I am inclined to believe Andrea Mitchell's reporting from yesterday afternoon -- that Sarah Palin is out of politics for good. That's the only reasonable explanation for what she's done. It is very difficult to accept the notion that this is being done to further some long-term strategy.
If Palin is resigning because of the pressure that public life and the endless, frivolous complaints have put on her and her family, that's respectable. If she's stepping down to avoid an impending scandal, then it's understandable.
If Sarah Palin thinks she can quit less than three years into her governorship in order to run for president, that's just crazy. Whatever other benefits this move brings, it means that she will probably never hold elected office again. And Palin probably understands this. Her announcement was carefully timed for a news-dump day and hour, for a weekend when no one will be watching the Sunday political shows....
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On this 4th of July, some of you (especially of the Democratic persuasion) may be considering going for a spot working directly for the president or one of his top staffers.
Aside from the feeling of doing something to serve the country, such jobs often have a lot of fringe benefits--premium prestige, the ability to put your personal ideas into policy, many jobs also involve a lot of travel.
One thing you won't likely get a lot of working at the White House is money, however.
According to an annual report just released by the White House, the top employee salaries max out at $172,000 per year, likely a big pay cut for the likes of Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel or White House legal counsel Gregory Craig, among others.
Out of about 450 employees, only 22 make the maximum salary. They are as follows:
David Axelrod, senior adviser to the president
Melody C. Barnes, director of domestic policy council
John O. Brennan, deputy national security advisor
Carol Browner, environmental policy adviser
Gregory Craig, White House counsel
Thomas E. Donnilon, deputy national security advisor
Anita B. Dunn, director of communications
Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff
Jonathan Favreau, speechwriter
Patrick Gaspard, director of political affairs
Robert Gibbs, press secretary
Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president
James L. Jones, national security advisor
Christopher Lu, White...
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's announcement of her resignation cannot be read in terms of the conventional wisdom of politics - i.e. that she's getting out ahead of some damaging political revelation she knows is right around the corner, she's fed up with the constant personal attacks on her and her family, or she's running for president in 2012 and wants to be free of the constraints of office.
A close reading of her actual words in her announcement reveals otherwise. The key fact about Palin is that she is not a conventional politician. She actually means what she says, which is why her statement must be read in light of that fact, not that she has ulterior motives. Her complete statement was posted on her official web site and it bears serious study, particularly this passage:
"Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations – such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters’ questions.
"Every one – all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won! But it hasn't been cheap - the State has wasted thousands of hours of your time and shelled out some two million of your dollars to respond to...
Her move to leave office early may save Sarah Palin the hassle of having to grind out the acrimonious end of her term in Alaska, battling Democrats and batting down frivolous ethics complaints as conservatives battle each other over her role.
But how can leaving office early help her with her greatest deficiency as a presidential contender -- a lack of experience on big issues? Palin has the total package has a candidate, except the obvious lack of a long track record of success. She took on the Alaskan establishment, rose quickly and energized the Republican party in August of 2008 -- a rise as fast as Barack Obama's. But what people want to know is whether she can get results.
She was introduced to the nation as a whip-smart up and comer from the wilds of Wasilla, but still in a state of becoming. After being turned back by voters, Palin seemed to follow a wise path of going back to Alaska to brush up on governance and gain greater mastery of issues.
If she spends the next two years developing her presidential team, raising money and trying to become the face of the Republican party she will be a different kind of target for her detractors and the drama that follows her will play out on the national stage.
If she spends her time with her family, writing a book and studying, perhaps Palin can overcome an incomplete grade for her one term as governor.
But I suspect that...
Professor Doug Kmiec, a prominent pro-life Catholic who endorsed Obama for President, has reaped his reward. Obama named him yesterday as ambassador to Malta, a small, Catholic, island nation in the Mediterranean.
I interviewed Kmiec over breakfast at the Democratic National Convention, and he pointed out that while he finds Obama's position on abortion "morally unacceptable," John McCain's abortion plank went only as far as nominating judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade. "I’ve got an imperfect McCain and an imperfect Obama," Kmiec told me. On other issues--most notably war--Obama's positions have hewed more closely to Catholic teaching.
