So why hasn't Obama been a leader in crafting his major policy objective?

President Obama has been putting forth a full court press to press the Senate version of the bill that is in place now and basically matches the House bill except they've added about another $100 billion. He has been making a public appearance every day to push for the passage of that bill and even took to the opinion pages of the Washington Post to urge passage of the bill. He was writing about that specific plan and telling us how much it would do for the economy and our long term problems.

Now we have this bipartisan group trying to cut out about $100 billion from the bill so that they can come up with something that will gain a few Republican votes and pass. And they're patting themselves on the back for saving Obama from failing with his highest priority.

But Ms. Collins said Mr. Obama had offered encouragement. Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, said the work of the group could ultimately be a plus for the president by coming up with a package that cost less and led to more jobs.

“We might be the president’s best allies, helping him achieve his objective but honoring the reform message he stands for,” Mr. Bayh said.

President Obama seems really passive in this whole procedure. He allowed Pelosi and crew to craft the House bill. Then he urged the Representatives to support that bill even though it didn't fit the criteria that he'd trumpeted previously of having 40% in tax cuts. After that he allowed the Senate leadership to put together their version of the bill. And now he's pushing for that version of the bill. Right now the moderates might put together a bill that can get a few Republican votes. He'll probably urge for passage of that bill.

But why hasn't he offered more leadership on what should be in the bill in the first place instead of outsourcing his high priority policy making to the Hill? He's turned himself into chief lobbyist for the bill rather than the man at the table making sure that it's a decent bill that matches his priorities in the first place.

Instead of a slightly less awful bill, pass a real emergency stimulus bill

There is a bipartisan group of senators sitting around trying to cut out some of the bloated spending so they can get a slightly less bloated bill through the Senate. This would seem to be a lifesaver for the Democrats, something that such senators like Susan Collins are always willing to do. But Harry Reid doesn't seem to be at all grateful that these moderate senators might pull his bacon out of the fire to pass the bill.

"As I have explained to the people within that group, they cannot hold the president of the United States hostage," fumed Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.). "If they think they are going to rewrite this bill and Barack Obama's going to walk away from what he has been trying to do for the American people, they've got another thought coming."

Holding the president hostage? This caused the workhorses to rear up.

"Oh, goodness, no," said Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) as he returned to the dealmaking table in Dirksen. "I'm for human rights."

And Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) chuckled at her leader's accusation. "A little dramatic, don't you think?"

Instead of nibbling around the edges to cut a few billion here and there, I wish they'd take the advice of Alice Rivlin which Bill Kristol distills here.

“This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending -- it's a strategy for America's long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education.”

With this key sentence from his op-ed in the Washington Post today, President Obama has given Republicans a golden opportunity: Insist on splitting the legislation being debated on the Senate floor into a true short-term stimulus, which can pass quickly, and long-term policy proposals, which require serious debate.

Republicans should stop trying to improve the unimproveable with small-bore amendments to the current legislative package. Instead, they can point out that Obama is supporting under the guise of emergency legislation a bloated catch-all of stimulus, pork and (often bad) policy. They can make clear that Republicans will support a real short-term stimulus (pro-growth tax cuts, housing measures and a few targeted spending provisions unemployment and COBRA extensions) that meets Larry Summers’s criteria of being targeted, timely and temporary. They should introduce such a measure as a substitute -- “The Emergency Economic Growth Bill of 2009” -- and trumpet their vigorous support of it. And they should insist that all the “energy, health care and education” proposals be debated in an orderly and serious way in the regular legislative process -- not jammed through as part of an emergency “stimulus.”

This strategy depends on GOP willingness to slow the process down and to challenge Obama’s arbitrary Presidents’ Day deadline. The Republican position should be: We’ll pass on this emergency timetable a real stripped-down emergency stimulus. But if Obama insists on legislation incorporating an alleged “strategy for America’s long-term growth,” then the country deserves hearings and debate that obviously will take some time. And Republicans should make clear they cannot agree to limiting debate to a couple of days on such momentous long-term legislation.

In other words: If Obama wants a stimulus, Republicans will give it to him tomorrow. It’s the president’s and the Democrats’ insistence on incorporating a huge and problematic policy agenda in this one bill that’s delaying action. Why then, Republicans can ask, is President Obama delaying a necessary, short-term, emergency growth package?

This makes such good sense that of course Susan Collins will ignore it. When they've cut out a mere $100 billion from the bill, we'll have to see whether the other Democrats will still vote for the bill. Probably they will since they'll still have a lot of what they want in the bill. And with Susan Collins and one more Republican senator they'll pass a slightly less awful bill. They still won't be able to answer why the emergency bill can't be stripped down to whatever is related to stimulating the economy right now instead of doing long-term spending that didn't need to go through the normal rules of debate on appropriations. Susan Collins won't be able to answer that question but she'll be happy to preen about her efforts at bipartisanship.

Forget that no-earmarks pledge

Remember how Obama and Biden vowed that there would absolutely no earmarks in the so-called stimulus bill. Well, of course, any bill that has that much money at stake is going to include earmarks and ProPublica, part of the Sunlight Foundation, is listing the earmarks that they're finding in this bill. My favorite is the $198,000,000 for Filipino World War II veterans that Hawaii's Senator Inouye placed in the bill. That might be a perfectly fine thing to do, but it doesn't have a thing to do with stimulating our economy. Most of those veterans don't even live in the United States. Why put it in an emergency stimulus bill instead of debating them under normal budgetary procedures?

Stoking fear on the economy

The economy is doing miserably, but that is not enough for the Democrats who have to heighten all sense of emergency in order to pass their porkapalooza bill. Charles Krauthammer notes how Obama's message has transmogrified into saying that the only thing we have to fear is not passing hundreds of billions of dollars that will do nothing this year to stimulate the economy.

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."

-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

....And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Ouch.

If the nation is truly in such a dire emergency, then instead of rushing through a bill outside the normal appropriations process where all this new spending can be debated alongside other spending and see if it should be a higher priority. Strip out the parts of the bill that are indeed stimulus and pass that. Save the rest of the extra spending that might be totally defensible, but do it under normal rules and as part of the budget.

Just remember, after they get done with the so-called stimulus, they still have to deal with the threatened TARP II for the banks and more bailout for the auto companies. Then they have to undertake to try to pass the regular budget which they haven't even started to tackle.

More ethics questions for Good Ol' Charlie Rangel

As if all the other questions about Rangel about not paying taxes on his property owned overseas and having four rent-controlled apartments weren't enough, there are new questions swirling around the guy. He wrote a book and somehow never reported the income from that book.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) is facing new questions about why he has not disclosed any royalty income on his 2007 memoir … And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since: From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress.

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocate for government transparency, wants to know why the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee has failed to report royalty income and has not voluntarily disclosed details of his book contract.

Sunlight senior fellow Bill Allison noted that Rangel’s book has already been published in paperback form, usually a sign that the hardback version sold enough copies to merit a second publishing. Rangel’s contract is with Thomas Dunne Books, a subsidiary of MacMillan.

While House ethics rules don’t require the public disclosure of book contract details, they do require members to report all outside income, including book royalties. The threshold for reporting is $200 for outside earned income.

Oops, I'm sure it was just an innocent oversight like all his other ethics failures.

