. Both Israel and Jordan passed enemy property seizure laws, thus "abandoned" Jewish property in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was seized by the Jordanian government, and "abandoned" Palestinian property was seized by the Israelis. In 1956, the United Nations convinced the Jordanian government to resettle 28 displaced Palestinian families in buildings constructed on the Sheikh Jarrah property now in question. However, the Jordanian government never transferred formal title of the property to the families.

After Israel took East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, two organizations, the Sephardic Community Committee and the Knesset Yisrael Committee, began a process in court to claim ownership of the land based on an Ottoman-era deed dating back to 1887. They were basically calling for the nullification of Jordan's enemy property law, with the objective of unblocking the path for resettlement of Jewish residents in East Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah. After years of wrangling, the families' lawyer, Itzhak Toussia-Cohen, ultimately opted not to challenge the claim to the land, but instead negotiated "protected tenant" status for the families which obligated them to pay nominal rent to remain in the homes.

The Palestinian families claim Toussia-Cohen struck this agreement without their consent, and they have been appealing the decision in the courts ever since (while refusing to pay the rents). As the case came to a head this summer, the Palestinians' current lawyer challenged the authenticity of the Ottoman deed, claiming records in Istanbul prove it to be a forgery. Nevertheless, a court in July found in favor of the Sephardic group and gave the families until July 19 to vacate the premises. When they refused, they were evicted.

It would be one thing if this policy were applied consistently -- for example, if the Israeli courts would recognize Ottoman-era deeds proving Palestinian ownership of seized property in green-line Israel. That, of course, will never happen. And the Sunday evictions appear to be just the tip of the iceberg. In 2008, Nahalat Shimon International, a real estate company often described as a "settler" organization, filed a plan with the Jerusalem municipality to develop a new settlement in the middle of Sheikh Jarrah called Shimon HaTsadik (after Simeon the Just, a Jewish high priest from the Second Temple period whose tomb is in the area). The Sunday evictions took place on land that would comprise part of this settlement. If all these plans come to pass, some 500 Palestinians are at risk of being evicted and displaced. And then there is the separate issue of the Shepherd Hotel development just up the street. So the tug-of-war over East Jerusalem continues....

Among the other sources of information in patching together a history of this complicated case are the Jerusalem Post, the Middle East Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. In addition, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Disaster Assistance (OCHA) in Jerusalem recently published an extensive report on Israeli development in East Jerusalem.

The Economist reigns supreme

2009-08-02T09:17:00.009-04:00

Why the British newsweekly is thriving, while its American rivals flounder.

The infamous September 10, 1994 edition's cover raised some eyebrows in the US.

JUST WHAT MAKES The Economist so invincible as a news weekly? While the likes of Time and Newsweek struggle to reinvent themselves and U.S. News and World Report dies a slow and quiet death, The Economist continues to thrive, with ad revenue actually rising this year. A growing percentage of its subscriber base originates in the United States as well.

In the July/August edition of another august publication, The Atlantic Monthly, Michael Hirschorn dissects what lies at the heart of The Economist's continued success. Admittedly, the newspaper (as it prefers to be called) has both ardent fans (some, like this one, desperate for a fix with my double espresso first thing every Friday morning) and detractors (who just think they look so cool challenging conventional wisdom). As Hirschorn writes:

The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey. Another word for this is blogging, or at least what blogging might be after it matures -- meaning, after it transcends its current status as a free-fire zone and settles into a more comprehensive system of gathering and presenting information. As a result, although its self-marketing subtly sells a kind of sleek, mid-last-century Concorde-flying sangfroid, The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the world, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that's a very good place to be in 2009.

In "Waking from its sleep", The Economist surveys Arab world for first time in 19 years

2009-08-02T04:31:00.007-04:00

Beneath the veneer of political stagnation, a quiet revolution is brewing, writes The Economist's new Washington bureau chief, Peter David, in this special report.

(Credit: The Economist, July 25, 2009)

IN ITS JULY 25 EDITION, The Economist published its first special report on the Arab world in 19 years. As with most Economist pieces, this survey is well worth the read. Authored by Peter David, the survey consists of seven in-depth articles that look at what was changed, but mostly what has not, since the last survey which was published before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Arguing that a quiet revolution is underway in the Arab world, the magazine opines that a true transformation in the region will not be possible until the last dictatorship has been replaced. Countries like Indonesia disprove the notion that Islam and democracy are incompatible; the problem is not congenital, but imposed.

While the Bush administration has done extensive damage to the democracy movement in the region by permitting neo-cons to hijack it for their own ideological ends, there are still ways that democracy can be supported and endorsed. The consequences of continued resistance to this transformation by an unelected and increasingly dynastic elite could be dire for both the region and the world at large

Radovan Karadzic, new-age sex therapist

2009-08-02T04:15:00.007-04:00

So that's what the former Bosnian Serb leader been up to for the past 13 years on the run....

Karadzic, as Dragan Dabic, did the European new-age circuit for years until he was finally arrested and turned over the to Hague. (Credit: SRNA)

FOR ANYONE WONDERING just what indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic has been up to the past 13 years, since he disappeared from the Bosnian scene, New York Times magazine feature writer Jack Hitt has provided some answers.

In "Radovan Karadzic's New-Age Adventure", which appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on July 26, Hitt describes a bizarre transformation from blood-soaked para-statal warlord to Dragan Dabic, Belgrade's latest new-age guru, sex therapist, sometime magazine columnist and the representative of a Connecticut-based vitamin supplement company.

