For years, congressional earmarks have been the target of vast public and media ire. Earmarks are obnoxious in many ways. They are lightly scrutinized, if at all; they are commonly used as political payoffs; and they promote a culture of corruption, as San Diegans witnessed with Randy “Duke' Cunningham, the local congressman turned federal prison inmate.
But the problem with devoting so much energy to earmarks is that they are a relatively minor part of a vastly larger problem: enormous federal deficits and the burgeoning national debt. Consider what happened in February: The U.S. government spent $328 billion while only receiving $107 billion in revenue. For anyone worried about government spending, preventing similar fiscal atrocities should be the priority, not fighting earmarks.
Now we're seeing a similar dynamic in California with another huge long-term fiscal problem: the cost of public employee pensions. In Sacramento, reformers are pushing for eliminating the use of “placement agents' – well-connected insiders, normally – to acquire hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the California State Teachers' Retirement System. There are also efforts to make it more difficult for public employees to spike their pensions through dubious late-career job transfers and to have pensions be based on an average of a worker's final five years of pay, not the final year alone.
These ideas, while worthy, don't address the pension system's fundamental problem: Its basic structure is unaffordable. California needs a complete break with current policies that allow government workers to retire in their 50s with pay equal to 60 percent to 90 percent of their final salaries. We need a new system with much less generous pensions and with disincentives to early retirements.
Last summer, CalPERS' own actuary said the current system is unsustainable. But CalPERS' official stance amounts to denial. It rails against those who doubt its optimistic return forecasts and who note the pension giant's key role in promoting a ruinous 1999 state law allowing local governments to give away 50 percent retroactive pension increases.
In key ways, this defensiveness is indistinguishable from dishonesty. As documented by David Crane, an economics adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, CalPERS uses accounting gambits to minimize its gigantic unfunded liabilities that it would never tolerate in the companies it invests in.
Such duplicity props up a broken system. This deserves much more attention than the relatively minor issues now taking up the time of many pension reformers in Sacramento. The sooner this sinks in, the better.
#1
Seems there are quite a few editorials and articles along these lines appearing in the news. Maybe people are finally awakening to the fact we are in trouble. The trouble will get worse unless people quit re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and decide to save the ship.
We are gathered here today to pay our final respects to John McCain's integrity.
It died recently — turned a triple somersault, stiffened like an exclamation point, fell to the floor with its tongue hanging out — when the senator told Newsweek magazine, “I never considered myself a maverick.' This, after the hard-fought presidential campaign of 2008 in which McCain, his advertising team, his surrogates and his running mate all but tattooed the “M' word on their foreheads.
Indeed, not only did they call McCain a maverick, but so did the subtitle of his 2003 memoir. Heck, his campaign plane when he ran for president back in 1999 was dubbed Maverick One. Yet there he is in the April 12, 2010, edition of Newsweek, page 29, top of the center column: “I never considered myself a maverick.'
And his integrity kicked twice and was still.
The death was not unexpected. McCain's integrity had been in ill health for a long time. Once, it had been his most attractive political trait, drawing smitten prose from political reporters and intrigued attention from voters sick of the same old, same old from politicians who would bend like Gumby for the electorate's approval.
McCain's integrity wouldn't allow him to be that guy. He was this hard-bitten former Navy flier and heroic POW, impatient with the belittling demands of politics as usual, a fellow who would speak an impolitic truth or cross the aisle to work with the opposition because he had this quaint idea that the needs of the country superseded the needs of his party. Then came the GOP presidential primary of 2000 in which McCain was bested by one George Walker Bush and a load of dirty tricks. McCain took note. And his integrity took sick.
The illness began in that selfsame campaign.
By his own admission, McCain lied to voters about his opinion of the Confederate battle flag, fearing that calling it what it is — a flag of treason, racism and slavery — would cost him votes in flag-worshipping South Carolina.
In later years, he embraced right-wing religious extremists he had once condemned. And reneged on a promise that he'd be open to repealing “Don't Ask, Don't Tell' if military leaders advised it. And went from opposition of offshore oil drilling to “Drill, baby, drill!' And et cetera.