It's gotten some positive reviews on Amazon so perhaps you would like to purchase it and give him some more income to forget to report to the House.

His office is claiming that the Congressman received no proceeds at all from the book and that is why he didn't not report them, but that raises other questions.

Also, was there an agreement with the publisher for whatever share of the proceeds the author would normally get to be donated to a charity? In whose name would it have been donated? Or, in lieu of royalties, did he get extra author’s copies to distribute to friends and supporters? Did he write the book for free, or was there some other form of compensation? Of course, it’s also possible that the book didn’t sell well enough to generate royalty payments, though it did manage to eke out a spot at the bottom of the New York Times’ hard cover poli-book best seller list (which, I hasten to add, is not the same thing as the New York Times Best Seller list) two months running after its release, and was reissued in paperback (usually a sign of some sales).

But wait, wait, that's not all!

The Sunlight Foundation, which is a nonpartisan watchdog group which strives to bring more transparency to Congress, has been researching Charlie Rangel. And they find that the guy is really quite forgetful.

The Sunlight Foundation report found that assets worth between $239,026 and $831,000 have appeared or vanished from Rangel’s annual financial disclosure reports with no explanation of when they were acquired, how long they were held, or when they were sold, as required by House rules.

Bill Allison, who conducted the study for Sunlight, said the omissions point to “consistent sloppiness” and failure to follow House disclosure rules.

I'm sure it's all very innocent and the guy charged with leading the House on writing our tax laws is just making these little mistakes with following the House rules and paying his own taxes and following New York City laws on rent control. But pull out the board game of "What If This Were a Republican?" and imagine how the media and the Democrats would be howling about keeping this guy in charge of the Ways and Means Committee while he's failed to answer all these ethical questions. I guess that the same innumerate Speaker of the House who thinks that the American economy is losing 500 million jobs a month has complete understanding about how the tax guy can not pay his taxes and forget to follow House rules.

Obama losing the message wars because the bill is stuck on stupid

Politico has an analysis of why Obama is losing the message war on the stimulus bill and public approval for the bill is decreasing. Jeanne Cummings, the piece's author, goes through several explanations such as the problems that the new administration is facing with out-of-date internet technology and laws that prevent the White House from using all the tools that the Obama presidential campaign used so effectively.

Obama’s campaign was lauded for its visionary use of modern tools for old-fashioned politics. Through the Internet, it recruited supporters, collected dollars, rallied supporters and organized get-out-the vote operations.

But when these modern heroes arrived at the White House, it was like the lights all went out.
Their contact with their millions-fold supporters was cut off, literally, as e-mail systems broke down and ‘The List’ of political supporters was blocked at the iron gate.

To meet government ethics rules, the campaign operation and its grassroots army were forced to de-camp to the Democratic National Committee, robbing the president of one of his most potent political weapons just as the stimulus bill was under consideration in the House.

....Obama had roughly 90 people working at his headquarters on Internet outreach and new technology projects, observes Joe Trippi, a Democratic operative who broke new ground on modern campaigning during Howard Dean’s 2004 Democratic primary bid.

Even with closet-sized spaces, the White House can only accommodate about only about 200 or so people for jobs ranging from national security to health care reform to Internet guru.

The Obama team “built this incredible campaign and now they have these ridiculously primitive tools. The communication tools they mastered don’t exist in the White House. It’s like they are in a cave,” said Trippi.

And then there are laws preventing coordination with the independent groups airing ads targeting swing legislators to urge them to support the bill. So the groups ended up airing an ad in New Hampshire targeting Judd Gregg just as he was nominated to be Secretary of Commerce. And they ran ads asking people if they were for Obama or Rush as if a radio talk show host were the equivalent of the President of the United States.

Cummings mentions the real problem with Obama's message on the stimulus package. It's a dang awful bill! He is not just selling his own awesome self but a bill packed full with goodies for Democratic interest groups and government entities and not enough of what his own economic adviser said was essential - targeted, timely, and temporary." Instead he was passive in allowing the Hill Democrats to craft a bill that is none of those things.

President Obama might not like to admit it, but his problem is not a tactical problem in getting his message out. The real problem is with what his message is. The Democrats might despise Karl Rove, but he makes a lot of sense in his column today about what is wrong with their bill.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama attacked "trickle down economics" as "bankrupt" and an "old, discredited" philosophy that "didn't work." He was wrong. Even worse, though, is that he and congressional Democrats are embracing a Democratic version of trickle-down economics that won't work.

It's embodied in the House-passed "stimulus" bill, H.R. 1, whose deeply flawed assumption is that spending $1 trillion to grow government will trickle down to help people who lost jobs. The Democrats' spending is horribly mismatched with industries that have suffered job loss.
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Since December 2007, Americans lost 791,000 jobs in manufacturing, 681,000 jobs in professional and business services, 632,000 jobs in construction, 522,000 jobs in retail, 167,000 jobs in hospitality, and 576,000 jobs in the rest of the service industry. It would be logical for policy makers to focus on job creation in these sectors.

Instead, Democrats want to spend $88 billion to increase the federal share of Medicaid. What American will be hired by a small business, factory, retail shop, hotel, restaurant or service company because of this spending? The answer is very few.

In H.R. 1, there's $41 billion set aside for school districts, $1.5 billion for university research grants, $2 billion for Energy Department labs, and $3 billion for the National Science Foundation. Yet education is one of the few sectors that added jobs last year.

There's also $4 billion for health programs like obesity control and smoking cessation, $2 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $462 million for the Centers for Disease Control, and $900 million for pandemic flu preparations. Health care also added jobs last year.

It is not surprising that the stimulus package is laden with new spending programs. Congressional appropriators, not job creators, wrote H.R. 1. Much of it is spending Democrats couldn't get approved in the normal course of affairs.

It's not due to out-of-date White House technology or laws governing independent groups that is hurting the White House message. It's the message, stupid. And the Democratic bill is stuck on stupid.

Why Obama's crack transition team goofed on nominees' tax problems

Remember all those stories about how brilliant the Obama transition team was and how they were doing more to vet their nominees than ever before. There were stories about the humongous questionnaire that potential nominees had to fill out. But what they couldn't control for was their own arrogance that they were picking people so absolutely wonderful that any questions about tax problems would be mere speed bumps on the road to painless confirmations. The Washington Post yesterday reported on that cocksure arrogance that led to the Daschle debacle.

The situation also raised questions about how thoroughly Obama transition officials had vetted their Cabinet nominees.

Officials said yesterday that myriad tax questions had been posed to Daschle, Killefer and Geithner. But the problems were largely dismissed as less important than the nominees' qualifications for the major tasks they were expected to confront in office, the officials said.

One person familiar with the appointment process said Obama and his top advisers were concerned about the possibility of political "combustion" occurring over the tax issues. "People were not unaware that might happen," the official said. But they believed that Geithner and Daschle were uniquely qualified.

"We knew he'd get punched around on this, and that he had made a painful mistake," John D. Podesta, who co-chaired Obama's transition team, said of Daschle. "But we believed he could be confirmed and that he was -- and I still believe this -- the right guy for the job of leading the department and finally getting health-care reform across the finish line."

As Obama assembled his administration, he conducted the vetting process methodically and required unprecedented scrutiny of candidates' personal, financial and professional backgrounds.