As if it couldn't get more unbelievable, Hitt relates that across from Karadzic-Dabic's apartment in New Belgrade lived a woman from Interpol who every morning switched on her computer to be greeted by pictures of Radovan Karadzic (circa 1996) and Osama Bin Laden. The physical transformation was so complete -- he grew a beard and gathered his flowing white mane into a front-facing ponytail -- that the woman would then leave her apartment for work, greeting Dabic with a "good morning" as she passed him.

With Karadzic now facing justice in the Hague before the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), only one major indictee remains at large, former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic. Until more progress by the Serbian government in handing him over to ICTY, the Netherlands has vowed to continue blocking Serbia's European Union accession negotiations.

Arab Sheikh, former Israeli PM opine on Middle East peace

2009-08-01T12:59:00.007-04:00

Those were the days.

RECENTLY, FORMER ISRAELI prime minister Ehud Olmert and current Bahraini crown prince Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa published back-to-back op-ed pieces in the Washington Post outlining some of their ideas for peace in the Middle East.

Olmert's piece mostly lends itself as a stale recitation of why the Obama administration's focus on freezing settlement expansion was not constructive. He claims that without an informal agreement on settlements between Israeli and the U.S. under the Bush administration, there would have been no Annapolis summit in 2007. However, even the list of things he says Israel agreed to do weren't done -- such as the removal of unauthorized outposts and cutting off subsidies that promoted settlement growth. Since neither commitment was honored, it is a bit disingenuous of the current Israeli government to make it sound like the U.S. is the one to blame here.

Shaikh Salman's piece, on the other hand, is a refreshingly candid acknowledgment of the need for the Arab community to do more to strive for peace. This is not something often heard, and it is rumored that Salman cleared his piece with the Saudi king before it was submitted, another positive signal that Israel's Arab neighbors are beginning to understand the need for them to play a more constructive role in jump-starting talks.

Stating that peace will bring both prosperity and security, Salman argues that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is not a zero-sum gain where one side wins at the expense of another.

Our biggest mistake has been to assume that you can simply switch peace on like a light bulb. The reality is that peace is a process, contingent on a good idea but also requiring a great deal of campaigning -- patiently and repeatedly targeting all relevant parties. This is where we as Arabs have not done enough to communicate directly with the people of Israel.

An Israeli might be forgiven for thinking that every Muslim voice is raised in hatred, because that is usually the only one he hears. Just as an Arab might be forgiven for thinking every Israeli wants the destruction of every Palestinian.

Essentially, we have not done a good enough job demonstrating to Israelis how our [Arab Peace] initiative can form part of a peace between equals in a troubled land holy to three faiths....

When stability pays, conflict becomes too costly. We must do more, now, to achieve peace.

Profile debunks misperceptions of Rahm Emanuel in Israel

2009-08-01T10:12:00.007-04:00

Rahm and Barack. (Credit: www.mediabistro.com)

IT IS A POPULAR STORY in Israel these days that Prime Minister Netanyahu's aides have allegedly referred to Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to President Obama, as a "self-hating Jew" and that Netanyahu holds Emanuel at least in part responsible for the hard line that Obama has taken with the new Israeli government on the settlements issue.

This feature piece from the weekly magazine of the Israeli daily Haaretz is an in-depth look at Emanuel, and seeks to debunk some of the misperceptions being thrown about in Jerusalem about him. The piece starts off with a brilliant little anecdote:

When I ask a liberal American Jew involved in politics what he thinks of the claim that Rahm Emanuel is an anti-Israeli fifth column in the Obama administration, he laughs. "So, do they really think in Israel that Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Dan Shapiro, Mara Rudman, Dennis Ross and the other good American Jews who work with Obama are a fifth column?" And then he says slowly, like someone explaining something to a person who has difficulty understanding: "How many times to you have to be told..."

"...that you love us?" I try to complete the sentence.

"No. That your policy is screwed up."

Breaching the "birthers"

2009-08-01T01:52:00.007-04:00

There is no question about where Obama was born (unless all American birth certificates are now to be questioned.) This is just a way for extremists exploiting the Internet to contaminate civil political debate in the U.S.

The official birth certificate of Barack Obama, care of the state of Hawaii.

THIS IS A VALID, REAL birth certificate -- or "certificate of live birth", as they are officially called. The very fact that, seven months into this presidency, we are having to even discuss this issue reveals a lot about how little we as a country have grown since the Clinton era. Actually, sometimes it seems that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of information we can get our hands on, and our intellectual maturity -- in a way, we're kind of like political Benjamin Buttons, gradually devolving back into wailing infants (with birth certificates).

When it was confined to the margins of the civic discourse, the false rumors that President Obama was really born in Kenya (and that his Hawaii birth certificate is not real) were virulent enough. There's the famous woman in Delaware caterwauling at a public town hall meeting to her senator about the matter while dangling her own birth certificate in a hermetically sealed Zip-lock. But for CNN to be giving credence to these rumors, even if it is through the increasingly unhinged likes of Lou Dobbs? At some point, it just becomes dangerous -- a lethal infection into the body politic, undermining the bedrock of trust in democracy and free elections that we claim to so revere.

The initial reaction of most sane Americans, of all political persuasions, is to laugh this off Colbert Report-style as another one of the Internet-fueled conspiracy theories that have pervaded our politics since the Clinton days (and which, to be fair, Bush II also fell victim to from the extreme left). But as Bill Maher points out this week in the Los Angeles Times, these rumors become ticking time-bombs; they should not be ignored or laughed off because regardless of their credibility, stories like these have legs, particularly among the public that get their news from limited, slanted, or unfiltered sources.

