Cracker Squire

Floating Bases Enhance Capacity For Quick Strikes

2012-01-28T10:10:00.000-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

Within the president's defense-budget plan is funding for an intriguing new item: a floating drone base that also could be used as a launching pad for commandos.

The vessel—called an "afloat forward staging base"—would be a platform that could be configured to carry and refuel small patrol boats, helicopters or pilotless aircraft.

It would also give the U.S. military the ability to stage a small strike force offshore—without obtaining a permission slip from another country for access to a land base.

Details are still emerging, but the project offers insight into how the Obama administration envisions a military that in some ways is more lethal even as it contracts.

Plans for the specialized vessel fit neatly with the Obama administration's plans to grow special-operations forces, while slimming down conventional forces such as the Army and Marine Corps.

Senior officials want to provide military commanders with affordable sea-base options without necessarily sending a big-deck aircraft carrier and a full complement of escort ships.

A defense official said the floating staging base was more like a freighter that would be outfitted for different kinds of missions, from countering mines to launching remotely piloted aircraft. It also could be used as a platform for launching commando operations.

Are you ready to allow the Legislature access to local education funds in pursuit of greater school choice?

2012-01-27T09:39:00.001-05:00

Maureen Downey in the ajc obverves, accurately I pray:

I suspect Georgia voters are going to be wary of turning over the keys to their local treasuries to the state Legislature. School taxes represent a sizable chunk of the local taxes collected, and this constitutional amendment would cede unprecedented access to lawmakers in Atlanta in the name of school choice.

The topic:

Rep. Jones, R-Milton, is sponsoring HR 1162, a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to approve charter schools over the objections of local school boards and redirect local dollars to them through a legislative sleight of hand.

If HR 1162 passes, the proposed amendment would be on the ballot in November. (You can find a petition for HR 1162 here.)

Last year, the state Supreme Court struck down a state-created commission authorized to approve charters and fund the schools at a level that incorporated local spending. (The state essentially funded the local share and dunned the locals that amount in their state allotment.)

She also quotes from my friend and fellow school board attorney Tom Cox:

To summarize the Supreme Court’s rationale for rejecting the state commission, I am turning to one of the winning attorneys Thomas Cox, who represented Gwinnett County in the challenge:
The Court ruled that the Charter Commission Act ran afoul of the Georgia Constitution for two primary reasons. First, the Court held that the schools authorized by the Act were not in fact “special schools” as contemplated by the relevant provision of the Georgia Constitution. After examining the history, including comments by committee members and drafters of the relevant sections of the 1983 Constitution, the Court concluded that “special schools” were intended to mean schools that enrolled only students with certain special needs (including, for example, the Georgia School for the Deaf and School for the Blind and vocational trade schools). The term was not intended, according to the Court, to create “a carte blanche authorization for the General Assembly to create its own general K-12 schools so as to duplicate the efforts of or compete with locally controlled schools for the same pool of students educated with the same limited pool of tax funds. ” Second, the Court held that the purported authorization of state-created, but locally operating, charter schools, which are not approved by the local boards of education, infringed on the “fundamental principle of exclusive local control” of public education embodied in the Georgia Constitution.

The success or failure of the forthcoming effort to amend the Georgia Constitution to permit the state to create its own charter schools, with access to locally levied tax revenues, will likely determine whether, going forward, the front lines in the battles over charter schools will be established at the local or state levels. If the Georgia Constitution is amended as proposed by some in the General Assembly, then the State will become the ultimate authority in approving or denying charter schools and in mandating the direction of local tax revenues to fund those schools.

Stay tuned readers. The Philistines are not only going to be pushing the constitutional amendment, but going after the Georgia Supreme Court Justices who stepped up to the plate and made the right decision.

North Carolina's Governor Won't Run

2012-01-27T07:08:00.000-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue said Thursday she wouldn't seek re-election, an unexpected development that could complicate Democrats' efforts to hold on to the governor's mansion and President Barack Obama's chances of carrying the swing state in November.

Indiana Right-to-Work Bill Advances

2012-01-26T06:46:00.000-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Indiana House passed legislation Wednesday that would ban contracts requiring employees to pay union dues, ending Democratic efforts to block the bill and making final adoption almost certain for the country's first right-to-work law in more than a decade.

