Author: mhasegawa

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Why so negative?

Let’s see.  Barack Obama has been President for 50 days today.  Only 50 days. During that time he has outlined a plan for economic recovery and gotten it passed, he has outlined plans to end the war in Iraq, and he has proposals to help some homeowners faced with foreclosures.  He is studying what to do about Afganistan and Guantanamo.  He has said we won’t torture, removed the ban on federal funds to groups who perform and/or counsel about abortion, removed prohibitions on stem cell reseach and etc., etc.  At the one month point, I quoted Eugene Robinson who called this ” an administration on steroids”. 

Politico writes of the first 50 days

It’s been a busy stretch. Obama revisited Bush-era policies on torture and the Guantanamo Bay prison, proposed to remake U.S. health care by year’s end, offered new rescue efforts for the housing and financial services sectors, expanded government stakes in Citigroup and American International Group, put forth a $3.7 trillion budget and announced his education policy Tuesday.

As president, Obama has signed a total of six bills. The most notable was the $787 billion stimulus legislation. He also signed a bill expanding children’s health insurance coverage and another making it easier to file suits alleging gender discrimination in the workplace. Another bill he signed was a so-called continuing resolution continuing temporary funding for federal agencies still awaiting a final appropriation for the current fiscal year. The two other measures were a bill to rename a post office in Illinois and legislation postponing the national conversion to digital television for about four months.

So why is everyone so negative?  Paul Krugman is worried we haven’t done enough.  Some Congressional Democrats are making noises about not wanting to spend any more.  The Republicans are on a vote no kick and want to go back to Bush economics – tax cuts and more tax cuts.  The left thinks he hasn’t done enough about about prosecuting W. and his pals and certainly isn’t withdrawing from Iraq fast enough.  The right thinks he is overturning the entire universe.

I’m certainly not happy with everything that President Obama has done so far.  I think the Tim Geithner appointment is a disaster and he also needs to lose Larry Summers.  I do like Orszag and Christine Rohmer. I don’t think we are planning to withdraw fast enough from Iraq and I’m worried about Afganistan.  I worry that some of the government programs are too complicated for local governments and non profits to administer.  But I’m not negative yet.

Everyone seems to be whining about something without giving things a chance to work.  If we want a large bank to fail – one, Leaman Brothers, already did and it didn’t help the economy much.  We had lots of tax cuts under W. and it didn’t stop the economy from tanking.  So let’s see what happens.  In a few more weeks most of us will get a few bucks more in our paychecks.  The Recovery funds will start hitting the street and projects will be underway in a month or so. 

We can’t let pundit negativity make us lose sight of the fact that is has only been 50 days today.  Give the guy a chance and don’t let negativity become a self-fulling prophecy.  So take a deep breath, relax a bit and notice that the market went up today.

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Where is Al?

Have you forgotten aobut the Minnesota Senate election?  I admit that I can go days without remembering that it is still not decided. 

A guy named Al Franken, a Democrat, is still leading Norman Coleman, a Republican and the incumbant, and they are still counting ballots under the direction of the Minnesota Supreme Court.  The Court has ruled that Franken cannot be seated until all the ballots have been counted.  They have also refused to issue, or allow to be issued, a certificate of election saying that the U.S. Senate has the authority to seat a senator should they choose to do so.  Of course, the Democrats have already screwed themselves because they insisted on a certificate from the Secretary of State of Illinois before they would seat Roland Burris.  So Harry Reid can’t now decide to seat Al.

As I understand it, there are now about 1500 absentee ballots that are being examined to see if they can be counted.  They are looking at things like is a registration form included (Minnesota has same day registratiion), are the forms completed correctly and are the ballots marked property.  So far, there are 89 such ballots that will be examined further before being counted.

Eric Kleefeld is blogging about the Minnesota Election on TPM daily.  His most recent entry

In order to win, Coleman needs to expand the universe of countable ballots. But this expansion was much smaller than some expected, out of the 1,500 ballots that were searched. At his post-court press conference, Coleman legal spokesman Ginsberg boasted that the search “found between 100 and 150 that were wrongly rejected and should be put in. so that gives you an increasing idea that the universe of ballots with which we’re dealing continues to fluctuate.”