...Every week, the chorus of conservatives demanding to see his birth certificate grows. It's like they're the Cambridge police, Obama's in the house -- the White House -- and they need to see some ID. And there's nothing anyone can do to convince these folks. You could hand them, in person, the original birth certificate and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background...and they still wouldn't believe it.

So far, the reaction from Democrats is to laugh this off, and I understand why. If you seriously believe that President Obama is an African sleeper spy, get out of your chat room and have your house tested for lead. But we live in America, and in America, if you don't immediately kill arrant nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, it can grow and thrive and eventually take over, like crab grass or reality hows about fat people. This flap might be a deluded right-wing obsession that is a total waste of time, but so was Whitewater, and look where that ended up.

Obama already addressed these issues during the primary campaign, and thorough conspiracy-confirming and -debunking websites like Snopes.com have done extensive research on the subject and come down conclusively that he was certainly, definitely, undeniably born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father. It is a shame that we have to waste time on such issues when there are other, pressing problems facing the country (recession, health care, etc.) but unfortunately unless this is faced down once and for all, extremists will continue debasing our political system by infecting it with such drivel.

The Middle East conflict this week - a round-up of the commentaries

2009-07-30T22:58:00.012-04:00

The barrier between Israel, West Bank. (Courtesy: MSNBC News)

THE VITRIOL CONTINUED this week between Israel and the United States, as four senior Obama advisers descended on Jerusalem for consultations on Palestinian-Israeli peace process, the settlements issue, and Iran. Nevertheless, there were some interesting columns in the press worth noting, in both corners of the ring.

The press was full of commentary as well. Celestine Bohlen of the New York Times and International Herald Tribune credited the Obama administration for standing up to Israel in her Letter from Europe on July 29 entitled" Telling Israel no: Obama's bold move".

Mr. Obama picked a small but symbolic issue, a 20-unit housing project on the site of the former Shepherd Hotel [in East Jerusalem], sparking a full-blown diplomatic stand-off....Neither the U.S. nor the rest of the world has ever recognized Israel's claim to the territories -- including East Jerusalem, which is mostly Arab -- that is captured after its victory in the 1967 Middle East war. By international standards, that makes Jewish housing projects in those areas "settlements"....The most important fact about this project is that the building permit was granted on July 2, just weeks after the Obama administration first signaled that it would object to any new building in the captured territories.

Meanwhile, the editor of the left-of-center Israeli daily Haaretz has called on President Obama to address the Israel people directly, in the manner in which he has addressed the Iranians and Arabs. First in the pages of Haaretz and later in the International Herald Tribune, Aluf Benn argues that Obama's successes - in getting Netanyahu to accept for the first time a two-state solution, and in perhaps getting a partial freeze on settlements, comes at a high price in terms of everyday Israelis' confidence in the President. Some good, solid points, but he more disingenuously questions the administration for insisting on a settlement freeze since the "larger, closer-to-home settlements will remain in Israeli hands under any two-state solution."

Strangely, it is in the right-wing Jerusalem Post -- which doesn't even see fit to refer to the West Bank, but instead prefers the settler terms "Judea and Samaria," to rebut Mr. Benn. In his July 30 "Rattling the Cage" column entitled Tit for Tat, Mr. President, Derfner endorses the present Obama administration strategy. Obama, in his opinion, has to ratchet up the pressure on Israel first because "we in Israel are happy with the status quo, while the Arabs, most relevantly the Palestinians and Syrians, are not."

The peace process is built on the idea of land for peace, an we've got something pretty close to de facto peace with the regimes of the West Bank and Syria, while we haven't given either of them an inch of land....The Palestinian Authority has been cracking down on Hamas for a long while, it kept the West Bank miraculously quiet during Operation Cast Lead, it's enforcing the law in city after city -- what more do we want from it now?

Finally, in a different vein, Ari Shavit writes in Haaretz about Palestine's first "non-settler planned city" northwest of Ramallah. Rawabi, the project of a Palestinian entrepreneur, seeks to develop a secular city based on technology companies, complete with pedestrian malls, cafes, schools, and gardens. He points out that the relative peace between Israel and the West Bank over the past few years has enabled a younger generation on both sides of the barrier wall to cooperate in developing technology firms. A nascent sign, but nevertheless, an indication of hope in what is often described as a hopeless corner of the world.

Settler blues....

2009-07-25T12:14:00.007-04:00

Obama's position on illegal settlements continues to rattle the Israeli government

Shepherd Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. (Credit: AP)

ACCORDING TO The Cable, President Obama is deploying his Middle East A-Team to Israel this week to sort through a variety of issues that have caused friction between the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration over the past few months. Chief among these is the President's firm stance on illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This week, right when it looked like the two sides may have reached agreement on a formula for freezing West Bank settlements, another irritant emerged -- this time, Jewish construction in East Jerusalem.

According to the United Nations, while it can be all but impossible for Palestinians in East Jerusalem to get permission to construct new homes or add on to existing ones, Israelis face fewer obstacles. The Shepherd Hotel in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem appears a case in point. Wealthy American Irving Moscowitz, a strong supporter of Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, purchased the hotel, a former residence of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in 1985. The municipality of Jerusalem recently granted permission for Moscowitz to redevelop the site and build residences on the land. Several foreign consulates, including both the U.S. and British (who happen to neighbor the tract of land in question) have quietly raised concerns about the development of this property, viewing it as yet another obstacle to peace.

In response to this criticism, the Israeli government launched a fiery series of rebuttals this week. First, it publicly condemned the State Department for raising the Shepherd Hotel issue with Israel's new ambassador to the U.S. (Aides to Netanyahu made it sound like the Secretary had summoned the ambassador specifically to discuss this point, while in reality it came up in the context of a series of issues in a routine meeting convened primarily to discuss the presentation of the ambassador's credentials.) Netanyahu went on to state that united Jerusalem would remain Israeli, period.

