By John Batchelor on September 30, 2010 12:29 PM
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Speak Dan Henninger, WSJ, re the missing piece of the GOP and Tea Party message about spending, spending, spending. The GOP is speaking in the Pledge to America as if reducing the costs of the Feds will solve the Great Recession and lead to jobs and GDP growth. Henninger argues correctly that this will not work, as it has not worked in the past. Austerity is not an engine of growth. What works is reducing or eliminating taxes on enterprises that hire and sell and build and sell. What also works is cutting the capital gains and dividend taxes. The chat with Larry Kudlow and Richard Rahn convinces that the Obama administration plan to raise cap gains taxes to 23.8% by 2013 and that to raise dividend interest rates to 39.6% by 2013 is unwise, or, in plain American, nutty. Growth also needs the trade agreements with Latin America and South Korea. Growth also needs cleaning up the healthcare mandates and jettisoning the threats of cap and trade and carbon tax and EPA-mandated shut-downs. Spending cuts will not work unless and until the disincentive of tax rates is solved, especially for the well-to-do who do the hiring and pay the bulk of the taxes. It's the taxes not the costs that keep the jobless rate high and the GDP low. Business budgets are commonsensical. You do not hire when you are faced with rising costs. Instead, you lay off and cut back and outsource and wait, all of which describes the Great Recession.
By John Batchelor on September 29, 2010 1:17 PM
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The spectacularly virile District Attorney Sean Duff (below), running so hard forDavid Obey's Wisconsin-7 seat that Obey fell away some months ago, posts a sensational new video that should push him well into the 55% win for November 2. I spotted Duffy on the trail with a rich and fresh website back in the winter right before Obey dropped out (right after the healthcare fiasco) and puzzled then how Obey could hold him off. Duffy truly does compete in lumberjack contests of climbing trees and logrolling and tree chopping. It is all sweaty, he-man, Northern Wisconsin stuff that is so compelling you think you are in Bunyan Land. A freshmen GOP class made up of Sean Duffy, joined by the equally virile GOP candidate Nick Popaditch (left) from San Diego/Imperial county CA-51 (Marine Gunnery Sergeant who lost an eye in Fallujah) is a class to make you laugh with the American Pie of it all. These guys are not playacting manliness, what TR called "American manly"; these guys are the real thing and make me, the city-dwelling middle-aged bookworm, feel correctly bypassed by the joy of the young GOP. Washington will not change Duffy and Popaditch; guys like them will change Washington. Conservative, passionate, determined, manly, impatient, direct, resolute, and all high energy and 21st Century cocky.
By John Batchelor on September 28, 2010 8:00 PM
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Spoke Jeff Zeleny, NYT, re the fresh fact that one-third of all votes for this midterm cycle will be in before election day, and that the Democrats are planning on rousing the base to vote in their pajamas and just any time before the big day. Am told that at Obama rallies in 2008, the campaign workers distributed mail-in ballots to the attendees, and that there was transportation to special polling places in Wisconsin and Ohio. On Election Day, 2008, John McCain defeated Barack Obama on the vote, but the early vote gave the state to the Democrat. Democrats have identified Florida and Ohio and Wisconsin as special projects. POTUS events over the next weeks are to turn out the young voters from 2008 who can and will vote by mail. It may work. The GOP tells Zeleny that it is slow to this dance but that it aims to catch up. Way to go, Michael Steele.
Handsome, precious Paul Ryan, six-term Republican from the safe-as-apple pie Janesville, Wisconsin, has fallen into a pout that worries his friends and entertains his enemies in the family feud that is the House GOP.
Eric Cantor, John Boehner & Paul Ryan (AP Photo 3)Ryan, 40 years old, is supposed to be the bulletproof numbers guy, ranking on the House Budget Committee, who is eager to take the chairmanship in the new Congress following the promised wave election; he is supposed to be the gifted ingénue who spent these last years in the minority bent over his spreadsheets while he tweaked his grindingly wonkish genius of 2008, A Roadmap for America's Future.
Instead, the Paul Ryan talked about these days on the Hill is withdrawn, conflicted, chagrined, and unavailable. And most importantly, he was missing in action last week at the ballyhooed Republican rollout of "The Pledge to America" in a Virginia hardware store.
One critic says of Ryan's relationship with Boehner: "He wants more love from Daddy."
Why was Ryan a no-show? Ryan's flacks claim his absence was a scheduling problem, which is a deliberately uncreative excuse. Ryan's allies say he skipped the event because he's genuinely stumped about why the leadership ignored his celebrated Roadmap, which lays out a utopia in which America would solve health care, Social Security, taxes, and jobs with Leprechaun dust and diligence. Nothing of Ryan's years of homework is to be found in the Pledge, and the absence is so obvious that the whispering is that Ryan is either in fresh disfavor or worse, self-exile.
"He's been very coy," says an ally. "He's not talked in about a month. He's caught in the middle. He doesn't know what to do. They ignored his Roadmap."
Another ally is more mocking: "His scene got left on the cutting-room floor."
Says another observer: "Boehner, Cantor, and [Kevin] McCarthy didn't think as much of his Roadmap as the (Wall Street) Journal does. (They think) it's a Roadmap to the minority."
One critic says of Ryan's relationship with Boehner, "He wants more love from Daddy."
Ryan has cause to believe he has fallen in stature in the Republican Conference. John Boehner not only did not ask for Ryan's help on the Pledge, but also Boehner's flacks claim that the boss correctly handed the construction of the Pledge to America to a member who pulled off the pretentious gimmick of "Listening to America"--the two-term California back-slapper Kevin McCarthy, a man not known for policy cogitation of any sort. In fact, the general suspicion is that the document was cooked by a Boehner flack named Brian Wild, whose mission was to heat the stew--"we go forward now with optimism"--until it disappeared into instantly inedible, forgettable jargon.
The Pledge stunt is not Ryan's only problem with Boehner and the Republican team. There is also the fiasco of the recent vanity publication, Young Guns, co-authored with the same schmoozer McCarthy and the big money man in the leadership, Whip Eric Cantor. The book is a sluggish presentation of the innocuous and the inane. Sipping what we are told are Diet Cokes and bottled water, Cantor says to Ryan, "We've got to reconnect and inspire the American people." Ryan replies to Cantor, "The American people still love the American idea." McCarthy contributes the factoid, "We have 4 million more government jobs in America than manufacturing jobs." Several dozens of these heart-stopping exchanges create the impression that a colloquy of congressional stars is not unlike the Jonas Brothers discussing what they got each other for their birthdays.