Potential picks had to answer 63-item questionnaires, which an army of lawyers, many of them volunteers, then scoured. Nine of the questions were about taxes. No. 37 asked whether "a tax lien or other collection procedure" had ever been instituted against the nominee, and No. 39 asked: "Do you have any expectation that you will be the subject of any tax, financial or other audit or inquiry?"

People familiar with the Obama transition said Daschle did not reveal his tax issue on the questionnaire.

"The car and driver is not something that will come up in a review of documents or tax returns," said a Washington lawyer who helped vet candidates. "It really is something you find out about in doing an interview of the potential nominee. You just have to ask the questions."

Some close to the process said the Obama team believed that the various tax errors were innocent mistakes and that any furor over them could be overcome.

"Every time a nominee gets in trouble for something, another question gets added to the questionnaire," one transition official complained. "We're getting to the point -- Killefer might be a better example -- where you're [having to hire] people out of some hermetically sealed tank."

Clay Johnson III, who ran President George W. Bush's transition team and later served in the White House as presidential personnel director, said he is surprised to see three of Obama's nominees weighed down by tax troubles considering that paying -- or not paying -- taxes has long been the top concern for vetters.

"It's huge," Johnson said. "Do you pay your taxes? . . . It is something that is checked religiously."

But Podesta and the other transition folk just didn't think it mattered because they were so convinced that someone like Tim Geithner or Tom Daschle were so superb that the little folk wouldn't care about that whole not habit of not paying taxes. They might not have found out about Daschle's free limousine habit ahead of time, but when they did, they were convinced that it just didn't matter. And now they have to deal with the fallout including becoming the butt of the late night comics. That is the reward for such arrogance.

The CBO doesn't have good news on the porkapalooza bill

Today President Obama lobbied for the stimulus package saying that it would be a catastrophe if it weren't passed and passed quickly. Well, maybe the Democrats should listen to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office which just issued a report saying that it would actually hurt the economy in the long run.

President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

The CBO did say that the bill would help in the short run, but the effects won't be very long lasting because of the long-term problems arising from the debt crowding out other investments.

CBOs basic assumption is that, in the long run, each dollar of additional debt crowds out about a third of a dollars worth of private domestic capital, CBO said in its letter.

CBO said there is no crowding out in the short term, so the plan would succeed in boosting growth in 2009 and 2010.

The agency projected the Senate bill would produce between 1.4 percent and 4.1 percent higher growth in 2009 than if there was no action. For 2010, the plan would boost growth by 1.2 percent to 3.6 percent.

CBO did project the bill would create jobs, though by 2011 the effects would be minuscule.

Let's see what the CBO says about a plan that would strip out all the extraneous spending that is larding up this bill. And doing some nicey-nice face-saving measure of stripping out just $50 billion from a bill that is close to $900 billion as the Maine senators and Senator Ben Nelson are working on is just not going to cut it.

Remember that Obama pledged that he would get past the typical Washington politics and focus on doing what works and not just what is good for his party. Well, he can start by paying attention to what the CBO is saying about the long-term effects of this porkapalooza of a bill.

This whole approach of hurry up, we've got to pass something, anything right away is ridiculous. Yes, the economy is in miserable shape but doing something bad won't improve the economy just because you pass the bill before some artificial deadline like doing it before President's Day. Scrap this monstrosity and then strip out the parts of the bill that will actually stimulate the economy. Save the rest of the spending scattershot bonanza for the regular budget procedure. After all, when this bill is passed and the next banking bill is passed, they'll still have to pass the regular budget. And those numbers aren't going to be pretty.

Follow Alice Rivlin's advice. She's a Democrat so they can't demagogue her recommendation

In testimony before the House Budget Committee yesterday, Alice M. Rivlin, who was President Bill Clinton's budget director, suggested splitting the plan, implementing its immediate stimulus components now and taking more time to plan the longer-term transformative spending to make sure it is done right.

"Such a long-term investment program should not be put together hastily and lumped in with the anti-recession package. The elements of the investment program must be carefully planned and will not create many jobs right away," said Rivlin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. The risk, she said, is that "money will be wasted because the investment elements were not carefully crafted."

Sounds like common sense, but I guess that is lacking when there is the opportunity to spend close to a trillion dollars on a package that will end up damaging the economy in the long run.

What Russia has been up to

Russia is finding new ways to blackmail the west, particularly the United States to do what they want. Their newest method was to bribe the government of Kyrgyzstan to close off the NATO air base that we use to fly supplies into Afghanistan. Since that is a crucial air base for us, they are clearly opening that the Obama administration will ease up on policies from the Bush administration that Russia objected to. Watch out for new demands about keeping Ukraine out of NATO and not building missile defense bases in Poland.

After announcing $2 billion in loans from Russia, the president of Kyrgyzstan announced the United States will no longer have access to the Manas air base, the lone base U.S. commanders have permission to use in Central Asia and a key supply line for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

"More than once we have discussed with our American partners the subject of the economic compensation to Kyrgyzstan for the presence [of the U.S. base], but unfortunately, we did not find an understanding from the United States," Kyrgyzstan President Kurmanbek Bakiyev said Tuesday. "For over three years, we have been talking of the need to review the terms of the agreement, which do not satisfy us completely, yet we have not seen an understanding from the United States."

Less than 24 hours later, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said he and his ex-Soviet allies want to cooperate with Washington in Afghanistan in return for no expansion among NATO membership and a U.S. reversal on a missile defense shield for Europe that Russia opposes.

"Missile defense is a piece of it," said George Friedman, CEO of Stratfor Security. "The entire question that's on the table here is will the U.S. recognize the Russians' sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union in return for providing a supply line into Afghanistan?"

The Kyrgyz Parliament has started drafting legislation demanding the exodus of the U.S. military, which pays $17.4 million annually to lease the base that sees 15,000 U.S. personnel and 500 tons of equipment pass through its doors each month. That lease agreement is part of $150 million given to the Kyrgyz government for various programs.

This Kyrgyz base is crucial to Obama's vow to increase our military efforts in Afghanistan. And just coincidentally one of the routes into Afghanistan was just shut down when insurgents destroyed a bridge into the region.

Petraeus announced on inauguration day that Russia and neighboring Central Asian nations had agreed to let supplies pass through their territory to U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, lessening our dependence on dangerous routes through Pakistan.

That need was shown Tuesday, when insurgents in Pakistan blew up a bridge in the Khyber Pass, disrupting one of two truck routes from the port of Karachi by which the 60,000 U.S.-led NATO troops in Afghanistan receive about 80% of their supplies.

"We have sought additional logistical routes into Afghanistan from the north. There have been agreements reached," Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said.

Joe Biden warned us that Obama would be tested in the beginning of his administration by conflicts. Add worrying about Kyrgyzstan and Russia's plotting there. Clearly Russia is testing Obama and we'll just have to see how the new foreign team he has in place can handle this. Of course, the Bush policy of trusting what President Bush saw in Putin's eyes was no success either at gauging the degrees to which Putin and Medvedev would go to keep our influence and presence away from former places that the former Soviet Union either owned or dominated. Obama blinked when Russia invaded Georgia during the campaign with a reaction that first cast equal blame on the invader and the victim. Let us hope that the Obama administration is more clear-eyed now at this definite pushback against our policies in Afghanistan and also eastern Europe.