Then, the Netanyahu government "leaked" a story that the Israeli Defense Forces were already strategizing how to deal with a possible U.S. military aid freeze (which the U.S. has never threatened). Aides close to the prime minister even mused that Israel could contemplate purchasing military equipment from France or Russia if relations with the U.S. continued to cool. (They must not have read the article that both France and Russia have also called for the Shepherds Hotel project to be halted.)

While the Jerusalem Post editorial page embraced Netanyahu's statements, left-leaning Haaretz questioned why the prime minister seemed so intent on picking a fight with the White House just when the settlement freeze dispute seemed to be leaving the front pages. As the editorial correctly points out, the U.S., like the rest of the world, has never recognized Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem and adjacent tracts of the occupied West Bank, and every peace agreement in the past ten plus years, most recently that offered by former Prime Minister Olmert, envisioned East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

Hitler and the Mufti (Credit: Getty)

Meanwhile, in perhaps one of his less well thought-out ideas, Foreign Ministry Avigdor Lieberman, himself a settler, has introduced an aggressive media offensive aimed at quelling criticism of the development. According to numerous press reports, Lieberman has sent to Israel's foreign missions around the world a photograph (above) of the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, meeting with Hitler. Al-Husseini, who once inhabited the Shepherd Hotel, led violent attacks against Jewish immigrants and the British colonial occupiers in the 1920s and '30s. But Lieberman may be making a serious misstep if he thinks he can connect modern-day criticism of the Shepherd Hotel development with support for Hitler....

Palin Interruptus

2009-07-20T14:43:00.007-04:00

The Alaska Governor self-emolates on live television

Palin at her resignation announcement, Wasilla, Alaska, July 3. (Credit: FOX News)

IN THE TEN MONTHS since John McCain plucked her out near-obscurity to serve as his running mate, Sarah Palin has had quite a tough go of it. In addition to the unseemly stories leaking out of the McCain campaign that she was essentially a trailer-park prima donna run amok, her popularity at home has taken a nosedive and her family have become the butt of late-night joke-fests. Still, a significant wing of the Republican Party considered her their standard-bearer, and she was expected to announce a run for higher office. So it came as rather of a shock to hear her rambling and near-incoherent resignation announcement on July 3rd, live from Wasilla.

The punditocracy had a holiday-weekend field day. Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd lobbed a fusillade of potshots at her, as did many others. And a new piece about the governor in Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum, credited by some for being the straw that broke Palin's back, became one of the hottest websites around.

The Economist laid it out a bit more measuredly. As Lexington points out in the July 11th edition, the country remains divided, in spite of President Obama's election victory last November. Although 44 percent polled recently by Pew viewed Ms Palin negatively, 45 percent had a more favorable impression of her -- a statistical tie when including margins of error. Even more revealing, she enjoyed a 73 percent approval rating among Republicans. Despite this, her credibility has taken a serious hit. Her volatile and unpredictable nature has turned off the party establishment. (Bill Kristol cover your ears.) Palin's career is probably over, but for all the liberal cries of victory, her gun-toting, westward-leaning, hunt-embracing core of support lives on and still has some muscles left to flex.

Victory as Obama extends benefits to domestic partners

2009-06-16T23:08:00.004-04:00

TODAY IN THE OVAL OFFICE, according to news reports, President Obama will extent federal benefits such as health care and relocation costs to unmarried domestic partners, including same-sex partners, of federal employees. This long hoped for, but till yet uncertain, announcement, would officially extend the same benefits at federal agencies like the State Department to gay couples.

The President is signing the executive order in part to mark Gay Pride Month, which extends through June.

Obama's truth commission indicates a non-partisan way forward

2009-04-30T17:03:00.006-04:00

Quick, before they ban it.... (Courtesy: AP)

PRESIDENT OBAMA has attracted a good deal of criticism from his own party by advocating a truth commission, rather than public show trials, for those involved in designing and implementing the previous administration's policy of abusive tactics against detainees in the "war on terror." It's not like the Republicans are rallying to his side, either; in complete contravention of modern-day post-presidential etiquette, former vice president Dick Cheney has been snarling from the sidelines that Obama will have the blood of the nation on his hands because he decided to stop waterboarding at Guantanamo.

The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and special contributor to the International Herald Tribune Garrison Keillor made complementary points in defense of President Obama's preferred manner for navigating through the shoals of this debate. In Tuesday's column A Tortuous Piece, Friedman argues that there was no good solution to the debate about how to deal with the Bush legacy of torture; trying lower-level officials would only beg the question why the "Decider in Chief" himself wasn't in the klink charged with having approved all of these policies -- because for many on the left, this really is all about getting Bush. And doing that would rip the nation apart, regardless of how satisfying it might be for some.

Keillor basically echoes many of Friedman's points but in folksier prose. In his column in the Chicago Tribune today, Retribution versus Restoration, Keillor writes: "What's needed here is not punishment, but truth."

Bush memoirs to shine light on his decision-making style -- and its fatal flaws

2009-04-26T07:09:00.010-04:00

The decider-in-chief hands over the reins. (Courtesy: Reuters)

A JOKE WAS MAKING the rounds of Washington last week when it was announced George W. Bush was going to skip the usual template for former presidents' memoirs and go for a coloring book layout instead.

Snide, but it is correct that the former president has opted not to follow the typical model. Instead he is selecting twelve of the most significant decisions of his presidency and framing the memoirs around them.