Not surprisingly, Paul Ryan is said to be in deep despair over the fact, suddenly revealed, that Young Guns is hack work and that, in the videos and still photos, he has been exposed as a trivial faceman.
"Ryan is embarrassed by the whole thing," reports a close observer, not a foe. "He shouldn't have done that. He made a mistake. He did Greta (Greta van Sustern show on Fox News Channel) to put a happy face on this thing."
"He caved on TARP, he caved on the Roadmap, poor Paul Ryan," measures a conservative Republican, summarizing correctly that Ryan voted with Boehner and Cantor on the infamous and Mark-of-Cain TARP of 2008; and that Ryan's Roadmap is an irritation to the conference, the tedious work of an acolyte who tries to outshine his professor as if politics is a spelling bee. "[Young Guns] was Cantor and McCarthy's idea. Ryan is ashamed."
There is yet a deeper problem for Ryan, and it may also be pushing him into this unusual sullenness. Many Republican wags, such as David Frum and Erick Erickson, are already on to the Boehner paint-by-numbers game of the Pledge. The document is worse than hollow, because it illustrates that the Republican ambitions are not anything about policy or philosophy or even passion. They are about conquest on K Street and dividing up the plunder of majority. The sprightly rumors of Boehner's lassies--"He enjoys looking at women. He's a guy," says a companion--are a tawdry exaggeration that Boehner and Cantor treat their ascendancy as deserving of booty. More, there are rumors from Wall Street that point to the slow-tongued Cantor and hint of challenges, double-crosses, coups. You scoff? Why?
How can guileless Paul Ryan hope to make his way in the frat house melodrama of the Republican ranks between the faint-heartedness of Boehner, the deceptions of Cantor, the shallowness of McCarthy? You begin to see why Ryan is said to be sulking like a teen who can't get the keys to the car.
An adversary knocks Ryan for his willingness to join the Cantor and McCarthy Young Guns farce and at the same time to yearn for the blessing of the weakling Boehner. "They've issued a pledge and didn't put out a list of people who took the pledge. Who's taken your pledges, you and your boyfriends? Why not? They only care about themselves."
A friend of Ryan's remarks with irony, "Ryan's not broken with Boehner. He's just risk-averse, and I don't know why. He got burned. He's with everybody now." (Ryan's office did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)
A Republican member looks past the current backbiting to the supposed GOP majority next year. "They've all been trying to be leaders, speakers, now they've got there. Look out to April and May, if they don't have it together, they will have to borrow more money, and the fighting will start again. They can't see the forest."
A Wall Street economist judges: "The Republicans will be bailing out the regional banks by next summer."
Republican conservatives who read Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, rather than the Club for Growth's materialist sonnets or the dynamic poison of the Crossroads GPS attack ads, judge the Pledge bluntly and defiantly, like raising a war drum in Sherwood. "It's the cesspool of Rousseau, a libertarian cloak. No mention of earmarks. Of immigration. We hear Boehner wanted the war left out. They say America is an 'idea.' They're idiots. America is an inheritance."
America, William Bradford's inspiring image of the "city on a hill," is preparing to receive news of the new bosses of the GOP, which is said to be why the markets are rallying, anticipating a Republican House, a filibuster-frozen Senate, and a gridlocked Washington. Paul Ryan, spoiled, sullied, and now educated by the court intrigue, prepares the Budget Committee that is soon to be his for more pledges, debts, and disappointments.
By John Batchelor on September 26, 2010 2:26 PM
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POTUS is said to be disconsolate and strangely uninspiring in meetings with confidants, allies, strangers, well-wishers, even the usual uninformed and fervent boosters. The White House operation is said to be hollowed-out, half-hearted, defensive first and second and third, reflexive at any event; in sum, overwhelmed by the poll plunge, the desertions, the screaming from the doomed members of Congress. See the profile of the blame-shifter-in-chief David Axelrodin the TNR for a glimpse at the man they all blame, and who then blames them. There are Democratic congressmen who look ashen on the floor of the House, such as Patrick Murphy, PA-8, who is stunned and despairing to learn he is 13 points down and cut off from the money. The Democratic Senate is sauve qui peut. The White House waits for the surrender terms from the GOP. Evacuation barges alongside the Oval Office. The last ditch is in Chicago, where MayorRahm Emanuel will provide 15-inch Rodmans and legions of Union Label ground troops to hold off the marauders of the right. And this is all the good news.
By John Batchelor on September 24, 2010 1:08 PM
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Oliver Stone does a favor to the Republican Party and the Tea Party phenomenon of taking a question about the Tea Party, in the context of an interview by WSJJason Riley, about the new film Wall Street II, and answering with banal disdain by making the analogy of the KKK: "...the rage is inchoate and Know-Nothing, you know, the Sarah Palins, Tea Parties, ... these people have always existed in American life, always, historically, there's nothing there... I was telling someone the other day, you know, if you read American history, the Ku Klux Klan had a march down a Washington, D.C., main boulevard of a hundred thousand people in white hoods... we have this tradition of ignorance... let's not talk about it and be productive, most people work for a living, they don't sit around and kvetch..." That's enough to understand the incoherence of the Hollywood Left. The hip cool crowd that was potent and mobilized in 2008 has become feckless and lost in 2010. Odd how it shifts, but then again it is a lesson of markets that extreme turmoil brings more turmoil, and that there never was a reason to expect the political markets to settle down after electing an unknown and untested freshman senator from Illinois who brought no experience of Washington to the White House.
By John Batchelor on September 22, 2010 11:28 PM
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What we have right now is thatRahm Emanuel leaves pronto and not just for the race in Chicago but likely also for a consultancy with a major financial institution. The report from some weeks is that Emanuel has been negotiating for a $10 million fee before he announces for Chicago. The other pieces of the staff will fall into place: the word for some time is that Valerie Jarrett will become chief of staff (once they have cleared up some doubts about her time as a developer of troubled properties in Chicago; there will be a stooge put in place until then). The ranks will close around the Oval Office. David Axelrod will go to Chicago to head up the re-election campaign. I do not know if Gibbs will go with him or remain at the White House. David Plouffe will go to Chicago with Axelrod. I am told that much of the authority at the White House is FLOTUS. That POTUS is disengaged generally and petulant specifically. Valerie Jarrett is the FLOTUS agent, and she has maneuvered for some time to elbow out Emanuel. Now, almost gone. The Oval Office closes the circle, tighter, tighter.