What Ginsberg is relying on is the addition of 72 more envelopes that had incomplete registration cards, and are unlikely to be included under the court’s strict standards for letting in new ballots — a point that the Coleman camp seems sure to appeal.

Two-thirds of the 89 came from pro-Coleman counties, but the sample of votes is by itself too small to provide much of a swing for him — and that’s assuming they do break for Coleman. It’s also likely that some of these envelopes will have other flaws with them, thus shrinking the pool even further.

I should also point out that even if Coleman gets all 89 votes which is not likely as some will be found to be flawed and some votes for Franken, he still cannot overcome the Franken lead of around 225 votes.

So eventually, it seems, the Senate Democrats will get their 59th vote.  And the drama of Minnesota will finally be over.  This saga could only happen to someone who used to be on Saturday Night Live.

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Ending the Defense of Marriage Act

A lawsuit was filed last week here in Massachusetts alleging that the 1996 Federal Defense of Marriage Act  is unconstitutional and discriminatory. 

According to the story in the Boston Globe on March 3

The suit, which legal specialists described as the first serious challenge to the federal law signed by President Bill Clinton, contends that the statute has deprived the plaintiffs of benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples.

Those benefits include health insurance for spouses of federal employees, tax deductions for couples who jointly file federal income tax returns, and the ability to use a spouse’s last name on a passport.

I think it is about time someone litigated the issue.  I have friends who end up going though lots of gyrations this time of year filing individual federal returns and joint state ones.  I know people who can’t get health insurance throught their federally employed spouse.  And I think it is criminal that people like Massachusetts Congressman Studds surviving spouse can’t get his death benefits.

Those who oppose same sex marriage worry that the end of the Defense of Marriage Act would mean that the individual states would have to approve of gay marriage.  Mary Bonauto, the attorney from GLAD who brought the lawsuit responds

If the plaintiffs win, she said, it would not extend same-sex marriage beyond Massachusetts and Connecticut, the two states where it is legal.

But it would dismantle a federal statute that affects more than 1,000 marriage-related benefits, and it would be a huge victory on symbolic and practical levels for supporters of same-sex marriage, according to legal specialists.

The plaintiffs and GLAD have a long road ahead of them and I, for one, wish them well and I’m proud that Massachusetts citizens are, once again, leading the way to equality.

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Secret Memos

The George W. administration was fond of secrecy:  secret renditions to foreign countries, secrect meetings to develop an energy plan, and secret legal opinions were among the secrets.  We’ve known about the existance of the John Yoo memos to justify just about everything for a while now, but the content is now public and he is either a very bad lawyer or he wanted to please his masters at Justice and in the White House so much he would write anything thing.

John Dean has a long essay  in FindLawanalyzing the Yoo memos and their effect of the Office of Legal Counsel.

In reading these newly-released memos, along with the previously-released documents relating to the use of torture as an interrogation technique, it is pretty clear who was the bad apple at OLC, it was the lead attorney in pursuing these extreme and baseless OLC positions law professor John Yoo. It is likely that Yoo did the drafting, and then either he or his boss, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of OLC, Jay Bybee, signed off on the memos. Bybee now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Dean also discusses the quality of Yoo’s legal work

Because Yoo became the leading legal adviser to the Bush White House after 9/11, many have looked closely at his scholarship, and more will likely scrutinize Yoo’s work with this new release of his OLC work product. When writing Broken Government, I paused to look at Yoo’s work and frankly was shocked to find such an intelligent person engaging in blatant intellectual dishonesty. It was not merely occasional excesses. Rather, when I examined his book War By Other Means, I found page after page of his material to be filled with deliberate distortions. In my book, I set forth example after example of his technique, and in doing so, I did not even scratch the surface of his deceitful methods of advocacy.

Also, I found that I was not alone in questioning Yoo’s intellectual integrity. For example, Georgetown law professor David Luban, when reviewing Yoo’s book War By Other Means for the New York Review of Books(Mar. 15, 2007), reported that “Yoo argues forcefully and intelligently, but not always honestly. Half-truths, straw men, double standards, selective quotations, significant omissions, and caricatures of his opponents’ positions – all are characteristic of War By Others Means.” [Emphasis added.] Unfortunately, this is how Yoo wrote legal opinions for OLC as well, which was very much contrary to the prior standards of that office.

