The Obama Signing Statement

President Obama signed the omnibus spending bill yesterday, and he came up with a program for earmark reform which is very much in the "mend it, don't end it" vein. Fair enough - I think earmarks are a fake debate, and Obama's ideas are fine (more transparency, competitive bidding) are fine. But there was also a signing statement appended to the bill. Unlike Bush's boilerplate language ("I'm the unitary executive and you can't stop me"), this signing statement was pretty detailed and thorough, and asked that five small sections of the bill be made supervisory. When these omnibus bills are combined, there are lots of conflicting pieces of information in them. And I hope this doesn't become a habit. But in the general sense, these particular points seem to be on relatively solid constitutional footing. Again, the signing statements debate is not that they ought to be completely abolished, it's that they shouldn't be used to nullify entire statutes based on flimsy reasoning. I'll add the whole signing statement below.

As I announced this past Monday, it is a legitimate constitutional function, and one that promotes the value of transparency, to indicate when a bill that is presented for Presidential signature includes provisions that are subject to well-founded constitutional objections. The Department of Justice has advised that a small number of provisions of the bill raise constitutional concerns.

Foreign Affairs. Certain provisions of the bill, in titles I and IV of Division B, title IV of Division E, and title VII of Division H, would unduly interfere with my constitutional authority in the area of foreign affairs by effectively directing the Executive on how to proceed or not proceed in negotiations or discussions with international organizations and foreign governments. I will not treat these provisions as limiting my ability to negotiate and enter into agreements with foreign nations.

United Nations Peacekeeping Missions. Section 7050 in Division H prohibits the use of certain funds for the use of the Armed Forces in United Nations peacekeeping missions under the command or operational control of a foreign national unless my military advisers have recommended to me that such involvement is in the national interests of the United States. This provision raises constitutional concerns by constraining my choice of particular persons to perform specific command functions in military missions, by conditioning the exercise of my authority as Commander in Chief on the recommendations of subordinates within the military chain of command, and by constraining my diplomatic negotiating authority. Accordingly, I will apply this provision consistent with my constitutional authority and responsibilities.

Executive Authority to Control Communications with the Congress. Sections 714(1) and 714(2) in Division D prohibit the use of appropriations to pay the salary of any Federal officer or employee who interferes with or prohibits certain communications between Federal employees and Members of Congress. I do not interpret this provision to detract from my authority to direct the heads of executive departments to supervise, control, and correct employees' communications with the Congress in cases where such communications would be unlawful or would reveal information that is properly privileged or otherwise confidential.

Legislative Aggrandizements (committee-approval requirements). Numerous provisions of the legislation purport to condition the authority of officers to spend or reallocate funds on the approval of congressional committees. These are impermissible forms of legislative aggrandizement in the execution of the laws other than by enactment of statutes. Therefore, although my Administration will notify the relevant committees before taking the specified actions, and will accord the recommendations of such committees all appropriate and serious consideration, spending decisions shall not be treated as dependent on the approval of congressional committees. Likewise, one other provision gives congressional committees the power to establish guidelines for funding costs associated with implementing security improvements to buildings. Executive officials shall treat such guidelines as advisory. Yet another provision requires the Secretary of the Treasury to accede to all requests of a Board of Trustees that contains congressional representatives. The Secretary shall treat such requests as nonbinding.

Recommendations Clause Concerns. Several provisions of the Act (including sections 211 and 224(b) of title II of Division I, and section 713 in Division A), effectively purport to require me and other executive officers to submit budget requests to the Congress in particular forms. Because the Constitution gives the President the discretion to recommend only "such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient" (Article II, section 3 of the Constitution), the specified officers and I shall treat these directions as precatory.

Senate Passes Omnibus Spending Bill

Good. Let's get this the hell out of the way and move forward. The earmark debate is so side-splittingly misinformed I can hardly stand it. Even Eric Boehlert couldn't hold off the stupid today. It's not just that earmarks are a small percentage of the bill, maybe 1-2%. It's that their inclusion in a spending bill DOESN'T CHANGE THE OVERALL AMOUNT OF SPENDING. Earmarks are a technical term of art whereby representatives of the people direct small pieces of funding instead of government bureaucrats. It kills me that it takes Bob Frickin' Bennett to point out this fact, which kind of makes the whole debate completely pointless.

BENNETT: First, let me make several things clear that you perhaps don't understand. Number one, if the money were not earmarked for this purpose it would still be spent. That is, the Department of Agriculture would be spending it somewhere else. And you would not be saving a dime if you eliminate these earmarks.

Is that so damn hard? Why can't one Democratic lawmaker, or anyone from the Obama Administration, make this simple point. After that, all you're arguing about is the size of the spending. And given that the economy is falling off a cliff and no other sector is creating demand, you simply don't get far with an argument that government should be tightening its belt at this juncture. That would fall under things the willfully ignorant say, or to be redundant, things cable television news anchors say.

(By the way, I agree with exceedingly little in BoBo Brooks' article other than these sentences: "The House minority leader, John Boehner, has called for a federal spending freeze for the rest of the year. In other words, after a decade of profligacy, the Republicans have decided to demand a rigid fiscal straitjacket at the one moment in the past 70 years when it is completely inappropriate." Brooks is so thick he actually contradicts himself on this later in the column.)

This whole debate has been a perfect example of the dumbing down of America.

Chipping Away

It may be weird to have a member of the Republican leadership say out loud that their goal as a party, in a time of crisis, is to lower Democratic approval ratings, but come on, we all knew this, right? Their public statements are carefully crafted to nitpick elements of spending bills that sound more outrageous that they actually are. When those examples of "wasteful spending" aren't in the bill, they make them up. And then they offer amendments on them anyway.

Interestingly enough, all three of Kyl's amendments deal with U.S. policy towards Palestine at a time when signs are pointing to a possible unity government by Fatah and Hamas. The most eyebrow-raising of the three, however, is a bid to prevent any government money from being used to resettle Palestinian refugees from Gaza to America.

As the Mondoweiss blog explains, an Internet rumor making the rounds on the right has accused President Obama of signing an order to resettle hundreds of thousands of Hamas sympathizers in the U.S. ... without a grain of truth to it.

Heck, the entire conception of starting a firestorm around earmarks is self-evidently ridiculous. The elimination of earmarks doesn't reduce spending by one penny - all an earmark does is direct appropriations to a specific project. Without them, money would be appropriated by an executive branch bureaucrat. And Republicans know that.

“I voted to take all earmarks out, but I will come back in the new process and put that back in,” Graham insisted, saying that the convention center is important to stimulate the local economy. “I think I should have the ability as a United States senator to direct money back to my state as long as it’s transparent and it makes sense.”

So of course the entire GOP game plan is to embarrass Democrats. Unfortunately, so far it has succeeded only in embarrassing themselves. But those are only the short-term ramifications. Over the long term, all they are doing is chipping away at the notion that government can perform its core function, demonizing the activities of the Congress, evoking mistrust in elected officials, and poisoning the whole notion of federal spending. That's their REAL project.

