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To that end, Porkbusters is shifting its focus from raising awareness of pork to calling attention to specific legislation that actually starts eliminating pork. The first bill that we are focusing on is sponsored by seven Senators who have styled themselves the "Fiscal Responsibility Team": Tom Coburn, Sam Brownback, Jim DeMint, John Ensign, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and John Sununu.
I had the pleasure of being invited to a conference call with Senator Coburn last week. I was impressed by what appeared to me to be his sincere desire to confront the idiocy involved in our current fiscal policies, even if it meant pissing off his fellow Senators.
Last week, Coburn and six other Senators released an "offset package" aimed at identifying budget cuts to pay for hurricane relief. The key provision in the bill for our purposes is that it would elminate all "offsets" ( i.e., pork) in the highway bill --- wiping away a vast chunk of pork in a single stroke.
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In contrast to Miers, Alito "has more prior judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in 70 years," the president said.
So consistently conservative, Alito has been dubbed "Scalito" or "Scalia-lite" by some lawyers because his judicial philosophy invites comparisons to conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. But while Scalia is outspoken and is known to badger lawyers, Alito is polite, reserved and even-tempered.(emphasis added)
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THE BIG LOSER in the Libby affair, it would seem to me, is the CIA. At least it will be if anyone pays attention.
Consider: Assuming that Valerie Plame was some sort of genuinely covert operative -- something that's not actually quite clear from the indictment -- the chain of events looks pretty damning: Wilson was sent to Africa on an investigative mission regarding nuclear weapons, but never asked to sign any sort of secrecy agreement(!). Wilson returns, reports, then publishes an oped in the New York Times (!!) about his mission. This pretty much ensures that people will start asking why he was sent, which leads to the fact that his wife arranged it. Once Wilson's oped appeared, Plame's covert status was in serious danger. Yet nobody seemed to care.
This leaves two possibilities. One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn't care much about Plame's status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.
The other possibility is that they're so clueless that they did this without any nefarious plan, because they're so inept, and so prone to cronyism and nepotism, that this is just business as usual. If so, the popular theory that the CIA couldn't find its own weenie with both hands and a flashlight would appear to have found some pretty strong support.
Either way, it seems to me that everyone involved with planning the Wilson mission should be fired. And it's obvious that the CIA, one way or another, needs a lot of work.
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TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday the only solution to the Middle East conflict was democracy for Palestinians, after provoking outcry last week by calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map".So I guess Iran wants a democratic Palestine to wipe Israel off the map? Is that what's going on here?
The official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying the best step would be political rather than military.
"The only logical solution to solve the Palestinian issue is to hold free elections with the participation of Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories and a recognition of the nation's legitimacy," he said after a meeting with Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald did not find evidence to prove that there was a "broad conspiracy to out a covert agent for political gain. He did not find evidence of wide-ranging criminal behavior. He did not even indict the media's ordained villain, Karl Rove," writes David Brooks in Sunday's NY TIMES.
"Leading Democratic politicians filled the air with grand conspiracy theories that would be at home in the John Birch Society."
"Why are these people so compulsively overheated?.. Why do they have to slather on wild, unsupported charges that do little more than make them look unhinged?
Brooks quotes from an essay written 40 years ago by Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."
Hofstadter argued that sometimes people who are dispossessed, who feel their country has been taken away from them and their kind, develop an angry, suspicious and conspiratorial frame of mind. It is never enough to believe their opponents have committed honest mistakes or have legitimate purposes; they insist on believing in malicious conspiracies.
"The paranoid spokesman," Hofstadter wrote, "sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization." Because his opponents are so evil, the conspiracy monger is never content with anything but their total destruction."
Brooks summarizes: "So some Democrats were not content with Libby's indictment, but had to stretch, distort and exaggerate. The tragic thing is that at the exact moment when the Republican Party is staggering under the weight of its own mistakes, the Democratic Party's loudest voices are in the grip of passions that render them untrustworthy."
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Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran’s fundamentalist president, on Wednesday declared that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and warned Arab countries against developing economic ties with Israel in response to its withdrawal from Gaza.
His remarks, delivered at a conference in Tehran entitled “A World without Zionism”, led to diplomatic protests by the UK, France and Spain, while Shimon Peres, Israel’s deputy prime minister, said Iran should be expelled from the United Nations.
