Wall Street Journal — Baghdad Bombings Stir New Insurgency Concerns
Things are getting more dangerous in Iraq. Until Wednesday’s coordinated attacks, though, the consensus was that the violence was a last gasp of the long, hard-fought insurgency. There seems to be less certainty on that front today and a concern that the civil conflict between the Sunni minority and Shiite majority may be opening again as U.S. troops hasten their withdrawal.
Writer Charles Levinson shows that the latest round of violence has received less coverage because Iraqis themselves are mostly the targets and the storyline of Iraq as in its denoument has taken hold. The political consequences, though, could still be intense if U.S. troops are either seen to be fleeing escalating violence or the president has to again rewrite his timetable for withdrawal in order to prevent another 2006-style meltdown in Iraq.
“But the U.S. has faded into the background and largely disappeared from Baghdad’s streets since concluding a security agreement with the Iraqi government in November. The pact requires all American soldiers to withdraw from Iraqi cities by June 30, unless the Iraqi government asks them to stay.
The local militias, known as the Awakening or Sons of Iraq, have become far less active since the Iraqi government took control of the program earlier this year. Salaries have been paid sporadically, many of the groups’ leaders have been arrested for crimes committed before they abandoned the insurgency, and promises to find government jobs for militiamen have gone unfulfilled.”
Wall Street Journal — Shorter Sentences Sought for Crack
One of the issues that the Obama administration has been coming alongside, slowly but surely, has been the effort to change drug policies away from a war and towards treatment of addicts.
Some issues entice liberals and libertarians alike – like a gradual decriminalization of drug use starting with marijuana. But writer Gary Fields shows how difficult the effort may be, the Justice Department’s move to lower crack penalties to the same levels as powdered cocaine on grounds that it is unfair and racist. Police hate the idea. They favor increasing powdered cocaine penalties to crack levels, want want high crack penalties to keep gang bangers locked up.
That would not achieve the administration’s aims since it would slightly increase the jammed federal prison population and do nothing to lower the high number of young, black males behind bars for crack.
“President Barack Obama’s choice to run the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, has suggested prevention and treatment as better alternatives. The U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets guidelines for judges to use in an advisory capacity when they hand down sentences, has been looking for alternatives to incarceration, including the use of drug courts and treatment options.
“Wednesday’s testimony is the biggest and most visible step yet. The law, which sets a mandatory minimum sentence, has been held partially responsible for the rapid rise in the federal prison population, where more than 52% of the system’s 204,000 inmates are serving time for drug crimes.”
Washington Times – Steele fights back against RNC ‘scheme’
RNC Chairman Michael Steele either discovered a plot against him or just created several. In a blistering email to five party leaders, later leaked to writer Ralph Hollow, Steele alleged that by giving the party’s treasurer additional control of the party’s finances was a usurpation of the chairman’s power.
There’s some debate (see below) whether or not that is the case, but it’s another episode of Steele-centric drama that does little to help a party that is in its worst shape since 1977. In office now for three months, Steele’s efforts to consolidate his power ought to have been mostly concluded by now.
“In the e-mail, Mr. Steele said the resolution “amounts to nothing short of a completely unprecedented usurpation of the authority of the RNC chairman, and a transfer of the chairman’s authority to the executive committee and the treasurer. No RNC chairman has ever had to deal with this, and I certainly have no intention of putting up with it either.”
But [the party’s former general counsel David Norcross], one of the measure’s sponsors, said in an e-mail to some members that the opposite is true. He argues that the financial checks and balances proposed in the resolution were always in play at the RNC and somehow got lost in the 2008 post-presidential nominating convention shuffle.”
Milbank – Milk the Drama, Obama
Dana Milbank proves his powers by almost making a rhyming opening to a column work. He goes on to chronicle the many, many, many ways in which the Obama administration celebrated itself for having made it through 100 episodes, er, days.
“Administration officials and their allies, meanwhile, issued their own report cards. “In the first 100 days, USDA has moved quickly,” Agriculture Secretary Vilsack said in a conference call. “I would definitely give the president an A,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a news conference.
And Obama’s 100 days brought to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s mind Winston Churchill in 1942. “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning,” Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement.”
Los Angeles Times — Obama 100-day crystal ball? Don’t count on it
At last, someone smart did a comparison of the Obama 100 days to the FDR 100 days. The conclusions business columnist Michael Hiltzik points out that FDR’s 100-day victory lap was just as much of a fabrication as Obama’s
“As was his habit, FDR was overselling the New Deal by presenting it as a full-blown and fully consistent economic program. In truth, as Raymond Moley of FDR’s “Brain Trust” wrote later, the Hundred Days were as haphazard an agglomeration of found objects as “the stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom.”
Little of what happened during that period gave a clue to Roosevelt’s political philosophy. The 15 major bills enacted then included many that delivered on FDR’s pledge of a “New Deal for the American people” in his nomination acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic convention — among them programs for emergency relief, the refinancing of home and farm mortgages and a public power system for the Tennessee Valley.
But any pundit judging FDR from the totality of his Hundred Days might conclude him to be a leader more orthodox in his economic thinking than Herbert Hoover, for he also was fixated on balancing the budget. The second bill he sent to Congress after the inauguration was a measure that cut the salaries of federal workers and slashed veterans’ pensions to pare $500 million from the federal budget.”