Not A Good Time To Shut Down The Government

I'm struggling to find the explanation for why Democrats are aiding an abetting a potential government shutdown. Today Congress passed a continuing resolution to avoid this, but the threat remains. This is all over earmarks, about 2% of the bill, for a measure that Republicans and Democrats created together, last year. And given the current state of the economy, there's no such thing as wasteful spending if it means a job is created.

Even if there is principled opposition, there's no reason to vote against cloture on the part of Dems like Russ Feingold or Evan Bayh. If they don't like the final bill, they can vote against it. There's no reason to hold up the government's business by engaging in obstructionism.

Idiots.

The Scolds Never Stop

John McCain had another "old man yells at cloud" moment yesterday, complaining about earmarks in last year's spending bill, and trying to eliminate all of them. His effort lost on a bipartisan basis, probably because this is last year's spending needed to keep the government running, a shutdown at this point would be completely counter to economic fiscal stimulus, earmarks are 2% of the total bill and half of them were inserted by Republicans, including $76 million from Thad Cochran (R-MS), the overall leader.

However, this hasn't stopped the Democratic worry warts to fret about spending, at a time when there's practically no other economic activity other than that coming from the federal government.

Moderate and conservative Democrats in the Senate are starting to choke over the massive spending and tax increases in President Barack Obama’s budget plans and have begun plotting to increase their influence over the agenda of a president who is turning out to be much more liberal than they are.

A group of 14 Senate Democrats and one independent huddled behind closed doors on Tuesday, discussing how centrists in that chamber can assert more leverage on the major policy debates that will dominate this Congress [...]

Asked when he’d reach his breaking point, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, said: “Right now. I’m concerned about the amount that’s being offered in [Obama’s] budget.”

Another attendee, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), said she expected the newly formed caucus to shape Obama’s budget proposal as it moves through Congress.

“We want to give the president a chance, but our concern is going to be on the budget, looking forward,” Landrieu said. She added that she agrees with Obama that there needs to be “fundamental change” in fiscal policy, but she said “we do have to keep our eye on the long term, on intermediate and long-term fiscal responsibility.”

Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who assembled Tuesday’s skull session, added that he was “very concerned” about Washington’s level of spending, especially in a $410 billion “omnibus” spending bill to fund the government until the start of a new fiscal year in October.

As for the tax increases on high-income earners called for in Obama’s plan, Bayh said, “I do think that before we raise revenue, we first should look to see if there are ways we can cut back on spending.”

“The American people and businesses are tightening their belts,” Bayh added. “I think we need to show that the government can economize as well.”

Ladies an gentlemen, your almost-Vice President, Evan Bayh.

Once again, the path for a Democratic President must go through Democratic fiscal responsibility scolds. And this is coming in the middle of a Great Recession, where investment is non-existent, trade is stalled, and consumer spending isn't going anywhere, meaning that ONLY GOVERNMENT IS SPENDING. Cutting that spending translates directly into losing thousands of jobs. That's reality for the next year or so.

If anything, Obama is being modest in his plans. And he is paying for the big investments in his budget by making the tax code more progressive and fair. And that's the reality of the fiscal scolds - they want to protect the status quo for their buddies and contributors. They would rather the 30-year cycle of radical conservative economic policy continues unabated. Obama's budget is a a threat to the DC estabishment that is best represented by these "moderates."

It was his boldest acknowledgment yet of what is slowly becoming clear to the rest of us: That his proposals represent such a dramatic reversal from the course the nation has been following over the last eight years -- and even the last three decades -- that they will inevitably face intense resistance from Washington's traditional power centers [...]

It's worth revisiting Obama's explanation of "how we arrived at this moment" from that joint address:

"The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank. We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy, yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform. Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for.

"And though all of these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before. In other words, we have lived through an era where too often short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity, where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election.

"A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations... were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day."

The inevitable conclusion here is that establishment Washington is complicit in what went wrong. That includes all the people in positions of power who accepted what was happening as simply politics as usual -- even as the country was slowly but inevitably headed to that day of reckoning.

After all, since the Reagan era, even mainstream Democratic leaders have internalized the trickle-down, free-market, small-government mentality which Obama now blames for our woes. Few in the Democratic party -- or the mainstream media -- did much more than watch as the economic playing field tilted further and further to the advantage of the rich.

And yes, it's true that many of Obama's initiatives could well be described as pent-up Democratic goals. But you might also call them nearly-forgotten goals, as far as the current batch of Democratic leaders is concerned. Even when they controlled Congress, they failed to block budgets that turned out to be blueprints for disaster. And they either didn't fight for their principles or flinched in a pinch. I described some of their capitulations to former president George W. Bush in this December 2007 column. These very same leaders may well be motivated to -- at least -- complicate or modify Obama's proposals to validate their own previous inaction.

Exactly, I don't remember Evan Bayh or Ben Nelson or any of these scolds raising an eyebrow to any of the radically destructive policies the Bush Administration trafficked in on a daily basis. It's only with a Democratic President attempting to lead on Democratic principles that their spines stiffen.

Fortunately, Obama remains extremely popular, and he has shown an growing aptitude for this kind of conflict. However, his favorability is favored more than his policies at this point. I'm not sure if Republicans will get their act together to exploit this, but they can certainly get a boost from these "moderates" to revive their political fortunes.

So Let's Talk About Spending

Today House Republicans are going to engage in an extended whine about the omnibus federal spending bill, which they claim is being pushed through in the dead of night even though the bills have been written and available for over a year. This is a leftover from FY2009 because George Bush constantly threatened to veto the bills. But be sure to hear plenty of Republicans clamor about "runaway spending" today. They're even planning on calling for a spending freeze in the midst of a recession where government spending is practically the only economic activity available. But if they want to yammer on about waste, they might want to look in the mirror.

Republicans are expected to deliver a daylong rant Wednesday against Democratic spending legislation, yet the bill is loaded with thousands of pet projects that Republican lawmakers inserted.

Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, included $142,500 for emergency repairs to the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., joined state colleagues to include $1.425 million for Nevada "statewide bus facilities." The top two Republicans on Congress' money committees also inserted local projects.

In all, an estimated $3.8 billion worth of specific projects, called "earmarks," are in the $410 billion spending bill that the House of Representatives is to vote on Wednesday. Easy passage is expected. The Senate is expected to act soon, too, since federal agencies will run out of money a week from Friday unless new funds are enacted.

It should be noted that the earmarks are less than 1% of the overall spending. And increases for appropriations like the Congressional budget, for example, are a cause of the GOP wanting to keep the same number of staffers despite having 20% less members of Congress, turning the whole concept of welfare on its head.

The strongest part of Obama's speech last night, in my view, was when he identified the hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in the federal budget that are entirely a consequence of corporate welfare, contractor fraud and a host of other methods that the GOP has been using for decades to funnel cash out of the Treasury to their contributors. They want to have a conversation about "fiscal responsibility" that slashes any worthwhile investment in people, while keeping intact the flows into executive bank statements and massive trust funds. They have played budget games for years, hiding the true costs of their giveaways to the rich, and this is the reckoning. We don't have a spending problem, we have a priority problem. And President Obama is vowing to fix it.

In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use. We will root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.