My friend Josh Mercer, a spokesman for the Catholic 527 Fidelis, gave me his response to Kmiec: "When you compare the 4,000 soldiers who lost their lives fighting valiantly in Iraq to the 4,000 babies who died today, it becomes clear…. Barack Obama has admirable qualities, but he advocates legal abortion for all nine months.”
An Obama has proven to be as antipathetic to the pro-life cause as his critics charged he would be. Right away, he directed taxpayer money to embryo-destroying research. He also chose Kathleen Sebelius as his secretary of Health and Human Services and NARAL veteran Dawn Johnsen to a top post at the Justice Department.
But now, Obama has given Kmiec his reward....
This excellent piece by Francisco Toro at The New Republic provides some very important context that most of the media has missed regarding the situation in Honduras. The most important thing you probably haven't heard on CNN: Article 42 of the Honduran Constitution specifically makes “inciting, promoting, or supporting the continuation or re-election of the President of the Republic” one of six crimes for which one can lose Honduran citizenship. That provision is specifically named later as one of the so-called "cast-in-stone" provisions that cannot be changed "en ningún caso" -- under any circumstance (see Article 374). Honduran presidents can serve only one term, period, end of story.
In that context, the arrest and exile of President Manuel Zelaya, at the order of the Supreme Court, actually does make a lot more sense legally than you might otherwise suspect.
That's not to say it was done according to Hoyle – in fact, at least one army official has admitted it was not. The relevant article of the Honduran Constitution appears to require that Zelaya be tried and sentenced first for seeking to stay in power, and only then deported. The decision to exile him immediately, according to another military official, was made at the last minute, supposedly to prevent violence.
But there is still time to do things right –...
Pollster Scott Rasmussen has the specifics: 80% want the government to sell its majority share of General Motors as soon as possible, 64% favor a law requiring it to be sold within a year—not exactly the government’s timetable, which shows it holding the shares until as late as 2018. Only 26% say the GM bankruptcy deal was a good thing. As Rasmussen notes, GM sales slumped more than expected in June, while Ford sales slumped less than expected.
On this Fourth of July weekend, it appears that most Americans do not at all like the idea of the government owning and running a major auto company. Yes, I know that President Obama said he has no intention of running GM. But I also know that he told Detroit Mayor Dave Bing that GM’s top executives would continue to operate out of offices in the Renaissance Center in Detroit, not the GM Tech Center in the suburb of Warren. I wonder if Mayor Bing got assurances of when the GM execs would have to punch in on the time clock at the RenCen and how many bathroom breaks they would be required to take in Detroit rather than the suburbs....
Financial Times -- Jobs data dash recovery hopes
When the May jobs report came out, some people were shocked to see unemployment up over 9 percent and climbing. The concern was that combined with the people who have been unable to find a job for long enough to be dropped from the rolls, the newly fired added up to a large enough number to create a perpetual motion recession in our consumer-based economy that could last for months.
The Obama administration pooh-poohed the worriers as chicken littles. The number of people being fired was shrinking and while many people already laid off still couldn’t find work, one of the first signs of a turnaround is always the decline in the number of the newly unemployed. The stimulus, they said, was starting to work, but would be ramped up.
But the new numbers – with job losses above what they were in October and companies scaling back on hours for remaining workers – put the lie to that notion. The president scrubbed the first day of his getaway to Camp David to stay and fret over the economy and the White House changed its official posture to one of concern and empathy for the unemployed. The stimulus, they said, though, was still working.
But as writers Krishna Guha, Sarah O’Connor, Michael Mackenzie and Ralph Atkins point out, the hopes for a recovery that begins by years’ end are mostly gone and the...
The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee is calling "absurd" an assertion by the Obama administration that some of the documents Republicans have requested relating to Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor are not relevant to her upcoming hearings.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, and other Republicans have accused Democrats of rushing the hearings, slated to begin July 13 in the Judiciary Committee. Republicans want more time to acquire and review documents related to Sotomayor's dozen years at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF). The group delivered 300 pages of requested material in recent days and the papers, said Sessions, "may provide insight into her judicial approach" used when she upheld a lower court decision to throw out the New Haven Fire Department's promotional exams because blacks did not earn qualifying scores.
