Year: 2008

Obama Floats Punishment for Florida: Cut Delegation in Half

Jon Ponder

Now that Barack Obama is officially the pre-presumptive Democratic nominee, he’s going to have to decide what to do about “punishing” Florida and Michigan for moving their primaries too close to the sacred lead spots held by Iowa and New Hampshire.
Obama should undo what mean Dr. Dean threatened to do and seat the entire delegations.
In Florida yesterday, he floated this idea:

Delving deeper into Florida’s Democratic delegate debacle than he ever has to date, Sen. Barack Obama said Wednesday that “a very reasonable solution” would be to count Florida’s disputed primary votes and cut the state’s delegation to the convention in half.

That may be a bit too Solomonic. Cutting the baby in half risks making everybody involved half unhappy. Obama has misjudged the mood among “average Floridians” about this issue:

The Illinois senator, just shy of securing the nomination, stressed that he intends to win Florida and doubted the controversy over Florida’s primary would cause any serious damage to his prospects.

“I don’t think that the average Floridian is spending all their time thinking about this,” he said, as his campaign bus cruised from Tampa to Kissimmee.

“I think what they’re thinking about is $4-per-gallon gas. I think what they’re thinking about is ‘my health care premiums have gone up 25 percent and my deductibles have gone up and I’m trying to hang on to the health care that I’ve got.”’

We are going to need all the happy Democrats in Florida we can muster in November. Since Obama will win the delegate count even if Clinton gets her larger shares in Florida and Michigan, he should countermand mean Dr. Dean and seat both delegations.

Richard Dreyfuss to Play Cheney in Oliver Stone Bush Biopic

Jon Ponder

Good choice:

[Actor] Richard Dreyfuss doesn’t seem like the sort to be afraid of a little political retribution. And it’s a good thing, too — because the white-haired star of The American President is about to sign on as the notorious American vice president in Oliver Stone’s new film, simply called W. This follows on the heels of three other crack casting choices: amazing Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, squinty Scott Glenn as Rumsfeld, and hilariously weaselly Rob Corddry as hilariously weaselly White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

House Committee Subpoenas Rove in Siegelman Case

Jon Ponder

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers announced this afternoon that a
subpoena has been issued to Karl Rove in the Don Siegelman case:

Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) issued a subpoena to former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove for testimony about the politicization of the Department of Justice (DOJ), including former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman’s case. Yesterday, Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, sent a letter to the Committee expressing that Rove would not agree to testify voluntarily, per the Committee’s previous requests.

“It is unfortunate that Mr. Rove has failed to cooperate with our requests,” Conyers said.

“Although he does not seem the least bit hesitant to discuss these very issues weekly on cable television and in the print news media, Mr. Rove and his attorney have apparently concluded that a public hearing room would not be appropriate. Unfortunately, I have no choice today but to compel his testimony on these very important matters.”

Separately, Chairman Conyers recently received a letter from DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) indicating that the office has opened an investigation into allegations of selective prosecution of Siegelman and others.

The BRAD BLOG has links to pertinent documents, including full text of the subpoena and letters to and from Rove’s lawyer.

Book Review: Ravens in the Storm

Buck Banks

Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement, by Carl Oglesby; Scribner; 2008.

ravens.jpgOK, I’m a sucker for the 1960s, those halcyon hippie days of political foment, social struggle, free love and good music. I missed them, mostly, being just a kid at the time, though I did my best during late adolescence and early adulthood to live them, at least the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll part.

So, when presented with an opportunity to review a book by one of the major players during some of the most turbulent days of the ’60s, I jumped at the chance. I’m glad I did.

“Ravens in the Storm” is at once an elegiac memoir, a chronicle of the inside workings of the antiwar movement and an apologia. There is a wistfulness about it, a sense of opportunities squandered and chances missed, but also a triumphant air that Carl Oglesby and his cohorts in the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS movement, had actually, in the final analysis, accomplished something not achieved before or since. They made a difference at a critical time in our nation’s history that has eerily familiar parallels to today, as we live through another illegal, ill-advised and unwinnable war.

The similarities to the 1960s Vietnam War era and the current fiasco in Iraq are an undercurrent in “Ravens.” Oglesby never mentions our current conflict, leaving it to the reader to draw the unmistakable conclusions: a nation of sleepwalkers trusting in a corrupt government, a president with an unclear mission and a blank check, and a compliant Congress that failed to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to reign in an out-of-control administration.

Oglesby’s 1960s featured a government that lied to and spied on its citizens, a corrupt, profit-driven military-industrial complex; a country bent on nation-building in a faraway place of which we had and have little cultural or historical understanding, and little sympathy for the millions of lives destroyed in a horrific and pointless war. Sound familiar?

The difference is for Vietnam they had Carl Oglesby and the SDS, and the best we could manage for Iraq was Cindy Sheehan.

[…]

McCain Hosts Possible Veeps at His Million-Dollar Ranch Near the New Age Resort of Sedona

Jon Ponder

John McCain has invited three possible running mates to his ranch in Page Springs, near the resort town of Sedona, Arizona, for a weekend visit. The three prospective veeps are Florida’s perpetually tanned, bachelor governor, Charlie Crist; former presisdential candidate, Mitt Romney; and Louisiana’s new governor, Bobby Jindal.
Jindal’s family immigrated from India, and he is brown-skinned. Putting him on the ticket might confuse the GOP’s racist base, who tend to view anyone with dark skin with suspicion. (This could be another ding against Crist, come to think of it.)
• Crist is popular enough in Florida to make a difference in a tight race this fall, but at least one GOP operative has insisted that Charlie must get married, but quick, lest yahoos in the GOP base think he is gay.