Our job is to hold the President to this rhetorical flourish, as he'll doubtlessly be under a lot of pressure to do the opposite. But what this said to me is that Republicans and fiscal scolds are being called out. If they want to talk about runaway spending, they have to be willing to talk about where the waste actually is. There's been a class warfare in this country for 30 years and the rich have won. This is the blueprint to turning that around.

Let's Talk About Stimulus

David Herszenhorn had a pretty good piece over the weekend on the evolution of the stimulus from the House and Senate bills to the finished product. It is basically is line with Obama's initial proposal, but gets to the public faster.

Smaller in that it was cut to $787 billion from more than $800 billion in early versions in the House and Senate. And faster in that the Congressional Budget Office now projects that 74 percent of the money will be spent by Sept. 30, 2010, compared with 64 percent in the original House bill.

Now the test is whether the mix of tax cuts and government spending, including public works projects, will create jobs and spur a recovery.

No one knows how it will turn out. Even Mr. Obama, who had predicted four million new or saved jobs, has pulled back to “more than 3.5 million.”

Reading the more detailed subheads in the piece, I'm a little more gratified by it. While I still find it fairly small, this is a bold plan to build and repair infrastructure, provide aid to the poor, fund public education, and modernize the electric and broadband grids, preparing us for the 21st century. There's enough to like that Republicans are taking credit for it even though they voted against it. So there must be a couple good nuggets in there. In addition, the curbs on executive pay embedded in the bill seem real and enforceable:

The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign into law next week, limits bonuses for executives at all financial institutions receiving government funds to no more than a third of their annual compensation. The bonuses must be paid in company stock that can be redeemed only when the government investment has been repaid. With the measure, lawmakers seek to address public outrage over extravagant Wall Street paydays even as taxpayers bail out the industry.

Unlike the rules issued by the White House, the limits in the stimulus bill would apply to top executives and the highest-paid employees at all 359 banks that have already received government aid.

"This is a big deal. This is a problem," said Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the nation's largest financial services firms. "It undermines the current incentive structure."

Talbott said banking executives expected certain restrictions would be applied to them but are concerned that some of the most highly paid employees, such as top traders, who bring in hefty sums for the company, would flee to hedge funds or foreign banks that have not accepted U.S. government funds.

I just don't think that's likely. Hedge funds and foreign banks are taking a beating; this is a global crisis and nobody's really looking to hire major new talent. I'm surprised Congress managed to act this boldly.

One potential problem is the work-around to make sure there are no earmarks in the bill. The spending has been farmed out to federal agencies to distribute based on formulas, but many of those agencies have no experience distributing this kind of money, which could slow the aid as the agencies get up to speed. The Department of Energy has to parcel out amounts equal to almost twice their annual budget, for example. If this is a spur to modernize federal agencies, and possibly streamline them, all the better. Maybe we save a bit in the process. But I do expect a lag.

The biggest problem, of course, is going to be Republican cherry-picking. I heard Cokie Roberts this morning saying that the stimulus is so big that it's bound to create some waste or possibly corruption, despite the safeguards and trnsparency. The problem is that people like Cokie will let Republicans use these single instances to define the entire $800 billion dollar stimulus, instead of putting it in the proper context. Once again, Democrats will have a political problem and not a policy problem.

Congress Gets Its Hands On A Perfectly Good Stimulus Bill, Bungles It

This is flat wrong, and I think unconstitutional:

We’ve been scouring the $825 billion House version of the pending economic stimulus bill this morning, and here are five curious clauses we've found so far. While we're making phone calls, please contact us with any others you find.

1. Blago Out, Stimulus Bucks In

No Illinois state agency can spend stimulus money without the state legislature's approval, the bill says, until a certain "Rod R. Blagojevich no longer holds the office of Governor of the State of Illinois." Ouch. We've put a call into the governor's office to see what he thinks of this.

Adam Bonin has more on this, including the well-supported theory that this violates the Bill of Attainder clause in the Constitution, which stipulates that Congress cannot punish an individual with legislation. This amounts to bribing the Illinois Senate "jury" into removing Blagojevich to secure stimulus funding.

It also is, it seems to me, unnecessary. Blagojevich is not participating in the impeachment trial because he knows he's going to lose. There is no need for inducements to the Illinois Senate, because the only drama in that trial is whether every Senator will vote to remove Blago or whether there will be one holdout. This is just bad lawmaking.

So is this:

2. Sorry, Las Vegas

The bill specifically prohibits stimulus funding "for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool." No mention of roller-skating rinks.

This is only in there to rebut conservative arguments about "wasted" stimulus money, but it's absurd. Someone has to build that aquarium or zoo or golf course. That person gets a job, and spending money. Job creation is the entire POINT of the stimulus. It doesn't matter what jobs are created, in a certain sense, although jobs that are more long-term and that multiply solutions by leaving something tangible behind or contribute to, say, reducing greenhouse gases are more desirable. But eliminating projects that may be shovel-ready because of PR concerns is just bad sausage-making.

Smart Spending

I never expected a massive Keynesian stimulus to be easy. But the fact that the Obama transition needs to allay fears about the package is worrying. What economy are these neo-Hooverists looking at? Jobless claims keep jumping - expect another half-million to be out of work by next month. The housing market is still crippled with no sign of recovery. And even the lead economist of the IMF, no left-wing liberal, is warning of another Great Depression if governments don't replace consumer spending with massive spending of their own.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, is pushing governments to increase their own spending in order to support growth. The IMF has always been a big enemy of deficits. Why the reversal?

We are facing a crisis of an exceptional breadth, the basis of which is a collapse of demand. The consumer and business confidence numbers have never fallen this much since they've first been recorded. We've NEVER seen this!...

It is imperative to curb the this loss of confidence, to relaunch it and, if necessary, replace private demand, if we want to avoid a recession that turns into a Great Depression. Of course, in normal times, we would recommend that Europe reduce its budget deficits. But these are not normal times.

The fears that the Obama team is responding to are largely about limiting pork-barrel spending in the final bill. I think the nation can survive if a pet project makes its way into a trillion-dollar bill. Somebody has to build that pet project, too, and the whole point is to get money into people's hands in exchange for public works. However, that's not to say that we shouldn't be careful about the spending. On the contrary, I believe that funneling money to build more highways and roads that perpetuate unsustainable suburban sprawl is a bad idea. The opportunity of the stimulus is that we can create new economic opportunities based on building green industries and projects that can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

"We've let our infrastructure crumble for a long, long time from water to roads to bridges. It makes sense to invest in them now," Biden said.

But environmentalists and their allies view old-fashioned highway construction as encouraging longer commutes and increasing the energy-consumption crisis of the past year. "They're going to put a bunch of money through a broken system to stimulate the economy. That doesn't make sense to me," said Colin Peppard, a transportation expert for Friends of the Earth.

Peppard's group recently began a "Road to Nowhere" campaign, saying that new roads would lead to "new pollution -- keep the economic stimulus clean."

