Dear Senators: Thanks for Not Caring

In trying to call to voice my opposition to the Great Heathcare Monstrosity:

A.) Senator World Class Scumbag Chuck Schumer wants me to call back during normal business hours. Well, I'd love to, but you're the one who's party has decided to schedule votes for freaking ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING.

B.) Senator Kirsten ("Chuck Schumer is soooo polite!") Gillibrand is marginally better. Her voice-mailbox is just full. Hopefully it's full via the likes of people like me who are expressing our utter disgust with what they are trying to jam down our throats during 1:00 AM votes.

Why...

... do I have to have this dirtbag as my senior senator?

Daily Beast's Big Fat Story: The Enablers

To believe the Federal Government in general, and Democratic party politicians in particular, are not a major source of our current economic turmoil is to be woefully ignorant.

Nice round up by the Daily Beast today on "The Enablers":



Thanks: Rahm, Barney, Chris, and Chuck!

“Let them eat pork”

This was too good to pass up (because, you're wrong Senator Schumer, the American people do care) .

Yes, let's please debate experience

I'm not sure whether I was more pleased by McCain's picking Palin or by the resulting Democratic response.

The Obama campaign's response was:

Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Chuck Schumer weighed in with this:

After the great success of the Democratic convention, the choice of Sarah Palin is surely a Hail Mary pass. ... Certainly the choice of Palin puts to rest any argument about inexperience on the Democratic team and while Palin is a fine person, her lack of experience makes the thought of her assuming the presidency troubling. I particularly look forward to the Biden-Palin debate in Missouri.

Besides both quotes continuing the trend from their convention of sounding mean and elitist, I'd like to encourage the Democrats to continue bringing up Palin's supposed lack of experience.

Here's why.

First, since it's obvious that Biden has more experience than Palin, and that McCain more than Obama, the comparison that gets made is between Palin and Obama. Once again, we're left wondering if Obama has enough experience. And Obama's the top half of the Democratic ticket; Palin's the bottom half of the Republican ticket. So this just winds up begging the question: which is more important to avoid - a supposedly inexperienced President or a supposedly inexperienced Vice-President?

Second, let's actually explore the experience differences between Obama and Palin.

Palin got into politics as a member of the Wasilla City Council in 1992. That makes it sixteen years since the start of her political career. Obama got his start with being elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996. That's a full four years longer that Palin's been picking up political experience.

Obama took his highest office, that of being a US Senator, in January, 2005. He's been (officially) campaigning to be president since February 10, 2007 though. So, he's had two full years where his attention was actually singularly-focused on being a Senator. Palin took her highest office, that of being the Governor of Alaska in December 4, 2006. So, she's been there almost two years. And she's actually been focused on doing the job her constituency elected her to do the entire time, instead of touring around the country trying to obtain the next highest office.

So, Obama has been a senator longer than Palin's been a governor ... but not by a whole lot, and really not by much if you factor out the time Obama's been focused on running for president instead of representing Illinois.

And now here's the two important points about the quality of that experience

One, the President is an executive role. Palin's been a mayor and a governor. Those are executive roles. Obama's been a state and national senator. There's zero executive experience to be found in either role.

Two, Palin can list accomplishment after accomplishment for her executive service. She cut property taxes dramatically in Wasilla. As governor she successfully went after corrupt officials within her own party. She cancelled the huge waste-of-tax-payer's-money "Bridge to Nowhere." She's challenged the current Washington establishment on oil and energy security. She's supported bringing change to Washington by supporting the effort to unseat (Republican) U.S. Congressmen Don Young from Alaska and has been anything but supportive of (also Republican) U.S. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.

What's Obama done? If you can't think of anything, you're not alone. But, maybe you're thinking back to the Saddleback Civil Forum where, when asked about something bipartisan Obama had done, he talked about how he worked with John McCain to pass ethics reform. There's an accomplishment, right? Well, not so fast. Obama did work, for about a week, with McCain but then jumped ship from a role in a bipartisan effort to just support the bill crafted by the Democrats. (But maybe Obama's audacity to lie to Rick Warren during the Saddleback Civil Forum counts as an accomplishment?)

The final area to consider is foreign policy experience.

I'm not sure what Obama can point to here, short of traveling to get some photo ops with foreign leaders and promising but then reneging to meet without precondition with our foreign leaders.

Palin too comes up fairly short. She does have the experience of governing a state with a 1500 mile border with Canada, and as a governor she also has experience overseeing Alaska's National Guard. As part of her experience with Alaska's National Guard she visited Kuwait (and her trip to the Middle East was nearly a year before Obama's).

And I'm not really that concerned with Palin's relative lack of foreign policy experience. Capable leaders who come in with executive experience, like say, Ronald Regan, have been known to do great things in the foreign policy arena (like, say, end a cold war), without formal foreign policy experience prior to their becoming President. Palin (unlike Obama) has that executive experience. And (also unlike Obama), Palin's only going after the second-in-command position.

Sailors' Statement In Full

The U.S. media seems more interested in covering the O'Reilly - Geraldo thing than this, so in case you (like I) missed this: the Telegraph has made the U.K. Sailor's statement in full available - "Sailors' statement in full".

