Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 24

Obama administration and Egypt | Michael Tomasky

Laura Rozen reports:

The Obama administration has scheduled a rare Saturday principals committee meeting to assess the rapidly-moving situation in Egypt as anti-government protests intensify in that country...

...The State Department and White House have expressed concern about violence and have repeatedly urged -- to no avail -- that Egyptian authorities not block social networking sites and the Internet, and respect the universal rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.

Meantime, senior Egyptian military leaders are currently holding annual bilateral meetings with their U.S. counterparts at the Pentagon this week about U.S.-Egyptian military cooperation.

"If the administration truly wants that message to be received by the Mubarak government, and the Egyptian people, it needs to speak with greater clarity and back its words with actions," a bipartisan Egypt working group of foreign policy scholars and former U.S. officials said in a statement Wednesday.

"We urge the administration to press the Mubarak government to lift the state of emergency that restricts freedom of assembly and to end police brutality and torture," the group, co-chaired by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Michele Dunne and the Brookings Institution's Robert Kagan, said. "The administration should also press for constitutional and administrative changes necessary for a free and competitive presidential election open to candidates without restrictions, supervised by judges and monitored by domestic and international observers."

As you can see, Dunne and Kagan are calling for fine things, but all the same things that aren't very dramatic; "press for" this and that. It underscores the fact that there's little Washington can do here, in part for the obvious reason that everyone is mindful that while Mubarak is no great friend of democracy, the likely alternative if he should go seems considerably worse. I remember that in 1979, some people were originally elated when the Shah had to take a powder.

Diplomacy cannot make things sweet and light overnight. I remember well the Lebanese Cedar Revolution of 2005 and how everyone (well, everyone on the right) was saying that it was only through the great efforts of the Bush administration was this coming to pass, and see, you weak liberals, democracy promotion worked!

The Bush administration does in fact deserve some credit for Syria's withdrawal. But now, as of last week, the March 14 coalition collapsed, without having accomplished much anyway because of the opposition's obstructing third and because that, uh, wily Jumblatt switched sides, and now Hezbollah is back in charge, as they fundamentally always are anyway, sad to say.

Obama still has moral authority around the world that Bush did not. He should use it more than he has. At the same time, we should not expect that America really has all that much power to change things.

Obama administrationUS foreign policyMichael Tomasky
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Tea party rhetoric and fiscal reality | Michael Tomasky

This is a story, I suspect, we're going to be hearing many versions of in the coming year or two, until people understand what a hoax the whole thing has been.

Nassau County New York, on Long Island, is run by a county executive, with a county legislature. In late 2009, with the fiscal situation near code-red and with taxes comparatively high there as they have long been, voters elected tea-party candidate Edward Mangano as county executive. Steve Benen writes:

Mangano would slash taxes, cut spending, and create a nice little utopia. Voters loved the sound of it.

A year later, "Eddie" had slashed taxes as promised, but struggled to limit public services that the community had grown to appreciate. This week, the consequences of Tea Party economics became clear -- Nassau County, facing a full-fledged fiscal crisis, saw its finances taken over by the state.

Benen then links to a thorough and devastating Reuters story retailing the whole saga. Mangano immediately undid a household energy tax. It cost the average household about $7.50 a month. Its absence is costing the county $45 million.

It goes on and on. The bottom line is a combination of heedless tax cuts that are requiring the slashing of services that no one in fact wants slashed, and fiscal sleight of hand that exposes the distance between feel-happy tea-party rhetoric and fiscal reality.

Mangano said he was wringing $61 million out of unions in concessions. But in real life, he didn't follow through:

At the end of April, Mangano met with labor leaders at Ruth's Chris Steak House in Garden City to inform them he would put $61 million in union concessions into his 2011 budget.

Union leaders say they remember the dinner as not very substantive, quipping that the main decision of the evening revolved around what to order as a side dish.

Carver said Mangano told him the budget item was a mere "place holder" while he pursued a possible Long Island casino project and his revamp of the county's costly property tax refund system.

