Popularity: 1% [?]

The Democratic Indiana primary looks like it’s going to be closer than anything of the races we’ve seen so far.

A new poll by the Indianapolis Star-WTHR shows that Sen. Barack Obama has a three-point lead over Sen. Hillary Clinton — 41% to 38% — with a week and a half to go before the May 6th primary. But with a margin of error of 4%, it’s basically a dead heat.

But here’s the real news — 21% of those poll said they are still undecided. That’s enormous block of people who have yet to make up their minds. You can bet that Indiana residents will get tired of seeing political ads on TV in the next 10 days

There is good news for Obama in the poll that may hint that the undecideds could break his way. In a match up with Republican Sen. John McCain, Obama beats him 49% to 41%. But Clinton and McCain are in a tie 46%-46%. And, by 49 percent to 35 percent, Democratic primary voters said Obama is the candidate best able to win in the general election.

The poll found that voters age 18 to 35 favor Obama over Clinton 48 percent to 34 percent, while the oldest voters, age 55 and older, prefer Clinton 43 percent to 32 percent.Obama is winning urban and suburban voters, 47 percent to 33 percent, while Clinton wins the rural areas by more than 2-to-1: 55 percent to 20 percent. Clinton is doing well among white women, who back her 48 percent to 29 percent. Among all women, though, Obama is slightly edging her out 41 percent to 40 percent.

So why isn’t McCain doing better in what has been a state that has long been in the GOP safe column. The answer may hint at problems that have plagued McCain since his campaign for the White House began?

Pollster J. Ann Selzer says many Hoosiers are not happy with the Bush administration’s track record. And she said McCain’s lack of strength also may reflect that he “doesn’t have a consistent track record on the issues conservatives care most about” and may not be a good fit for conservative Republicans in Indiana.
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UPDATE: The South-Bend Tribune’s new poll shows Obama with a one-point lead 48% to 47% (5% margin of error. But the poll continues to show that Clinton’s negatives are much higher than Obama’s. More than twice as many people — 48% to 235 — think Clinton is running the more negative campaign.

Popularity: 2% [?]

C’est Terrible

Alexander Cockburn

When in trouble, reach for nuclear submarines. President Nicolas Sarkozy, derided by the French as a lightweight, rushed off at the end of March to launch Le Terrible, the fourth in France’s fourth generation of such submarines. Thus he seizes the torch of “massive retaliation” from his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who said that a state-terrorist onslaught on France or even the EU might require a nuclear missile lobbed into the perp’s presumptive backyard, wherever that might be. Le Terrible is itself powered by a nuclear reactor, and the range of its 16 missiles, each armed with three warheads, is just under 5,000 miles, so M’sieu Ahmadinejad had better watch his tongue, otherwise it might be Teheran frappe.

Le Terrible’s deployment brings France’s full menu of warheads to 348 warheads, of which 288 are on submarines, 50 on air-launched cruise missiles. There are 10 old-fashioned bombs.

On his way out of office at the end of 2006, Tony Blair took the same line as Sarkozy. A Britain without up-to-date nuclear-armed subs, he proclaimed, would be the sport of every bully on the block. “Our independent nuclear deterrent is the ultimate insurance,” Blair told the House of Commons. He cited Iran and North Korea as prime present dangers. Mind you, Britain’s present nuclear guardians — the Vanguard subs — are only scheduled to go out of service in 2022. It will apparently take 17 years to design and build the new subs. Double this to allow for screw-ups (more on screw-ups in a moment) and we won’t be seeing Britain’s last, best line of defense deployed until about 2050. By then global freezing will have rendered subs moot anyway.