By John Batchelor on September 21, 2010 12:57 PM
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POTUS filibusters the Velma Hart question on CNBC. Little need be said more than that POTUS ducks with palaver -- and that little nervous tic of his, counting off items on his fingers to run out the clock of a question he can't handle -- and he still gets smacked. POTUS cannot answer his own voters. Colleague Tunku Varadarajan, Daily Beast, features this deeply operatic and telling exchange between the president and the veteran in his trenchant remarks today. Velma to Barack: no go. What do you make of this if you are John Boccieri, (OH-13), who voted for healthcare after a long struggle, and now runs away from Joe Biden when he comes to Akron to campaign for the sinking Rod Strickland? POTUS ducks. Biden rambles. Velma is a dynamic doubter. And the growth recession is eating the scenery at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Velma Hart aims to walk back her success on CNN the day after, but the damage is done. Velma will vote for him again, but she has her doubts that others will; and it shows.
By John Batchelor on September 20, 2010 2:16 AM
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Spoke Rich Miller, Bloomberg, to learn the new explanation for the sluggishness we see in the malls and at the markets is that this is a growth recession. The GDP will rise to 2.5% and higher in 2011, but joblessness will also climb over 10% again, and the housing market will remain a black hole for consumers and a drag on the recovery. There are 7-8 million homes with mortgages that are in some process of foreclosure. One quarter of the people who have stopped paying on their mortgage are still living rent-free in their forceclosed home -- and most of these folk have jobs and are just making a practical decision to keep their money for the future and not pour it into an underwater hole. The center of the trouble remains the joblessness. Am told it will last years, and that many people over 50 who lose their jobs will never work fully again. Walmart tells the tale that many of its customers are depending upon government assistance: the last day of each month, the stores fill up with shoppers at midnight who are waiting for their government debit cards to regain cash so they can buy food and baby formula. The poverty rate for 55-64 is climbing quickly. Growth recession. POTUS was on CNBC in a defenseive shell. POTUS does not evidence an understanding that his vastly expensive programs have retarded recovery by heaping on debt. Study shows that debt discourages growth because folk anticipate sensibly that there will be higher taxes. POTUS trusts taxes. POTUS does not trust private investment -- which is why he thinks raising cap gains and taxing the rich will not deter growth. Wrong foot, wrong brain, wrong direction: and the White House is about to be spanked at the polls. The day after, the panic will begin. Walmart growth recession.
By John Batchelor on September 19, 2010 2:45 PM
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Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune.
What a pleasure to review the "violence inherent in the system" scenario from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was a great moment in my moviegoing youth to attend this film with a raucous and cocky Upper West Side audience -- at one of the vast complexes that used to show movies, in May 1975 on Broadway, can't be sure of the exact date, but am guessing it was the weekend of May 10th. Huge crowd. Date night. I probably had a date, though it is foggy. I was still at Union Seminary, brooding. I recall the theater crowd, spontaneous cheering, much mirth, several hundred hipsters with joints in their pockets. These were the silly and sloppy Gerald Ford months, after the Nixon pardon, during the spring of the Saigon collapse and the bugging out of the last helicopter. The CIA was in disrepair; the US Army and Marine Corps were abandoned tools of statecraft. The Democrats had won everything in the midterm of fall 1974, and they were getting ready to go in search of a Crusader to take out the remnant of the Nixon era. Henry Kissinger was StateSec, covering his tracks on the Watergate stuff, making phone calls to the Kremlin and Beijing. George H. W. Bush was in the Beijing embassy, the US ambassador to the slaughterhouse poverty of late-Mao Red China. George W. Bush would have been somewhere between Texas and China, chasing girls with two tequilas under his belt. Bill Clinton, at 29, was in Arkansas, chasing girls at the university and lining up endorsements to run for Attorney General next year. HRC was at work in those glasses. Barack Obama was 14 years old in Honolulu with his grandparents, hanging out and playing b-ball as King Obama. You know, America walking on the Wild Side, 1975, still listening to WNEW and puzzling over the power of the NYT. Back then, even Warren Buffett wasn't a billionaire. Attending The Holy Grail for a laugh at kingship was the cool thing to do. The Upper West Side was the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune of Planet High. Thirty-five years form now, won't we look goofy, too. The president was who? What's a bank too big to fail? Tehran said what? You could get a 30-year mortgage for 4%?? It was called California back then -- not yet Calistan? What was General Motors called? People watched TV still? Who was in charge of the gold supply?
By John Batchelor on September 18, 2010 1:18 PM
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Fresh marketing notion when a pop performance act with no discernible creativity, with self-conscious derivative dyhamis, presents herself as a civic-minded and self-denying crusader in the Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt tradition, in order to attract the usual fan base of the young and energetic. The message is slobberingly imitative. The politics are worthless urban repetition. The strife is manufactured. The flag is wallpaper. The young person, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, at 24 calls herself Lady Gaga, which alone is clever dullness. The facts support the observation that there is a template for Manhattan pop, and the Yoko, Blondie, Madonna, Gaga role is a constant, playful, parochial sybarite. Cute enough and walking by ordinary means. What is especilly surprising to me, since this is the first time I have focused on this hipster (speaking Eric Felten WSJ on Monday re how Gaga isLiberace redux), is that there is no turn of the screw here. Gaga/Stefani reads poorly, as if she has not much worked at line-reading. The eyes are dull because she is reading. How many takes? The hair looks wiggish yet may not be. The voice is recognizable chit-chat on the subway, twenty-somethings with a complaining archness, as if their new shoes don't fit correctly and yet what can you do? Why address the Senate? Because the recitation of senatorial names, all of them her grandfather's age, represents overreach. The politics are fresh if this was 1994. It is 1994. Housing prices are 1994. What also strikes me, now that I have come this far, is how Gaga is derivative like POTUS. Gaga lacks sincerity: it is an act; she's okay at it; the money rolls in; what do you want? -- it's pop and cool. Same for POTUS: it's an act; he's okay at it; it was popular two years ago; if you don't like it, move on -- and isn't it worthwhile that hipsters get involved. The answer is, No, politics is too dangerous to be left to the innocent and obedient and dull. Gaga's weakness may be hat she is insufficiently cynical, a mark of youth: she may actually believe her remarks are significant. After one day on YouTube, this slip of a marketing tool is approaching one million visits. Well done to some sassy Manhattan team. When ya got it, baby, flaunt it.