Two things here: One, all the nattering about flip-flops aside, there is nothing wrong with changing one's opinion. It indicates a thinking mind.
Two, McCain is hardly unique. Indeed, they have a name for people who change their opinions in order to win votes: politicians.
But these are not just changes of opinion we're talking about. Rather, they are betrayals of core principle. And while that might be politics as usual, there is a higher standard for the politician who has positioned himself as a man of uncommon integrity, a purveyor of straight talk in a nation hungry for same.
So it stings to see McCain knuckle under to the ideological rigidity that makes it heresy to cross the aisle, question the orthodoxy or have an independent thought. There's a sense of loss for those who ask of leaders, leadership.
One is reminded of that poignant scene in The Truman Show where Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank has just discovered his entire life was a made-for-TV fiction. “Was nothing real?' he asks. A voter who believed in John McCain, who regarded his iconoclastic singularity as a stirring example, might be forgiven for asking the very same thing.
“I never considered myself a maverick'?! Wow.
With those words, McCain completes his transmutation into an avatar of all that is wrong in American politics.
#1
The country needs to forget McCain and move on. He's not to be trusted; he has a problem with principles. He for amnesty and then he's against it. Seems like it depends upon whether it's election time or not. I thank him for his service to the country--he did serve his country in the military. His record in the Senate is questionable.
#2
McCain lost me during the Abu Ghraib media event, when he could have stood, pointed to the panty clad Iraqi prisoner and stated "That is not torture". That he didn't say a damn thing showed me he was more interested in seeing the media twist the current President into knots. John let his own ego override his respect and love of this country and her institutions.
It is sad that some heroes live long enough (or remain in the public eye enough)to wither in front of their once adoring public. Maverick or not, John is a plain old politician - one step up from a child molester.
#6
If it was the choice of VP that lost the election for him, he was a weaker candidate than he appeared, 746. Mr. Wife pronounced him lost the day he flew back to Washington to deal with the TARP bill instead of continuing the campaign. "He was thinking like a senator instead of a president, and doesn't deserve to win," quoth Mr. Wife. I have no idea whether or not that's so, or if it was Gov. Palin, or the campaign team was weak in critical ways, whether no Republican could have won against the traditional media, or whether the electorate was tired of a Republican in the White House -- the Taking Turns hypothesis.
#7
'Twas the financial meltdown killed McCain. Barry was trailing McC before October. He surged past McC after the system was shown to have utterly failed. When the whole foundation of our economy blew up, independents and nat'l-security Dems decided to ditch the incumbent party and roll the dice with a newbie.
Wall St in its own way elected Barry, and is doing its damnedest to re-elect the joker.
#8
Coming from behind, the McCain-Palin team had built up it's first sustained lead over Obama-Biden. Then someone or government took $500 billion out of the US financial system in one hour. The thing is it isn't that hard to do for unfriendly governments who have built up huge cash reserves or certain billionaires who can use the 300-400X leverage available to currency speculators.
I find it strange that Obama is so incurious about how the US financial system could be wrecked so quickly and from outside the country, especially given his interest in "reforming" the entire financial system.
Posted by: ed ||
04/20/2010 15:37 Comments ||
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#9
I find it strange that Obama is so incurious about how the US financial system could be wrecked so quickly and from outside the country, especially given his interest in "reforming" the entire financial system.
I'm certain that once Mr Soros gives his ok, he'll get right on that.
#10
My recollection 746 is that McCain started to pick up in the polls once he added Palin to the ticket. One can argue whether or not Palin was the best VP for the ticket but it seemed she breathed some life into his moribund campaign. I wondered when he was going to wake up and campaign. When she came on the ticket he seemed to wake up some.
#11
Palin prevented McLame from losing by double digits. I think his "principles", ie his "maverick" image, was simply a reflection of his vindictiveness towards W and the Trunk base that rejected him. He is not a conservative. He needs to retire.