Now, a familiar pattern is for statesmen and high functionaries to retire and then spend their sunset years denouncing nuclear weapons and “the balance of terror.” Not Jimmy Carter, I’m glad to say. You’d think that after years talking up peace and the benefits of peaceful negotiation, Carter would reel in shock if someone said, “I want our next nuclear sub to bear your name.” But he didn’t. After Bill Clinton tied down the Connecticut vote by OK-ing another Trident nuclear sub to be built at Groton, he announced in 2000 that it would be called the Jimmy Carter. As in, “Today Teheran is a smoldering, irradiated ruin after receiving a salvo of nuclear missiles from The Jimmy Carter.” It was probably Bill Clinton’s idea of a joke after Carter had said that he really loved Al Gore’s loyal and loving relationship with Tipper, so similar to his with Rosalynn.

But Carter was thrilled. The announcement came during the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in 2000. Larry King interviewed Carter and was clearly baffled at the contradiction:

KING: The USS Jimmy Carter is being constructed. It will be the newest submarine in the fleet.

CARTER: And the fastest and quietest ship in the world.

KING: Now that has got to be …

CARTER: I’m very flattered.

KING: I know, Mr. Former President, there’s a lot of things to be proud of, but that’s got to be kooky.

CARTER: Kooky?

KING: I mean, kind of like kooky. You’re going to go and slam the champagne against it. It’s your sub.

CARTER: My wife will christen the submarine.

KING: Permission to board the Carter, right? They’re going to say that.

CARTER: Absolutely. You’ll be welcome, by the way.

Sums it all up, doesn’t it? Here we have an absolute disconnect between the rational human who has criticized Israel for its apartheid policies and the lunatic reveling in having his name painted on a machine that could kill hundreds of thousands of people with a single detonation.

In the old days I would have ended with a pious paragraph or two about the pressing need to end the arms race. Not any more. We’ll never stuff that genie back in the bottle. Every country should have a couple of nuclear missiles and, if they really want one, a nuclear sub. You can get the sub from the Germans and put the missiles out for bid.

“Screw-ups,” I wrote above. Why so negative, Mr. Cockburn? As readers of this column may know, I speak as a maiden-voyageur on March 27 through Britain’s latest tour de force in technological incompetence — T5. This is the new British Air terminal at Heathrow, which cost about $7 billion to build across nearly twenty years. All systems failed. BA had forgotten to provide parking for the baggage handlers. The software for the entrail didn’t work either. A seasoned baggage handler said the conveyors went too fast anyway.

If you can’t design an entrail to put a bag on a plane, can you design a nuclear sub to launch untested armed systems to speed a nuclear missile on its way to Teheran or the Hindu Kush or Pyongyang and be sure it won’t swerve off course and hit Tel Aviv, capital city of our “stalwart ally,” as Barack Obama calls it even when he’s sound asleep?

Richard Rogers, designer of T5, is also the architect retained to do the redesign of the Javits Convention Center in New York. He was recently pressed by defenders of the reputation of our stalwart ally to explain his connection to a group called Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, which had criticized Israel’s wall. Rogers distanced himself from APJP at a speed approaching that of light, and said he thought the wall is a fine idea. Maybe the T5 disaster was retribution for this cowardice.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Slap Down ‘Free Market’ Pirates

Joe Conason

For many years, Robert Morgenthau has warned America that the nexus of capitalism and criminality poses a serious threat to our prosperity, security and growth. Now in the wake of the collapse of Bear Stearns, which pushed global markets further closer to the brink, perhaps the nation will listen to the Manhattan district attorney, whose scrutinizing gaze is fixed on targets well beyond New York.

As a legendary prosecutor of international financial crime, Morgenthau has long kept a watchful eye on the buccaneering crew at Bear, the firm that now symbolizes the worst in amoral capital. Its executives were notorious for testing the limits of the law by sheltering shady stock promoters and bucket-shop brokerages, and by swelling the assets of its hedge funds with dubious mortgage-backed assets.

When a pair of Bear hedge funds based in the Cayman Islands fell last summer, after their subprime mortgage investments went sour, Morgenthau sounded an early alarm. He urged the federal government to remember the fall of Long-Term Capital Management, the huge Cayman-based hedge fund whose implosion 10 years ago came close to sinking several major U.S. banks. The inevitable multibillion-dollar federal bailout prevented or postponed financial disaster — but we were not ready then to absorb the real meaning of that costly experience. That lesson, as Morgenthau explains, was simple: “Markets, like the hedge fund market, that are unsupervised and conduct business in secret, in tax havens, will eventually cause serious problems.” He has always possessed a talent for understatement.