This doesn't mean that existing infrastructure shouldn't be upgraded in the meantime. But projects like rail, smart energy grids, building out broadband, and developing alternative energy need to get their share of the pie. And there are examples of where "old infrastructure" and "green infrastructure" can work together. The best example is in the building trades. The commercial real estate industry wants their own bailout, and they're going to be the next of many industries seeking one. Now, just handing over money to developers who bought high and are underwater, when the default process works perfectly well and wouldn't disrupt the greater economy much at all, makes no sense. However, if we offered developers a deal like the Architecture 2030 proposal, which would save money in energy costs and have a societal good, that would be worthwhile. And it could be extended to ordinary homeowners as well.

An outfit called Architecture 2030, founded by Edward Mazria, suggests that we offer homeowners not just low-interest loans, but a sliding scale of low-interest loans that's conditioned on renovating their homes to increase energy efficiency. Their proposed scale is on the right. The nickel explanation is below:

"Mazria walked me through a hypothetical example that highlighted the huge incentives the plan could unleash. Say you're a homeowner with a $272,000 mortgage at 5.55%, paying about $1550 a month. You decide you want your mortgage rate to drop to 3%. In order to qualify for the reduction, you have to improve the energy efficiency of your home 75% below code, and it's going to cost you a pretty penny: about $40,000.

Existing tax credits would take care of about $10,000 of that cost. The rest would get tacked on to your existing mortgage, bringing it up to $302,000. But, at 3%, you'd be paying only about $1280 — saving almost $300 a month on the mortgage alone, plus another $150 in reduced energy costs. The value of your home rises, you have more disposable income, you've given work to someone to do the upgrades for you — and s/he's now paying federal taxes, and you've reduced your carbon footprint."

The Architecture 2030 folks claim that their program (which has a component for commercial buildings as well) would cost a mere $170 billion over two years, and in return would create over 8 million new jobs, jump start a new $1.6 trillion renovation market, save consumers a boatload of money, and reduce CO2 emission by about half a billion tons. What's not to like?

I think they're being a little sunny about the positive impact, but not very much.

We definitely need to be smart like this, but it's a tough job. There are a lot of competing interests at play, and nobody's going to be totally happy. At the very least, however, this cannot look like a highway bill.

...Matt Stoller has a good piece on the politics of this. The Blue Dogs appear to favor highway and road projects, but the question is whether they have enough clout to get what they want. Also, a bill like this includes Congresscritters seeking money for their districts that split ideological lines. For instance, the major green jobs repositories in California are Bakersfield and Palm Springs, which have Republican members. I don't think the Blue Dogs are going to be able to dictate this so easily.

Ending Perpetual Privatization

Whether or not his hands are tied on future spending plans as a result of the Paulson bailout, I hope Barack Obama follows through on this:

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama moved to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility in a roiling economy, vowing on Monday to slash federal spending on contractors by 10 percent and saving $40 billion.

Urging members of his own party to be just as fiscally tough as the most conservative Republicans, Obama said the $700 billion economic bailout plan proposed by the Bush administration and congressional leaders is forcing a renewed look at federal spending.

As president, Obama said he would create a White House team headed by a chief performance officer to monitor the efficiency of government spending [...]

President Bush ran for office on a platform of efficiency in government, Obama said, noting that Bush instead has presided over a mushrooming federal budget and deficits. Under Bush, spending on contractors has more than doubled, from $203 billion in 2000 to $412 billion in 2006.

"We cannot give a blank check to Washington with no oversight and accountability, when no oversight and accountability is what got us into this mess in the first place," said Obama. He warned that even as the government moves to bail out the financial sector there are signs that special interests are looking to profit.

The rhetoric may sound fiscally conservative, but what Obama is really talking about is the privatization of everything. That includes letting private companies collect taxes instead of the IRS, letting private military contractors fight our wars instead of the US military, letting lobbyists and corporate interests run our foreign and domestic policy. And there's a pretty stark choice here, more than is conventionally described in the traditional media. The fact is that McCain has a belief in privatization as a way to drown government in the bathtub, and he certainly has not been shy in enriching those private contractors, even in the case of the earmarks he supposedly never pursues.



The fact that Sarah Palin supposedly rejected the bridge to nowhere while spending $25 million on a road to that same stretch of nowhere is similiarly discordant.

The federal government needs to do the job of the federal government. This idea that private interests are inherently more efficient has been proven a lie by the past eight years. If Barack Obama wants a legacy as a privatization hunter, I'm all for it.

Meme Watch

Let it be known that this was the week that the press caught up to everyone closely following the Presidential campaign and finally started reporting on John McCain's troubling pattern of consistent lies. It has now become a staple of campaign coverage, and the McCain campaign is on the record as calling it a deliberate strategy.

To top it off, McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said this to the Politico about the increased media scrutiny of the campaign's factual claims: "We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

What they're saying is that they don't care about the truth. They have contempt for the electorate and are cynical enough to believe that their voters will ignore reality while they create it themselves.

If you doubted that McCain offered a third Bush term, read that previous sentence again.

By the way, the lies keep on coming, about all things great and small. Turns out Sarah Palin has never been to Iraq, and her team admitted that she was only in Ireland on a refueling stop. The crowd size at recent McCain-Palin events has been inflated. It was revealed that Palin is still actively pursuing a "Bridge to Nowhere" project with federal money, all the while repeating the stock line in her stump speech that she said "thanks but no thanks" to it (even after Charlie Gibson called her out on this on national television). More fact-checks show recent ads and statements to be full of lies. They even lie in multiple languages:

The campaign Friday launched a 30-second Spanish-language television ad charging that Democrat Barack Obama and his Senate colleagues torpedoed meaningful changes in immigration laws.

"The press reports that their efforts were 'poison pills' that made immigration reform fail," the ad charges. "The result: No guest worker program. No path to citizenship. No secure borders. No reform. Is that being on our side? Obama and his congressional allies ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead."

What that's wrong: Media accounts cited two votes as effectively killing immigration reform last year — and Obama was on the same side as McCain in both.

The Obama campaign is absolutely making this an issue. Here's a piece of their memo to reporters:

Here are the facts. Governor Palin supported the Bridge to Nowhere, requested hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks, never visited Iraq, increased spending as governor, increased taxes as governor, and was about as successful selling that luxury jet on eBay as the McCain campaign has been selling her reputation as a reformer. Oh yeah, and the gas pipeline she touts won’t be usable for at least a decade, if it’s completed at all.

While the media is slowly starting to call the McCain campaign on their dishonest tactics, McCain’s staff boasts that they don’t care.

They also said yesterday that McCain is running a campaign not worthy of the office he is seeking. And they're right. If McCain were still in the Navy he would be tossed out for this kind of conduct.

Honor has suddenly taken center stage in this Presidential campaign. And McCain's is gone.

...in a way, McCain's entire focus on earmark spending as the biggest problem in the federal budget is a lie all its own. Earmark spending is miniscule. The military budget is far more central to government waste, but of course McCain procures a lot of that for his contractor buddies in Arizona, so that's sacrosanct.

The Anti-Truth Campaign

The first line of this AP story says it all.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Friday running mate Sarah Palin has never asked for money for lawmakers' pet projects as Alaska governor when in fact she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year.