The CIA quietly announced the "resignation" of its deputy director on Wednesday, accompanied by all the accolades normally reserved for a top government official forced to resign in disgrace. There were many reasons why Stephen R. Kappes needed to resign at age 60, five years before the agency's mandatory retirement age. Even the CIA's Greek chorus at the Washington Post and the New York Times have acknowledged that this mandarin had no clothes.
The immediate cause appears to have been the catastrophic operation on Dec. 30 in Khost, Afghanistan, that cost the lives of seven people and maimed several others when an al Qaeda double agent, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was trustingly brought onto a U.S. forward operating base without undergoing a body search. Mr. Kappes was so enthusiastic about the prospect of having a source who had infiltrated the highest levels of al Qaeda that he reportedly briefed President Obama in person before the disaster.
In keeping with Mr. Kappes' long record of failure as an operations chief, the would-be mole had not been recruited by a CIA case officer and was not a unilateral American asset. He was being offered to the CIA by Jordanian intelligence. "Kappes transformed CIA operations into a liaison service," a former senior CIA operations officer told me. By that, he meant that Mr. Kappes no longer insisted that CIA case officers recruit agents and clandestine intelligence sources themselves, but rely on the cooperation and the offerings of "friendly" intelligence services willing to take the risks.
I have called Mr. Kappes one of a legion of "shadow warriors" who played politics with intelligence. In 2004, he and other colleagues led an internal insurgency against Porter Goss, the former case officer and congressman President George W. Bush appointed to head the CIA that year. Mr. Goss was threatening to clean out the "deadwood" at the agency and prune away senior managers who represented the failed culture that brought about the agency's faulty performance in the months and years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Behind the scenes, Mr. Kappes won support from congressional Democrats, who loved him because he fed them information they could use against Mr. Bush. But in the end, he overplayed his hand, and when he threatened to resign in November 2004 and take half of the operations directorate with him, Mr. Goss called his bluff. Consummate shadow warrior that he was, Mr. Kappes used his exile from the agency to plot his revenge. His moment arrived just 18 months later, when the Democrats managed to oust Mr. Goss and get Mr. Kappes appointed deputy director under Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden.
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, who was then chairman of the House intelligence committee, was furious at the Kappes restoration and called it "back to the future." "This is a vindication of all those people who didn't want to change," he told me in an interview for "Shadow Warriors." "The person Porter [Goss] saw as the primary obstacle to change is now in charge."
When Mr. Obama took office and named former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta as the new CIA director, many Democrats were upset, even though Mr. Panetta was one of their own. "Democrats loved Kappes and wanted him to be the next CIA chief," says Ishmael Jones, a former clandestine CIA officer and author of "The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture.""When Obama chose Panetta, [Senate intelligence committee chairman Sen. Dianne] Feinstein was upset and insisted that Kappes stay on as a powerful number two at the agency."
In his book, Mr. Jones describes several incidents with Mr. Kappes, who consistently blocked case officers from recruiting sources in order to avoid risks. It was all part of a risk-avoidance culture, Mr. Jones says. "Kappes was a master at making small operations appear momentous and making vast numbers of government employees appear busy." Relying on the risk-taking of friendly intelligence services may have seemed appealing on the surface, but it has generated a clandestine service that is top-heavy with managers and short on spies.
Take the operation in Khost. The woman put in charge of the base was trained as a reports officer, not a clandestine operator. Because she wanted the new agent the Jordanians were handing her to "feel comfortable," she organized a mass welcoming party for him at Forwarding Operating Base Chapman in Khost and rejected requests from security contractors that the agent undergo a search before being allowed onto the U.S. base. When al-Balawi got out of the car and saw the crowd, an eyewitness who survived the attack says he began praying under his breath and then blew himself up. "The whole operation was a travesty," a former senior clandestine officer told me. And it was Kappes' own, meant to be his crowning moment.
Because the Khost operation was such a consummate failure, it became Mr. Kappes' undoing. Now is the time for Mr. Panetta to choose a deputy who will shake up the culture at the CIA so the agency can recruit and retain new blood.
#1
Now is the time for Mr. Panetta to choose a deputy who will shake up the culture at the CIA so the agency can recruit and retain new blood.