So, are we going to prosecute Yoo and Bybee?  Maybe they really didn’t have any evil intent, but they were interested in justifying the actions of those they worked for and those actions lead to violations of little things like the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture.

Seven newly released memos  from the Bush Justice Department reveal a concerted strategy to cloak the President with power to override the Constitution. The memos provide “legal” rationales for the President to suspend freedom of speech and press; order warrantless searches and seizures, including wiretaps of U.S. citizens; lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely in the United States without criminal charges; send suspected terrorists to other countries where they will likely be tortured; and unilaterally abrogate treaties. According to the reasoning in the memos, Congress has no role to check and balance the executive. That is the definition of a police state.

That is Marjorie Cohn’s take on Alternet.  She concludes

There are more memos yet to be released. They will invariably implicate Bush officials and lawyers in the commission of torture, illegal surveillance, extraordinary rendition, and other violations of the law.

Meanwhile, John Yoo remains on the faculty of Berkeley Law School and Jay Bybee is a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. These men, who advised Bush on how to create a police state, should be investigated, prosecuted, and disbarred. Yoo should be fired and Bybee impeached.

President Obama is probably smart to not lead the charge, but to let Congress and the natural course of events to dictate prosecution.  He and Eric Holder should just continue to mine the archives and release information.  I have to believe that prosecutions will happen in the natural course of events. 

Meanwhile over at the blog RedState, the most recent post is Warner Todd Hudson’s Fist [sic] Kill the Lawyers  in which he rants about a Boston Globe story about lawyers getting laid off.  (Why anyone would rejoice at anyone being laid off, I’m not sure but that is for a different discussion.)  Hudson concludes

So, I rejoice at the troubles seen by Boston’s legal eagles and I hope their discomfiture is felt in every city of the land. I further hope that many of them find useful work in some furniture store or perhaps a nice Taco Bell somewhere. At least they’d finally be serving the public instead of milking them dry.

Anyway, let’s not kill all the lawyers in literal fashion. But let’s encourage them to seek a new profession, shall we?

Can we start with Yoo and Bybee?

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Howard should be in now that Sanjay is out

Sanjay Gupta has announced that he will no longer be a candidate for Surgeon General.  President Obama now has the chance to appoint Howard Dean.

The New York Times has posted this on their politcal blog The Caucus.

The Obama Administration just got a lot less sexy.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent and a practicing neurosurgeon who was one of People magazine’s “sexiest men alive” in 2003, has announced that he has withdrawn from being considered as surgeon general, CNN reported.

In one of the comments, Stephen Fox of the New Mexico Sun News has posted  a call for people to email the White House asking them to appoint Howard Dean Surgeon General. 

This should most certainly and most deservedly open the door for Dr. Howard Dean, whom I always felt would be the best possible choice for HHS, and even FDA would be a large enough and challenging enough job for this great American.

So if you agree with Mr. Fox and me, please do email the White House.  Howard Dean deserves a position in the Obama Administration and Surgeon General would be perfect for him.  Dr. Dean as the next Dr. Koop – only sexier.

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Getting things through the Senate

William Kristol, Editor of the Weekly Standard, from his column in the Washington Post following the President’s speech to Congress

For Obama’s aim is not merely to “revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.” Obama outlined much of this new foundation in the most unabashedly liberal and big-government speech a president has delivered to Congress since Lyndon Baines Johnson. Obama intends to use his big three issues, energy, health care and education, to transform the role of the U.S. federal government as fundamentally as did the New Deal and the Great Society.

Conservatives and Republicans will disapprove of this effort. They will oppose it. Can they do so effectively?

Perhaps — if they can find reasons to obstruct and delay. They should do their best not to permit Obama to rush his agenda through this year. They can’t allow Obama to make of 2009 what Franklin Roosevelt made of 1933 or Johnson of 1965. Slow down the policy train. Insist on a real and lengthy debate. Conservatives can’t win politically right now. But they can raise doubts, they can point out other issues that we can’t ignore (especially in national security and foreign policy), they can pick other fights — and they can try in any way possible to break Obama’s momentum. Only if this happens will conservatives be able to get a hearing for their (compelling, in my view) arguments against big-government, liberal-nanny-state social engineering — and for their preferred alternatives.