As The Economist wrote in its April 16 edition, this actually is a very appropriate method for the former "decider-in-chief" (as he liked to refer to himself as) to frame his presidency.

(Credit: Berkeley University Press)

Bush entered office marketing himself not just as an average Joe, but as an iconoclast, determined to break through the perceived bureaucratic inertia of Washington, a city that in his view (and that of many conservative Republicans) was the source of much of what ailed the country during the 1990s. The Manichean approach of Bush -- couched as "cutting through the bull" and ending the frat-house debate-club style of the Clinton White House -- sought to simplify the issues, boil them down to their essence, and take decisive action.

For a while, particularly after September 11th, the American public appreciated this approach. It took the cooking of intelligence estimates, the curtailing of internal debate, and ultimately the poorly thought-out invasion of Iraq, to put paid to this dumbed-down approach to governing the world's most powerful country.

The problem with this is that while attractive on the surface, a black-and-white view of decision-making fails to appreciate that we are living in a very complicated, and totally interlaced, world. As nice as it would be to end the debate and cut to the chase, it is not a responsible way to govern. As we have seen in the last eight years, cutting off debate too soon because it is tiresome can result in ill thought-out actions taken based on less-than-full information. "Going with your gut" doesn't have to mean following instinct at the expense of a thorough review of the options.

Americans elected Bush (all be it barely or debatably) in part because they were sick of the messiness, the "everything hanging out there" style of the Clinton years. What the country needed was more discretion, not less attention to detail. The world is complicated, but that just means that decisions need to be explained. We elect leaders to lead, not to oversimplify things for us because we're too stupid to wrap our brains around complexities.

Compare the way President Bush ended debate on an Iraq invasion with the way the current president decided to release the CIA memos on torture of enemy combatants, as outlined in the Washington Post this week. President Obama dispatched a bipartisan fact-finding squad to the CIA. He then convened both sides on the issue to hold an organized mini-debate with each side designating a person to represent their view. He then composed in their presence his decision to release the memos.

A decider, but an informed one, able to think quickly, assess the positions presented to him, and frame a position. While some dismiss Obama as over-educated, smug, or too clever by half, you have to appreciate the ability to fuse an airing of views and a decision-making system into a tight process that, did not result in an agonizing, drawn out public leak-fest (as it would have in the Clinton years) or a snap decision wired in advance by connected insiders (a la the Bush years).

It is said the new Bush presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas will also be designed around the same "twelve decisions" format. Fitting, since this is the best way to explain the former president. Hopefully, by shining a spotlight on the way he formed his decisions, the country can prevent itself from making the same mistakes again. Yes, it would be attractive if the world were like the one in George W. Bush's mind, a simple, black-and-white place where good stood on one side, and evil on the other. Unfortunately, that is not the world in which we live, and to treat it as such will only result in more bad decisions and more Iraqs.

Gay rights percolating to top of Obama's to-do list

2009-03-15T09:57:00.008-04:00

DURING THE CAMPAIGN then-candidate Obama made some fairly sweeping commitments to the gay community expressing his support for the repeal of the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and "Don't Ask - Don't Tell" military policy. Although he had probably hoped for a bit more time before making good on these campaign promises, events have played out differently. The President now faces some tough choices if he is to make good on his word.

Obama's gay supporters have already been disappointed by a handful of unintentional but nevertheless hurtful missteps during the Inauguration. The first, and biggest, was the controversial selection of Rick Warren, a mega-church pastor and perceived champion of anti-gay causes, to give the Inauguration's invocation. To compensate for the offense this did to gay backers, the Inaugural committee invited gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to give the opening prayer at an open-air inaugural concert earlier in the week. Unfortunately, this backfired when HBO failed to broadcast the prayer, only starting its broadcast of the concert afterwards. In a scramble, the committee ensured the prayer was included in subsequent broadcasts and apologized for the "oversight", but the damage was already done.

In fairness to the campaign, Rick Warren is not the most virulent of anti-gay campaigners; Melissa Ethridge and he had a very public back-and-forth in which she ultimately expressed her opinion that he was someone the gay movement needed to continue a dialogue with; and the whole Gene Robinson affair appears to have been a blunder, not a slight. The real issues are now coming front-and-center, and there is little wiggle-room for Team Obama this time.

Issue one is the whole matter of granting health care and other rights to the gay partners of Federal employees. Obama has expressed his commitment to overturning DOMA, which conservatives claim was designed expressly to ensure the denial of such benefits. Groups such as GLIFAA, the gay and lesbian association for foreign affairs personnel, have been urging Secretary of State Clinton and the administration to re-interpret DOMA more literally so as to loosen up some of the restrictions on gay foreign service officers. (As things stand now, the U.S. government will pay to send diplomats' pets overseas, but not their life partners.) Simultaneously, a Federal court in California recently decided that benefits needed to be extended to same-sex partners of court employees -- which runs completely contrary to the current policy of the Office of Personnel Management. Secretary Clinton has promised to review the policy on benefits, while President Obama has stated publicly that his appointment to run OPM -- not yet confirmed -- shares a commitment to extend benefits to same-sex partners. But a wary gay community wants action, not words.

Issue number two involves another Clinton-era legacy, "Don't Ask - Don't Tell." In early March it was revealed that the military undertook a mini-purge of gay enlistees in the final days of the Bush Administration, at a time when the army's recruitment numbers are down and its commitments expanded. The Bush Pentagon waged a low-level war against gay soldiers over the past eight years, firing among others a large number of skilled (but homosexual) Arab linguists. Many hoped President Obama would immediately suspend "Don't Ask - Don't Tell" but that has yet to happen. Secretary of Defense Gates, however, has made some conciliatory statements indicating a possible review of the policy -- but he was the same Secretary Gates who oversaw the January purge.