They are running a campaign based on lies. Lies about their opponent's record. Lies about their own record. Lies on all things great and small.

And the Obama campaign responds by saying, b-but I'll offer real change! And anyway, McCain is old and out of touch!





The first ad is useless (does talking to the camera directly really work anymore?), the second ad would have been good three months ago but we're in a different phase of the campaign. Sen. McCain is lying about the record, lying about everything, actually, and the only antidote is to call this what it is. And then hit back with the truth, which is actually more shocking than the lies in this case.

Planned Parenthood does it:



And Defenders of Wildlife pivots.



I mean sheesh, if you wanted to go the "out of touch" route, how about the fact that just yesterday McCain called himself "divorced from everyday challenges"?

Ari Berman shows how it's done, you call these hacks liars, you call them dishonorable, you do it again and again.



I'm slightly fed up this morning.

Today In Palin

As we await the hard-hitting, brutally frank, just-the-facts-ma'am interview that I'm sure Charlie Gibson is about to throw down for his prime-time special on 20/20, today options for questions sprouted up practically all over the place.

First, we have yet another of her "accomplishments" called into question as just a substanceless catch-phrase. The natural gas pipeline she claims to have built is anything but.

Certainly she proved effective in attracting developers to a project that has eluded Alaska governors for three decades. But an examination of the pipeline project also found that Ms. Palin has overstated both the progress that has been made and the certainty of success.

The pipeline exists only on paper. The first section has yet to be laid, federal approvals are years away and the pipeline will not be completed for at least a decade. In fact, although it is the centerpiece of Ms. Palin’s relatively brief record as governor, the pipeline might never be built, and under a worst-case scenario, the state could lose up to $500 million it committed to defray regulatory and other costs.

Indeed, claiming any kind of major fiscal success in Alaska at a time of record energy prices is kind of like saying that the King of Saudi Arabia is a competent fiscal steward. It's not his leadership, but the resources in the ground that provide the wealth. Alaska is a petro-state that nevertheless steals from the federal government treasury billions upon billions in largesse to finance themselves. It's true that its proximity demands some manner of federal aid, but look at what Palin has requested in earmarks over the past year:

According to Alaska's 2009 catalog of earmark requests the state's sea life are in great need of federal money. As Politico points out, Palin's office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.

Those requests for the study of wildlife genetics and mating habits seems pretty antithetical to the long-standig views of Palin's running mate, John McCain.

Might be a good question for either Palin or McCain.

Meanwhile, the continuing saga of Troopergate has added more surprises and revelations. Palin was apparently warned by a judge to stop disparaging her sister's ex-husband, even before she became governor of the state.

Court records obtained by NEWSWEEK show that during the course of divorce hearings three years ago, Judge John Suddock heard testimony from an official of the Alaska State Troopers' union about how Sarah Palin—then a private citizen—and members of her family, including her father and daughter, lodged up to a dozen complaints against Wooten with the state police. The union official told the judge that he had never before been asked to appear as a divorce-case witness, that the union believed family complaints against Wooten were "not job-related," and that Wooten was being "harassed" by Palin and other family members.

Court documents show that Judge Suddock was disturbed by the alleged attacks by Palin and her family members on Wooten's behavior and character. "Disparaging will not be tolerated—it is a form of child abuse," the judge told a settlement hearing in October 2005, according to typed notes of the proceedings. The judge added: "Relatives cannot disparage either. If occurs [sic] the parent needs to set boundaries for their relatives."

Indeed, after she clearly fired Public Safety head Walt Monegan for his refusal to fire Wooten, an adviser to her warned her of the abuse of power perception, telling her that "'the situation is now grave' and recommended that she and her husband, Todd Palin, apologize for 'overreaching or perceived overreaching' for using her position to try to get Trooper Mike Wooten fired from the force." He also told her to fire any staff members who contacted Monegan over the firing.

Of course, Palin didn't step back then, and she's certainly not now, enlisting her state Attorney General to help quash subpeonas that may arise during the legislative investigation.

"The eyes of the nation have now turned upon us,'' senior Assistant Attorney General Michael Barnhill wrote. "We think there is a legitimate concern that this investigation is no longer being conducted in a fair manner.''

Barnhill complained in a seven-page letter about public comments made by Hollis French, a Democratic senator, that Palin or her aides may have broken the law by allegedly obtaining personnel files of the fired state public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan.

TPM Muckraker is skeptical that much will come of the investigation, as Republicans in the state who were eager to look into this before Palin was made their party's Vice Presidential nominee feel less inclined to do so now.

But there's one story that could absolutely get lots of attention, and should, especially by women.

Speaking to a teleconference audience of reporters around the nation, former Gov. Tony Knowles and current Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein -- both Democrats -- accused Palin of misleading the public in her new role as the vice presidential running mate of Arizona Sen. John McCain.

While some of their complaints have already been aired, Knowles broke new ground while answering a reporter's question on whether Wasilla forced rape victims to pay for their own forensic tests when Palin was mayor.

True, Knowles said.

Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla prompted the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill -- signed into law by Knowles -- that banned the practice statewide.

"There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla," Knowles said.

Note that it essentially was an Obama surrogate that pushed this story into the mainstream. It's getting other traditional media pickup, too.

I cannot imagine someone so callous as to charge victims of rape for their own exams. That's shocking. Disgusting. It speaks to judgment. And it should be known by every family in America.

UPDATE: Great catch by Jed - McCain voted against Joe Biden's bill which ended the practice of charging victims for rape exams. McCain and Palin really are soulmates.

This HAS to be an ad.

Working Our Own Refs

It's clear that the media has little choice but to fact check the McCain campaign's decidedly wrong comments on earmarks and federal largesse. It hasn't changed behavior, however, nor will it. That's a key difference between Democrats and Republicans

John McCain and Sarah Palin criticized Democrat Barack Obama over the amount of money he has requested for his home state of Illinois, even though Alaska under Palin's leadership has asked Washington for 10 times more money per citizen for pet projects.

At a rally in swing state Missouri, the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate accused Obama of requesting nearly $1 billion in earmarks for his state during his time as a senator. The new line of attack came after Obama made his first direct criticism of Palin over the weekend, using the topic of earmarks, which are special projects that lawmakers try to get for their districts and constituents.

"Just the other day our opponent brought up earmarks — and frankly I was surprised that he would even raise the subject at all," Palin said. "I thought he wouldn't want to go there."

Obama hasn't asked for any earmarks this year. Last year, he asked for $311 million worth, about $25 for every Illinois resident. Alaska asked this year for earmarks totaling $198 million, about $295 for every Alaska citizen.

There is no such thing as "contradiction" in the conservative lexicon. The McCain campaign has repeated the nonsense about Palin opposing the bridge to nowhere, despite documentary evidence to the contrary, 19 times and counting. It really doesn't matter to them. They're going to continue to portray themselves as fiscal conservative patriots:

The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters.

The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin's legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla.

"It's too bad that the city of Wasilla didn't do their homework and secure the land before they began construction," said Kathy Wells, a longtime activist here. "She was not your ceremonial mayor; she was in charge of running the city. So it was her job to make sure things were done correctly."