• Romney proved himself to be so inauthentic during his self-financed run against McCain last winter that it is hard to imagine why McCain would seriously consider him. Perhaps he’s on the list because, if McCain was chosen because he was the least-bad candidate, Romney was second least-worst.

• Jindal is a wild card. He was a congressman before running for governor, and is well-known in Louisiana but not elsewhere, which means introducing him to the country would eat up campaign time and resources. Compounding this is his ethnicity. McCain can’t run on the success of the Iraq occupation or the Bush economy, and he’s even been botching his purported strong suit, foreign relations and security, lately. That means the best — maybe only — thing the McCain campaign has going for it is the fact that his opponent, Barack Obama is African-American, a factor that will energize the GOP racist base. Jindal’s family immigrated from India, and he is brown-skinned. Putting him on the ticket might confuse those core voters, who tend to view anyone with dark skin with suspicion. (Another possible ding against Crist.)

In any case, McCain adviser Charlie Black denies that the weekend at the ranch is going to be anything but a fun sleepover for grown-ups. It will be “purely social,” he insists, and has “nothing whatsoever to do with the vice presidential selection process … Wouldn’t it be difficult to interview people for vice president with the other competitors there?”

McCain’s wife Cindy is worth $100 million, we’re told, and, not surprisingly, the setting of the McCains’ vacation home sounds pretty nice:

[The] 6.6 acre ranch is located about 13 miles west of Sedona. It is in a small town called Page [sic] Arizona. It is the best-kept secret in the Verde Valley.The town is bordered by 2000 acres of National Forest and is located between Sedona and Cottonwood, on the banks of Oak Creek it is located at 3,400 feet in a quaint setting of giant oak trees, sycamores, old cottonwood trees and artesian streams.The Oak Creek has created a migratory corridor for more than 500 species of birds traveling from Canada to South America – a bird watcher’s paradise…

The area has many points of interest, parks and monuments to offer travelers full days of activities and fun. Page boasts several wineries. Javelina Leap Vineyard & Winery, Oak Springs Winery, Page Springs and Echo Canyon Vineyard and Winery.

Sedona is also a world-famous spiritual center — but this is a different kind of spiritualism for the fire-and-brimstone, apocalyptic religiosity promoted by McCain’s BFF John Hagee:

[…]

Poll: Obama 10 Points Ahead of McCain

Buck Banks

In a new nationwide Zogby International poll released today, Barack Obama has taken a double-digit lead over John McCain:

Democrat Barack Obama has sprinted out to a 10-point lead over Republican John McCain in a four-way presidential contest including Libertarian Bob Barr and Liberal Ralph Nader, the latest Reuters/Zogby telephone poll of likely voters nationwide shows.

Obama does well among his Democratic base, winning 79 percent support — an indication that the party faithful may be coming together behind his campaign as a bruising nomination campaign nears the end. He also does well among nonaligned voters, as independents favor him over McCain by a 48 percent to 32 percent margin.

Obama leads in the East, the West and in the South, while the two are essentially tied in the central part of the country, including the Midwest and the Great Lakes region, the poll shows. He leads among all voters under age 65 — including by huge percentages among those voters under age 30 — but trails McCain among those older voters by a 45 percent to 34 percent margin. Interestingly, Obama holds a 13-point edge among those voters age 50 to 64.

The survey hints that Libertarian Bob Barr could do some serious damage to McCain by stealing support among the very conservative and libertarian voters. Barr wins 10 percent support among those self-described “very conservative” voters, and wins 22 percent among philosophical (not necessarily “capital L”) libertarians.

Hamilton Jordan Dies

Jon Ponder

Today:

Hamilton Jordan, the former top strategist and aide to Jimmy Carter, died Tuesday night after a long battle with cancer.

Friends said death came at around 7:30 p.m. and that he was comfortable and surrounded by friends. His son, Hamilton, Jr., return[ed] from Europe in time to be with his father…

He was 63 years old.

Jordan was a key advisor and strategist for Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign and during Carter’s administration. He was White House Chief of Staff in 1979-1980.

House GOP’s 2008 ‘Families Agenda’ Signals Defeat on Gay Rights, Abortion

Jon Ponder

After three straight losses in special elections, including the loss of the seat held by former Speaker Denny Hastert and two seats in the Deep South, the House GOP is in a panic.
“When you’re losing, people are suspicious if you change. Republicans have defined themselves on these issues for three decades.”
— Congressional scholar
Based on the new “American Families Agenda” House Republicans released this week, the results from their polling and focus groups were scorchingly clear: Normal Americans are concerned with kitchen table issues like jobs, healthcare and gas prices — as well as George Bush’s botched occupation of Iraq — not with rightwing obsessions like oppressing gay people and transferring control of women’s reproductive organs to government bureaucrats. These and other red-meat issues for the GOP base are completely absent from the new agenda:

There’s not a single mention in the 47-point program of such red-meat GOP issues as banning abortion, outlawing same-sex marriage, allowing prayer in the public schools, banning flag burning and protecting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Instead, the plan focuses on such GOP-introduced ideas as allowing private sector workers to take compensatory time instead of premium pay for overtime worked (HR 6025) or permitting full tax deductibility for most medical expenses (HR 636).

In an effort to appeal to moderates in their uphill push to retake the House, Republicans have pushed divisive social issues off center stage and replaced them with a host of pocketbook items they hope will appeal to working women, moderates and even some Democrats.

Julian Zletzer, a congressional scholar based at Princenton University, said the Republicans retreat from issues favored by its base is risky because it sends a signal that they are losers. “When you’re losing, people are suspicious if you change,” he said. “Republicans have defined themselves on these issues for three decades. It’s much harder to divorce yourselves from them.’’

The risk here, of course, is that the GOP base will feel abandoned. Who needs two Democratic Parties, they might ask.