David RePass wants to call the Republican bluff.  If they want to implement the delaying tactics and as Kristol says, “slow down the policy train” Harry Reid should let them try.

To reduce deadlock, in 1917 the Senate passed Rule 22, which made it possible for a supermajority — two-thirds of the chamber — to end a filibuster by voting for cloture. The two-thirds majority was later changed to three-fifths, or 60 of the current 100 senators.

In recent years, however, the Senate has become so averse to the filibuster that if fewer than 60 senators support a controversial measure, it usually won’t come up for discussion at all. The mere threat of a filibuster has become a filibuster, a phantom filibuster. Instead of needing a sufficient number of dedicated senators to hold the floor for many days and nights, all it takes to block movement on a bill is for 41 senators to raise their little fingers in opposition.

Historically, the filibuster was justified as a last-ditch defense of minority rights. Under this principle, an intense opposition should be able to protect itself from the tyranny of the majority. But today, the minority does not have to be intense at all. Its members have only to disagree with a measure to kill it. Essentially, the minority has veto power.

The phantom filibuster is clearly unconstitutional. The founders required a supermajority in only five situations: veto overrides and votes on treaties, constitutional amendments, convictions of impeached officials and expulsions of members of the House or Senate. The Constitution certainly does not call for a supermajority before debate on any controversial measure can begin.

And fixing the problem would not require any change in Senate rules. The phantom filibuster could be done away with overnight by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. All he needs to do is call the minority’s bluff by bringing a challenged measure to the floor and letting the debate begin.

I have to say that it has long puzzled me that a majority is 60 votes, not 51.  RePass concludes

It also happens to make a great deal of political sense for the Democrats to force the Republicans to take the Senate floor and show voters that they oppose Mr. Obama’s initiatives. If the Republicans want to publicly block a popular president who is trying to resolve major problems, let them do it. And if the Republicans feel that the basic principles they believe in are worth standing up for, let them exercise their minority rights with an actual filibuster.

It is up to Mr. Reid. He can do away with the supermajority requirement for virtually all significant measures and return majority rule to the Senate. This is not to say that the Democrats should ride roughshod over the Republicans. Republicans should be included at all stages of the legislative process. However, with the daunting prospect of having to mount a real filibuster to demonstrate their opposition, Republicans may become much more willing to compromise.

Jean Edward Smith concurred with RePass in his entry on the New York Times blog 100 Days.  Writing on March 1 he pointed out the racist modern history of the filibuster.

In the entire 19th century, including the struggle against slavery, fewer than two dozen filibusters were mounted. In F.D.R.’s time, the device was employed exclusively by Southerners to block passage of federal anti-lynching legislation. Between 1933 and the coming of the war, it was attempted only twice. Under Eisenhower and J.F.K., the pattern continued. In the eight years of the Eisenhower administration, only two filibusters were mounted. Under Kennedy there were four. The number more than doubled under Lyndon Johnson, but the primary issue continued to be civil rights. Except for exhibitionists, buffoons and white southerners determined to salvage racial segregation, the filibuster was considered off limits.

But with the enactment of major civil rights legislation in the 1960s and ’70s, the issue of equality for African-Americans faded from the Senate’s agenda, and the filibuster shed its racist image.

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It was during the Clinton years that the dam broke. In the 103rd Congress (1993-1994), 32 filibusters were employed to kill a variety of presidential initiatives ranging from campaign finance reform to grazing fees on federal land. Between 1999 and 2007, the number of Senate filibusters varied between 20 and 37 per session, a bipartisan effort.

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The routine use of the filibuster as a matter of everyday politics has transformed the Senate’s legislative process from majority rule into minority tyranny. Leaving party affiliation aside, it is now possible for the senators representing the 34 million people who live in the 21 least populous states — a little more than 11 percent of the nation’s population — to nullify the wishes of the representatives of the remaining 88 percent of Americans.

So this is a challenge to Harry Reid:  Call the Republicans’  bluff, call William Kristol’s bluff and make them filibuster legislation proposed by a President that the latest polls show has a close to 70% approval rating.