"He gave me the impression that this was never going to happen," said Carver, who pointed out that the $61 million reduction would be the equivalent of an 11 percent cut in police salaries.

He didn't fail to follow through because he's a weakling. He failed because people don't want cops' salaries cut by 11%.

Wednesday, the Nassau County Interim Financial Authority said the county's $2.6 billion budget was out of balance to the tune of $176 million, necessitating NIFA's takeover of the county's finances.

I hope that things like this will make people think long and hard about these issues. If you want well-paid cops and nice parks and good schools and upgraded county roadways that can handle the traffic, you have to pay for them. I'm well aware that paying taxes isn't fun. I pay high ones in Montgomery County. But things work there, generally speaking, and life is good there, and I'm happy to pay 'em. People have to learn these things in their own time, I guess.

Tea Party movementMichael Tomasky
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Jay Carney replacing Gibbs | Michael Tomasky

Listen to Howard Fineman gush about Jay Carney, currently Joe Biden's press aide and soon to be the new Robert Gibbs:

Gibbs was one of the first hires by the original proto-campaign, and was with the presidential entourage from the start. In the early days, he played Sancho Panza to Axelrod's Don Quixote. He was best at deflecting news, rather than creating it. The Obama story was so compelling that the main goal of his campaign in 2007 and '08 was to not screw it up.

Carney has proven that he can excel at that same cautious game, but he can play it at a deeper, more confident level, given his long history in the mainstream media (he was at Time for nearly 20 years, including three as D.C. Bureau Chief). He has handled Vice President Joe Biden's account well, prevented the gaffe-prone veep from gaffery. He also managed to help Biden get some good publicity, including a laudatory New York Times Magazine story that portrayed the vice president as a powerful, behind-the-scenes player.

Carney is a card-carrying and evidently venerated member of The Village, as it's sometimes called: the true A-list of Washington media insiders who go to one another's parties and donate to one another's charities and such, and who, rather less benignly, establish what passes for conventional wisdom in Washington. Sally Quinn is probably, still, The Village's mayor, although some are surely looking into term-limits referenda.

I, you may have guessed, am not a member of The Village. And I don't want to be; I prefer standing a bit outside all of that. I used to resent this a little, I will admit to you, but I'm too old for that now, and I just want to stay home with my daughter anyway. Besides, I spent my formative years in New York, and I guess I was a member of the New York Village, although it doesn't exist there in anything like the same self-regarding way.

Anyhoo. Carney. Will he be a net plus is the question. Probably yes, if only because it seems everyone was tired of Gibbs' act. Nothing against Gibbs. It's an occupational hazard and is inevitable. The fact that Carney is liked and respected by the local media probably redounds to the president's benefit on the margins. It's not like anyone in the White House press corps will sit on a juicy story because they like Jay Carney, but they'll maybe give a little more weight to his spin, that sort of thing. As was the case, certainly, with Tony Snow, who did the job for Dubya for a time (and died far too young of cancer).

Fineman thinks the pieces are all now in place:

...by choosing [Carney] as his new press secretary, President Barack Obama has completed his swift and thorough transition from crusading outsider to shrewd insider as he prepares to deal with the wild folk of the Tea Party, Karl Rove and the Republican kneecappers, and an electorate still fearful that the world is spinning out of control.

Say this about Obama: He is adaptable, he is a survivor and he has a supreme desire to win...

...Obama came to the White House in the manner of Jimmy Carter, with whom he was, early on, mistakenly compared. But while Carter never expanded his circle beyond the "Georgians," Obama has, with stunning swiftness, retooled his administration to play hardball in the D.C. League.

Wow. Well, if you say so, Howard. It's remarkable to me how quickly the aforementioned conventional wisdom has decided that the guys who won last year's election by historic margins are probably headed for doom. Or am I over-reading things? And it's not because of the librul media. It's because, as I keep saying, the Republicans very much appear to be putting themselves in the politically untenable position of wanting to cut programs by percentages they'll never be cut by. It's also happening, I think, because most observers look at the likely GOP 2012 field and go meh.