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Targets include spending $500 million a year to: increase fuel efficiency in Wal-Mart’s truck fleet by 25 percent over three years and doubling it within 10 years; reduce greenhouse gases by 20 percent in seven years; reduce energy use at stores by 30 percent; and cut solid waste from U.S. stores and Sam’s Clubs by 25 percent in three years.
He said improving fuel mileage in the trucking fleet by one mile per gallon would save more than $52 million per year. The company also aims to cut energy usage at its stores by 30 percent.
Wal-Mart recently opened an experimental store in McKinney, Texas, to study environmental efforts such as heating the store with used cooking and motor oil. Scott said the savings so far were not enough to cover the cost of building the store, but that it may be economically feasible if Wal-Mart takes advantage of its size and rolls out such changes across the chain.
Scott said the plan was part of goals set after a year of talks with Wal-Mart’s employees, suppliers, critics and customers that he said showed many of the issues where the company was on the defensive could be opportunities instead.
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"This is an excellent appointment that will promote stability and confidence in the market, since Bernanke is clearly a Fed insider and a familiar face that people already trust," said Steven Wood, chief economist with Insight Economics. "It would be hard to argue that monetary policy would've been any different over the last year under Bernanke than it has been under Greenspan."
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The first red flag, here, is the Purdue researchers’ reliance on a mathematical model of global climate — essentially the Purdue scientists’ crude guess as to how our exceedingly complex climate system works.This is why Wednesday night's South Park was just so hilarious.
While scientists and engineers often can use mathematics to successfully explain how many natural and artificial systems function — where success can be determined by how well the model’s results match up to real-world data — successful climate modeling has so far proved to be too difficult to achieve. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, says that the models fail to correctly describe the behavior of clouds, which may cause predictions of higher temperatures to be three times too high.
In fact, no mathematical climate model has ever been validated against the historical temperature record. So why would anyone believe that climate models can predict future climate with any reasonable certainty?
Although the Purdue study claims that increasing greenhouse gas emission levels will lead to more extreme weather events, a look at the historical record seems to refute the claim.
In this episode, Stan and Cartman accidentally crash a boat into the world's largest beaver dam, flooding the town of Beaverton, Colorado; people are stuck on their roofs and the media begins reporting guesses of violence in the city, and while nobody tries to help the situation, everybody tries to figure out who to blame (George W. Bush, FEMA, etc.). They then decide, based on no evidence, that it is the result of global warming, which will hit two days before the day after tomorrow...which is today!.So good, and so true. One of the highlights for me is early on, right after Beaverton floods, reporters who are unable to get into the town report "Casualties in the hundreds of millions in this town of ten thousand, and we are reporting looting, raping and even acts of cannibalism." When questioned by the anchor, the reporter replies that "We don't know for sure, but we are reporting it."
Everybody runs from the "global warming," crowding in the South Park community center, believing there is an ice age outside that would kill them if they left.
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JB: Well, does that bother you, Senator? I mean, are you worried so much about Oklahoma projects?Norm Coleman makes it because the United Nations and the EU wants to steal the Internet from the United States (far more democratic than either of those two bodies):
TC: No. I don't ask for any projects. I ran on a platform of saying the biggest problem we face in our country is financial and economic, and cultural in Washington, that if we don't change that, I promised you I will not earmark a thing until the budget is in surplus.
JB: Wow.
TC: So I don't have any earmarks. So I don't have any...you know, there's no power over me to withhold earmarks, because I have none.
"The Internet is likely to face a grave threat" at the summit, Coleman said in a statement on Monday. "If we fail to respond appropriately, we risk the freedom and enterprise fostered by this informational marvel and end up sacrificing access to information, privacy and protection of intellectual property we have all depended on."Every other Republican Senator besides Allen (VA), Burr (NC), DeMint (SC), Ensign (NV), Graham (SC), Hagel (NE), Kyl (AZ), McCain (AZ), Sessions (AL), Sununu (NH), Talent (MO) voted against the Coburn amendments, these are the hacks for this week. Russ Feingold gets an honorable hero mention for being the only Democrat to vote for the amendments.