Many pundits have been claiming these gay battles are the last thing Obama needs right now, and cite the disastrous attempts by President Clinton to overturn the ban on gays in the military in the first months of his presidency. Some express concern that by taking a firm stand for gay rights, Obama will alienate the very Republicans he needs to pass his ambitious program of economic, health, and entitlement reform.

Nothing could be further off the mark. Clinton, elected with well shy of 50 percent of the vote, never had the approval ratings Obama does at this point in his presidency, and anyway, it was his prevaricating on the issue, rather than the issue itself, that ultimately resulted in the muddled "Don't Ask - Don't Tell" compromise. With his approval ratings hovering in the high 60 percentile, and solid majorities in both the House and the Senate, President Obama can afford to do this with plenty of room to spare. The military doesn't even seem wholeheartedly opposed to gay servicemen and -women -- after seven years fighting in the trenches of Afghanistan and Iraq with them, they are viewed as loyal colleagues, not fifth column deviants. Colin Powell has even expressed support for binning the policy.

Postponing decisive action on such a political hot potato will ensure nothing will be done for another four years. President Obama owes it to his loyal gay following to start acting on his campaign promises to extent equality to the gay community. And Secretary Clinton, for her part, can begin atoning for the sins of her husband's triangulation (remember, he signed DOMA into law after the Republican majority passed it) by ordering an immediate overhaul of the State Department's policy towards same-sex partners as GLIFAA has requested.

"Insane, childish, disastrous": Bobby Jindal crashes and burns

2009-02-28T18:09:00.008-05:00

GOP, Democrats unite in criticizing Louisiana governor's speech

"Even I can't keep a straight face through my speech."

GIVING THE RESPONSE to the State of the Union -- or any other presidential address to Congress -- sounds a lot more glamorous than it actually is. How many presidents have emerged from that particular forum? Not any come to mind....

Certainly following on the heels of a president as eloquent as Barack Obama is bound to make the job even tougher. So on Tuesday night, 37 year-old Bobby Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana, and the GOP's great anti-Obama hope, crashed and burned. He sounded like a junior insurance salesman explaining his job to a bunch of first-graders on "Take Your Dad to Work Day". Jindal was painfully not ready for prime-time.

Even the right-wing punditry panned his lackluster performance. David Brooks, a critic of President Obama's economic stimulus plan, called Jindal's arguments "tone-deaf" and added, for good measure, that Jindal's belief the reason the country rejected the GOP was because it too moderate was "insane". Fox News commentator Juan Williams called it "childish and simplistic". Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg wrote "Jindal whiffs like banker-golfers".

To make matters worse, Jindal was forced to admit he actually fabricated a story in his speech
related to Hurricane Katrina. Jindal claimed he had been in the office of Henry Lee, the long-serving sheriff of Jefferson Parish just outside of New Orleans, when Lee was arguing by phone with "some government bureaucrat" who was refusing to let Lee send rescue boats out to retrieve stranded storm victims. According to Jindal in his speech Tuesday night, Lee told the bureaucrat he was deploying the boats and they could arrest then-Congressman Jindal and Lee if they dared.

Sounds dramatic. Unfortunately for Jindal, it was made up. His spokesperson admitted later that Jindal had "heard about the story" from Lee later. Not just a minor difference since the governor's point was to place himself in the center of the action in the aftermath of Katrina.

Jindal pulled off the incredible feat of making Sarah Palin look polished and articulate. Both did far better tucked away in their state capitals, where their stars could shine brightly beyond the glare of that pesky and revealing spotlight. If these two are the best the GOP can find, the party apparently has a long road ahead of it.

Maybe Minnesota should just lose a Senate seat....

2009-02-28T07:23:00.007-05:00

If they can't just elect someone the normal way....

Coleman looks towards better days. (Credit: Theuptake.org)

MEANWHILE, AT LEAST Kentucky has two senators. Minnesota is now entering its third month as the only solo-Senator state in the country. Poor Amy Klobuchar -- she and her staff have had to handle the state's entire U.S. Senate caseload for two months now, and there appears to be no end in sight, as the legal celebrity death-match between Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken wends its tortuous way through the courts.

It's not like America isn't accustomed to the occasional close race: the 2008 Senate races in Alaska and Oregon were also squeakers, yet those were resolved rather amicably (and expeditiously); Washington state likewise has had its share of close-run gubernatorial contests. The current governor, Democrat Christine Gregoire, seems unable to win by more than 100 votes no matter what she does. (The Republican competitor in 2004 had already started measuring the curtains in the Olympia Governor's Mansion when he learned he had actually lost by a hair's breath.) In a rematch in 2008, the result was also a toss-up the day after the election, though Gregoire somehow pulled off another victory. (I won't raise the 200o presidential election, which only took six weeks to resolve.)

So why is Minnesota so different? The reason is simple: it had the misfortune of being the last race to be resolved, with the Democrats within two votes of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. If the race in Alaska or Oregon had dragged on just a bit longer, perhaps we'd be reading accounts of absentee ballot court cases in Juneau or Salem instead. It is what it is -- but at some point, one of the contenders is going to have to be the bigger person and step aside for the sake of the state.

Coleman has been on a losing streak since December; as the incumbent, he could not clear even 45 percent of the vote. He should salvage whatever modicum of respect he has left and step aside. Minnesota, for its part, must learn a lesson from this: it needs to set an example for other states by passing comprehensive electoral reform to ensure that its splintered political party system won't paralyze the state. A run-off system, like those in Georgia and Louisiana, would help guarantee this doesn't happen again.