Ironically, Bear Stearns executives shunned any participation in the rescue of Long-Term Capital in 1998 — and indeed mocked the government intervention that they now covet. Like so many corporate leaders who proclaim strict adherence to free market principles and standards, the Bear gang doesn’t stand up too well under close examination. When those Cayman-based funds — wonderfully named the “High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund” and the “High Grade Structured Master Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund” — nose-dived last year, Bear’s clients lost billions.

Of course Bear’s poor performance didn’t dissuade James Cayne, its recently departed boss, from the gross display of buying himself a $28 million home weeks before his corrupted firm finally tanked. There he sits in diminished splendor, while lawyers and economists bargain with the Treasury Department over the price of his company’s distressed shares.

If we must preserve Bear and its profligate executives to protect ourselves, we should make comparable efforts to save the homeowners, cities and states that stand to lose so much in this deluge of stinking paper. There is no moral excuse to subsidize the losses of the super-rich, while leaving everyone else to the mercies of the market. What’s good for the country club Republicans is good for the working family Democrats, too.

But as Morgenthau insists, we cannot sustain an economy of universal bailouts. A son of FDR’s treasury secretary, he understands how the New Deal saved democratic capitalism from mindless greed 75 years ago, and he knows that the undoing of those reforms during the past 25 years has led to our present troubles. More and more of our capital (including public pension funds) has moved into offshore havens, where banking and corporate secrecy laws allow hedge fund operators to avoid regulation and taxes. This escape from transparency will continue as long as it is permitted by law and rewarded by the tax code.

All that will soon have to end, or we will find ourselves again at the edge of disaster.

Obviously, we should hope that the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve find a way through this crisis without severe damage to the U.S. and world economy. The question is whether we will make the necessary changes to our political economy — including a renewed regulatory regime and a new New Deal for the American people — without suffering hard times such as we have not seen for decades.

As we mark the end of a long era of conservative excess, we could do much worse than heed Morgenthau’s advice. In the name of free markets, we made ourselves and our economy vulnerable to the worst impulses of a greedy, remorseless few. He saw that on the horizon and tried to tell us. Now, perhaps we will listen.

Popularity: 2% [?]

On Clinton’s Tax Returns, A ‘frankly Disturbing’ Lack Of Transparency

By Arianna Huffington, Tribune Media Services

It’s hard out there for a surrogate. Especially for a Clinton surrogate being asked why Hillary Clinton has not released the last eight years of her tax returns. As congresswoman and Clinton surrogate Nita Lowey made clear on “Meet The Press” last weekend, the reason it’s so hard to give a good answer to “Why hasn’t Clinton released her returns?” is because there is no good answer.

Lowey gave it a shot, but it wasn’t pretty — or particularly intelligible. When Tim Russert asked about the returns, she opened with the main talking point the Clinton campaign has been using for weeks: “It’s my understanding that there are 20 years of tax returns in the public view from both Bill and Hillary Clinton.”

And she’s exactly right. There are 20 years worth of returns that have been released. What’s missing are the last eight years — years in which Bill Clinton has been making money hand over fist, and involving himself in all kinds of interesting financial deals (see Ron Burkle, Yucaipa, and the ruler of Dubai).

Lowey then quickly pivoted away from tax returns (clearly the 20-year line, as lame as it is, was the only arrow in her quiver) to make points about earmarks and the terrific work Bill Clinton’s foundation has done on HIV/AIDS in Africa — neither of which Russert had asked her about or have anything to do with tax returns.

Now, Nita Lowey is no slouch. She’s smart and accomplished. But when you are sent into battle armed with little more than nonsensical blather, you are not going to end up looking very good. And Lowey didn’t. And she seemed to know it — her eyes belied a classic case of surrogatancholy.