The documents showed that during Sotomayor's time with the PRLDEF, the group used race to contest the test scores of municipal employees in other states.
Sessions said Thursday that the PRLDEF has reviewed only three of more than 300 boxes of materials and Republicans want to see more, with help from the White House.
"Rather than simply defend PRLDEF, the White House should respect the Judiciary Committee's important bipartisan request that these documents be delivered to the Committee in a...
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Susan makes note below of Sen. Dodd's presentation of the new and improved Senate Obama-care plan. It includes a so-called "public option" for government-run insurance, and it also requires that employers either provide coverage or pay a $750-per-year fee to the government for each non-covered employee.
To put things into perspective, the average American employer pays $5,800 per year from his own pocket for each employee covered by a company health plan, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
So let's say I have 100 employees who make $50,000 on average. Health insurance costs are a problem for me, but I care enough about my employees (and about keeping them) that I'm not going to leave them hanging when it comes to health insurance. Suddenly, this bill passes, meaning that my employees can easily get coverage from the government. They can't even be turned down or charged more because of their health condition. In fact, most of my employees will be eligible for a subsidy -- Dodd's bill offers them to anyone making up to 400 percent of poverty ($73,000 for a family of three).
What this means is that I would, at the very least, phase out all insurance coverage for new employees -- perhaps I'd even dump coverage for current employees and give them part of my taxpayer-subsidized savings back in the form of a raise. If Sen. Max Baucus's (D-Mont.) plan to tax...
Quick, how many "czars" do you think President Obama has appointed since becoming president? Eight? A dozen? Guess again. Try 31, at least according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, which actually counted them.
Washington czars are not new, President Ronald Reagan had one in "White House drug czar" Bill Bennett. But Obama has taken the practice to a new high, effectively creating nearly three dozen.
Taxpayers for Common Sense describes the growing czar ranks:
"By our count there are at least 31 active Czars (see our list here), giving the current administration more Czars than Imperial Russia had in its history. We have a Mideast Peace Czar and a Mideast Policy Czar, a Sudan Czar and aGuantanamo Closure Czar. There’s a Green Jobs Czar, a Pay Czar and anEnergy Czar, an Urban Affairs Czar, Technology Czar, and even a Great Lakes Czar. Thankfully, there’s also an Information Czar."
And TCS adds:
"As they say, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. When you look at the Czar proliferation (there’s a WMD Czar, too), you have to scratch your head and ask if perhaps we should re-think this approach. Instead of constantly creating new positions to coordinate our government's activities, might it make more sense to figure out how to make the existing structure perform better for the taxpayer?"
You can read the full...
At Wednesday’s Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board meeting, chairman H.R. Crawford – a former District Council member and Marion Barry confidante – told fellow Board members that he has heard talk on Capitol Hill about yanking former President Ronald Reagan’s name off the local airport and returning it to its previous generic moniker: National Airport.
“It was just a discussion. We’re not aware of anything specific,” MWAA spokeswoman Tara Hamilton later told The Examiner.
It’s clear that the current crop of congressional leaders want no part of Reagan’s grand conservative vision for America, but erasing all trace of his memory from an airport that’s already been named in his honor is about as petty as you can get.
Why would anybody on Capitol Hill even consider such a patently partisan move, which is guaranteed to make Democrats look small and ridiculous? Do they so fear the inevitable comparisons between the Great Communicator and his teleprompted successor in the White House?...
For those who like to read fascinating, well-written books in the summer, rather than airheaded potboilers, I have two books to recommend, both written by authors who once worked for me. I’m in the middle of both, and look forward to reading more.
In historical order, the first is War on the Run: The Epic Story of Richard Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontiers, by John F. Ross. It’s the story of Richard Rogers, the ranger scout whom I had never heard of, who led daring attacks on the French during the French and Indian Wars, and whose rules for rangers have continuing relevance for special forces today. John worked for me more than 25 years ago, as a researcher for The Almanac of American Politics; now he is editor of American Heritage. He is also an intrepid outdoorsman and has hiked over the same trails where Rogers led troops some 240 years ago.
The other is American Passage: The History of Ellis Island, by Vincent Cannato. This is a definitive history of Ellis Island, the immigrant entry port opened in the 1890s, through which so many of our ancestors traveled. It is at the same time a history of the debate over American immigration policy and a collection of personal accounts of Ellis Island immigrants: macro and micro at the same time. Vin worked for me as a researcher on my immigration book, The New Americans:...