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The Current State of Baseball and Illegal Drugs

It is no secret to people who know me or anyone who follows this blog and has read my occasional baseball posts but I love baseball.  I follow certain basketball teams but I really don’t watch unless one of them is playing.  Baseball on the other hand, particularly live baseball is a love.  If it is live, I can watch any two teams at any level play.  I think I like the game so much because it one one of the things that my grandfather who spoke little English and I could watch in common.

This spring training 2009, what is the state of baseball.  Well, I think that the use of steroids is down.  George Vescey writes in the New York Times in his column titled “The Incredible Shrinking Baseball Player.”

Baseball clubhouses seem to be getting bigger this spring, with more room to move around. Or maybe the players are becoming smaller.

Out of the roughly 1,000 major leaguers in spring training camps, a couple of dozen appear to have lost significant weight in the off-season, all in the name of health and agility.

Some of them did it by eating grilled fish. Others played active video games with their children. Some went on diet programs or took up yoga. Others cut back on alcohol. Whatever they did, clubhouse attendants are coming up with smaller uniforms all over Florida and Arizona.

Whether or not it is because they are no longer using steroids or because, like many of us non ballplayers, they are discovering a healthier lifestyle, Vescey can’t say.  But he has his suspicions.

“You have to be a little skeptical, given the context of watching bodies change,” Dr. Gary Wadler, an internist and member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said Thursday. “The explanation then was that they were eating more and working out more. Now if you hear players say, ‘We changed our ways,’ all you can do is be suspicious.”

But the weight loss can be good.

The model for clean living and technique over brute size is Derek Jeter of the Yankees, whose physique and hitting style have never fluctuated since he came up in 1995. Jeter seemed to be quietly seething last week when having to discuss revelations of steroid use by Alex Rodriguez. Not all of us did it, Jeter veritably hissed. That is an important fact to remember as players assert their inner athlete.

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Baseball players did not necessarily need all the bulk they were sporting in the last generation, said Dr. Michael Joyner, deputy director and vice dean for research at the Mayo Clinic, an expert in exercise physiology.

“I think it’s better to say people were going in the easier direction,” Dr. Joyner said, referring to past weight gain. “Athletes are supercompetitive. Many of them are almost sociopaths in almost a friendly way,” he added, saying that players would compete in anything, including body mass.

Dr. Joyner recalled the power of a small hitter like Jim Wynn and a slender pitcher like Ron Guidry, of the 1960s and 1970s. He also praised the immortal lefty Sandy Koufax and the four-time Olympic discus champion, Al Oerter, who combined athletic ability and technique.

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Still, thin just may be in. This minitrend has been labeled the Pedroia Effect by Greg Lalas, retired soccer player and writer for Goal.com. He was referring to the 5-foot-9-inch, 180-pound second baseman with the Red Sox who hit .326 with 17 home runs last year and was named most valuable player in his league.

I knew I’d get a reference to a member of the Red Sox in there someplace.

But the big story, at least in my mind, is the tie between the Barry Bonds trial for perjury and the tactics of the Bush Justice Department.  Who knew that all those questionable tactics would come home to roost in the trial of a baseball player for using steroids?

David Zirin writing in The Nation and also appearing of the Rachel Maddow show makes this connection.  His story “The US v. Barry Bonds” begins

This is a story about garbage. There’s the actual garbage overzealous federal investigators examined in their efforts to prosecute a surly sports celebrity. There’s the shredding of the Bill of Rights, crudely ignored by the government in the name of obsession and ambition. Finally, there’s the thorough trashing of people’s reputations, not to mention the game of baseball. Welcome to The US v. Barry Bonds; please disregard the stench.

…

The embodiment of this obsession was IRS agent Jeff Novitzky. He broke open the BALCO case after spending a great deal of time, to the adulation of the press, literally sifting through garbage and sewage.

Novitzky was given the green light by President Bush and Ashcroft to go for the jugular. In 2004, accompanied by eleven agents, he marched into Comprehensive Drug Testing, the nation’s largest sports-drug testing company. Armed with a warrant to see the confidential drug tests of ten baseball players, he walked out with 4,000 supposedly sealed medical files, including every baseball player in the major leagues. As Jon Pessah wrote in ESPN magazine, “Three federal judges reviewed the raid. One asked, incredulously, if the Fourth Amendment had been repealed. Another, Susan Illston, who has presided over the BALCO trials, called Novitzky’s actions a ‘callous disregard’ for constitutional rights. All three instructed him to return the records. Instead, Novitzky kept the evidence….”