Bunning on the ropes

2009-02-28T02:27:00.006-05:00

Republicans try to push out one of their vulnerable, but who will have the last laugh?

I've got about this much patience left. (Getty Images)

ACCORDING TO A recent Louisville Courier-Journal article, Republican U.S. Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky is threatening to resign if the party keeps trying to pressure him into stepping down in 2010. Apparently the Republicans are concerned about Bunning's chances of winning re-election. Fellow Kentucky Senator and Republican Minority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell has gone so far as to leak that a potential primary opponent to Bunning met with the National Republican Senatorial Committee recently, apparently in the hopes of quietly showing Bunning the door.

Unfortunately for the Republican party, every seat counts -- and counts now. Rather than succumb to the pressure, Bunning is threatening to resign before his term is up if the party continues to withhold support for his re-election. A Bunning resignation would be potentially calamitous for the GOP, jeopardizing its tenuous 40-seat filibuster-proof bloc since Bunning's replacement would be selected by Kentucky's Democratic governor, Steve Beshear. Antagonizing the mercurial senator may not be the best strategy for a party that is barely able to prevent the Democrats from completely disregarding them at the moment.

According to the Huffington Post, a Democratic Senate aide pointed out: "Bunning has always been a loose cannon. It's just surprising that Mitch McConnell decided to light a match so close to him."

Minnesota exposes, once again, an electoral system in need of repair

2009-01-03T02:45:00.009-05:00

Dour Norm, raunchy Al tied after recount. (Source: Minnpost.com)

ONLY WHEN A true electoral crisis comes down the pike does America wake up to the inadequacies of our electoral system. (I'm braced for all those who will start questioning my patriotism now....) Florida in 2000 provided a momentary wake up call for the country -- but after agonizing over whether our democracy was broken, and all the head-scratching about hanging chad and butterfly ballots, very little has changed. Minnesota is the latest mess to call into question the way the United States does elections.

There's a misconception that our electoral system must be preserved, like some museum relic, at all cost; in fact, there have been enormous changes over the years. Our constitution originally envisioned that only property-owning white males would have the franchise, and even then created the electoral college as a safety net to correct any disaster that tiny voting bloc could cause. Blacks weren't allowed to vote at all -- though they were counted, for representational purposes, at 3/4 that of a white. That was fixed. So was the issue of voting rights for women. The Senate was originally appointed by the states, and only became directly elected in the early 1900s.

Minnesota's Senate contest, between raunchy liberal former comedian Al Franken and the tainted Republican incumbant Norm Coleman, has become the latest blemish on our democratic system. It exposes the lack of independent electoral authorities to assist in technical oversight of the propose and the complete absence of nation-wide standards to guarantee quality. We have witnessed over the past two months the spectacle of partisan hacks from both parties nitpicking over the shoulders of those trying to recount the ballots; with a race often separated by just tens of votes, both campaigns have questioned legitimate votes and called into question the integrity of the process each in their efforts to edge ahead in the count.

Part of this has to do with consistent voting practices -- including methods of designing, counting, and recounting the ballots, as well as procedures for election day. The other part of the puzzle is the method America uses to select most of its politicians -- the divisive "first-past-the-post" system where the candidate who wins the most votes (rather than, in many systems, an absolute majority of 50% plus one) is victorious.

The entertainment and culinary fronts aside, Louisiana isn't generally an example worth emulating, at least with regard to politics. But as far as electoral systems go, the rest of the country could learn from that state's example. Louisiana is the only state in the country that requires a run-off election between the top two candidates for national and state-wide offices, if the winner does not win over 50% of the vote on Election Day. This means that for anyone to win, they must appeal to at least half of the electorate. "Running to your base" does not suffice as a strategy -- you can't just attracted the most votes and tromp to victory.

Georgia has a similar system for some state-wide offices -- Senator Saxby Chambliss was forced into a run-off that he won in early December, after failing to take over 50% on the Election. If this was the standard across the country, we would have a Senator from Minnesota by now. Either Coleman or Franken, in a face-to-face run-off between just the two of them as the top vote getters on Election Day, would almost certainly have won a clear majority, and we would not be facing the prospect we now do of a highly politicized and messy fight in the Senate with the Republicans threatening a filabuster to deny Franken taking the seat he appears to have just scraped into according to the recount.

So take a cue from Louisiana; for all its other issues, the one thing we haven't seen in recent years is a contested election with no clear winner in that state.

Leave Jon Favreau Alone!

2008-12-24T08:37:00.007-05:00

DOESN'T AL KAMEN know when to retire? The geriatric curmudgeon whose thrice-weekly, petty little Washington Post gossip column masquerades as genuine news took a broadside at the highly talented (and adorable) Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau recently. (Al Kamen, we adore Wonkette, and you, old man, are no Wonkette.)

Not one to discriminate news from, well, not news, and always one to try to score a "gotcha" on the cheap, Kamen published photos of the rather cute 27-year old massaging the pectoral (at least that's what he appears to be doing) of a life-size Hillary cut-out at a party. A friend, meanwhile, is generously feeding her a beer (squelching a thirst for ale the senator developed while traipsing around Pennsylvania throwing back Yuenglings during the campaign, no doubt).

This is not a big deal. In fact, it isn't a deal at all. Some tried to contort this into a grave offense -- even calling for Favreau's resignation as White House speechwriter before he even started thge job. Favreau was forced to "reach out" to Senator Clinton with an apology; to her credit, Clinton made light of the whole incident, expressing appreciation for Favreau's apparent interest in serving the soon-to-be Secretary of State.