This is what true evil is

For Al Qaeda, finding a supply of people willing to blow themselves up in the hopes that they take some infidels with them might seem to present a supply problem. In an increasingly improving Iraq were there enough people who so desperately hated both westerners and the Iraqis who tolerated their presence in Iraq? Well one group found a way to increase their supply of suicide bombers. A woman who was part of the group would arrange for young women to be raped. Then she would counsel the rape victims that the only alternative for them was to become suicide bombers.

A WOMAN suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame.

Samira Jassam, 51, was arrested by Iraqi police and confessed to recruiting the women and orchestrating dozens of attacks.

In a video confession, she explained how she had mentally prepared the women for martyrdom operations, passed them on to terrorists who provided explosives, and then took the bombers to their targets.

"We arrested Samira Jassim, known as 'Um al-Mumenin', the mother of the believers, who was responsible for recruiting 80 women'', Major General Qassim Atta said.

"She confessed her responsibility for these actions, and she confirmed that 28 attempts had been made in one of the terrorists' strongholds,'' he said.

And that may not be all. Weasel Zipper links to this story in which an Algerian official claims that young men are being homosexually raped in order to convince them to become suicide bombers.

Islamic terrorists are raping young men in order to drive them into suicide bombings.

The Sun quotes Algerian militant Abu Baçir El Assimi:

"The sexual act on young recruits aged between 16 to 19 was a means to urge them to commit suicide operations."

The paper claims that "intense social stigma and fear of more gay sex attacks leaves Muslims prepared to die."

Rape and homosexual acts are punishable by death under Sharia law.

If Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups were having trouble recruiting true believers to carry out their suicide murders, these stories won't increase their popularity in the Muslim world. Let the world go out that not only are these groups killing innocent Muslims who just might be near the location of a suicide bombings but that young women and men are being raped to turn them into bombers and the terrorists will start to lose whatever bizarre legitimacy they have in the Muslim world.

Clueless and dishonest Andrea Mitchell

Newbusters has the transcript of Andrea Mitchell predicting that the public will blame the GOP for bringing down Tom Daschle.

During MSNBC's live coverage on Tuesday of the sudden resignation of Health and Human Services nominee Tom Daschle, reporter Andrea Mitchell suggested to Republican Senator Jim DeMint that the American public will see this as the GOP having "brought him [Daschle] down."

Oh, please.

First of all, most of the American public probably has not a clue who Tom Daschle is and why they should care. He'll be forgotten in a couple of weeks as soon as there is a new nominee. A year from now few except Washington insiders and political junkies will remember this whole brouhaha.

Secondly, if the public has registered this story, I bet the American public doesn't have much sympathy for a guy who had a free limousine and river for several years and neglected to pay taxes on it. Or a former senator who cashes in to make a few million dollars after he left the Senate. Andrea Mitchell might have her heart wrenched by talking to a "tearful, overwrought" Daschle, but most people are too busy worrying about their own lives to even consider whom to cast blame on for this story.

And finally, Tom Daschle himself told Mitchell that he made his decision after reading the New York Times. Since when does the New York Times take their cues from Republicans? But Mitchell then, full of sympathy for the embarrassed Dascle, is happy to turn around and cast blame on the Republicans for this fiasco.

Actually, the Republicans had been relatively quiet on this. A few GOP senators had come out saying they wouldn't support his nomination, but most of them were keeping their powder dry. I wish the Republicans had such clout that they could bring down one lousy nomination after another, but it just isn't so no matter how Andrea Mitchell wants to spin it.

I guess in her eyes, every Obama failure is an occasion for the public to blame the GOP.

If you think that our congressman aren't like you and me, you're right

Here's a little tidbit about this Congress compared to the last Congress.

The average net worth of new House and Senate members is $1 million greater than that of their colleagues in the 110th Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The number, no doubt, was driven up by new Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, who worth is estimated at between $60.6 million and $415.1 million, according to the Senate's annual disclosure forms.

But a bunch of House freshmen are moneybags, too:

Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) is worth between $97.4 million and $254.4 million. Polis, an Internet entrepreneur, is now the third wealthiest member of the House of Representatives, based on CRP's calculations, behind Reps. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). Republican Cynthia Marie Lummis of Wyoming and Democrat Alan Mark Grayson of Florida are also among the wealthiest new members of the House.

[T]he "poorest" Senate freshman, Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), is still worth at least $1.5 million.

Perhaps that is why this Congress doesn't mind passing a so-called stimulus package that does more to reward favored constituencies than actually stimulate the economy to help the little guys.

And can we finally bury that idea that the Republicans are the party of the fat cats?

Half-props for President Obama

I give Obama credit for going on all those network interviews yesterday in the midst of the whole fallout from the Daschle debacle and taking blame by telling ABC News "I screwed up." He admitted to Fox News that he shouldn't have a double standard on taxpaying.

"We can't send a message to the American people that we've got two sets of rules -- one for prominent people and one for ordinary people," Obama said, defending his administration's standards.

While I think that Americans appreciate a president who takes responsibilities for mistakes, I think that Obama is being a bit disingenuous here. His first instinct was to let these nominations go through. He knew about Geithner and Nancy Killefer 's tax problems before he made the nominations and went ahead anyway. He only found out about Daschle's tax negligence after he made the nomination, but he stuck with Daschle up until yesterday. So he didn't mind the dual message on Monday, but then decided it was unacceptable on Tuesday.

Earlier this week he was speaking out in defense of Daschle. And Geithner has been confirmed and now is the head of the Treasury including the IRS. There is no indication that Obama is going to act on his sudden realization that he shouldn't be sending that message to the American people about the two sets of rules by asking Tim Geithner to step down. So he doesn't want to send that message for Daschle, but doesn't mind that it continues to be sent with Geithner.

So halfway props for Obama. Yes, he took responsibility which is always refreshing, but he ignored that it was only public outrage and ridicule that made him decide that Daschle's problems were just a bridge too far. And he's not canceling out that message being sent by Geithner's position in his cabinet.

Senator Dodd's sleazy mortgage deal

While everyone is focusing on the nominees with tax problems, let's not forget other politicians with their own sleaze problems. Chief among them is Senator Dodd from Connecticut who got a sweetheart deal from Countrywide Mortgage while he was chairman of the Banking Committee and overseeing mortgage companies. Ed Morrissey explains the details of what Dodd did and how he's trying to paper over the sleaze today.

SEN. Chris Dodd is hoping to make his sweetheart deals with Country wide Mortgage - which saved him tens of thousands of dollars on two mortgages - disappear.

Dodd, the chairman of the Banking Committee, announced this week that he'll have the mortgages refinanced and managed by a third party to protect against allegations of influence peddling.

Problem is, this doesn't negate any prior influence peddling. It's akin to closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, torn down the fences and set the farm on fire.

The influence-peddling took place when Dodd got the special deal from Countrywide - and the shenanigans that Dodd & Co. allowed Countrywide and other irresponsible subprime lenders to engage in have already burned down the US economy.

Dodd promised last summer that he'd release all of his mortgage documentation to the public. He's now in his seventh month of failing to deliver. This week, Dodd released some of the papers - but only to a select group of reporters, who weren't allowed to make copies.