There is a quiz this Friday! It will be posted this afternoon, and it's quite a fun one, so stay alert, Bert.

Obama administrationMichael Tomasky
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Clarence Thomas, what? | Michael Tomasky

So we have Palin and Bachmann who don't care what they say. And what about this guy, who doesn't seem to care what he does:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report his wife's income from a conservative think tank on financial disclosure forms for at least five years, the watchdog group Common Cause said Friday.

Between 2003 and 2007, Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation's IRS records. Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years, instead checking a box labeled "none" where "spousal noninvestment income" would be disclosed.

In his 2009 disclosure, Justice Thomas also reported spousal income as "none." Common Cause contends that Liberty Central paid Virginia Thomas an unknown salary that year.

Federal judges are bound by law to disclose the source of spousal income, according to Stephen Gillers, a professor at NYU School of Law. Thomas' omission — which could be interpreted as a violation of that law — could lead to some form of penalty, Gillers said.

"It wasn't a miscalculation; he simply omitted his wife's source of income for six years, which is a rather dramatic omission," Gillers said. "It could not have been an oversight."

Another professor is quoted farther down in the piece saying it's not really a crime. This lawyer, a Kos diarist, says like hell it isn't a crime:

While 5 USC app 104 makes this conduct a misdemeanor punishable for up to a year in prison, 18 USC 1001 is, on its face still applicable. Take a look at the indictment against Don Young's former aide, who is awaiting trial for a violation of 18 USC 1001 for failing to report his World Series Trip if you have doubts.

While there is no doubt an argument to be made that this conduct is just a misdemeanor, take a look at UNITED STATES v. WOODWARD, 469 U.S. 105 (1985) where a person checking the "no" box on a custom form was punished both for the false statement (18 USC 1001) violation and the charge of failing to report the currency itself -- all as a result of checking the "no" box.

Obviously, Thomas is not going to be indicted over this. But how could a man - a member of the Supreme Court! - just openly lie on such a form? Lie? Yes, rather obviously. Let's put it this way. If you or I were filling out a form, and we came to a question about our spouse's income, and we knew very well that our spouse had income, we would check the appropriate income category. And here is one of the nine leading legal people in the United States. On what conceivable honest basis could he have thought his wife, who got up every morning and went to work every day at one of Washington's most richly endowed think tanks, had no income? For six years?

I wish we had a satirist, a Balzac, chronicling this age. It is beyond believability.

US domestic policyMichael Tomasky
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News flash: the Senate acts like...the Senate | Michael Tomasky

Shocking, I know, but it looks as if the push for filibuster reform will result in...no filibuster reform. Ezra Klein:

A few moments ago, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the Senate to announce a five-point agreement on rules reform. But the five-points weren't, well, the point. The real agreement was on the process by which rules can be reformed.

"As part of this compromise," Reid said, "we've agreed that I won't force a majority vote to fundamentally change the Senate -- that is the so-called 'constitutional option' -- and he [McConnell] won't in the future." In other words, Reid and McConnell have agreed that the Senate's rules cannot -- or at least should not -- be decided by a simple majority. That was what the constitutional option was about, and that's what Reid explicitly rejected in his speech. Why? "Both McConnell and Reid feared what would happen if they were in the minority," explains a Reid aide.

Predictable, but sad. It's just a game of chicken. Reid fears, with Democrats having to defend many more seats in 2012, that the GOP might control the Senate come 2013. So he reasons what's the sense of changing rules now? Republicans control the House, so nothing we want will pass there anyway. And in two years, they might have the Senate too, so if we changed the rules now we'd just be handing them a big present.

Understandable, I suppose. But it doesn't change the fact that this is an undemocratic institution. I support a simple-majority plus four cloture hurdle, i.e., 55. That would still slow things down, as the Senate was designed to, but not to nearly the extent that 60 slows things down.