Newt Gingrich spoke to a closed-door breakfast of the Republicans of the House the other day after the last primaries, and the irony you need to know is that the only members who showed up were the clueless Boehner crew, who are not in on the joke that in the GOP cloakroom they call Newt "Fat Elvis."
The young House members have spent the last four years living under siege from the Democratic battalions while their ranks thinned and their cash dwindled, and all the while Newt Gingrich was in the pulpit of Fox News castigating them for their gutlessness. The young remember the scoldings and the sermons, and, much like a child who grew up to be a star athlete, they resent having been kicked by Grandpa Gingrich when they were helpless--and yet they are not yet ready to belt back at him now that he comes preening to show how much he loves them.
"The young people who have no ties to him," an observer explains of Gingrich, "they think, what an asshole."
Does Gingrich notice that the young do not turn up to celebrate his wisdom? Not much, because Gingrich wanted only the obeisance of being feted at the breakfast as a "special guest," so he could go on Fox News to boast, as one indifferent observer put it, that "I addressed the House Republicans, and they need me." Last Wednesday, Gingrich filled the cozy audience's time by dispensing cookie-cutter advice such as, you should have more than $50,000 in your NRCC account if you're serious about the majority; and such as the Gingrich genius, "Any of you who think this is locked doesn't get it."
The more useful question than why Gingrich lays himself out for ridicule by the young and restless (and it is likely he hears the snickers when he walks in) is why do Minority Leader John Boehner and his leadership team put up with a busybody?
"You appease Newt," a Republican concludes, reminding me again that John Boehner and his "Young Guns" are all conflict-averse, "and then he won't say bad things about you on TV."
"The young people who have no ties to him," an observer explains of Gingrich, "they think, what an asshole."
Gingrich has been emailing House members for years with his searing advice and grandiloquent concepts, and everyone is mostly used to the fact that Boehner puts up with it just as if he was still Newt's waterboy and bagman from 1995, handing out Big Tobacco checks to good soldiers on the floor of the House. In sum, Boehner is not afraid of Newt, but then again he acts as if he is beholden in the way of a co-dependent dealing with an abusive and cranky older relative.
The best description for this strange family arrangement follows along the satirical description of Gingrich as the "Fat Elvis" of the Republican Party. A wag in the cloakroom observes of Gingrich, "He's turned Boehner and Cantor into Red and Sonny"--a reference to Red and Sonny West, the Elvis bodyguards during the years of drug abuse, who were charged with fetching Presley's banana sandwiches and cleaning up after his rampages. "It's [Gingrich's] self-satire."
Boehner and Cantor are both suffering the same sort of open mockery as Gingrich from the young House members, and they endure it with flustered dignity. The GOP House is not a dysfunctional family; it is better understood, according to a disgusted member, as "6-year-olds on a sugar high."
The imminent wave election prospect has deeply rattled Boehner--as well as the self-promoting trio calling themselves "Young Guns," Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan. A wise ally who has watched this transformation comments on the peculiar phenomenon of how the GOP House leaders are trying to explain their suddenly rosy future to the media and to the donors: "The beauty of what they're going through is that they have nothing to do with the success, but they don't know it."
The snickering fiasco of the Gingrich breakfast is an aspect of this quandary. The Republicans are like lads holding a winning lottery ticket, yet are seeking philosophical reasons for their unearned riches before they cash the check. By standing in front of Gingrich, Boehner and the Young Guns hope they will be associated with a golden age of Republicanism. At the same time, Boehner makes the same boneheaded mistakes as before, such as when he went on national television last Sunday and goofed on the tax-cut question.
At the breakfast, after Gingrich cast his pearls, Boehner--who hails the former speaker with a hearty "Newt!"--spent many tense moments trying to explain to the bored audience how he didn't mean what he said about voting for the president's tax hike if it was the only choice he was offered, and that the rascally media had twisted his words. The audience tsk-tsked in sympathy. The conference is understanding of Boehner, because everyone knows, from the elderly to the puppies, that John Boehner will say anything any time that keeps him from feeling unwelcome.
Boehner's personal foible of fear of conflict, his yearning for comity regardless of incoherence, is the door that is always open to the bullying Gingrich--who is genuinely self-hypnotized to believe he is presidential timber. The next excitement for the House members is that Boehner promises a document, "America Speaks Out," that is constructed by the footman Kevin McCarthy to represent the email suggestions of tens of thousands of Republicans. Boehner hopes to imitate the "Contract With America" that he helped Gingrich write back in 1994 and that Gingrich has been using as a carte blanche ever since to get what he wants from the GOP.
Another sturdy Republican comments with a great deal of irony of the lavish bedlam at the baronial National Republican Club of Capitol Hill, "The Capitol Hill Club is swarming with donors and lobbyists. The DCCC is a graveyard. What's that tell you?" What it describes is a wave election that is so far advanced that the hapless surfers in the House cannot do anything too self-ridiculing, not even using Newt for a surfboard, to stop it.
By John Batchelor on September 16, 2010 2:44 AM
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Spoke David Drucker,Roll Call, who tells me that Mitch McConnell believes he has the votes to block a hybrid Obama tax cut. POTUS aims to continue the Bush tax cuts for the so-called middle-class (under $250K) and to raise taxes on the rich. McConnell has the whip hand, so sayLarry Kudlowand John Fund. The game begins next week. The puzzle is, who is afraid of POTUS? Re Jerry Seib: he is spinning wheels. The Dems are getting run down. He doesn't like it. Shrug. Source tells me that the Capitol Hill watering holes are running over with lobbyists and party ops and Hill staffers, singing and boozing and back-slapping with Republicans. Girls like good chocolate, in pearls and pastels. The DCCC is a graveyard in comparison: stern, blockish, Irish girls on their Macs and iPhones, speaking softly. What do you think?