The bill now heads to the Indiana Senate—controlled by Republicans 37 to 13—which could move the legislation to Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels by Feb. 1. If Mr. Daniels signs the bill, as expected, Indiana would become the 23rd right-to-work state in the nation, and the first in the industrial Midwest, home to many of the nation's manufacturing jobs and a traditional bastion of organized labor.

Doonesbury - 1-24-2012

2012-01-24T07:13:00.001-05:00

The film may be right - The film posits that there were three jihads: One at the time of Muhammad, a second in the Middle Ages and a third that is under way covertly throughout the West today.

2012-01-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

"The Third Jihad," a film that cast a very hard light on American Muslims, was shows to some New York officers and is now in the news. See the story in The New York Times that notes:

The film posits that there were three jihads: One at the time of Muhammad, a second in the Middle Ages and a third that is under way covertly throughout the West today.

This is, the film claims, “the 1,400-year war.”

Justices Rein In Police on GPS Trackers

2012-01-24T06:44:00.000-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that police violated the Constitution when they attached a Global Positioning System tracker to a suspect's vehicle without a valid search warrant, voting unanimously in one of the first major cases to test privacy rights in the digital era.

The government said Federal Bureau of Investigation agents use GPS tracking devices in thousands of investigations each year. It argued that attaching the tiny tracking device to a car's undercarriage was too trivial a violation of property rights to matter, and that no one who drove in public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored. Police were free to employ the tactic for any reason without showing probable cause to a magistrate and getting a search warrant, the government said.

The justices seemed troubled by that position at arguments in November, where the government acknowledged it would also allow attaching such trackers to the justices' own cars without obtaining a warrant.

Mitt Romney to release tax returns Tuesday

2012-01-23T07:16:00.001-05:00

From The Washington Post:

Hoping to put to rest the mounting controversy over his personal finances, Mitt Romney said Sunday that he will release his 2010 tax returns and an estimate for 2011 Tuesday. The Republican presidential candidate had said previously that he would make some of his tax information public in April.

“We just made a mistake in holding off as long as we did,” Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. “It just was a distraction. We want to get back to the real issues in the campaign: leadership, character, a vision for America, how to get jobs again in America and how to rein in the excessive scale of the federal government.”

The decision comes a day after Romney’s campaign sustained a blow in South Carolina, where former House speaker Newt Gingrich won the state’s primary after a last-minute surge. Romney had been the front-runner in the polls there just a week ago, but Gingrich finished more than 12 percentage points ahead of him.

In the interview, Romney said Gingrich’s strong debate performance Monday, in which he aggressively chastised moderator Juan Williams, contributed to the former congressman’s last-minute surge.
Romney also acknowledged that he had a tough week of attacks by his opponents, including criticism of his time at the helm of the private equity firm Bain Capital, and had to contend with the announcement that, despite being declared the early winner of the Iowa caucuses, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum officially prevailed in that contest.

Line of Scrimmage Forms Over Right to Work Bill

2012-01-23T07:01:00.000-05:00

A T-shirt worn by members of the Teamsters has been interpreted in various ways.

INDIANAPOLIS — This city is in full preen for its moment in the spotlight, its first Super Bowl.

[I]nside the Statehouse, people are consumed by something else entirely: a partisan fight over union strength has boiled over. The standoff, three weeks old, is over whether Indiana should become the first state in the Midwest manufacturing belt to adopt legislation banning union contracts from requiring nonunion members to pay fees for representation. And it threatens to linger even as the national attention on the Super Bowl arrives — a possibility that Indiana Republicans want to avoid but that some union supporters seem to be hoping for.

“It’s a forum for this to get out beyond the state of Indiana, for the world to know what’s happening to workers here in Indiana,” said Mike Gillespie, business representative of Local 135 of the Teamsters Union, who stood in a crowd of union supporters inside the Statehouse. He wore a T-shirt that bore the numerals of the Super Bowl, XLVI , with a slash through them, a message people here interpreted in various ways.