It's cool -- I got this one. (afp photo)
Vice President Joe Biden landed in Iraq today for a surprise, two-day visit to meet Iraqi officials and troops. According to a pool report from the NYT, Biden is working on reestablishing contact with Iraqi leaders and will try to help foster political reconciliation there. It's unclear where exactly Biden is in Iraq.
President Obama recently shifted Iraq into Biden's portfolio -- which also includes overseeing stimulus spending, a task force on the middle class and smoothing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's path in the Senate, among other topics. Notes ABC News:
White House officials were careful to define Biden’s role – he is not an envoy and this is not a full-time position. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill and Gen. Ray Odierno do not report to the vice president, but because of Biden’s foreign policy background, the president wanted him to take a more active role on Iraq policy.
So, more of a go-between and a facilitator. It's unclear who is in Biden's entourage for this trip (other than the NYT). It's also worth noting that while officials continue to tout progress being made in Iraq, the security is still so bad that they have to make these trips...
In response to staggering cost estimates for their health care overhaul proposals, Democratic Senators have whittled down the price tag of a bill introduced by Sen. Edward Kennedy, leaving intact the provision creating a government-run health insurance option and calling for an employee mandate or "play-or-pay" requirement for any business that employes 25 or more people.
Those companies would have to pay the government $750 per full-time employee or $375 for each person working part time if they opted out of providing health insurance.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who has taken charge of the bill for the ailing Kennedy, D-Mass., said Friday his committee aims to finish drafting the bill within two weeks.
Dodd said the bill would cost $611 billion over ten years, a drastic drop from the $1 trillion estimated last month by the Congressional Budget Office.
Dodd could not pinpoint exactly what was cut from the bill, only that he had been on the phone with staff and Senators for days in an effort to shrink the cost.
"We believe it is going to be very encouraging to people worried about cost," Dodd said.
Under the proposal, the Department of Health and Human Services would control the government-run option and would set premiums for the insured and reimbursement rates for health care providers.
Dodd said his new proposal would cover 97 percent of...
Washington Post officials are scrambling to explain themselves after Politico chief political correspondent and former Washington Post reporter Mike Allen revealed that the organization was offering lobbyists access to key officials of the Obama administration.
"Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders."
A source recently e-mailed a copy of what appears to be the original flier distributed to top lobbyists in Washington.
Click the thumbnail below for a full version
"Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No," the flier states. "The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it."
Reporters Bill Myers and Kiki Ryan investigate further into the story and K Street Editor Tim Carney reports that the Washington Post recently closed its one time lobbying shop that once cost $10,000 a month....
Regarding the Politico- and Drudge-induced furor about the Washington Post apparently selling lobbyists access to both reporters and Obama administration officials, the letter from Managing Editor Marcus Brauchli and this post by media columnist Howard Kurtz sets things straight. Looks like a pretty bad misstep by someone in the Post's corporate offices....
Washington Post -- S.C. Governor Resists Pressure to Resign
It’s getting pretty crazy down in South Carolina, even by local political standards which include two attempts to secede from the Union and a goodly number of duels.
Mark Sanford, who vowed to keep his job because he shouldn’t take the easy way out after playing Wild Bull of the Pampas, seems to be beyond dignity and unable to be silent for even a moment.
In the wake of Sanford’s Tuesday interview in which he was compulsively confessional about his relationships and personal failings, Sanford Wednesday became suddenly secretive, withdrawing a promise to release records about his trips to see his mistress on the state dime.
Writer Philip Rucker explains that as the always eccentric governor grows more and more erratic, pressure on the local and national level mounts for onetime GOP presidential hopeful Sanford to leave or be thrown out.
“‘What we saw in that interview was just him being irrational,’ state Sen. Larry A. Martin (R) said in an interview. ‘The very idea that he would be that candid, that frank, that brutally honest about his feelings for the woman in Argentina versus his wife versus the other girlfriends, I just find that incredible. Rational people don't do that.’
‘He doesn't need to be talking to reporters,’ Martin added. ‘He needs...