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly paired herself with John McCain as of late, making the case that they are candidates with a “lifetime of experience,” so it seems appropriate that her refusal to release her tax returns is another thing they have in common.

While Clinton has been tossing verbal bouquets to McCain and attacking Obama for not being “vetted,” Obama has been living up to his promises about making government more transparent. Not only did he release his latest tax returns in April 2007 , he also just made public his list of earmarks, and sat down at the end of last week with the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times to answer all their questions about Tony Rezko. The conclusion of the Tribune?

“When we endorsed Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination Jan. 27 , we said we had formed our opinions of him during 12 years of scrutiny. We concluded that the professional judgment and personal decency with which he has managed himself and his ambition distinguish him. Nothing Obama said in our editorial board room Friday diminishes that verdict. . . . Barack Obama now has spoken about his ties to Tony Rezko in uncommon detail. That’s a standard for candor by which other presidential candidates facing serious inquiries now can be judged.”

It’s a standard not being met by either McCain or Clinton.

As Sheila Krumholz of the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics said of Clinton’s not releasing her tax returns: “What is the holdup? She hasn’t exactly made it clear as to what process is making it so cumbersome to just release them.”

Or as John Aravosis summed it up: “People with nothing to hide don’t usually hide.”

The main excuse we’ve gotten so far is that Hillary Clinton just has too much on her plate. “I’m a little busy right now,” she said during the Ohio debate. “I hardly have time to sleep. But I will certainly work toward releasing, and we will get that done and in the public domain.”

That was three weeks ago. Two weeks ago, Howard Wolfson promised that the returns would be released “on or around April 15 .” But weren’t the returns completed and filed a long time ago? Doesn’t Clinton’s accountant have time to print them out and make some copies. (Note to Clinton’s accountant: Many Kinko’s are open 24 hours.)

As Andrew Sullivan notes, “Did they file an extension for the past few years? If they didn’t, the forms are available now.”

And it’s not as if the Clintons have attempted to make a reasoned argument as to why the returns shouldn’t be released — something about there being too much scrutiny of public officials. Instead, they’ve gone with Classic Clintonism: Envelope themselves in lofty, good-guy rhetoric while utterly failing to follow through. And then smearing their opponents, such as their absurd attack on Obama’s campaign for “imitating Ken Starr.”

The Clintons have obviously done very well during the Bush years — well enough that she was able to loan her campaign $5 million at a critical moment. Is it really Ken Starr-like to want to know where that money came from? Or to ask for a list of the donors who have contributed $500 million to her husband’s library? Or to ask what her policy as president would be regarding the transparency of huge donations from foreign interests to her husband’s charitable fund? (See the $31.3 million donation and additional $100 million pledge to Bill Clinton’s foundation after he helped a Canadian mining mogul secure a massive uranium deal with Kazakhstan.)

As a New York Times editorial put it: “As a former president, Bill Clinton has been making millions annually giving speeches and traveling the globe. What is publicly known about his business dealings is sketchy, and clearer disclosure of them is required to reassure voters that Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy is unencumbered by hidden entanglements.”

In short, it’s well past time for Hillary Clinton to be as “vetted” as she claims to already be — and to have this vetting done now by Democratic voters rather than later by GOP hit squads. She needs to live up to the standard she laid out for Rick Lazio, the opponent in her 2000 Senate race. At that time, she said it was “frankly disturbing” that Lazio was holding back on releasing his tax returns.

What a difference eight years — and tens of millions of dollars (some of them from questionable deals) — can make.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 3% [?]

How the Democrats Could Lose

Richard Cohen

By official count, The Washington Post’s 10th most e-mailed column of 2007 was published last June under the headline “How the GOP Could Win.” It said that the Republican Party would promote national security as the salient issue of the campaign, making a silk purse (victory in November) out of a sow’s ear (the quagmire in Iraq), and keep the White House for another four years. Increasingly, I think I might have been right.

It was Mitt Romney, the Harvard MBA, who left John McCain with what could be the winning business plan. In his campaign swan song, Romney used the two words you will repeatedly hear in the fall: retreat and defeat. Referring to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Romney said, “They would retreat, declare defeat, and the consequence of that would be devastating.”