Reid and McConnell did agree to some changes. They will supposedly end secret holds, but I'll believe that when I see it: the last time senators agreed to end secret holds, they put into place something that actually increased them. They will reduce by a third (about 400) the number of presidential appointees that require Senate confirmation.

But it will remain a dysfunctional body. It won't matter as much these next two years, because no progressive legislation is going to get out of the House, obviously. As I've suspected all along, filibuster reform will have to wait until the day the Republicans have a president and 59 senators. Then, I can guarantee you they'll get five or six Democrats to vote with 'em!

US CongressMichael Tomasky
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Her again: Palin's cold war ideology | Michael Tomasky

So Palin thinks Sputnik caused the fall of the Soviet Union. Really, Sarah?

Guess who?:

"He needs to remember that, uh, what happened back then with the communist U.S.S.R. and their victory in that race to space," the Fox News contributor said Wednesday night, reacting to Obama's reference to Sputnik in his State of the Union speech. [X] called the Sputnik name drop one of the "W.T.F." moments in the speech, a play of the President's call for "winning the future."

"Yeah, they won but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union," [X] said.

Well, actually, it could be a lot of people. But yes, go with your first instinct. She whose name anagrams out to Sharia Plan, according to this anagram generator, which actually is pretty apposite if you think about it, because if she really believes that man walked with dinosaur, which she in fact basically said she does believe, then she might have some kind of strange religious plan for us if she's ever living on Pennsylvania Avenue.

For those of you who are interested, I haven't linked to this in a couple of years, but it's the Taylor Trail, in (where else?) Texas, that provides the "evidence" that humans walked with the dinosaurs. You know, it was in the newspapers. All of them.

Anyway, what happened to the idea that Randy Scheunemann was teaching her history lessons these days? The idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union happened because of the space...well, there I go, actually taking something she says seriously. Forgive me.

I really do wish that some US outlet...USA Today, let's say, would announce one day: from this day forward, we're covering Palin in the entertainment section, not the news section, because that's all she is, because she is not intelligent enough to be taken seriously as any other sort of person.

Barack ObamaSarah PalinMichael Tomasky
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Fascinating budget history (really) | Michael Tomasky

The better that we're all on the same information-rich page, I tracked down the following, which is the most useful table I've seen in some time. It lists US budget spending in the main categories from 1962 through 2015 (estimated spending for the years that haven't yet happened). To see it, go to this page from whitehouse.gov and then click on Table 8.1, Outlays by Budget Enforcement Act Category 1962-2015. You'll get an Excel spreadsheet with all the goods.

The reason to do this is to see just how daunting historically is the idea of cutting non-defense discretionary spending. This category - which is really what right-wingers are talking about when they rail against the guvmint - is clearly marked on the spreadsheet, and you will see that it has gone from $19.5 billion in 1962 to $581 billion in 2009. I went into the table and did some breakdowns and ran some numbers.

They support what we generally know. Nixon was a big domestic spender because he only really cared about foreign policy and let the Democrats run the domestic shop, more or less. Reagan slowed the rate of growth of spending and even cut it, a little, two years out of eight. Dubya: kaboomba, through the roof.

President by president, the numbers look like this. Bear in mind that I may have miscalculated by a hair insofar as I sometimes wasn't sure whether to put a transition year in the exiting or arriving president's total, so a true wonk might take issue with my calculations. But even if I was off by one year in some cases, it would not throw my overall percentages off by all that much. Here's what I got:

Johnson:
1964: $24.1 billion
1969: 35.8
Increase: 48.5%

Nixon:
1969: 35.8
1975: 70.3
Increase: 96.4%

Ford:
1975: 70.3
1977: 99.6
Increase: 41.7%

Carter:
1977: 99.6
1981: 149.9
Increase: 50.5%

Reagan:
1981: 149.9
1989: 184.8
Increase: 23.3%

Bush Sr.:
1989: 184.8
1993: 247.0
Increase: 33.7%

Clinton:
1993: 247.0
2001: 343.3
Increase: 39%

Bush Jr.:
2001: 343.3
2009: 581.0
Increase: 69.2%

Obama so far:
2009: 581.0
2011 estimate: 670.6
Increase: 15.4%

Now of course, these are just raw percentage increases, so someone who was in there eight years will likely have a higher number than someone who was in there for four. Obama's percentage is deceptively low in this regard. And of course, who ran Congress really mattered here, since Congress makes the budget.