It was a frightening abuse of power, all aimed at imprisoning a prominent African-American athlete. Yet despite the landfills of trash, the government’s case always rested on a flimsy premise. Bonds’s contention under oath was that anything illegal he may have ingested was without prior knowledge. The only person who could contradict Bonds was his trainer and longtime friend Greg Anderson. The government pressed Anderson to give testimony. He refused, citing a promise made by the feds that he wouldn’t have to testify after pleading guilty to steroid distribution and money laundering in 2005. The feds stuck him in jail for thirteen months to soften him up, but he didn’t crack.

We all knew that the Bush Justice Department was completely ignoring the Constitution to keep us safe from terroists, but to convict baseball players who used steroids?  I guess it could be a threat to the American pasttime.

It’s way past time to say enough is enough.

Whether or not you are a Barry Bonds fan, or consider him to be just a step above a seal-clubbing, pitbull-fighting bank executive, every person of good conscience should be aghast at the way the Justice Department has gone about its business. Barry Bonds, Greg Anderson and maybe thousands of others have had their rights trampled on, all for the glory of a perjury case that looks to be going absolutely nowhere. Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama have strongly indicated that the government is getting out of the steroid monitoring business. That is welcome, but after so many years, so many tax dollars and so many reputations destroyed, it all feels positively Pyrrhic.

You can also watch Dave on the Rachel Maddow Show.

I’m sure that there will be another drug.  And I sure that ball players get through the long season and the travel using the occasional upper, but for now at least healthy living seems to be a trend.

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Pondering the Year of the Ox

There was an interesting op-ed in today’s Boston Globe about Niu which is the Chinese for Ox.  The writers invoke the spririt of niu as the spirit of President Obama.

Niu has been an important labor force on Chinese farms for thousands of years. Therefore, in Chinese culture, niu is often used to symbolize a hardworking and trustworthy spirit. There is a famous saying in Chinese – “Although niu only eats grass, it produces milk” – which praises niu’s willingness to contribute. In addition, a poem by the 20th-century Chinese writer Lu Xun brings home niu’s attitude of serving without complaining: “To a thousand pointing fingers I defy with fierce brows, and to younglings I’d be fain to bow and serve as a niu.” Niu’s qualities – no-complaints, trustworthiness, unselfishness, and willingness to give and serve the people – are exactly the spirit that we should pursue in a time of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear amid the crisis.

That spirit must inhabit us all. As President Obama said in his inaugural address, there is a demand to return to the truth – the values upon which America’s success depends – including honesty, hard work, courage, and fair play.

The one thing I don’t really understand is the writers seem to be using “ox” and “bull” to refer to the same animal.  In English “bull” refers to a male and would never give milk no matter how much grass he ate.  But that quibble aside, they have a point.  They conclude

In Chinese, crisis (wei ji) means crisis (wei) and opportunities (ji). The crisis may open up an opportunity for the world’s largest developed country and largest developing country to address global challenges instead of triggering a crisis in bilateral relations. Obama has the choice to turn a crisis into an opportunity – if he leads in the spirit of niu and works with world leaders to turn the year of the ox into the year of the bull.

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Very Early Monday Morning Thoughts

It is snowing like crazy and I have to get to work.  City Hall is open for some crazy reason.  I got up at 5 to check and started scanning the news.  Not sure exactly why we aren’t supposed to put out the trash, but we are supposed, despite everyone saying to stay home if you can, to get to work.   

The blog RedState.com  has decided to join Rush Limbaugh is calling for President Obama to fail.  I’m not exactly sure why one would want the President to fail.  I think is is related to the Republican hysteria I wrote about several days ago.  If the Republicans are going to come back from the wilderness (and, yes, I realize that just under 50% of the voters did choose John McCain) they need to offer a more coherent message and have some new ideas – or at least package the old ones better – and get off the tax cut kick.  If the tax cuts they like so much really created jobs, would we have the unemployment we have today?  It really didn’t work too well.  And after the Presidents speech to Congress last week, I believe his approval rating went to 67%.

The White House response?

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel charged Sunday that conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh is “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.”