The long wait suggests that Dodd has something to hide. The incomplete "disclosure" and the refinancing, meanwhile, look more like an attempt to bury evidence than a sudden commitment to clean government.

Frankly, he could keep the mortgages as they are - no one cares how much he pays for them now. What matters is the sleazy manner in which Dodd got deals that normal consumers couldn't.

Plus, of course, refinancing now probably won't cost him much. Thanks to Dodd and his colleagues, mortgage rates are as low as they'll ever be. Who wouldn't refinance in this market? (Talk about a win-win!)

And just like Charlie Rangel with his tax problems continuing to chair the House Ways and Means Committee, Dodd will continue as chair of the Banking Committee.

I guess that if, God forbid, Al Franken wins the election challenges and comes to Washington as a senator, he'll be placed on the Senate Finance Committee to write tax laws based on his expertise of neglecting to pay taxes on income earned in 17 states as well as "forgetting" to pay workmens' compensation for his employees. He'll fit right in and I'm sure he and Dodd can hang out together.

Recommendations on education

I usually don't agree with Richard Cohen much but he has some good ideas on education recommending that, instead of just handing over money to the states to continue doing more of what they do, President Obama could use some of his popularity and influence to demand some real reforms in education.

But if the money is going to be offered, why not couple it with demands for reforms? After all, without the extra cash, the likelihood is that teachers across the country will be laid off. That gives the president some leverage: take my money, take my reforms. Maybe a deal could not be done. We won't know. We do know, though, that the teachers unions have an understandable aversion to some reforms. We also know that the unions supported Obama in his campaign.

Do your reading on education and you will find an emerging consensus. Abolish tenure. There are other ways to ensure that teachers are fairly treated without guaranteeing the jobs of the inept. (Cops don't have tenure, and neither do columnists.) Ensure that the best teachers teach at the most challenging schools and ensure also that they get lavishly paid for doing so.

How about extending the school day, maybe for an hour or so? How about extending the school year? How about tinkering with No Child Left Behind, but insisting that testing -- accountability -- be maintained? How about doing something about the sad fact that teachers aren't what they used to be? Now that women and minorities have more opportunities in almost every field, the best of them have abandoned teaching. The pay is lousy and the work can be hard. Can $100 billion do something about that? Could be.

None of this is exactly radical. It is more or less the program advocated by such reforming big city school chiefs as Washington's Michelle Rhee and New York's Joel Klein. They, as well as other educators, are not union-busters in the old sense of the word. They are, in fact, rather conventional liberals. But if your priority is the kids -- what a businessman would call "the product" -- then certain rules have to be changed. The federal government cannot micromanage 50 states and thousands of school districts, but it can set standards for getting its money. This, as any parent knows, is how allowances are earned.

Of course the chances that Obama and the congressional Democrats would do anything to get rid of tenure is a pipe dream. And I don't support the federal government telling states what to do with education, but if the central government is handing out money to the states, they can attack strings and states can take them or leave them.

Of course, this also ignores the question of how any of this education money is an economic stimulus. It shouldn't be part of an emergency economic package but should be part of regular education spending that should be passed as part of the normal budget procedures instead of being stuffed into a supposed stimulus for the economy.

What the spending package will cost us

Kevin Hassett looks at the numbers to figure out how much each of us will have to pay for the so-called stimulus package.

Under President George W. Bush -- a big spender in his own right -- the federal budget deficit reached a record $455 billion in fiscal 2008, more than double a year earlier. Government bailouts of banks and other industries that started under Bush, and may accelerate under President Barack Obama, will help push the deficit toward that $1.7 trillion mark.

That is $1.7 trillion in future taxes. Nobody knows exactly when the tax hike will come. It might even be that we shall try to foist the costs on our children. Still, those planning their financial futures should account for the dramatically higher taxes that will be the result of this year’s policies.

Check the Numbers

Suppose the government eventually decides to allocate the bill according to the latest distribution of taxes. In 2006, for example, people with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 paid about 10 percent of all income-tax revenue. As a thought experiment, how much would those people’s taxes go up if Uncle Sam raises 10 percent of $1.7 trillion from them?

If you run the numbers for that and other income brackets, you’d better sit down. Our spending policies are not digging a hole, they are conjuring up a Stygian abyss.

If your family income in 2006 was between $75,000 and $100,000, the extra taxes that you will have to pay at some point in the future add up to about $14,000.

If your income was between $100,000 and $200,000, your future tax hike will be about $28,000. If your income was between $200,000 and $500,000, then your future tax bill just went up by $90,299.

While our tax system is heavily tilted against the rich, even those with relatively low incomes will eventually have to pay. The extra tax bill for someone with 2006 income between $25,000 and $30,000 will be about $2,500.

These numbers are in present value. If government puts off sending you the bill -- and thus must pay interest between now and then -- the bill will be higher. How much higher? If the government waits 10 years to collect the $14,000 from the person with income between $75,000 and $100,000, the bill a decade from now will be about $22,800.

This might be worth it if the package was going to turn around the economy. But, as the House and Senate bills are packaged now, that is quite unlikely. Economist Roger T. Brusca has looked at the Senate package and divided it up into spending that is stimulus, cushion for the financial downturn, and that part that is simply part of the Democratic agenda. His analysis:

It is hard to categorize the spending. But I have looked at the Senate plan in more detail and my rough estimate is that its $365bln of spending is roughly 24% stimulus, 36% cushion and 40% agenda. Admittedly, constructing these categories is quite subjective but let's understand the idea first. 'Stimulus' is something intended to propel the economy ahead. 'Cushion' is something that will not propel the economy but will soften the blow of recession on parties injured by the recession in various ways. 'Agenda' is the pursuit of polices endorsed by the administration that are not clearly linked with helping the displaced or with cushioning the blow, although admittedly most dollars spent will have some positive role of cushioning the impact on somebody.

You might quarrel here and there with his allocation of the spending, but it's in that ballpark. James Pethokoukis had this metaphor.

Let's say your house is burning down, and you have a water hose in your hand. Do you a) try to put out the fire; b) start filling up your pool; c) sprinkle your lawn; or d) some combo of "a," "b" and "c." To the Obama administration's credit, it didn't choose "b" or "c." Unfortunately, it went with "d." Although there has been a sense of urgency in getting the stimulus bill passed, the bill itself shows little urgency in doing much to help the economy.

Remember that all those nice agenda items are going to have to be paid for at some point. And we will all be paying. Better to put them into a standard budget reconciliation package and let Congress debate them next to all the other normal spending demands that Congress faces every year and decide if those agenda items are more deserving than all the other spending priorities we have every year.

Stop pledging to have the most ethical administration in history

Politicians frequently come into power promising that they will bring ethics to their administration. Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi demonstrated how empty such promises to have the most ethical administration or House in history. We're still waiting for the Ethics Committee to report back to us about Charlie Rangel's tax problems. Meanwhile he sits as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee writing our tax laws.

Barack Obama campaigned strongly on the ethics rules that he was going to demand in his White House and an executive order establishing those rules was one of his first signature acts as president. However he's now finding, as the New York Times writes, that it is a lot easier to campaign about ethical changes than to actually carry them out in real life. But banning all lobbyists from his administration turned out to be harder in reality.