By John Batchelor on September 15, 2010 10:30 PM
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Spoke to Carly FiorinaandDevin NunesCA-21 (R) re the senate race in California, and learned thatBarbara Boxer has just launched an ad campaign attacking Fiorina as a rich, spoiled, indifferent and failed capitalist for her tenure at HP. Fiornia pushed back accordingly; mention that building HP into the big cheese in Silicon Valley is her legacy. The surprise to me is that Boxer has heretofore committed her campaign to preaching on green jobs and energy reform in California and nationally, and now she is shifting to ad hominem. Not a strong move. Devin Nunes spoke passionately of the mandated water troubles in the San Joaquin Valley caused by radical environmentalists in San Francisco and Los Angeles and by regulation from Sacramento. Jeff Bliss raised the San Bruno investigation, and Carly Fiorina commented that Barbara Boxer ran a committee on the environment and energy and that she had done nothing in her service to address the out-of-date energy infrastructure in California that gives us a sixty-year-old pipe failure. Of the Tea Party, Carly Fiorina said she has attended many events and will again and welcomes the energy of citizens who are disgusted with the business as ususal of Washington and Sacramento.
Markos and Karl.
Also spoke to Markos Moulitsas, the famous Daily Kos, who spoke exactly as didKarl Rove in his disregard of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware ("nutty") and for the chances of Christine O'Donnell to win the Democratic senate seat in Delaware. We enjoyed a laugh when I pointed to how Markos and Karl agreed; and Markos rushed to say it is the only thing he has ever agreed with Rove about. Mention that Markos does not regard Boxer as a strong contender to retain her seat.
Eric Cantor, a soft-spoken Virginian, is a fresh face to curious Tea Party voters who, we are told, are surging like Marines in order to make him the majority leader of the RepublicanHouse come January and the new 112th Congress. What do you need to know about the man who would be King Lite besides the brandished fact that he is the only Jewish Republican in the solar system?... (continued)
A sound measure of the big time for the Tea Party is when the New Yorker deploysJane Mayer to uncover that the Tea Party is the secret product of the Koch Brothers using their Midas fortune to lease buses, make cheesy signs and launch battalions of naive Americans into revolutionary battle. The Koch brothers explain everything heretofore puzzling to foolish observers. The Tea Party is nothing more than a rented mob with signs. The Tea Party obeys the insidious orders of rabble-rousers who are quietly encouraged by Koch Brothers agents. The whole phenomenon of the Tea Party, starting in the spring of 2009 when the AIG fiasco and the stimulus genius were thrown into the news like so much fast food, has been a product of cunning, opportunism, provocation, race-mongering and lies printed sloppily on signs. Nothing about the Tea Party is genuine except perhaps the very dated and clearly nonsensical metaphor of citizens' protesting stupidity by authority. In sum, the Tea Party is a conspiracy on the same scale as Wall Street. Not all of it is lies, but no one would come back to another Tea Party event if there wasn't a trick, such as those cheesy signs and the leased buses. The Soviets would envy this enterprise. Billionaires hire peasants for the cost of signage. The least satisfaction in this shock of revelation is that the Democrats can know that they were beaten at the polls by money and not by ideas.
By John Batchelor on September 11, 2010 10:13 PM
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Do I hear this video package from Reuters correctly? Does this narrator say that the US has "adopted a counterinsurgency approach, hoping to win the hearts and minds of the population after nine years of war"? Spoke Bill Roggio, Rufus Phillips, and Arif Rafiq re the Afghan conflict, and they were clear that a success in Afghanistan was at least a decade of struggle from here, using USAID and US military while correcting the egregious Karzai cartel. Also that no success in Afghanistan was rational without a massive and ungainly effort to solve the unstable and nuke-armed Pakistan. I also spoke with two officers of the 82nd Airborne who are just back from a year's deployment in Zabul and Kandahar provinces. They were less than positive that the war effort is stable. They attended a memorial today for a comrade who was killed by the Taliban with two IED explosions last February: Dan Whitten, West Point 2004. I asked both Dave Oclander and Derrick Hernandez what was the purpose of Dan Whitten's struggle that led to his death? Rough questions. The answer was that his conduct helped his men get home. Is that what POTUS tells us about his plans for Afghanistan? There is more. Al Qadea may be a sham of incoherent punks who got lucky twice because of the accident of dumb and dumber, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his cousin Basit (a/k/a Ramzi Yousef). It is a disturbing development. More soon.
By John Batchelor on September 10, 2010 12:25 PM
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POTUS sets his travel schedule for the October campaign, and it shows Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada through October for personal appearances. Theatrical event in Philadelphia on October 12, where POTUS will (may) invite John BoehnerandMitch McConnell to debate him in a tele-townhall. POTUS is the guy who wants the ball to win at the buzzer with a three-point shot. Spoke Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, re POTUS travel plans. Alter concedes that this is about protecting 50 seats in the Senate. The GOP needs 51, or a ten-seat pick-up. POTUS has a long shot in PA, with Joe Sestak; in OH, with Fisher. It appears that the last ditch will be protecting Russ Feingold in WI, and protecting Harry Reid in NV. Note that the White House is abandoning offense, and has not set plans for events in NH, FL, MO, CA, DE or even IL. I asked Alter re IL; his response was that POTUS does an ad for Giannoulias, but there was no mention that POTUS will go to Chicago. The White House is in a defensive shell. Holding on to 50 seats in the Senate will be regarded as a win. The Marco Rubio ad (above) shows a seat that the White House long ago abandoned, with only the hope thatCharlie Crist can talk his way to an independent seat. Of note to me is that Alter also conceded that POTUS will not build in CA on his formal schedule. Nevada makes CA easy, and yet no event. Is Boxer abandoned? Is Boxer unsure that POTUS will help with independents in CA? And why no WA? Patty Murray is abandoned? And why no CO? Michael Bennet is abandoned? All strange.
POTUS Presser.