I guess she didn't know that she had "actual responsibilities."

Sebastian Mallaby, hardly a liberal, gets at the heart of this persistent variance between appearance and reality today in his column, which raps McCain for lying about Obama's tax plan.

McCain used to be a real straight talker. On campaign finance, spending earmarks, Iraq and immigration, he has fought bravely for his principles; and that record might have been a trump against an opponent who has taken almost no such risks. But we are now witnessing what might be called McCain's Palinization. McCain once criticized Christian conservatives as agents of intolerance, but he has caved in to their intolerance of a pro-choice running mate. McCain claims to be devoted to his country, yet he would saddle it with a vice president who is unprepared to serve as commander in chief. In the same sad way, McCain has caved in to his party's anti-tax fanatics. The man of principle has become a panderer. The straight talker flip-flops.

I think as the progressive netroots we need to reward those journalists who tell the truth, and mau-mau the others into doing the same. It's an uphill battle - in crucial ways the game is rigged - but it's worth doing because otherwise you cede all ground to the right. Tell them to put the lies in context, to build an overall picture of dishonesty around the McCain campaign.

The Latest On Troopergate et al.

Quite a few developments, actually. Michael Wooten has emerged for an interview with CNN:



Wooten doesn't come off as entirely credible here, and he admits he tasered his own son in a demonstration. I don't know where the sympathies are going to go, but the personality of Wooten vs. Palin is besides the point. The Public Safety Administrator wouldn't fire him, so Palin fired Walt Monegan. And she used her public office to settle private scores. That's the issue.

The Alaska State Legislature has now fast-tracked the investigation, which means the details will be released earlier in October and not by Halloween, as scheduled. However, while they will issue subpoenas in the case, Palin will not be compelled to testify.

The commitee, led by Sen. Hollis French, an Anchorage Democrat also announced that it would meet on September 12 to issue subpoenas in the case.

But according to the release, Palin herself will not be subpoenaed. The committee still holds out hope that she will talk to indepedendent investigator Steven Branchflower voluntarily.

"We also discussed and agreed amongst ourselves that no subpoena will be issued for the Governor," said Representative Nancy Dahlstrom, R-Eagle River. "She has told the public that she intends to cooperate with the investigation, indeed, she has told the public that she welcomes the investigation and I have every faith that she means it. If necessary we can send Mr. Branchflower to wherever the Governor is, or she can give her statement to him over the telephone, whatever is most convenient for her. We recognize that her schedule is extremely busy, and we want to accommodate that."

I think the majority-Republican committee is being way too nice to Palin here. She has explicitly said that she wouldn't testify in the case. And now they've moved up their deadline, making it easier for her to elude them. Like Palin's media strategy, her strategy will be to deny any request followed by attacking them for bothering to investigate. There won't be a backlash strategy, she won't call the Alaska Legislature "effete" or "East Coast liberals," but she will certainly mourn the "witch hunt" that intrudes on her private life (all the while making sure everyone sees the results of her private life, which she'll use as a human shield).

Meanwhile, on the earmark front, it turns out that the lobbyist for Wasilla, Alaska is the lobbyist that secured the bridge to nowhere, and Palin was certainly happy with his performance while she was mayor. In fact, she's praised the earmarking done by her porkbarrel colleagues in the Congress as recently as this year:

"And our congressional delegation, God bless 'em. They do a great job for us," she said at the forum hosted by the Alaska Professional Design Council. "Representative Don Young, especially God bless him, with transportation -- Alaska did so well under the very basic provisions of the transportation act that he wrote just a couple of years ago. We had a nice bump there. We're very, very fortunate to receive the largesse that Don Young was able to put together for Alaska."

Young barely hung on in his primary race - will Palin endorse him? Will she endorse the indicted Ted Stevens, who she ran a PAC for a few years ago?

Radio silence.

Amateur Hour

Another sign that the Republican Party has divested itself of all competent people is that they have this firecracker of a Vice President, but they did such a craptacular job of vetting her that they have to send her up to Alaska for a week off the campaign trail to hide her away.

CHUCK TODD:Well Ron, We’ve been able to see that there are a few folks who are saying [Palin is] actually going to hole up in Alaska for a little, she’s got to see her son off who’s going to be deployed to Iraq, so we may not see her on the campaign trail for a little while.

RON ALLEN: Yes she hasn’t been home for a long time, and she’s obviously got some business to deal with there.

Usually, what you do after introducing someone to the nation, and getting a positive reception, is you CAPITALIZE on it. But the McCain campaign is so terrified of an unscripted moment or a need to answer questions that they literally have to send her 6,000 miles away from the media glare. In fact, they're going to try and get through the entire campaign without having a question lobbed at their VP nominee.

Now, aside from this being a direct threat to democracy and the desire to show the nation only propaganda and nothing else, this is just bad strategy. Here's the one asset to the ticket - really the only thing firing up the base right now - and they sock her away. I know there's a lot for her to work on in Alaska - there's that road to nowhere to build, with $100 million in taxpayer money connecting about 10,000 people to one another, and there's that ethics inquiry to squash, and a subpoena to avoid, and there are all those issues to learn about, except for energy, where she's so smart that she actually believes, contra George Bush and John McCain, that we can totally drill our way out of crisis, and her perspective is great for Alaskans and oil companies but bad for humanity... so yeah, maybe she needs a week or so.

But still, taking your best asset off the trail with 8 weeks to go until the election? That's just dumb. And it's not like it'll stop the media hounds, either.

Who the heck is running the McCain campaign, and are they trying to lose?

Good Speaker, Same Lies

If this is indicative of the reaction to last night's set of speeches, then I'm not too concerned. The GOP is running a red meat base strategy because they think the low-information voters will just jump on board with the tougher candidate. Na ga happen.

In two different focus groups of Clinton-supporting Nevada women -- married and unmarried -- conducted immediately after Gov. Sarah Palin's Wednesday night speech to the Republican National Convention, a few common reactions quickly took shape.

First, women in both groups were impressed with Palin's speaking ability and poise. But they were hardly convinced that she was qualified to be vice president, or that she truly represented the "change" they were looking for, especially in light of what was deemed an overly harsh "sarcasm" pervading her address [...]

In the "married" group, when one attendee kicked off the discussion by saying "she's a good speaker, and a crowd pleaser," the rest of the room articulated their agreement. "I didn't expect to be as impressed as I was," said another respondent. But then another woman added: "Once she started mudslinging, I thought, it's the same old crap as other politicians. McCain used her to get the women's vote. And she's using McCain."

"Thank you," another woman responded. "That really upset me; there was no need for that. It was snippy."

The unmarried group also voiced similar objections to the harsh, partisan edge of Palin's remarks. "I'm not impressed with her at all as a person," one said, citing her "finger pointing" and general sarcasm after the group had generally agreed that she was a talented public speaker.

Still not all focus group members thought Palin came off too harsh. "She didn't seem very aggressive to me at all," said one unmarried participant.

But in both groups, narrow majorities said they held a more negative view of Palin after her speech. "She comes off pretty cutthroat," said one.