Emanuel, speaking in deliberately soothing tones, told anchor Bob Schieffer on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Limbaugh has been up front about “praying for failure” by President Obama.

“I think that’s the wrong philosophy for America,” Emanuel said. “What Americans want us to do, and what President Obama has been very clear about, is work together setting our goals …

“Our goal, Bob, is to continue to reach out and it’s our desire that the Republicans would work with us and try to be constructive, rather than adopt the philosophy of somebody like Rush Limbaugh.”

So with the economy still tanking and unemployment rising, I will trudge off in the snow thinking about why anyone wouldn’t want to try something new to try to turn the ship around.  Maybe because the ideas are designed to actually help ordinary people?

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The Military Budget

President Obama said he expected to save money by withdrawing troops from Iraq (which savings will actually show up in the budget now that Iraq and Afganistan spending is no longer “off-line”) and that saving is part of how he proposes to spend on things we all want like health care, education, and energy efficiency.  That is all well and good.  But the elephant in the room (and I don’t just mean Republicans, but also Democrats with their own self-interests) is military spending.

Congressman Barney Frank has an article in the March 2 issue of the Nation in which he talks about military spending.  He begins

I am a great believer in freedom of expression and am proud of those times when I have been one of a few members of Congress to oppose censorship. I still hold close to an absolutist position, but I have been tempted recently to make an exception, not by banning speech but by requiring it. I would be very happy if there was some way to make it a misdemeanor for people to talk about reducing the budget deficit without including a recommendation that we substantially cut military spending.

As Congressman Frank points out there has been a huge increase in the military budget and not all of it attributable to the Wars in Iraq and Afganistan.

It is particularly inexplicable that so many self-styled moderates ignore the extraordinary increase in military spending. After all, George W. Bush himself has acknowledged its importance. As the December 20 Wall Street Journal notes, “The president remains adamant his budget troubles were the result of a ramp-up in defense spending.” Bush then ends this rare burst of intellectual honesty by blaming all this “ramp-up” on the need to fight the war in Iraq.

Current plans call for us not only to spend hundreds of billions more in Iraq but to continue to spend even more over the next few years producing new weapons that might have been useful against the Soviet Union. Many of these weapons are technological marvels, but they have a central flaw: no conceivable enemy. It ought to be a requirement in spending all this money for a weapon that there be some need for it. In some cases we are developing weapons–in part because of nothing more than momentum–that lack not only a current military need but even a plausible use in any foreseeable future.

It is possible to debate how strong America should be militarily in relation to the rest of the world. But that is not a debate that needs to be entered into to reduce the military budget by a large amount. If, beginning one year from now, we were to cut military spending by 25 percent from its projected levels, we would still be immeasurably stronger than any combination of nations with whom we might be engaged.

So are there any signs of hope that we might, despite what will be a conservative outcry about “keeping America strong” and the loss of jobs from miliary spending (can’t many of those folks shift toward developing good things like better batteries for electric/hybrid cars?) and so on?  Christopher Hayes  in a companion piece to Frank’s writes

Indeed, over the past year Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made a series of speeches about shifting resources toward nonmilitary international engagement, as well as reducing spending on outdated weapons systems. “The spigot of defense spending that opened on 9/11 is closing,” he told senators on the Armed Services Committee in January. “The economic crisis and resulting budget pressures,” he said, would provide “one of those rare chances…to critically and ruthlessly separate appetites from real requirements, those things that are desirable in a perfect world from those things that are truly needed in light of the threats America faces and the missions we are likely to undertake in the years ahead.”

Obama expressed similar sentiments on the campaign trail: “I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending,” he said in a campaign video. “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.”

Most recently, Rahm Emanuel hinted on Meet the Press that the administration might have the Pentagon in its sights as part of its promise to trim fat from the budget. “We have about $300 billion in cost overruns,” he said. “That must be addressed, and we will be addressing it.”

We seem to be getting some mixed signals, however.  William Lynn from defense contractor Raytheon who has been described by Hayes (and others) as “never having met a weapons system he didn’t like”  has been appointed deputy defense secretary.  On the other hand,  Obama has just appointed Ashton Carter from the Kennedy School to be Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.  As far as I know, Dr. Carter has mostly worked on non proliferation issues and has no ties to any defense contractors.