POTUS talk presser on Friday 10 contributed more confusion to the travel schedule. The Democrats have controlled Congress for the last four years. They have controlled Congress and the White House since January 2009. Yet POTUS still speaks as if the Republicans in Congress are the problem. Odd remark about "skewed policies." Odd modifier. And he holds onto the word "crisis." It is his trump card. If there is a crisis, then POTUS and the Democrats are okay. Odd. POTUS remarks that progress with the economy is "painfully slow." POTUS says he is frustrated. POTUS says the Republicans must "get serious." Is he trying to identify with the Tea Party? A pro colleague writes me about the presser, "Is he nuts?"
"I understand there's an election coming up, but the American people didn't send us here to think about our jobs, they sent us here to think about theirs," Obama said. "And if the Republican leadership is prepared to get serious about doing something for families that are hurting out there, I would love to talk to them."
By John Batchelor on September 9, 2010 12:28 AM
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"Rethinking."
Terry Jones, the Florida character at the center of the thin but thrilling story of the burning of the Koran on 9/11 Day, is more confused than the foolish TV networks who are covering him, but not by much. Mr. Jones, who makes claims of leading the First Cult of Book-Burning in Florida (recently), is now a world historical figure. Late news is that the confused Jones is "rethinking" his decision not to burn what he said he was planning to burn. Hilarious.
The decision earlier today for POTUS to involve himself by speaking against the incoherent Jones may prove to be a less than brilliant move. Jones now looks to control the story, and the White House has not left itself an obvious option in the event that Jones, in his profound "rethinking," now goes ahead with his pyromania. Never get in the rink with a fool in Florida is a lesson learned. The open question is, Where is the money? Jones mentions that he is traveling to New York on Saturday. Is that part of the now phony deal to move the mosque at Ground Zero? Or is that a search for cash? A book deal? TV appearances on CNN and Fox?
By John Batchelor on September 8, 2010 4:26 PM
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"When I walked in, wrapped up in a nice bow, was a $1.3 trillion deficit, sitting right there on my doorstep."
-"I'm keenly aware that not all our policies are popular."
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"You didn't elect me to just read the polls and figure out how to keep myself in office. You elected me to do what's right!"
Wave Grows.
Spoke Salena Zito, PTR, to learn that Jason Altmire, PA-4 (D) is struggling against an underfunded Republican challenger just because the internal polling shows Altmire at only 51% in his district. Altmire voted against healthcare, voted against cap and trade, voted against the bank bail-outs, in sum, voted as a sturdy Blue Dog all during 2009 and 2010, and yet he cannot get credit for it in a decidledly Democratic district. POTUS speech in Cleveland does nothing for Altmire. POTUS attacking the generally little-known John Boehner as a villain does nothing for Altmire. John Boehner, from Rust Belt Cincinnatti, is a type of Repubican that the Rust Belt understand and even respect. For POTUS to say that Boehner is the problem is to confuse a voting base that alread doubts POTUS as a leader, and did not vote for him in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania in April, 2008. POTUS is the unpopular figure in the Keystone state, not Boehner. I asked Salena Zito if the White House understood the disconnect. Unknown. Bob Cusack, The Hill, asserts that the White House chose Cleveland as the venue for POTUS remarks just because Boehner had used it to knock the stimulus and the White House economic team. The White House has lost its way, and it is just Labor Day. The wave grows by itself, but POTUS is helping it, not blocking it.
By John Batchelor on September 7, 2010 5:15 PM
|4 Comments
Better Idea.
Evan Newmark and Dennis Berman, WSJ, point to the surprising decision by the Obama administration to endorse the 100% tax credit for R&D, which will fuel purchasing of equipment and boost jobs for manufacturing, especially technology and vehicles. This is a long-past-due good idea, and it is widely popular immediately. Speaking Tuesday 7 Larry Kudlow,CNBC, WABC;Steve Moore, WSJ; Joseph Brusuelas, Bloomberg; John Fund, WSJ, all on the economy but especially on the tax credit plan. This will work. POTUS in retreat has thrown out a very solid step toward rebuilding business confidence. What will most work is cutting marginal rates for corporations and individuals. Will POTUS now retreat from his insistence the rich must pay their fair share -- meaning the Bush tax cuts expiring for incomes over $250,000? Negative. POTUS remarks Wednesday promise the usual "fair share" palaver. Brusuelas asserts that the expiration of the tax cuts will cost jobs, has started already to cost jobs.
Mention that Rahm Emanuel is fleeing the White House for Chicago, and am told that he is looking to negotiate a $10 million exit fee with a bank or hedgie, to smooth his route to the Cook County bossism. Also mention that Valerie Jarrett is the first in line to become new CoS. Incredible but true. More soon.
By John Batchelor on September 6, 2010 12:06 PM
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Why Not Twenty?
Rasmussen shows the generic poll on Labor Day now expands to a fairly never-seen-before 48-36 lead for the Republicans over the Democrats. The ten-point spread last week was considered unusual. This poll shows that the electorate is not stabilizing. Twelve points? Why not twenty? I am reminded by a colleague that in 2006, the generic poll showed the Democrats with a five-point lead, and that the GOP started to close the gap on Labor Day. The turning point that year was the Mark Foley imbroglio in September, when the hapless Dennis Hastert could not control the story, and Foley's emails to House pages made a laughing-stock of the rightous GOP maneuvering. This September 2010, Mrs. Pelosi has the Charlie Rangel public trial to suffer and survive, and possibly another trial for Maxine Waters. Two of the most senior members of the CBC, the loyalestDemocratic vote in the House, both to be pummelled by the media with less than six weeks to go to the election and the early voting already starting by mail. There is also the drumbeat of economic news that will not improve over the next month, and new panic signs from the White House about another stimulus package and more bribes for the municipal unions ($50 billion for infrastructure means contracts to be handled by the State workers and big cut to the State union favorites). The generic may get stranger. What does a massacre look like generically? Did Saladin have a 12-point spread over the Crusaders? Is Mrs. Pelosi the new Poll Toxin?
Pick Your Poison.