In the campaign, Mr. Obama assailed Washington’s “entire culture” in which “our leaders have thrown open the doors of Congress and the White House to an army of Washington lobbyists who have turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.” He vowed to “close the revolving door” and “clean up both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue” with “the most sweeping ethics reform in history.”

The language, however, was always more sweeping than the specifics. He spoke of refusing campaign money from lobbyists but took it from the people who hired them. The ethics plan he outlined, and eventually imposed on his administration, did not ban all lobbyists outright but set conditions for their employment and did not cover many who were lobbyists in everything but name.

Mr. Daschle, for instance, is not a registered lobbyist, but he made a handsome living advising clients seeking influence with the government, including some in the health industry. Mr. Obama also gave himself the right to grant waivers in cases he deemed exceptional, most prominently to William J. Lynn III, an ex-Raytheon lobbyist he nominated as deputy defense secretary. Others were lobbyists more than two years ago, and therefore not covered by the Obama rules.

Some who worked as lobbyists have found places in the administration, including Mark Patterson, who represented Goldman Sachs and is now chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. William V. Corr, who lobbied for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, has been selected as deputy health and human services secretary.

Obama advisers said that the exceptions were minimal given the thousands to be hired and that appointees would be barred from work on issues they lobbied on in the last two years. The exceptions, they said, were needed for particular skills and experience.

What this really means is that the Obama administration finds that some lobbyists are better than others. Having the blanket condemnation against all lobbyists was short-sighted. Lobbyists are actually helping interests fulfill their First Amendment rights to petition the government. They often know more about their particular issue than almost anyone else because information is their stock in trade. Ban corrupt lobbyists, but don't assume that any lobbyist is corrupt.

And don't tell us that all lobbyists are too corrupt to work in your administration and then tell us that it's okay to grant waivers for particular experts that you want to have work for you. This is what happens when you have these broad, unnuanced condemnations of a whole group of people.

It was never practical to say that you weren't going to hire any lobbyist. But it wouldn't have made such an appealing campaign process to proclaim that you were going to limit your hiring of lobbyists to those people you really wanted to work for you.

There is more to ethical reform than demagoguing against the entire class of lobbyists while waiving through exceptions. Sure it made a nice campaign promise and photo op but the fact is that in order to stock any administration with experienced people in these policy areas, you're going to end up with people who have done some lobbying in their past. They're not evil or unethical unless there is something in their individual records that indicates they were. Base your choices on those individual records rather than on broad accusations.

Health care on the back of smokers

In order to pay for the expansion of SCHIP, the Democrats put in an increase in the federal taxes raising them from 39 cents a pack to 61 cents a pack. While I have no problem with increasing taxes in order to discourage behavior, there are two things to keep in mind about such a tax. One is that it is highly regressive since the poor are more likely to smoke than the wealthy. These are also the people whom the President promised would see no tax increase from his presidency. Fine, you might say. They are the ones who most need to stop smoking since they can't afford the health care to take care of the consequences of smoking.

But there is also an economic problem in looking to cigarette taxes to fund a major expansion of a health care benefit. As you increase the taxes, people are likely to respond by smoking less. We're all happy now, right? Yes, but it also means that the revenue stream for SCHIP will be decreasing while the recipients are increasing. As the Wall Street Journal wrote,

So paying for the biggest new health-care expansion in years with a declining revenue source is a guarantee of future red ink that will increase pressure for higher income taxes too. Just ask the politicians in Maryland, who doubled their cigarette tax two years ago to finance a new health-care program. That has led to 25% less tobacco revenue than expected because of declining sales, so the program is already in the red after its first year. But hey, it's the thought that counts.

Don't learn the wrong lessons from the New Deal

Amity Shlaes, author of the very readable and informative The Forgotten Man, argues that we are in danger of learning the wrong lessons from the New Deal.

But Roosevelt the economist is unworthy of emulation. His first goal was to reduce unemployment. Of his own great stimulus package, the National Industrial Recovery Act, he said: "The law I have just signed was passed to put people back to work." Here, FDR failed abysmally. In the 1920s, unemployment had averaged below 5 percent. Blundering when they knew better, Herbert Hoover, his Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Congress drove that rate up to 25 percent. Roosevelt pulled unemployment down, but nowhere near enough to claim sustained recovery. From 1933 to 1940, FDR's first two terms, it averaged in the high teens. Even if you add in all the work relief jobs, as some economists do, Roosevelt-era unemployment averages well above 10 percent. That's a level Obama has referred to once or twice -- as a nightmare.

The second goal of the New Deal was to stimulate the private sector. Instead, it supplanted it. To justify their own work, New Dealers attacked not merely those guilty of white-collar crimes but the entire business community -- the "princes of property," FDR called them. Washington's policy evolved into a lethal combo of spending and retribution. Never did either U.S. investors or foreigners get a sense that the United States was now open for business. As a result, the Depression lasted half a decade longer than it had to, from 1929 to 1940 rather than, say, 1929 to 1936. The Dow Jones industrial average didn't return to its summer 1929 high until 1954. The monetary shock of the first years of the Depression was immense, but it was this duration that made the Depression Great.

It's hard to improve the environment for business if you're demonizing and penalizing them. And we can learn from the effects of putting major work in the hands of a public entity like the TVA instead of working together with private businesses to provide the needed power. Stop regarding tax cuts for businesses as tax cuts for the greedy rich, but rather as encouragement for businesses to grow and hire more workers.

Read her essay or, better yet, read her book.

And while you're in a history mood, read Ilya Somin's explanation of why it is wrong to regard Herbert Hoover as a do-nothing president. Hoover was a progressive and he tried several programs that presaged the New Deal. He had been advocating government intervention in the economy since 1920 and throughout his career as the Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge.

After Hoover left office, New Dealers used the myth of his supposed adherence to laissez-faire as a justification for discrediting free market policies. Today, we are seeing the creation of a similar myth about Bush. The truth, however, is almost the exact opposite of the myth.

The fact that Hoover and Bush pursued interventionist policies doesn't in and of itself prove that free markets are the way to go. Perhaps Hoover and Bush simply chose the wrong kinds of interventions. Nonetheless, the myth of Hoover as laissez-faire advocate was an important rhetorical prop for supporters of big government policies in the 1930s.

Those writers like Josh Marshall and Frank Rich who are busy comparing the Republicans of today to Herbert Hoover need to return to their history books.

UPDATE: Two economists Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian write today to explain how government intervention prolonged the Great Depression much longer than it should have been.

So what stopped a blockbuster recovery from ever starting? The New Deal. Some New Deal policies certainly benefited the economy by establishing a basic social safety net through Social Security and unemployment benefits, and by stabilizing the financial system through deposit insurance and the Securities Exchange Commission. But others violated the most basic economic principles by suppressing competition, and setting prices and wages in many sectors well above their normal levels. All told, these antimarket policies choked off powerful recovery forces that would have plausibly returned the economy back to trend by the mid-1930s.