At times in recent days, the chants of protesters — who say the legislation, known as a “right to work” bill, will result in lower wages and weakened unions — have echoed through the rotunda: “Occupy the Super Bowl!” Some say they want to hold marches, slow down beer deliveries or hand out leaflets in the Super Bowl crowd, while others have hinted at more drastic measures.

Disdainful of Strategists, Gingrich Acts as His Own

2012-01-21T10:41:00.003-05:00

From The New York Times:

If Newt Gingrich soars on his strong debate performances this week, overcomes the blowback within his party from attacking Mitt Romney as a corporate buyout king, and goes on to do well when South Carolina voters go to the polls on Saturday, one political strategist will get both blame for the stumbles and credit for successes: Mr. Gingrich himself.

Openly disdainful of professional political operatives, Mr. Gingrich employs almost none of them after a mass exodus of aides in June nearly derailed his candidacy. Asked in a debate here Thursday night to name one thing he might undo about his campaign, he said, “I would skip the opening three months where I hired regular consultants.”

Instead, Mr. Gingrich makes nearly all the key strategic decisions by himself, and in a manner befitting his personality — spontaneously, thinking aloud, often voicing a half-formed idea in full public view before committing to it.

His political instincts are much like everything else about him: brilliant at times, befuddling and exasperating at others.

“In politics, you say something, and it has to be correct the first time and everyone has to be 100 percent behind it or else it’s going to face criticism,” said R. C. Hammond, the spokesman for the Gingrich campaign, describing what he said was the conventional way of running a presidential campaign.

Mr. Gingrich “doesn’t operate that way,” Mr. Hammond said. “It’s O.K. to say an idea and have it be criticized because in this process there’s going to be an improvement.”

The Wealth Issue (Mitt Romney)

2012-01-20T05:27:00.000-05:00

David Brooks writes in The New York Times:

Mitt Romney is a rich man, but is Mitt Romney’s character formed by his wealth? Is Romney a spoiled, cosseted character? Has he been corrupted by ease and luxury?

The notion is preposterous. All his life, Romney has been a worker and a grinder. He earned two degrees at Harvard simultaneously (in law and business). He built a business. He’s persevered year after year, amid defeat after defeat, to build a political career.

Romney’s salient quality is not wealth. It is, for better and worse, his tenacious drive — the sort of relentlessness that we associate with striving immigrants, not rich scions.

Where did this persistence come from? It’s plausible to think that it came from his family history. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once observed that it takes several generations to make a career. Interests, habits and lore accrue in families and shape those born into them.

The Romney family history, which is nicely described in “The Real Romney” by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, is a story of tenacious work, setbacks and recovery. People who analyze how Mormonism may have shaped Romney generally look to theology. But the Mormon history, the exodus, matters most.

Mitt Romney’s great-great-grandfather Miles was a member of the church in Nauvoo, Ill., and spent years building a temple there. Even after Joseph Smith was killed by a mob and most of the Mormons fled, Miles stayed to finish his temple.

Then, in 1844, as the great work was being completed, mobs burned it to the ground and forced Miles and his family to head West. Most Mormons made the trek to Salt Lake City, but the Romneys could not afford an ox cart. They were part of a small, malnourished band that took four years of struggle to make it the 1,300 miles west.

Mitt’s great-grandfather, also Miles, made the trek starting at age 7. He was married in 1862, but a month after his marriage Brigham Young told him to leave his wife, Hannah, and become a missionary for three years in Britain. Hannah supported herself by taking in other people’s washing.

Miles returned in 1867 and bought a two-room house. Young commanded him to take another wife, and Hannah had to prepare the room for the woman who would be her rival. “I used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow,” she recounted in her own private memoir.

Then they were commanded to leave family and friends and build a new settlement in the desert 300 miles south of Salt Lake City. Living at first in primitive huts, they built a community, and Miles prospered. Then came a new command to move 400 miles across the wilderness to settle a desert patch in Arizona.

Again the Romneys were thrown back into primeval hardship. Miles, his three wives and their many children lived in a small wooden house and survived on bread, beans and gravy. There, as elsewhere, the locals detested the Mormons for their polygamy, for their religion and for the fact that the Mormons tended to outwork them. The local newspaper said Miles should be hung for polygamy, so two of his wives were sent to hide in cornfields and the mountains of New Mexico.