If ratified, Coleman's resolution would assure the Bush administration and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of political support on Capitol Hill during the negotiations at the World Summit on the Information Society. Similar support has already come from both senior Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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The Miers debacle is beginning to remind us of New Coke--a product introduced in an effort to expand market share, which instead infuriated loyal customers. If Bush wants to "save his presidency," the way to do so is clear: withdraw the Miers nomination and reintroduce Court Classic.
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The United States and its allies should threaten to cut the budget of the United Nations if it fails to end corruption and adopt badly needed reforms, the man who led the probe into the U.N. oil-for-food scandal said yesterday.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that he opposed a unilateral U.S. withholding of U.N. dues, but that a "de facto alliance" of nations demanding reform could cut through the world body's "culture of inaction."
The message, he said, should be: "Look, if the organization isn't ready to reform itself, that has budgetary implications."
The Iraq oil-for-food program has proven to be the biggest financial scandal in U.N. history, tarnishing the reputation of Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other top U.N. officials and fueling calls for a complete overhaul of the body's internal oversight and personnel practices.
The Bush administration opposes a House-passed bill that would require mandatory cuts in the U.S. dues payment to the United Nations if it fails to adopt more than three dozen specific reforms in the next few years.
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Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department aims without exception to expel all those who enter the United States illegally.
"Our goal at DHS (Homeland Security) is to completely eliminate the 'catch and release' enforcement problem, and return every single illegal entrant, no exceptions.
"It should be possible to achieve significant and measurable progress to this end in less than a year," Chertoff told a Senate hearing.
Thousands of "Mexicans who are caught entering the United States illegally are returned immediately to Mexico. But other parts of the system have nearly collapsed under the weight of numbers. The problem is especially severe for non-Mexicans apprehended at the southwest border," Chertoff explained.
Could Michael Chertoff be spearheading this effort?
"Today, a non-Mexican illegal immigrant caught trying to enter the United States across the southwest border has an 80 percent chance of being released immediately because we lack the holding facilities," he added.
"Through a comprehensive approach, we are moving to end this 'catch and release' style of border enforcement by reengineering our detention and removal process."
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US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said the world would have to learn to live with high oil prices and their negative impact on economic growth "for some time to come".
"Although the global economic expansion appears to have been on a reasonably firm path through the summer months, the recent surge in energy prices will undoubtedly be a drag from now on," Greenspan told business leaders here.
"In the United States, Japan and elsewhere, the effect on growth would have been greater had oil not declined in importance as an input to world economic activity since the 1970s," he said in a speech devoted to energy issues.
"We and the rest of the world doubtless will have to live with the geopolitical and other uncertainties of the oil markets for some time to come."
Greenspan also said the impact of high oil prices on economic growth and inflation was likely to be less severe than during the 1970s oil price spikes.
Taking into account inflation, the average price of crude oil was still below the peak of February 1981 in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, when oil hit the equivalent of 75 dollars a barrel in today's prices.
Oil is only two-thirds as important as an input into world gross domestic product now as it was three decades ago, he noted.
This meant the recent surge in prices "is likely to prove significantly less consequential to economic growth and inflation than the surge in the 1970s."
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Sen. Edward Kennedy said Wednesday he would back fellow Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 -- even if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton also pursues a White House bid.I certainly would not call Kerry particularly talented politically, as he failed to capitalize on a weak Presidential incumbent (who then got the most votes of any President in recent history), and managed to made himself radically unpopular with Middle America (I suppose that is one of the two Americas).
"If he runs, I would support him," Kennedy told The Associated Press in an interview at his Boston office.
While Kennedy has frequently entertained the New York senator and her husband, former President Clinton, he said his loyalty is to Kerry. Early polling shows Clinton and Kerry among the favorites for their party's nomination in 2008, but neither has said for sure whether they'll run.
Kennedy called Kerry, the 2004 nominee, an "able, gifted and talented political leader."
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Behind such ostensibly peaceful ambitions lie more militaristic ones, however. China's spending on defense this year will be $90 billion, according to a Department of Defense report to Congress. Thus, China is the third biggest defense spender in the world after the U.S. and Russia. What's more, China's defense spending has grown by double digits every year for the past decade and a half. Given that China doesn't face any threats in its region, it's clear the country's defense spending, too, is about asserting a position across from the United States, whether in the context of a fight over Taiwan or over something else.