This is a classic Facebook incident. The picture appeared on the social website and was taken down all within about two hours, most likely at Favreau's behest. Stupid of his friends to post it, but come on. This was not the slam at Hillary that a few of those still embittered over her primary defeat tried to make it out to be.

Public service does not mean checking your private life at the door -- if it did, what kind of people would we have in government? Disconnected, opportunistic, socially closeted, and dysfunctional, that's what. That can't be the better alternative. So leave Jon alone, let him have a life, keep feeling up cut-outs of famous politicians if that's your thing, and please, Jon's friends -- don't post pictures without running them by him first.

Bosnia Again on the Edge - 1992 Redux, or a Lot of Hot Air?

2008-12-23T16:35:00.008-05:00

Thirteen years after the end of major hostilities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country's intransigent leaders may be dragging the country back to war.

"Come on, boys, act like you mean it."

Bosnian Serb PM Dodik (sort of) shaking hands with Bosnian Presidency Member Silajdzic. (Source: Daylife.com)

IT HAS BEEN THIRTEEN years since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement brought the war in Bosnia to a close. The success at Dayton helped pave the way for Clinton's re-election the following year and helped burnish the careers of several Balkan hawks such as Dick Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright. Now, on the cusp of a new Democratic administration, the Balkans -- left on the U.S. foreign policy back burner pretty much since 9/11 -- may be coming to a boil once again.

Last week in The New York Times, reporter Dan Bilefsky painted a grim picture of the current situation on the ground in Bosnia. The central government is paralyzed by the same ethnic disputes that the Dayton Agreement had hoped to squelch. While the Bosnian Serbs are at the receiving end of most of the U.S.'s invective, the Bosnian Muslims have done themselves no favors by electing -- barely -- as their president one of the greatest Dayton rejectionists on the Muslim side, former Prime Minister, and Dayton negotiator cum anti-Dayton firebrand Haris Silajdzic.

What short memories we have. Not so long ago -- in 2002, to be exact -- the west breathed a sigh of relief when Siladjzic -- off his meds and out of therapy (unfortunately prematurely on both counts) narrowly lost election to the Bosnian Muslim seat on the three-person presidency. That time, as with his successful romp to victory in 2006, he ran on an unapologetic platform of binning Dayton and forcing a unitary state down the throats of the resistant Serbs.

Also, not so long ago, the current (and then) Prime Minister of the Serb half of the country, Milorad Dodik, was a darling of the west, a reformer whose victory marked the demise of Serb nationalist control over the government of the Serb republic in Bosnia. The High Representative in Bosnia even removed the democratically elected nationalist president of the Serb Republic from office when he refused to nominate Dodik as his prime minister. With the obstructionist president out of the way, Dodik was reappointed and he has pretty much been in power ever since.

There are many reasons why Bosnia has failed to come around after over a decade of international chaperoning and nearly $20 billion in assistance. Some have to do with the nature of Dayton -- a messy compromise that left all sides somewhat disappointed -- and certainly the international community's stewardship of Bosnia also got off to a shaky start, only strengthening three or four years into its mandate. The attention span of the U.S. eventually shifted elsewhere, first to Kosovo in the late 1990s, and then after 9/11 to Afghanistan and Iraq. By 2008, nearly all U.S. troops had withdrawn and the peacekeeping mission was an entirely European affair.

And it is also easy to forget just how far Bosnia has come. Organizations like the European Stability Initiative take issue with those who minimize the accomplishments of the past several years, such as the significant returns of displaced minorities to their former homes. The very fact that the country has held numerous peaceful elections, for the past several years under a multiethnic and independent election commission, demonstrates a civic will to move forward.

Dodik's bark is likely worse than his bite; in light of Kosovo's independence, he needs to position himself as the defender of Serb rights, and Silajdzic presents him with great material to work with. In the past, Dodik has proven himself a rational actor who can be reasoned with, if the approach is handled with a modicum of respect (sometimes difficult for the international community to remember). Silajdzic, on the other hand, has proven himself over the years both a volatile demagogue and a wily courter of western opinion, tormented by his inner demons and seeking vengeance by casting his vitriolic petrol on the smouldering ashes of war.

As the old Clinton team reconstitutes in the State Department, it would serve it well to treat Silajdzic with a degree of nostalgic respect, but more importantly figure out how to reengage Dodik and bring him back into the U.S. camp. Messy and unfair as the compromise at Dayton was, it ended the war and brought the parties together; to scrap it now risks throwing the achievements of the past ten plus years into jeopardy. With everything else happening in the world, does anyone really have the time to put out another fire in the Balkans?

The Lesson of Sir Rupert, the Gay Knight

2008-12-17T10:05:00.003-05:00

SIR RUPERT THE GAY KNIGHT IS MAKING the rounds of the blogosphere after debuting on YouTube last month. It makes for a cute tale, particularly in a world where acceptance and tolerance are unfortunately still not uniform principles.

Shoe-ing Bush Out of Office

2008-12-14T17:08:00.004-05:00

THE BUSH PRESIDENCY can't draw to an end fast enough for many. An Iraqi journalist in Baghdad threw his shoes at the President while he was holding a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki today. Bush ducked, dodging both shoes. The journalist was dragged away by security, along with two other members of the Iraqi media who declared solidarity with their shoe-wielding colleague.

Exposing the soles of your shoes to someone -- yet alone throwing your shoes -- is about the worst it gets in terms of Middle East insults. Given today's incident, one has to wonder if the Bush Administration hasn't completely hit rock bottom. Although the President has failed to produce a decent reaction to the current economic crisis, at least we know he still has some reflexes.