What remains for sophomores such as Joe Donnelly, IN-2 (D), is to hide behind whatever looks like tall grass, such as claiming that he, Donnelly, opposes Nancy Pelosi on something so vague he calls it Nancy Pelosi's "energy tax." The healthcare vote is the mark of Cain. What is instructive about Indiana Second is that it is so typical of the vulnerable districts. The local pol is helpless to explain or explain away the actions of the Obama administration these last two years. Donnelly calls himself a Blue Dog Democrat. The NRCC just has to put up an ad (above) showing Donnelly's obedience to Mrs. Pelosi on healthcare, bail-outs and taxes. RIP. The GOP is running a local state representative, Jackie Walorski, from St. Joseph County who not only schooled and graduated in the state but also has worked for the Humane Society and is married to a school teacher. This is all smart recruiting. But Jackie Walorski has a deal more than the right connections. See below for a firebrand when she was running for the primary last spring.
By John Batchelor on September 5, 2010 6:24 PM
|4 Comments
Combat Eye of the Beholder.
The coordinated shahid attack in Baghdad strongly resembles the same old AQ ops from the bad old pre-surge days. Is POTUS prepared to explain an increase in violence in Baghdad? No. POTUS is "flailing" at the domestic economic metrics -- so says the reawakened John McCain. Meanwhile, AQ in Iraq can read the headlines. Bll Roggio, FDD, writes that the attack was sophisticated, with a VBIED containing suicide vest-wearing shooters. Two shooters stormed the gate to clear way for the VBIED (van). The Iraqi guards cut them down. Two more tried to get the gate open. The Iraqi guards held their position and fell when the vests exploded. It was the end of their time. Insha'Allah. The VBIED driver saw that he was a failure, so he crashed the gate and exploded the car bomb. Twelve dead. Does POTUS figure he can beat First Cause jihad peasantry with palaver in Cleveland about $100 billion tax forgiveness for research? A bribe to the washed? Delusional. The First Cause team is back in action, and POTUS shows weakness. Those 50,000 American troops in Iraq are now in more jeopardy than any time in the last years. In the eye of the First Cause beholder, the US is a weakened and spooked Crusader. Those vests come from online Shahid-Я-Us: it's a cash and carry business, outposts in Tehran and Damascus. The Iraqi forces are ready. Are the Democrats ready? Not for the next year, but for the next eight weeks? Bumpy ride. POTUS lives in frowning denial.
The explosions left a deep crater filled with body parts at the entrance to the base while bloodstains and bullet marks in an unused defense ministry building bore witness to a fierce gunfight.
"It was a well organised terrorist attack but our soldiers were alert and managed to stop them," Defense Minister Abdel Qader Jassim said at the scene.
U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Eric Bloom said U.S. troops provided "suppressive fire" during the attack, as well as support through helicopters and drones. U.S. explosives experts were also brought in to examine the site.
By John Batchelor on September 4, 2010 11:30 AM
|3 Comments
The Magnus Effect.
News from researchers in France puts forward a peer-tested explanation for the "Impossible Kick" by Brazilian Roberto Carlos in a 1997 match of Brazil vs France. The spin on the ball brings it back into line just as if it was a slider or curveball from a flamethrowing pitcher. The effect is pronounced because of the distance, about 35 meters, or 110 feet. Carlos kicks the ball with his left foot at an amazing 130 mph, which is about 30 miles faster than the flamethrowers. Over this distance, the Magnus Effect takes hold profoundly, much more so than in the shorter distance between pitcher and batter (60.5 feet). One side of the ball is moving faster than the other side relative to the air it moves through, and this makes the ball move to the faster side and create an arc. But the resistance of the air eventually slows the ball down and pushes it into a tighter spiral -- the effect of falling off a table, or in the case of the "Impossible Kick," it just floats into the corner of the goal -- in line with the kicker. Roberto Carlos kicked a hanging curveball. The goalie never moved. Goal! The French researchers worked this out using balls in liquid, which substituted for the air; and there is now a formula to explain the flight path.
What Political Lesson?
Never assume. Never wait. Go to the ball. Part of the GOP House is now attacking, part is playing defense. POTUS does get as many free kicks as he wants, that is the nature of the Bully Pulpit. POTUS can and will use the Magnus Effect, and the court media can and will give him the goal. What the GOP has for a defense is a colorless lot of apparatchiks who have spent the last two decades as ingenues, bridesmaids and bagmen. POTUS does not have to hold the House -- all he has to do is make the case that the House is the game. This will take a few seats from the GOP in places where it could have won; it will also prepare the White House for spectacular headlines when the 112th convenes. "POTUS to House: Drop Dead! Put Up or Shut Up! Lay Your Cards Down! Cut Social Security over My Dead Library!" The Magnus Effect works. All this palaver will win back the partisans, who correctly vote from fear and not greed. The GOP must go to the ball -- unlike the French goalie who just stands there, watching the magic. The only defense is to attack, attack, attack, from all angles, all sides of the field. Many voices on attack, new attacks every day. Attack on taxes, on spending, on entitlements, on healthcare, on social security, on energy, on education, attack, attack, and especially attack on the war, national security, the Chinese cadre sneaks, and then go back to the attack on taxes.
John Boehner is in dress rehearsal to become the Speaker of the House for the putative Republican Congress, and what the feverish partisans among us need to accept is that this chain-smoking, conflict-averse, glad-handing and peculiarly orange-tinged golfer is the pay-off for the last two years of Lilliputian turmoil. No matter how successful the Tea Party and Club for Growth vote on Election Day--60-seat swing! coup de main!--all the king's horses cannot do more come January and the 112th Congress than to wait on the modest brainpower of a 61-year-old professional Ohio pol who, on his best day, is described by a wag as so out of touch with the Americanculture that he thinks of himself as cool, just like Dean Martin.
What does John Boehner say of his plans for the No. 3 job in the Republic? Two of his recent policy speeches in Cleveland and Milwaukee are so stunningly facile that there is an open question as to whether the guileless Mr. Boehner is putting us on. Boehner warned with a mighty trumpet, "Never before has the need for a fresh start in Washington been more pressing." Boehner cried out like a blue-eyed Jeremiah for "a series of immediate actions to end the ongoing economic uncertainty..." Boehner proposed with drum-rolling militancy, "...We must focus on working together to identify our national security priorities ..."