The most damaging policies were those at the heart of the recovery plan, including The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which tossed aside the nation's antitrust acts and permitted industries to collusively raise prices provided that they shared their newfound monopoly rents with workers by substantially raising wages well above underlying productivity growth. The NIRA covered over 500 industries, ranging from autos and steel, to ladies hosiery and poultry production. Each industry created a code of "fair competition" which spelled out what producers could and could not do, and which were designed to eliminate "excessive competition" that FDR believed to be the source of the Depression.

These codes distorted the economy by artificially raising wages and prices, restricting output, and reducing productive capacity by placing quotas on industry investment in new plants and equipment. Following government approval of each industry code, industry prices and wages increased substantially, while prices and wages in sectors that weren't covered by the NIRA, such as agriculture, did not. We have calculated that manufacturing wages were as much as 25% above the level that would have prevailed without the New Deal. And while the artificially high wages created by the NIRA benefited the few that were fortunate to have a job in those industries, they significantly depressed production and employment, as the growth in wage costs far exceeded productivity growth.

These policies continued even after the NIRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935. There was no antitrust activity after the NIRA, despite overwhelming FTC evidence of price-fixing and production limits in many industries, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave unions substantial collective-bargaining power. While not permitted under federal law, the sit-down strike, in which workers were occupied factories and shut down production, was tolerated by governors in a number of states and was used with great success against major employers, including General Motors in 1937.

Hmmm, do unions demanding wages that are well above the average threatening General Motors sound at all familiar?

It's fitting that we should be debating the effects of the New Deal on the nation's economy now that so many Democrats are demanding a new New Deal. Before we commit almost a trillion dollars, politicians should do a bit more reading on their role model of government intervention in the economy.

Rendition is suddenly acceptable

The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the Obama administration was maintaining rendition as a tool to deal with terrorists.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

They've decided that renditions are a tool that they just can't do without in their battles against terrorism.

One provision in one of Obama’s orders appears to preserve the CIA's ability to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects as long as they are not held long-term. The little-noticed provision states that the instructions to close the CIA's secret prison sites "do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis."

Despite concern about rendition, Obama's prohibition of many other counter-terrorism tools could prompt intelligence officers to resort more frequently to the "transitory" technique.

I wonder how long "transitory" will turn out to be.

I don't have any problem with this decision, but do note the hypocrisy of human rights advocates who suddenly don't have a problem with rendition when it is Obama's CIA doing it and not Bush's. Darren Hutchinson blogging at Dissenting Justice points out how Human Rights Watch has changed its rhetoric. Back in April, this is what Human Rights Watch had to say about rendition.

The US government should:

Repudiate the use of rendition to torture as a counterterrorism tactic and permanently discontinue the CIA's rendition program;

Disclose the identities, fate, and current whereabouts of all persons detained by the CIA or rendered to foreign custody by the CIA since 2001, including detainees who were rendered to Jordan;

Repudiate the use of "diplomatic assurances" against torture and ill-treatment as a justification for the transfer of a suspect to a place where he or she is at risk of such abuse;

Make public any audio recordings or videotapes that the CIA possesses of interrogations of detainees rendered by the CIA to foreign custody;

Provide appropriate compensation to all persons arbitrarily detained by the CIA or rendered to foreign custody....

Refuse to cooperate in secret detention and rendition efforts, and disclose all information about past cooperation in such efforts

This is what they are saying today.

"Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "What I heard loud and clear from the president's order was that they want to design a system that doesn't result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured -- but that designing that system is going to take some time."

Malinowski said he had urged the Obama administration to stipulate that prisoners could be transferred only to countries where they would be guaranteed a public hearing in an official court. "Producing a prisoner before a real court is a key safeguard against torture, abuse and disappearance," Malinowski said.

How values change when the administration changes in the White House.

What will the Democratic response to Daschle's nomination say about them?

You'd think that President Obama would be a mite bit ticked that Senator Daschle didn't inform him of possible tax violations before he accepted the nomination. And what's with Daschle's accountant supposedly taking six months to inform Daschle that he needed to have paid taxes on the car and driver? Can't a couple earning as much as the Daschles were earning afford an accountant who can figure out that gifts in kind need to be taxed?

Tom Maguire has his own theory about that delay in the accountant's analysis.

As to the idea that it took his accountant six months to resolve these questions, please - is this the sort of glacial progress we can expect as Daschle oversees the transformation of the US health care system? For any Democrats out there not familiar with the process by which the rest of us pay our taxes, most returns are filed by April 15; summertime is the slow season and one would hope that as important a person as Tom Daschle could have gotten an answer promptly, if he had so desired. In fact, Daschle only got his answer after he had been tapped for a post requiring Senate confirmation; if Daschle had gotten the nod for a consigliere spot in the White House, I have no doubt his accountant would still be researching this

As Maguire suggests an out for the Democrats. They can turn him down to be Secretary of HHS and he can just be happy being the Health Czar since Obama already said he'd have that position to oversee the White House health care office.

The Wall Street Journal is correct when it says that Daschle's tax avoidance is going to tell us a lot about the Senate Democrats.

As a legal tax matter, this isn't even a close call. Mr. Daschle says he used the car service about 80% for personal use, and 20% for business. But his spokeswoman says it only dawned on the Senator last June that this might be taxable income. Mr. Daschle's excuse? According to a Journal report Friday, "he told committee staff he had grown used to having a car and driver as majority leader and did not think to report the perk on his taxes, according to staff members." How's that for a Leona Helmsley moment: Doesn't everyone have a car and chauffeur, dear?

The Senate Finance Committee is also reviewing whether certain "travel and entertainment services" provided to Mr. Daschle and his wife Linda, an aviation lobbyist, should also be reported as income. The Washington Post reports that Mr. Daschle has earned more than $5 million over the past two years, including $220,000 from the health-care industry he's been nominated to regulate. Capitalism is wonderful, but at the very least Mr. Daschle's record strips the veneer from President Obama's moralizing that lobbying and special interest pleading are the root of all evil in Washington. In appointing Mr. Daschle, Mr. Obama is showing that lobbying is fine as long as it is done by people who agree with him.

Some Democrats said on the weekend that Mr. Daschle deserves to be confirmed because they "know" he is "honest." But that isn't the standard Mr. Daschle set for GOP appointees who had no ethical taint. In 2001, he established a new, 60-vote confirmation standard for Eugene Scalia to be Labor Department Solicitor, though Mr. Scalia had been approved in committee and would have won on the Senate floor. He also filibustered Miguel Estrada, a judicial nominee of wide renown, on the trivial grounds that the Bush Administration wouldn't release internal memos when Mr. Estrada had worked as a Justice Department staff lawyer.

We'll be watching in particular to see how Democrats Max Baucus and Kent Conrad handle the Daschle tax mess. Finance Chairman Baucus gave a pass to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, albeit for a lesser offense, and Mr. Conrad also voted to confirm Mr. Geithner though not without saying he wouldn't have done so in "normal" times. We assume by "normal" he doesn't mean when nominees are Republican. If nothing else, a vote to confirm Mr. Daschle will expose the insincerity of Democratic tax populism.

Perhaps Tom Daschle could have a chat with Vice President Joe Biden who lectured us that paying taxes is patriotic. And the Democrats can have a quiet talk with their own consciences and see what their standard is for nominees. If they confirm him, they're guaranteeing that there will be an ethical cloud over Daschle's career at HHS.