Good luck with that. As an evil government employee I can tell you that the state of affairs in other Fed LE Agencies is similar to that of the CIA. The CIA doesn't appear to have improved much since 9/11, and in our current "man caused disaster" government I doubt it will be allowed to.
#4
Take the operation in Khost. The woman put in charge of the base was trained as a reports officer, not a clandestine operator. Because she wanted the new agent the Jordanians were handing her to "feel comfortable," she organized a mass welcoming party for him at Forwarding Operating Base Chapman in Khost and rejected requests from security contractors that the agent undergo a search before being allowed onto the U.S. base. When al-Balawi got out of the car and saw the crowd, an eyewitness who survived the attack says he began praying under his breath and then blew himself up. "The whole operation was a travesty," a former senior clandestine officer told me. And it was Kappes' own, meant to be his crowning moment.
A touchy feely analyst type gets an operations role and manages to get both herself and the people under her blown to bits. Yet another great decision by an Ogabe minion. I wonder if she had anything to do with the leaks that damaged Bush so badly.
If Chris Dodd hadn't been so cozy with the financial industry, he wouldn't have been hounded out of the Senate.
But if he weren't retiring, he wouldn't have a free hand to write the legislation to change the way the financial industry is regulated.
The financial industry built Dodd's career, so why shouldn't it profit from the demise of it? It's like a political credit-default swap. It's a perfect fit for the Goldman Sachs era on Wall Street: No matter who loses, they win.
Dodd had been on political auto pilot for decades, but he tried to liven things up with a run for the presidency in 2008.
The biggest investor in his presidential campaign was Connecticut-based hedge fund SAC Capital ($248,200). But the management teams at all of the big financial houses came across for Dodd's bid. Employees of Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Goldman and American International Group were all high on his donor list.
Despite moving his family to Iowa, he finished last in the state's Democratic caucuses -- behind Joe Biden and "uncommitted."
Worse for Dodd, his vanity candidacy tipped off Connecticut voters that something was amiss with their senior senator.
Dodd was elected to the House in 1974, just four years after his father had been driven from the Senate by a campaign finance scandal. In 1980, Dodd moved up to the Senate and mostly allowed his state to forget about him.
Dodd's legislative pursuits were deadly dull to voters but of great interest to the insurance and finance industries that dominate Connecticut. That Dodd, unknown in the rest of the country, could raise and spend $18 million on his absurd presidential candidacy is good evidence of how lucrative it is to focus on financial regulation in Washington.
Connecticut voters might have forgotten about his goofy Iowa campaign by now if it hadn't been for the bursting of the mortgage bubble.
In June 2008 Dodd proposed an aid package for subprime lenders, including Countrywide Financial. As Dodd was pushing the bailout, reporter Daniel Golden of Portfolio magazine discovered that the banking committee chairman had saved about $75,000 on two loans because of preferential treatment he received from Countrywide's then-chief executive officer, Angelo Mozilo.
As the mortgage market continued to melt down, Dodd was scrambling to protect his biggest political benefactors -- mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Dodd had for years pushed rules to allow Fannie and Freddie to operate like private companies when it came to profits and like public companies when it came to losses. It made him very popular in Washington.
Fannie and Freddie provided safe harbors for politicians between gigs -- like the $320,000 Rahm Emanuel pocketed for a no-show seat on Freddie's board. But more importantly, the firms funded campaigns.
Dodd was the top recipient of Fannie and Freddie funds ($165,400 through 2008), but the two government-sponsored entities, as they are benignly called, shrewdly spread the wealth around, including $120,349 in donations to the church plate of then-Sen. Barack Obama.
Dodd pleaded for the Fannie and Freddie bailout that has so far cost $126 billion. When Dodd argued in support of the cash dump, he called the lenders "fundamentally strong."
Dodd was later caught in a shady deal on an Irish vacation cottage with a former Bear Stearns executive whom the senator had helped to get a pardon for insider trading from outgoing President Clinton.
But the electoral catastrophe for Dodd came in March 2009 when it was revealed that he inserted language in the Obama stimulus that allowed bailed-out insurance firm AIG to pay out $165 million in bonuses.