But we can still make out certain trendlines and draw certain conclusions. Nixon, Carter and Bush Jr. were the biggest spenders. Clinton, pretty moderate for a Democrat. Reagan was indeed the most fiscally conservative of the lot.

In addition to all that, I wondered, how many years out of the 48 actual years (1962 through 2009) did non-defense discretionary spending actually decrease, in real dollars? Five times:
1969, by 3.4%
1982, by 6.6%
1987, by 1.8%
1996, by 1.7%
2007, by .6%

Add these up and these decreases averaged 2.8%. And remember, they happened only five times out of 48.

This is the context in which to think about Republican proposals to peel this category of spending back to 2008 levels. The 2008 number, this table shows, was $522.3 billion. The 2011 estimate is $670.6 billion. That's $148.3 billion, or 28.4%.

So for these GOP plans to come true, Congress, which has never cut domestic discretionary spending by more than 6.6% in any single year in the last half-century, is going to cut it nearly by five times that? Forgive me if this just does not sound plausible to me.

Obama's budget comes out Feb. 14. These numbers are all from supporting documents for last year's budget. Next month, I will look for the updated version of this table and see what the administration's new 2011 estimate is. I'm guessing it will be lower than $670.6 billion, by a few bil. But it's not going to be $150 billion lower, and neither is the end result later this year. So now you see why I think the Republicans have set themselves up in a losing argument. Even if they shave $30 billion, which would be enormous and seems unlikely, it's still not a numbers victory for them, and there's reason to think cuts that large would be highly unpopular.

US politicsMichael Tomasky
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State of the union address: not classic but effective | Michael Tomasky

Such setpieces are rarely game-changing, but Obama made the most of it by moving to the centre at the Republicans' expense

Was it a speech for the ages? No. State of the union addresses rarely are.

They're checklists, salted with rhetoric because speeches have to be. They're not written to be chiselled onto obelisks, but to serve a purpose. Barack Obama's was to put him on the side of the future and make the Republicans look stuck in the past.

The world has changed, he kept saying. We've been No 1 economically, but we all fear that could change, and it will, unless we make the investments I'm suggesting. That resonates on Main Street, because there is no Main Street in today's America that doesn't feel global tremors.

It's a theme Obama surely plans to carry through to the 2012 election campaign. So he did fine, but more importantly, he's getting lots of help from the Republicans, because while Obama is trying to talk to middle America, they are talking only to their base.

They want budget cuts most Americans won't support. The 50 states, all in fiscal distress, need every federal dollar they can get, which means Republican governors and mayors are going to look over congressional Republicans' proposed cuts to programmes they depend on and ask, "what are you people thinking?"

Here, the rubber of Tea Party euphoria meets the road of grinding out policy, and the results are laughable. Hours before Obama's speech, new Kentucky GOP Senator Rand Paul, a Tea Party poster boy, released his own budget for fiscal year 2011. His $500bn in cuts would reduce homeland security spending by 43%, interior (parks, public land) by 78%, federal courts by 32% and so on. That's a joke.

Even less radical Republicans are talking numbers that just won't work. They want to go back to 2008 levels, which would mean 22% cuts in domestic spending, and that is impossible.

Republicans have confused the results of last November's election, in which their base turned out in arge numbers and others didn't bother, with the will of the American people. The GOP has staked out a position that can't win. If Obama can keep ownership of rhetoric about the future, the future should be his.