A Martha Washington makeover

Historians are taking a revisionist look at Martha Washington to rescue her from the rather dumpy image that she has had. The new take on her is that she was a rather foxy and romantic woman who chose George over a wealthier suitor because George was a hunk. And George loved her. Such a revision rescues George from seeming like a fortune hunter, marrying the wealthy widowed Martha so that he could become the wealthiest planter in Virginia.

That's revisionism I can believe in.

Kentucky freezes; Obama dines on $100 a pound steak

The Anchoress points to the disparity in media coverage over the ice storm that has blanketed Kentucky and led to over 40 deaths and the failures of FEMA there compared to the coverage of post-Katrina New Orleans. FEMA has been slow to respond and has had difficulty getting aid to those without power. Yup, it's hard to get aid to people in need after a natural disaster.

This proves once again that the mainstream media is selective in its coverage, which is driven by its own agenda. What it wants to cover and hype for good or ill gets covered and hyped ad nauseam. And what it does not want to address, gets lost. This is an inconvenient story, with inconvenient victims, so you won’t see the high drama, the probing questions and harsh criticism we’ve seen before.

As Bill Quick writes,

“Where’s FEMA?” is not the appropriate question. The appropriate question is, “Where is the mainstream media, screaming in one united voice, that the absence of FEMA demonstrates the utter fecklessness and failure of the current President and all his policies?”

(link via Instapundit)

I don't blame FEMA or Kentucky authorities unless it comes out that they somehow messed up their crisis response. It is danged hard to recover quickly from natural disasters and emergencies. But Bill Quick is correct to point the finger at how the media decides to spin a story. Think of the stories that would have been written if President Bush had been entertaining guests on steak that costs $100 a pound while millions were shivering without power in the midsection of the country. Yet it's left to conservative bloggers to make that connection or even wonder why the President would have such a tin ear as to serve such an expensive meal to his congressional guests a little over week after being sworn in. Add in his turning up the thermostat in the Oval Office and you have what would have been a full-blown front page contrast to the people freezing and dying in Kentucky that would have haunted Bush for the rest of his life. It's all in how the media decides to cover a story. For Bush, it would be a sign of his cold-hearted incompetence. But for The One, not so much.

Why do we need a tax cheat as head of the HHS?

Sure, maybe we needed Geithner at Treasury. Some well-respected people thought he was the perfect nominee and, in a time of crisis, the president needed to have the man he wanted at Treasury. But Tom Daschle? How unique are his skills? As Yuval Levin puts it,

He is the co-author of a book about health care, and has certainly taken an intense interest in the subject over the last few years, but he was never thought of as a particular health care expert as a legislator, his background and professional experience do not otherwise distinguish him in this area from dozens of people we could think of, and he has never run anything in his life (HHS employs more than 60,000 people and in a normal year spends about a quarter of the federal budget). That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be Secretary of HHS—he’s as qualified as many cabinet appointees are when they’re chosen—but it means he is not somehow uniquely qualified in a way that should override other concerns about his suitability.

And, it turns out, he has even more tax problems than originally thought.

The report indicates that Daschle's failure to pay more than $101,000 taxes on the car and driver a wealthy friend let him use from 2005 through 2007 is not the only tax issue the former Senate Majority Leader has been dealing with since his December nomination prompted a more thorough examination of his income tax returns.

Mr. Daschle also didn't report $83,333 in consulting income in 2007.

The Senate Finance Committee Report also notes that during the vetting process, President Obama's Transition Team "identified certain donations that did not qualify as charitable deductions because they were not paid to qualifying organizations. Daschle adjusted his contribution deductions on his amended returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007 to remove these amounts and add additional contributions." This adjustment meant a reduction in the amount he contributed to charitable foundations of $14,963 from 2005 through 2007.

With the unreported income from the use of a car service in the amounts of $73,031 in 2005, $89,129 in 2006 and $93,096 in 2007; the unreported consulting income of $83,333 in 2007; and the adjusted reductions in charitable contributions, Daschle adds a total of $353,552 in additional income and reduced donations, meaning an additional tax payment of $128,203, in addition to $11,964 in interest.

On January 2 of this year, Daschle filed amended tax returns to pay the $140,167 in unpaid taxes.

The Finance Committee staff still is reviewing whether travel and entertainment services provided Tom and Linda Daschle by EduCap, Inc., Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation, Academy Achievement, and Loan to Learn should be reported as income. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Daschle made use of the jet belonging to EduCap, a non-profit student loan organization.

Remember, this is a former Senate Majority Leader. How does he just forget to pay taxes on over $80,000 in consulting income? Not quite a member of the hoi polloi, is he when what is many people's yearly income just slips his mind at tax time.

And the whole story of his suddenly realizing that, "hey, maybe I should have paid taxes on that free car and driver" in June last year is quite fishy. As Ed Whelan points out, this is right at the time that Obama clinched the nomination and that Daschle started talking publicly about how he'd like to be Secretary of HHS. What a nice coinky-dink of a coincidence for Mr. Daschle's sudden stroke of conscience concerning his taxes on that free car and driver!

Do the Democrats really want to be known as the party of tax cheats? That is what they will be if they close ranks to push Daschle's nomination through. And President Obama is the one who, knowing both Geithner and Daschle's problems paying taxes, cynically nominated them anyway or allowed their nominations to go forward in the hubris that such mundane concerns just don't matter for anyone that he cared to extend favor towards. And I'd be interested in seeing a timeline of when this information was made known to the Finance Committee. Was it after Geithner got approved? I just wonder if the Obama administration didn't make sure to get Geithner through before revealing that they had another nominee with tax problems. I would have guessed that, if Republicans on the Finance Committee had known that there was another nomination coming down the pike with a similar question, one of them would have raised the issue or leaked it to the press during the debate over Geithner. Now the press is out there to absolve Obama of knowing about Daschle's problems before the nomination but he still went ahead and continued the nomination instead of sending Daschle over to Bill Richardson-land.

Scrappleface has the best defense of the Obama administration.

In office less than two weeks, President Barack Obama has already increased tax receipts at the U.S. Treasury with an innovative plan to get tax-dodgers to pay up, in full, immediately.

“The president’s plan is simple but ingenious,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, “He targets wealthy individuals who filed inaccurate tax forms, cheating the government out of tens of thousands of dollars. Then he just nominates them for cabinet positions. They suddenly see the error of their ways, and they cut checks for the full amount owed, plus interest.”

In the month of January alone, Mr. Obama has forced Timothy Geithner, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to cough up $43,000 he owed the IRS, and former Sen. Tom Daschle to pay off his $128,000 tax obligation. Mr. Geithner will put his tax-paying experience to good use, overseeing the IRS as Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Daschle hopes his recently-good behavior will garner Senate confirmation as the next Secretary of the Health and Human Services.

“With the IRS underfunded as it is,” said Mr. Gibbs, “this collection method is much more efficient than dispatching field agents. Arresting these men, or compelling them to pay penalties would take years, and make them feel bad about themselves. The president’s method not only gets more money to the government to help our economy, but provides a self-esteem boost by giving these wealthy men important-sounding titles.”

The Obama administration will reportedly expand the program by creating hundreds, perhaps thousands, of additional cabinet posts, available to any rich person willing to “fess up and settle up” with the IRS.