When he announced his retirement in January 2010, Dodd was losing in head-to-head polls to all Republican comers in a heavily Democratic state.
Since his political future caved in, Dodd has been working with great fervor to complete the financial legislation sought by Obama. Though the president wants Dodd to drop a $50 billion fund to cover the cost of future bailouts, he and Dodd agree that the idea of institutions being "too big to fail" should be codified in law.
If Dodd were running for re-election he would be under pressure to get tough on Wall Street. The Left wants the government to break up the big banks, and the Right wants to end bailouts permanently. But because he is on his way out, Dodd is free to ignore their demands.
Because an inappropriate relationship with the financial sector cost a senator his career, that senator is in a unique position to change the regulation of the financial sector without fear of political consequences.
It is an only-in-Washington story.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/20/2010 00:00 ||
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Gov. Charlie Crist almost certainly cannot beat former House Speaker Marco Rubio for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Florida this year.
But Crist almost certainly could be the GOP nominee in 2012 in the race against Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., might be able to power a cap-and-tax bill through the Senate this year with the help of Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and the assistance of Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
But Graham will greatly decrease the chances of his friend Sen. John McCain's re-election bid in Arizona if he does so.
The choices confronting Florida's governor and South Carolina's senior senator carry with them probabilities of outcomes that have to be weighing on both men this week.
Crist is far, far behind Rubio in polling on the race for the Sunshine State's GOP primary.
McCain is a handful of points ahead of former Rep. J.D. Hayworth's challenge in the Arizona GOP primary.
If Crist bolts the GOP and runs as an independent, his future with the national GOP is damaged beyond repair, and even if he wins the Senate seat, his career as a national figure will be in ruins.
If he instead runs a good race as a Republican and accepts a defeat with grace and determination to come back -- as a Republican -- he could do so, as many political figures in the past have come back from losses -- like Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. Losses don't end careers or cap upward mobility.
Bolting a party does. Crist is 53, and a two-year delay in his ambitions is hardly the crushing end that defeat in a three-way scramble would mean.
And Graham must know his long association with McCain is a bond that is securely forged in the public's mind, and the mind of the Arizona electorate. Championing cap and tax in 2010 is close to a political death wish for a Republican.
Graham may figure his future is so secure in South Carolina that he can survive any policy apostasy, but the same is clearly not true of McCain. The GOP's 2008 nominee has been assembling a successful re-election bid in Arizona with the help of 2008 running mate Sarah Palin and former rival Gov. Mitt Romney.
But a finger-in-the-eye play by his closest ally in the Senate for higher taxes in the service of a flawed regulatory scheme designed to address a "threat" that is not widely understood to be immediate or even subject to influence by a single country is an enormous blow to the conservative comeback McCain has been staging.
Crist could retool his national image by leading an effort to pass a different teacher tenure and pay reform act, one that would help heal the deep wound he opened with conservatives with a veto last week of just such a bill.
Crist could also negotiate with Rubio a pledge for the popular former Florida House speaker's support in 2012 in exchange for Crist's wholehearted support now. John Thune lost in 2002, won in 2004 and is now on the short list of future GOP presidential prospects. Good things happen to politicians who keep themselves on the eligible list.
And proposed laws that don't work in some years make sense in others. A cap-and-tax bill that is toxic in 2010 could muster large, bipartisan support in 2011 if the economy is growing, the science less troubled, and a plan for overall fiscal sanity accompanied it.
Patience in politicians is rare. We will see in the next few weeks if Crist and Graham have this most unusual of political virtues.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/20/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Hewitt's widely considered a smart commentator. He isn't smart enough to see that gramnasty, christ and mcshame are all egomaniacs who make no calculation of what is good for anyone but each's immediate self. And, no, Hugh, this doesn't help Mitt Romney...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/20/2010 8:52 Comments ||
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#2
To be honest, I don't see how Graham gets another term in South Carolina unless they have collected more Hispanic voters in the last ten years than I give that state credit for. I wouldn't vote for him, and this comes from a guy who voted for Specter.
Twice.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
04/20/2010 10:25 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
By Kenneth R. Timmerman 