On other issues, women in both groups said they wanted to hear more of Palin's own policy views, outside the realm of energy. Education, heath care, the economy and Iraq were all cited as areas in which women were hungry for more information -- especially in light of McCain's age. "I think America is concerned, because of McCain's age, that we're gonna have a female president who's maybe inexperienced. The nation needs to know what her issues are," said one married respondent, which prompted another to add: "I don't think she's got what it takes." An unmarried participant said she had yet to hear enough "in regards to her personal views, which could be implicated on us if McCain was to die."

The speech didn't reflect her views because it wasn't her speech; it was written for somebody else. And she delivered it well, but the effect showed her to be just another Republican politician playing the resentment card. Works well in the hall, not necessarily at home.

Not only that, when there was substance, it was a set of lies:

PALIN: "I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history. And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly forty billion dollar natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence. That pipeline, when the last section is laid and its valves are opened, will lead America one step farther away from dependence on dangerous foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart.

THE FACTS: Palin implies that construction has begun on a major natural gas pipeline from the top of Alaska into Canada. That is not correct.

In fact, no building has begun and actual construction is years away, if it ever happens. This summer the Alaska Legislature, at Palin's request, passed a bill under which the state will issue a "license" to a Canadian energy company, TransCanada Corp., and pay it up to $500 million as an incentive to someday build this enormous project, which Alaska politicians have long sought with little success. The license is not a construction contract, and federal energy regulators have not yet approved the project [...]

PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."

THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.

In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation, although she has cut, by more than half, the amount the state sought from Washington this year. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to Gravina Island, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

It's amazing that she kept in the bridge to nowhere line, when she's documented as supporting it. And this memo of an earmark with Palin's own handwriting on it, pronouncing "We did well!!!" just shows how bankrupt this "reformer" meme is. Here's another report fact-checking the speech. Obviously the GOP hopes that they can keep lying their way through it.

And there was one line that overreached.

“Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown,” Ms. Palin told the delegates in a speech that sought to eviscerate Mr. Obama, as delegates waved signs that said “I love hockey moms.” “And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Let's see if the media will react to a Democratic hissy fit. Because there's ample opportunity. Roland Martin lays this out. Community organizers, which were part of George H.W. Bush's thousand points of light, give comfort to the suffering, help save jobs, create opportunity. In the largely white confines of the Republican convention, the phrase is a slur, like "ghetto hustler," but lots and lots of people benefit from community groups, including church groups, and the help they provide ordinary people. The Obama campaign is going to try and ramp this up, they've already done so in an email to supporters:

I wasn't planning on sending you something tonight. But if you saw what I saw from the Republican convention, you know that it demands a response.

I saw John McCain's attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a part of this campaign.

But worst of all -- and this deserves to be noted -- they insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process.

You know that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, everyday people have the power to build something extraordinary when we come together. Make a donation of $5 or more right now to remind them.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.

Let's clarify something for them right now.

Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.

And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.

Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it's happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.

Meanwhile, we still haven't gotten a single idea during the entire Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies.

It's now clear that John McCain's campaign has decided that desperate lies and personal attacks -- on Barack Obama and on you -- are the only way they can earn a third term for the Bush policies that McCain has supported more than 90 percent of the time.

But you can send a crystal clear message.

Enough is enough. Make your voice heard loud and clear by making a $5 donation right now:

https://donate.barackobama.com/fightback

Thank you for joining more than 2 million ordinary Americans who refuse to be silenced.

They can go ahead and hate the people who try to make a difference in their communities. They can keep turning up their nose at regular people. Winning this election will be about making sure those people know who's on their side.

Palin read a TelePrompTer well last night, but I'm not sure it fundamentally changed this campaign. And if the Obama campaign can pull off the righteous indignation, it might have hurt.

Scandal Overload

I actually think this mad rush to do John McCain's vetting work for him has led to too much information out there about Sarah Palin. It's simply not possible to process it all. There are important issues and not-so-important issues and issues that aren't important but bring up other issues that might be, and the whole thing devolves into a kind of scandal morass not unlike what you see with the Bush Administration, allowing the offending party to emerge relatively unscathed. It's harder for Palin because this is her debut in the national spotlight, but the effect is the same. Like I said, I think she's going to have a great speech tonight and the media will do a complete 180, even though she'll be unchallenged on many fronts and omit key details while defining herself completely on her terms.

She'll call herself a reformer and discuss how she took on the "old boy's club" of backroom politics in Alaska. But there is now documentary evidence that she supported the "Bridge to Nowhere" throughout 2006 until it became a national laughingstock, and she made a career as a small-town mayor out of calling for earmarks, even some that wound up on John McCain's pork-barrel list of unnecessary expenditures. She's even defended the earmarking process while governor:

This year, Palin, who has been governor for nearly 22 months, defended earmarking as a vital part of the legislative system. "The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship," she wrote in a newspaper column.

(she's not entirely wrong here - earmarks are overrated as a budget-buster - but the success with which Alaska gets their federal projects funded is out of proportion with the rest of the country, and with their petro-dollars that looks even worse.)

She'll call herself someone who rooted out the corruption and impropriety in government, yet she has a clear record of abuse of power, firing public officials not for lapses in their job performance but insufficient loyalty.

She'll call herself someone who held public officials to the standards of all citizens, but in the current "Troopergate" case, where she dismissed Walt Monegan, the Department of Public Safety head who wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law, she's clearly obstructing the investigation.

Gov. Sarah Palin wants a state board to review the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan -- taking the unusual step of making an ethics complaint against herself.

Her lawyer sent an "ethics disclosure" Monday night to Attorney General Talis Colberg. The governor asked that it go to the three-person Personnel Board as a complaint. While ethics complaints are usually confidential, Palin wants the matter open [...]

Tom Daniel, an Anchorage labor and employment lawyer hired by the board in the Renkes case, took a quick look at Palin's complaint Tuesday.

"It appears that the Governor has filed an ethics complaint against herself. ... This is very unusual because ethics complaints typically are filed against others," Daniel wrote in an e-mail responding to a Daily News query.

Asked whether the personnel board could take the investigation away from the Legislature -- as Palin wants to do -- Daniel answered: "I've never looked at that issue, but I can't see why filing a complaint with the personnel board would deprive the Legislature of the right to conduct its own investigation."

Aides are also refusing to testify in the probe.

And then there are her many troubling stances on issues like reproductive rights, family planning, science, global warming, book burning (!) and a host of others.

This is actually too much to digest at once. And so it heads down the memory hole. Of course, once the anaesthesia of the speech wears off, there'll be more drip-drip-drip.

...UPDATE: Some speech samples here. It's going to be tough and straight-up Orthogonian politics of resentment. We'll see if she can channel her anger at being called out for ridicule this week; I think she's up to the task, and this backlash stuff is standard Republican politics when they are put up against the wall. Stoller is asking the right question - will this be the right way to introduce yourself to the whole nation, including independents?