They were compelled to move again. Romney left his family to build a colony in Mexico. It was 1885, and he was living out of a wagon. Hannah led eight children through the Arizona mountains to join him. In Mexico, they lived in a house with a dirt roof, so mud dropped down when it rained. Eventually, all the wives and the 21 children were reunited. Miles and his son Gaskell, Mitt’s grandfather, built a successful community, with brick homes, churches and wealth.

George Romney, Mitt’s father, was born in Mexico. But when he was 5, in 1912, Mexican revolutionaries confiscated their property and threw them out. Most of the Romneys fled back to the U.S. Within days, they went from owning a large Mexican ranch to being penniless once again, drifting from California to Idaho to Utah, where again they built a fortune.

Mitt Romney can’t talk about his family history on the campaign trail. Mormonism is an uncomfortable subject. But he must have been affected by it.

It is a story of relentless effort, of recovery and of being despised (in their eyes) because of their own success. Romney himself experienced none of this hardship, of course, but Jews who didn’t live through the Exodus are still shaped by it.

Romney seems to share his family’s remorseless drive to rise — whether it’s trying to persuade the French to give up wine and join his church, or building a business, or being willing to withstand heaps of abuse in pursuit of the presidency. He may have character flaws, but he does not have the character flaws normally associated with great wealth. His signature is focus and persistence. The wealth issue is a sideshow.

In Deportation Policy Test, 1 in 6 Offered Reprieve

2012-01-20T05:14:00.000-05:00

From The New York Times:

A review ordered by the Obama administration of virtually all 7,900 deportation cases before the immigration court here has identified about 1,300 foreigners — 16 percent — who pose no security risk and will be allowed to remain in the United States, although with no new legal status, immigration officials said Thursday.

It was a fast-paced test run of the first comprehensive docket review in the nation’s immigration courts. Department of Homeland Security officials plan to extend it in coming months to all of about 300,000 deportation cases before the courts nationwide.

The court review is part of a broad effort by the administration, as President Obama heads into his re-election campaign, to ease the impact of enforcement on immigrant and Latino communities by stopping some deportations while also reducing huge backlogs swamping the immigration courts. Based on an early projection of results from pilot projects here and in Baltimore, as many as 39,000 immigrants across the country could see their deportation cases closed.

Romney screws up, and heading to become new poster boy for 15% rate. Says he: The $374,327 I reported earning in speaking fees last year was "not very much."

2012-01-18T07:19:00.000-05:00

We all know -- let's say that the great majority of Americans who are not elected officials serving in Washington recognize -- that solving the deficit is going to require tax increases along with decreasing expenditures, including entitlement reform. This self-inflicted wound by Romney is going to assist on the tax issue.

From The New York Times:

[Romey's] effective tax rate was “probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything,” Mr. Romney said at a campaign stop in South Carolina, noting that most of his considerable income over the last decade has come from investments rather than from earned income like salary. He also characterized as “not very much” the $374,327 he reported earning in speaking fees last year, though that sum would, by itself, very nearly catapult most American families into the top 1 percent of the country’s earners.

As a candidate, Mr. Romney has also advocated for tax policies that would significantly benefit people who, like him, derive most of their income from investments.

Assuming Congress does not act to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, the rate for capital gains income is set to return to 20 percent for the 2013 tax year, while the rate for dividend income will jump to 39.6 percent. But in his economic plan, Mr. Romney calls for making permanent the Bush-era tax cuts on capital gains and dividend income, keeping them both at the current rate of 15 percent.

See also discussion of rates in The Wall Street Journal.

Long-Term Unemployment Ripples Through One Town

2012-01-18T06:53:00.000-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

ROSWELL, Ga.—The waiting list for subsidized housing here, just 40 families long a year ago, is up to 500. The number of children eligible for free or reduced lunch is up 50%. A little more than a year ago, the Methodist church began seminars for marriages strained by job losses.