State of the union addressBarack ObamaObama administrationUS politicsUnited StatesDemocratsRepublicansRand PaulTea Party movementUS elections 2012Michael Tomasky
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Peter King, Mr. Softy | Michael Tomasky

I've been amused to have been reading about this:

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) is scheduled to hold hearings on "radicalization" of American Muslims next month, and he has already taken heat from Muslim leaders and others who are aghast at, for example, King's suggestion that "80 percent" of mosques are controlled by radicals.

But King is now facing criticism from an unlikely source: the self-described "anti-jihadist" writers who make their living by crusading against Islam and would be expected to be King's biggest supporters. As blogger Pamela Geller (of "ground zero mosque" fame) wrote in the American Thinker last week:

Methinks Representative King is a wee bit in over his head. I am filled with dread and sorrow at another lost opportunity. Doesn't King know he is going to be smeared and defamed for these hearings no matter what? So why not achieve something? Why not have the courage of your convictions?

They're angry because King is not calling as a witness Steve Emerson, a long-toiling conservative terrorism expert. I remember first writing about Emerson back in the late 80s, probably. I was also there one day on the Hillary campaign trail in 2000 when he showed up at one of her press conferences to challenge her on her alleged ties to some jihadists. I don't remember what happened, but I don't recall any direct and courageous confrontation, and anyway the whole business was a pack of lies as usual.

Still, it is a bit mystifying to me why King has iced Emerson. Politico:

In a move that will come as a relief to Muslim leaders, King told POLITICO that he's not planning to call as witnesses such Muslim community critics as the Investigative Project's Steve Emerson and Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer, who have large followings among conservatives but are viewed as antagonists by many Muslims.

He aims, he said, to call retired law enforcement officials and people with "the real life experience of coming from the Muslim community." Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim to serve in the House and a critic of the hearings, will likely be a minority witness, King and Ellison both said.

The focus, King said, will be on — among other topics — reported complaints from Somali Muslims that the Council on American Islamic Relations and other groups discouraged them from talking to the authorities about young men who had left to fight for the Islamist cause in Somalia, and on cases like that of the imam who — while ostensibly cooperating with the FBI — allegedly tipped the Times Square bomber off to an investigation.

Maybe King is making an honest effort here to secure the cooperation of legitimate Muslim-American groups? And to highlight at least a few instances where Muslim-Americans have actually cooperated with authorities? Those would obviously be too much for the likes of Geller, especially the second category.

Again, remember that King might be redistricted and have to run against an incumbent Democrat. Whatever the motivation, to the extent that he's keeping the red meat in the freezer here, he's to be applauded.

US CongressMichael Tomasky
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Let's trade Michele Bachmann theories | Michael Tomasky

I assume by now you all know what she said last weekend at a speech in Iowa:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said the United States was founded on racial and ethnic diversity and that the founding fathers were responsible for abolishing slavery.

Speaking at an event sponsored by Iowans For Tax Relief, Bachmann hailed the "different cultures, different backgrounds, different traditions" of the early European settlers in America, adding that the "color of their skin" or "language" or "economic status" didn't preclude them from seeking happiness.

"Once you got here, we were all the same," she said. "Isn't that remarkable? It is absolutely remarkable."

The Minnesota Republican called slavery an "evil" and "scourge" and "stain on our history."

"But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States," Bachmann added, claiming "men like John Quincy Adams... would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country."

The general reaction has been: what a dope. But I don't think she can possibly be that stupid. It just isn't possible, is it. She went to third grade. She went to high school. She obviously possesses an IQ somewhere north of 100. So she can't be this dumb.

My alternative theory is that she, like many people on the right, just says s--t. She just says it and doesn't care. She said the thing about "skin color" because she doesn't care if she offends anyone with a skin color different from hers. She says J.Q. Adams was a founding father because, well, close enough. And she said the founders eradicated slavery because, you know, some of them wanted to and it happened eventually.

She'll just say anything. If it pisses off liberals, so much the better. Of course, even right-wingers who know something about history will find these kinds of things embarrassing eventually.

Do you have a theory?

Michele BachmannMichael Tomasky
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