What explains this colossal banality? Grant that Boehner is a foreign-policy tenderfoot after two decades of kissing the hem of the domestic Abramoffs. Still, his remarks on the economy suggest, as Mark Twain taught us to repeat, that he is an idiot as well as a member of Congress. It may be possible that Boehner, one of 12 children of a modest tavern keeper in Cincinnati, has worked so hard at being an anonymous footman since entering Congress in 1990 as part of Newt Gingrich's dynamiters that he's incapable of the cogency associated with historical memory. He might be nothing more than what we see: a maitre de pork, a Buckeye hack on the make, a fall guy who played Newt's bagman for tobacco companies on the floor of Congress once upon a time in 1995, who inherited the IED ruins of the GOP House from the fleeing Tom DeLay in January 2006, who took a palooka's dive for Hank Paulson's TARP folly in 2008, and who has clung to his "Leader Boehner" with the bravery of a parasite these last years of leading the "No" team as if it were destiny.
Then again, it is also possible that Boehner has taken on this rinsed-out golfing partner act just because he is struggling to stay youthful, hip, in step with his backroom boys. Boehner may have an envy problem and, if so, it is making him sillier and sweatier by the week. The problem has names: Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan. Easily the most self-involved Republican tyros since TR and Cabot Lodge, they call themselves the "Young Guns," and they do this without measurable irony. Not only does the trio offer a new book, Young Guns, of sensationally unoriginal genius--"...less Washington and more hope, opportunity and freedom..."--but also they have produced a YouTube video that sets a new standard for suicidal vanity. Appearing in open-necked white shirts, either like frosh virgins or West Hollywood parking valets, they gaze longingly at each other with a soundtrack of celestial choir-wailing and a script written from Frank Capra outtakes. "America is at a crossroads ... a new team is ready to bring America back ... together they are ready to make history ... innovative, energetic, forging new solutions ... a new generation of conservative leaders."
As we watch the manly gunslingers stride purposefully down the horse trail together, it is worth considering that this trio is about to be given the keys to the House of Representatives because John Boehner is spooked by their togetherness. It is an incredible fact that John Boehner thinks calling yourself a "Young Gun" is a vote-getter. The "Young Gun" video is humorless, callow, tyrannically stupid--including the phallic Washington monument under photoshopped storm clouds and a cameo with a frightened, angry citizen shouting down the surly, worn Arlen Specter. If the video were less inane, it would be a burden to the GOP comparable to Michael Steele cracks. As it is, it is a threat only to John Boehner's fantasy life.
Consider what the rest of us see in the "Young Guns," who are neither young nor noticeably armed. Eric Cantor, VA-7 (R), has limited social skills and no charisma; his position as majority leader-in-waiting is built on the money he can raise as the only Jewish Republican in the Solar System. Kevin McCarthy, CA-22 (R), is a backslapper and small-talker from a safe district, who can work a room full of Gingrich cronies as a stand-in for the slow-tongued Cantor. McCarthy is useless as muscle, as an enforcer, because, says an observer, "That would put him in a position [where] he was unpopular."
Paul Ryan, WI-6 (R), is the babyface of the lot, no money, but lots of braininess about taxes and spending. Ryan loves to spew numbers in Cantor's earshot, which makes Cantor feel smart and less bad about the fact that he voted for TARP twice and every other bank bail-out he could find in Nancy Pelosi's kitchen. Ryan also has the problem of two "yes" votes to TARP. Oddly, McCarthy, thinking of his options, rejected TARP twice, but he is too polite to bring it up to his amigos, the "young conservatives" Eric and Paul.
Cantor, McCarthy and Ryan are most of the faces that Boehner sees in his smoke rings when he orders his food-taster changed monthly and feels a chill as he starts another cigarette. Another face Boehner sees is Mike Pence, IN-6 (R), an older gun, sort of a pop gun, who is generally uninvolved in the intrigues in the House because he fancies himself presidential timber, another Hoosier without a sense of proportion.
Boehner also knows that Cantor has presidential ambitions. Surprised? There is no sentimental limit to the delusions of these fellows, and why would there be? The pollsters tell us that this wave election will sweep out the Democrats. By default and for no other reason, a great deal of the responsibility in the First Article of the Constitution will then pass to the hands of men who have eyes only for themselves and their self-described guns.
The lesson in political combat is that if you can build a weapon that defeats the enemy, then the enemy can build a weapon that defeats your weapon. David Plouffe and the 20- something ragtag YouTube team of the 2008 campaign gave Candidate Obama an edge. Now the tools have become widely available, and the new campaign edge goes to the bizarrely funny. The NRA has a winner. The aim here is at a group that may have stayed away in 2008, but that certainly is not likely to vote in 2010 Midterms -- unless it is motivated to think that it is cool to vote. Chuck Norris is the motivator, but what sells the pitch is the "Blougar" remark. Deeply effective. Chuck Norris is much slower than the lead characters, as if he is doing an imitation of himself; but the ad works with wit, smarts, content and focus. Credit Plouffe with inventing YouTube campaigning, and now the combat comes home to America.
This Mercury Messenger robot snapshot of Earth and Moon in the brightness of reflected sunlight makes me relax for the scale of our ambition to describe what is and how it got here. Also makes me snicker at the closed-mindedness of the Washington ops. Take a breath, guys. Look up! What's your policy noise to that? What are POTUS and his evasiveness to that? The part of the Obama administration that grinds me the most each week is the arrogant blindness to NASA, and the uses of NASA. The Obama team does not comprehend how NASA is the stuff that dreams are made of. Sure, NASA is pork. But it is well-worth-it pork, to get our eyes up on the planets. And someday we will have folk looking back at Mother Earth just like this. Where did we come from? Those two companions in the night sky. And what about the galactic center (below)? This is where the Sun came from, that convergence of dust shoved around by clumps of dark matter and held to be ever-expanding (at faster speeds?) because of the mysterious, unperceived presence of dark energy. We are destined to get out there, perhaps physically, perhaps with information download (homo sapiens are energy-consuming information uploads).
"What does Earth look like from the planet Mercury? The robotic spacecraftMESSENGERfound out as it looked toward theEarthduring its closest approach to theSunabout three months ago. TheEarth and Moonare visible as the double spot on the lower left of theabove image. Now MESSENGER was not at Mercury when it took the above image, but at alocationfrom which the view would be similar. From Mercury, both theEarthand itscomparatively large moonwill always appear as small circles of reflected sunlight and will never show acrescentphase. MESSENGER has zipped right byMercurythreetimessince beinglaunchedin 2004, and is scheduled to enter orbit around the innermost planet in March of 2011."