Roswell is a pre-Civil War cotton mill town that grew into a wealthy bedroom community of Atlanta as the metro area prospered. More than half the city's 88,000 residents have four-year college degrees. But Roswell sits in a region with an unusually severe case of long-term unemployment: About 40% of the unemployed in the Atlanta metro area in 2010, the most recent local data available, were out of work for a year or more versus the national average of 29%.

One of them is Marcy Bronner, 57 years old. When she lost her job at Pennzoil back in 2000, it took her seven months to find a new one at Quintiles, a bio- and pharmaceutical-services company. She eventually became senior director of human resources at a salary in the low six figures.

In November 2010, she was laid off again. More than a year later, she is still looking for work. "It's harder now," she says, compared to the 2000s. "There's a lot more people out there."

While the job market is improving—the national unemployment rate fell to 8.5% in December—long-term unemployment continues to be particularly pronounced, and there is little indication that it is falling quickly. The government said that in December 3.9 million nationwide had been out of work for at least a year and were still looking. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called this "a national crisis."

Some will eventually find jobs, though long spells of unemployment are likely to scar them for years. Workers who were jobless for six months or more in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Connecticut and eventually found work earned 60% less than those who were unemployed for three months or less, economists Kenneth Couch of the University of Connecticut and Dana Placzek of the state labor department found.

Some will never find jobs again. Their ties to the job market will wither. The splotches of unemployment on their applications will make them unattractive to potential employers. Workers who had been unemployed for less than five weeks in 2010 had a 34% chance of finding a job the following month, according to Labor Department data. Those out more than six months had only a 10% chance.

When their unemployment benefits run out, some will find other ways to get by—relying on families, drawing on retirement savings or, if they can qualify, going on government disability programs.

"This is what people saw in Europe: You had large groups of people who hadn't worked in a long amount of time," says Betsey Stevenson, former chief Labor Department economist and now a visiting professor at Princeton University. "I am really quite fearful that 10 years from now we're going to look back and go, 'Why didn't we fight this harder?"

The longer people are out of work, the more likely their skills are to become obsolete—particularly at a time of rapidly evolving technology. "You are in your 40s, 50s or 60s, and you are suddenly out of work," said Jonathan Warner, director of community and economic development at Chattahoochee Technical College, which has its main campus in Marietta, Ga., the next town over from Roswell. "What are you going to do? Who is going to hire you? The smart ones come to us to get retooled."

Ms. Bronner, the former human-resources director who lives in Marietta, has been told by job-placement experts that she has too much experience for some openings. She gets that. "I would be saying the same thing if I was sitting in my old chair," she says.

Moving is an unattractive option: Her husband's home inspection business relies on local referrals.

Nationally, the rise in the number of two-earner couples and the decline in home prices has made moving harder when one spouse loses a job. Only 11.6% of Americans moved in 2011, a smaller percentage than in any year since the Census Bureau began keeping track in 1948.

So Ms. Bronner, who has a bachelor's degree in business technology from the University of Houston, has gone back to school, earning certifications in business quality improvement methods at Chattahoochee Tech. Ms. Bronner has joined a support group for the jobless at Roswell United Methodist Church and has posted her resume on the LinkedIn website, and she checks job websites daily. "There is no resting on your laurels, not anymore," she says.

Lately, she has started thinking of looking outside of human resources. A neighbor was unemployed as an electrician for a year, and went back to school to become a pharmacy technician. She is considering more training in project management to qualify for work in other fields, though the prospect of "completely switching gears" in middle age is daunting, she says.

It can also be depressing. While helping with the wedding of one of her three daughters last year, she found herself crying uncontrollably at random moments. For about four months, she says, she was in "a pretty big funk." At one point, her husband told her: "Your daughter is so afraid you're going to lose it. You've got to get your act together." A counselor helped her pull through, and the wedding became a turning point, helping her renew her as-yet-unsuccessful job hunt.

Unemployment is, at first, a personal struggle. But as it persists, the ripples spread throughout a community.

Local governments in the arc of wealthy suburbs north of Atlanta don't have the infrastructure to deal with thousands of middle-class residents who have been out of work for six months or more. They never had the need before.

"I haven't experienced this kind of impact in my lifetime," says Jere Wood, a 63-year-old lifelong resident of Roswell who has been its mayor since 1997. "This isn't the first time a lawyer's lost his job, but it's the first time a lot of them have lost their jobs." Unemployment in the Atlanta metropolitan area in which Roswell sits was 9.8% at last tally, well above the national average.