Some key excepts (emphasis mine):

We were equipped with Xeres true navigational equipment and hand held GPS for backup. The helicopter in support provided continuous navigational confirmation and we were also linked to HMS Cornwall who were monitoring our exact position at all times. Let me make it absolutely clear, irrespective of what has been said in the past, when we were detained by the IRG we were inside internationally recognised Iraqi territorial waters and I can clearly state we were 1.7 nautical miles from Iranian waters.

—

When we tried to leave, they prevented us by blocking us in. By now it was becoming increasingly clear that they had arrived with a planned intent.

Some of the Iranian sailors were becoming deliberately aggressive and unstable. They rammed our boat and trained their heavy machine guns, RPGs and weapons on us.

Another six boats were closing in on us. We realised that our efforts to reason with these people were not making any headway.

—

We were flown to Teheran and transported to a prison where the atmosphere changed completely. We were blindfolded, our hands were bound and we were forced up against a wall. Throughout our ordeal we faced constant psychological pressure.

Later we were stripped and then dressed in pyjamas. The next few nights were spent in stone cells, approximately 8ft by 6ft, sleeping on piles of blankets. All of us were kept in isolation.

In light of all of this, I ask: Where's the outrage!? - Where are the consequences for the Iranian regime!?

Once again, Iran does something outrageous to the West and gets away scott-free. Even all the blogs who lobbed heaps of criticism on the United States for supposed U.S. violations of the Geneva Conventions have been deafeningly silent on Iran's violations in this case.

The dramatic amount of outrage feigned by Capitol Hill over the U.S Attorney firings (political appointees being dismissed for political reasons?! (gasp!)) makes their relative silence on this embarrassing. The press release web page of my state's senior senator, Chuck Schumer, is filled with announcements about the attorney firings, pork he is bringing back to the New York, and even the Buffalo Bills, but has no mention about Iran's illegal behavior on this.

Disgraceful.

Firing the U.S. Attorneys Story

Half of me is in shock that this story (first reported at the beginning of February) is still in the news.

The other half is disgusted. Especially since Congress has aproved subpoenas about this.

In most of the coverage I've heard on this story, the press "dutifully" reports the Clinton administration was subpoenaed thirty odd times (it's been unclear to me whether those were all Congressional subpoenas or if they include subpoenas from other government branches as well.).

There's a world of difference between this "scandal" and the things the Clinton administration was subpoenaed for those 30-odd times. The Clinton subpoenas were over matters where strong evidence suggested the law had been broken.

That's not the case here.

The closest we come to evidence the law was broken was that Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Heather Wilson, both of New Mexico, apparently tried to pressure former U.S. attorney David Iglesias into giving them information as to why he wasn't prosecuting Democratic voter fraud.

If Iglesias's allegations are true, what these two legislators did was clearly inappropriate (speaking of inappropriate behavior...), but I haven't heard any charges that it was illegal. And even if what they did was illegal, they aren't part of the approved-to-be-subpoenaed Bush administration.

As the Wall Street Journal aptly points out (with my own emphasis added):

[The] House Judiciary Subcommittee promptly approved subpoenas yesterday for Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and other top current or former Presidential aides to testify before Congress, publicly and under oath.

The Beltway is now abuzz with talk of a "Constitutional crisis." We'd put it another way: What's at stake here is whether George W. Bush is going to let Congress roll up his Presidency two years early. Democrats are trying to use the manufactured outrage over the entirely legal sacking of Presidential appointees to insert themselves into private White House deliberations. Mr. Bush needs to draw a line somewhere, and fast, or Democrats will keep driving until the White House staff is all but working for Democratic Senate campaign chief Chuck Schumer.

These columns have long supported the principle of "executive privilege," though we realize it is not a blanket prerogative: Both the Burger Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon and the Rehnquist Court in Clinton v. Jones upheld the principle that a President cannot use the claims of his office to protect himself from criminal or civil legal claims.

But there's little doubt that this or any other President has the right--we'd say the obligation--to protect the confidentiality of internal White House discussions, especially over Presidential appointments. If Congress can solicit any email concerning advice to the President, or haul any White House official before Congress, then executive branch deliberations will soon be an oxymoron.

...

U.S. attorneys are "political appointees," and so by definition can be replaced for political reasons. If San Diego's Carol Lam was out of step with the Administration's priorities on immigration enforcement, or New Mexico's David Iglesias was judged insufficiently aggressive on voter fraud, then it was entirely appropriate for the President to replace them with officials more in line with his views. What's the alternative? Presumably, Mr. Bush's Congressional critics would have him--and his successors, Republican and Democratic--preside over political appointees who are unaccountable to anyone except Congress.

What would be genuine grounds for outrage is if a U.S. attorney were dismissed to interfere with a specific prosecution, or to protect some crony. This was the root of our objection, in 1993, to Janet Reno's dismissal (at Webster Hubbell's instigation) of all 93 U.S. attorneys in his Administration's earliest days. But there is no such evidence involving any of the eight Bush attorneys.

There are no criminal or civil claims here. The firings were done for increasingly obvious political reasons, and the Bush administration foolishly tried to paint them as having been done for performance reasons. But that's where this "scandal" ends. It's about time for the Congress and the Press move on to more important things.