Anti-Satellite Weapons: China is working on systems that could track, identify and destroy U.S. satellites. It is researching ground-based lasers that could fire at a satellite and destroy or damage it, or at least blind a satellite in low-earth orbit.
The U.S. has to pay attention to these developments for one main reason: If the U.S. were ever in a war with China, the U.S. would be heavily dependent on information it gathered from satellites, not least because the U.S. would probably not be fighting on its own turf. If the Chinese disabled U.S. satellites, the attacks could seriously undermine U.S. warfighting capabilities. Indeed, strategists in the Chinese military have written about striking U.S. dominance in space, as well as its "electromagnetic dominance," early in a conflict.As Freddy Mercury sang, "Jaws was never my scene and I don't like Star Wars." As far as I know, he was referring to the movie and not the anti-missile program, but space weapons may come sooner than later.
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"Nobody wants to take a sharp stick and poke it in the eye of the president no matter what his approval rating is," said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster with the firm Public Opinion Strategies. "He is too strong with Republican primary voters and three years from now he will remember anyone who votes against his nominee."It may seem like the rats are abandoning the sinking ship, but I still think the GOP has a better shot in 2008 than the Dems (though 2006 will be very interesting). Let's hope this is all settled out by Janurary.
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"One reason Reagan liked me was that I wasn't afraid to tell jokes in front of him," the governor of Mississippi says with a mark of pride that reflects an essential part of his political personality, even during these most unfunny days in post-Katrina Mississippi. The former lobbyist and Republican National Committee chairman has long cherished the recreational facets of politics -- the jokes, the stories, the adventures. He is a throwback to a time when politicians would refer to their friends -- on the record -- as "drinking buddies."
Barbour, 57, has many "drinking buddies." And has smoked "some great cigars" with Rudy Giuliani and shared a "lotta laughs, lotta good times" with George W. Bush, or "Junior" as he used to call him. He goes back to the Young Republicans with Karl Rove, the Reagan days with Andrew Card, and is well-known among an A-list of senators, congressmen, governors and lobbyists. "Haley's got more friends than anyone I know," says lobbyist Don Fierce.
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Newly released data from the Congressional Budget Office show that, as in other areas of his life, Clinton didn't exercise tremendous self-control when it came to domestic spending — contrary to the image now put forward that the 1990s was an era of unprecedented fiscal rectitude.With this kind of defense cuts seeming unlikely or impossible in the post 9-11 world, the government must manage unnecessary spending even more closely, something neither the Bush Administration or Congress has done (Does Bush even own a "veto pen"?).
It's true that government spending in the 1990s increased on average only about 3% a year, which was well below GDP.
But this can be accounted for by the post-Cold War reduction in defense and the savings in interest associated with it. Defense expenditure dropped from 5.6% of GDP in 1989 to only 3% a decade later, while interest came down from 3.1% in 1989 to 2.5% in 1999.
Spending as a proportion of GDP in all other areas over the same period increased from 12.5% to 13.2%.
So it was defense reductions that account for the fact that spending overall dropped from more than 21% of GDP on the eve of the 1990s to well under 19% at the end of the decade.
All in all, federal spending is growing at a rate of about 7% a year, and entitlements remain a perennial problem. Social Security payments are growing at 5% a year, and reform of the system seems stalled politically.There is no other way to reduce the deficit, which has gone worrysomely high except by cutting entitlements. Tax-happy Democrats will want to raise taxes, but lower taxes increases tax revenue because it stimulates more output. Raising taxes will increase tax revenue for two to three years, but once those are adjusted for, productivity will decrease, and the government will lose tax revenue and future tax revenue were the Bush tax cuts to remain in place.
Medicare will grow 12% from 2005 to 2006, and Bush seems committed to following through on expanding Medicare with a pricey prescription drug benefit scheduled to take effect in the new year.
Meanwhile, Medicaid spending has gone up by nearly 50% since the year 2000.
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In the mid-‘80’s, Governor Barbour advised President Ronald Reagan for nearly two years as Director of the White House Office of Political Affairs.
From 1993 to January 1997, Governor Barbour served two terms as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, including the 1994 elections when Republicans won GOP control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years and increased the number of Republican governors rose from 17 to 32.