The roster of Roswell residents collecting Social Security disability benefits, often the last refuge of those who can't find work, is up nearly 16% since 2007, mirroring the national increase. Local charities are serving residents who once earned six-figure salaries. Unemployed parents scramble for fee waivers to keep children in after-school sports.

As job losses became more prevalent, the 6,700-member Roswell United Methodist Church reacted, offering a support group for the unemployed. The twice-a-month events drew nearly 350 last year, up from fewer than 100 in better times. In late November, Ms. Bronner went for the first time—and was amazed by the number of others who were there.

In November 2010, the church launched the seminar for couples dealing with the tension that unemployment can cause—particularly as it continues for long periods. The church considered doing so earlier but there wasn't interest.

Geoff Wiggins, 58, who runs the seminar with his wife, usually opens sessions like this: "How many times have you had this discussion? The working spouse comes in at the end of the day and says 'How was your day?' And the unemployed person says, 'I'm out of work, how do you think my day went?'" The goal is to help couples communicate better as they struggle with income insecurity and battered self-worth. "What breaks my heart," Mr. Wiggins says, "is how many people aren't getting help."

The recession hit the church budget hard. Donations fell. "The jobs just aren't out there," says Mike Long, senior minister. "Because of that they simply couldn't give to the church like they were."

In 2009 the church cut spending by 10% and trimmed staff salaries by 5%. In 2010, it cut its program ministries by 15%. When paid employees were laid off, volunteers took over lawn maintenance and custodial work. Last year's $4.5 million budget is 13.5% below 2008 levels.

One of the other participants in the church support group, Edward "Ted" Boone, a 49-year-old college graduate, lost his job in August 2010. He had been earning in the low six figures in a business information job, a field in which he had planned to work until retirement.

He, too, rejected an out-of-state move. His wife is employed as a pastor nearby. Instead, he concentrated on aggressive networking.

In November 2011, after 15 months of unemployment, one of his contacts helped him land a data manager's job at a Decatur, Ga., nonprofit. He begins work this month. One drawback: The new job will pay half what the old one did. "I'm not going to find what I was making years ago," Mr. Boone says. "It's less, but that's fine."

When the recession took hold, job losses stung all parts of the Atlanta economy—Roswell included. Employers with jobs to offer are flooded with applicants. Applications and placements at staffing firm Hire Dynamics LLC, which has six Georgia locations including one near Roswell, were up 40% last year, says chief executive Dan Campbell. But it takes longer to winnow candidates because there are so many. A recent ad drew 400 resumes.

For some openings, the unemployed need not apply. Amy Grimmer, for instance, is searching for a sales representative in the Atlanta area for a client in the payroll outsourcing services business.

"We're not looking at the unemployment pool," says Ms. Grimmer, president of Centripetal Consulting Group, based in Dallas. "They feel like the sales people [who] are talented enough would have found positions." Most clients, she adds, aren't so explicit.

In the worst of the early 1980s downturn, the typical or median unemployed American had been out of work for 12.3 weeks. In December 2011, the typical unemployed person had been jobless for 21 weeks.

In response, Congress has extended unemployment benefits—which normally last no more than 26 weeks—for as long as 99 weeks.

For Jennifer Barbee, 34 years old, it doesn't matter what Congress does. A mother of three who once made $40,000 a year, she lost her human-resources job three years ago and has exhausted her $330 a week in jobless benefits. Now she relies on $600 a month in child support, Medicaid for her children's medical care, food stamps and aid from a local food bank, North Fulton Community Charities.

Demand at the food bank is running 30% ahead of 2007, and organizers are still playing catch-up. "People don't realize we're seeing middle-class families that have been unemployed 18 months or longer," says Vonda Malbrough, the development director.

Ms. Barbee has widened her job search to waitressing and other hourly jobs. Her plans to earn a college degree online are on hold so she can put any cash toward her children. She does what she can to keep her skills fresh, teaching herself to use Adobe Dreamweaver to help a friend with website work. Her laptop has the 2007 version of Microsoft Office so she has been looking online for subsequent changes to stay up to date.