In my 2007 column, I compared this presidential campaign to that of 1972, when George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon. The parallels are in some ways obvious — the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, above all. What I could not have foreseen a year ago was how much more obvious the parallels would become. Back in ‘72, the Democratic Party was split between doves and hawks, reformers and stogie smokers — even men and women. The result was a national convention that was boisterous, unruly and ugly to look at. It might, however, look like a tea party compared to what could happen in Denver this August.

At the moment, no one can figure how the Democrats are going to get a nominee. What the party needs is someone like George Mitchell, a senior figure of trusted wisdom who might be able to do what Howard Dean, the party chairman, clearly cannot — avoid the train wreck everyone can see coming. But barring either Mitchell or a miracle, neither Clinton nor Obama can garner sufficient delegates on their own. It might take a combination of superdelegates and a revote in Michigan and Florida — punished for holding unauthorized primaries — to come up with a nominee. By the time that happens, the Democratic Party will be one, huge, dysfunctional family.

In that 2007 column, I did not take the surge into account. Putting an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq has indeed made a difference. It has not won the war and it has not enabled American soldiers to come home, but it has dampened the violence there — notwithstanding the carnage on Monday. Overall, civilian deaths are down. Overall, military deaths are down. To that (limited but important) extent, the surge has worked.

When I mentioned 1972 and Vietnam to an important Clinton adviser, he pointed out that Nixon initially won in 1968 by saying he had a secret plan to end the war. That nonexistent plan was still apparently unfolding four years later. In addition, Nixon made opposition to war seem unpatriotic and defeatist. He exploited the war, exacerbating cultural divisions.

John McCain lacks Nixon’s raw talent for hypocrisy, so I don’t think he’ll go that far. But he will make his stand on the surge and it will be, for him, the functional equivalent of Nixon’s secret plan. McCain’s plan, he will say, is to win. The Democrats’ is to surrender. The issue, if he frames it right, will not be the wisdom of the war, but how to get out with pride.

McCain, of course, owns the surge. He advocated putting additional troops in Iraq way back when President Bush, deep into denial, was proclaiming ultimate faith in Rummy and his merry band of incompetents. McCain, in fact, oozes national security. His weakness is that he has too often advocated using — or bluffing — force (North Korea, Iran, the former Yugoslavia). With the deft application of just a little demagoguery, he can be made to look like Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), the deranged Air Force commander in Stanley Kubrick’s always instructional “Dr. Strangelove.”

You can see it all happening again: a Republican charging that the Democrats are defeatist, soft on national security and not to be trusted with the White House. And you can see the Democratic Party heading toward Denver for yet another crackup. This time, instead of McGovern, a genuine war hero (the Distinguished Flying Cross) caricatured as a sissy, the party will put up either a candidate who has been inconsistent on the war or one with almost no foreign policy or military experience. A year ago, it looked like the party could not lose. This year, it seems determined to try.

Popularity: 3% [?]

US lawmakers ‘rolling in money’ Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:12:46

A Washington watchdog report has suggested that America’s looming economic nightmare will not stop US lawmakers from rolling in money. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, members of the US congress have enjoyed ‘an extraordinary run in their personal investments and other finances’ in the past two years. “The median net worth of senators was estimated at $1.7 million and House of Representatives members at $675,000,” said the Washington watchdog group which monitors the influence of money on government. “Members of Congress, who are now paid about $169,000 annually, saw their net worth soar 84 percent from 2004 to 2006, on average,” added the group. Financial disclosure reports filed from 2006 led the watchdog to the conclusion that some 58 percent of senators and 44 percent of House members could be considered millionaires. “Like a lot of Americans, as the economy did well, Congress did well — but lawmakers did especially well,” said the center’s executive director Sheila Krumholz. She concluded that now that America is on the inescapable road to recession, US congressional representatives have a far more comfortable cushion to bear the brunt. SBB/HGH

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]