Palin's Night v. Palin's Reality

Sarah Palin is going to have a great night. Everyone knows that, yes? She'll have a home-field advantage, won't have to answer any questions, and has spoken in front of crowds of this size in the past week. She has personal charisma and everyone in the audience will be rooting for her. The entire night will be defined on her terms, and the media is aching to deem her a success after a turbulent week. The media went out on a limb in focusing on personal issues instead of the very serious allegations lodged against her. She has an easy parry for that, and it'll turn them around.

But there will be a lot left unsaid tonight. For instance, how many times will Palin simply not tell the truth in her speech? Already, we've seen her lie multiple times in her introductory speech.

PALIN (8/29/08): I signed major ethics reforms and I appointed both Democrats and independents to serve in my administration. And I've championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress, thanks but no thanks on that Bridge to Nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said, we'd build it ourselves [...]

In fact, Palin never “told Congress” a bloomin’ thing about that much-derided bridge or earmark; Congress had removed itself from the matter thirteen months before she took office. But just to establish the fuller record, let’s ask two more obvious questions. When did Palin “champion reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress?” And returning to her alleged defiance of Congress: When did Palin “tell Congress” that “if our state wanted a bridge, we'd build it ourselves?”

“If our state wanted a bridge, I said, we'd build it ourselves?” Question: When did Palin say or do something that dimly resembles that? [...]

And no, that isn’t the only howler in Palin’s new stump presentation. In this passage from Friday’s speech, she gives an absurdly bowdlerized account of her vastly heroic work on behalf of Alaska’s tax-payers:

PALIN: Along with fellow reformers in the great state of Alaska, as governor I stood up to the old politics as usual, to the special interests, to the lobbyists, the big oil companies, and the good old boy network. When oil and gas prices went up so dramatically, and the state revenues followed with that increase, I sent a large share of that revenue directly back to the people of Alaska.

What a champion of the people! But Palin vastly misstates this heroic tale too. Once again, she has basically lied.

What’s wrong with Palin’s account? She makes it sound like “state revenues” soared because “oil and gas prices went up so dramatically.” But this omits a fundamental part of this story; in fact, state revenues soared because Palin and the Alaska legislature raised taxes on the oil companies!

Whether it's the bridge/earmark nonsense, or casting herself as a reformer despite hiring a lobbyist with ties to Jack Abramoff and Ted Stevens while mayor of Wasilla, and taking money from the same interests that have led Stevens to be indicted, or even claiming that she's visited Ireland when she was actually on a refueling stopover for a half-hour, the official story is riddled with lies. And there are likely to be more tonight. And it's unclear whether or not they'll be reported.

Then there's the extremism, which may come out in the speech in oblique ways, but not nearly in ways that would offend or shock the vast majority of what will prove to be a large viewing public. There's the total rejection of women's reproductive rights (including in the cases of rape of incest) and the slashing of funding for the very teen mothers that she now has in her own family. But there's more. The Alaska Independence Party, of which her husband is a former longtime member, and which she courted as recently as 2002, is the Alaska conduit for the Constitution Party, which has as its goal "to restore American jurisprudence to Biblical common-law functions" (that's a direct quote). And Mrs. Palin has her very own pastor problem:

...just two weeks ago, when Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the founder of Jews for Jesus [...]

Brickner then explained that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jewish.

“The Jewish community, in particular, has a difficult time understanding this reality,” he said.

Brickner’s mission has drawn wide criticism from the organized Jewish community, and the Anti-Defamation League accused them in a report of “targeting Jews for conversion with subterfuge and deception.”

Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.

"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can't miss it."

Palin was in church that day, Kroon said, though he cautioned against attributing Brickner’s views to her.

Uh, God damn America?

This is the perspective you won't hear tonight, and there certainly won't be any Democrats in the story the way Republicans were all over the DNC. Unfortunately, this is the night when narratives will be cemented, and the media will make their judgment. I hope the Obama campaign has a way to get out the real record.

Sharks Patrol These Waters

When I last left the Internet for a delightful Labor Day barbecue, the questioned raised about Sarah Palin were merely the stuff of blog comment sections and the like. It took what ought to be a private occurrence of the Governor's 17 year-old daughter's pregnancy, but the traditional media has now caught on that this pick is exceedingly strange, and that the only people who knew less about her than the American public were John McCain's Vice Presidential vetting team.

Greg Sargent has a great rundown.

* The news that Palin once backed the Bridge to Nowhere went national.

* It emerged that Palin has links to the bizarro Alaska Independence Party, which harbors the goal of seceding from the union that McCain and Palin seek to lead.

* The news broke that as governor, Palin relied on an earmark system she now opposes. Taken along with the Bridge to Nowhere stuff, this threatens to undercut her reformist image, something that was key to her selection as McCain's Veep candidate.

* The news broke that Palin's 17-year-old daughter became pregnant out of wedlock at a time when the conservative base had finally started rallying behind McCain's candidacy.

* Barely moments after McCain advisers put out word that McCain had known of Bristol Palin's pregnancy, the Anchorage Daily News revealed that Palin's own spokesperson hadn't known about it only two days ago.

* A senior McCain adviser at the Republican convention was forced into the rather embarrassing position of arguing that McCain had known about the pregnancy "last week" -- without saying what day last week he knew about it.

* It came out that Republican lawyers are up in Alaska vetting Palin -- now, more than 72 hours after it was announced that she'd been picked.

* Palin lawyered up in relation to the trooper-gate probe in Alaska -- a move that ensures far more serious attention to the story from the major news orgs.

There's actually more. The lawyer she hired in the trooper-gate probe - which is being paid for by state taxpayers - asked for all documents from the investigator, a discovery request which may make sense in a grand jury but not in an independent legislative investigation. ABC is on the case of the Alaska Independence Party, which is kind of a big deal - a secessionist group which possibly has ties to separatist militias. The earmark story has gone national - turns out that as mayor she had a personal lobbyist that secured around $27 million in federal earmarks. There are at least 10 McCain operatives up in Anchorage at this point, and didn't get there until THURSDAY, the day before the choice was announced. And major media is asking the forbidden questions:

While there was no sign that her formal nomination this week was in jeopardy, the questions swirling around Ms. Palin on the first day of the Republican National Convention, already disrupted by Hurricane Gustav, brought anxiety to Republicans who worried that Democrats would use the selection of Ms. Palin to question Mr. McCain’s judgment and his ability to make crucial decisions.

...and...

Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina said that he had heard no discussion about removing Ms. Palin from the ticket. In fact, he said, he thought her daughter’s pregnancy would not hurt her with voters.

What's notable is that the media is asking the question of if she'll be removed from the ticket. It's not a far reach to go from if to when. When the traditional media smells blood in the water, ideology goes out the window. Check out Campbell Brown, married to Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor Campbell Brown, eviscerating a McCain spokesman.



Focus groups are weighing in with, shall we say, concern, and what's more, major media is reporting on them. And the secessionist party thing is so hot to handle that McCain's camp is not commenting on it. They tried to dump a lot of this news on the Labor Day holiday with a major hurricane hitting land and it didn't work. They are completely off message, the revamped convention (which already lost a day's worth of attacking Obama) is at a crossroads, and the questions from the talking heads will be all about Palin.

I actually hope he keeps her on the ticket at this point, this is too entertaining...