It is harder to keep tabs with constantly changing regulations that human-resources professionals are supposed to know, such as recent changes governing health insurance. "I kind of try to pay attention when I hear about them," she says. "But I really don't know what's out there right now."

Meanwhile, she writes to the local parks and recreation department requesting fee waivers so her children can participate in football, basketball and gymnastics. The department has seen a spike in such requests, which allow parents to pay $5 or $10 instead of $100 or more.

Roswell is changing. More than 9,200 children, 19% of those enrolled in schools in and around Roswell, received free and reduced-price school lunches last year. Before the recession, 13.2% qualified.

The free-lunch line has been tough to explain to Ms. Barbee's 10-year-old daughter, who goes through it every day. Most of her friends don't. "She has said, 'Mommy why do we get free lunch and other people don't?'" the mother says. "It's something that they notice."

Iraq Lashes Out at Turkey as Sunni-Shiite Rift Grows

2012-01-17T07:09:00.001-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

Iraq summoned Turkey's ambassador on Monday to protest what it called Ankara's meddling in Iraqi politics, the latest sign of a rising rift between Sunni Turkey and its Shiite neighbors.

Iraq's government was angered by recent warnings from Turkish leaders that Sunni-Shiite tensions in Iraq could engulf the entire Islamic world, as well as by Turkey's support for a Sunni rival to Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

"Turkey interferes by backing certain political figures and blocs" in Iraq, Mr. Maliki told The Wall Street Journal last month. "I believe Turkey is unqualified to intervene in the region's flash points." In a weekend interview with Arabic language Al-Hurra TV station, Mr. Maliki went further. "Unfortunately, Turkey is playing a role that could lead to a catastrophe or civil war in the region," he said.

Iraqi officials were particularly angered by public Turkish comments on the case of Tariq al-Hashemi, Iraq's Sunni vice president. Mr. Hashemi took refuge in Kurdish-ruled northern Iraq late last year, after the government accused him of leading death squads against Shiites.

But analysts say the rapid deterioration of relations between Ankara and Baghdad also reflects the wider conflicting interests of Sunni Turkey and Shiite Iran in the wake of the U.S. drawdown from Iraq and of the Arab Spring, now lapping at the borders of both Iraq and Turkey, in Syria.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu warned on the eve of a visit to Tehran earlier this month against the risk of a "Cold War" developing between Shiites and Sunnis across the Middle East.

"Tension is now rising between Turkey and Iran and it will be increasingly difficult to manage as it's being aggravated by sectarian tensions. These problems are likely to be long-term; I don't see an easy solution," said Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Baghdad's concerns also have been fueled lately by fears that Syria's uprising is developing into a Sunni insurgency that Mr. Maliki has said could spread "like a house on fire," into Iraq. A fresh wave of violence has killed more than 200 Iraqis since the end of the U.S. military mission on Dec. 18.

Unlike Iraq, which is majority Shiite, Syria is about 75% Sunni, but it is governed mainly by a minority of Alawites, a Shiite sect. Syria's President Bashar al-Assad's Tehran-backed regime has expressed deep anger and distrust of Ankara due to its decision to provide haven to mainly Sunni Syrian rebels.

Turkey says its actions are purely humanitarian, made in the face of Syria's brutal crackdown on protesters. It also denies any effort to meddle in Iraqi politics.

Turkish analysts say Ankara is a reluctant hard-power player in the region. for all its neo-Ottoman pretensions, Only a year ago, Mr. Assad was Exhibit A in Turkey's "zero-problems-with-neighbors" foreign policy. That approach boosted relations and trade with neighboring Muslim regimes, while downgrading ties with former ally Israel. The Arab Spring, however, upended that policy as allies such as former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi were pushed aside and Shiite-Sunni tensions rose across the region. In a major change, Turkey agreed last fall to host a North Atlantic Treaty Organization missile-defense system, which was designed by the U.S. to contain Iran.

Turkish and U.S. diplomats say they now cannot remember a time when cooperation between Ankara and Washington was closer, after a period of significant strain in 2009-2010.

"When Prime Minister Erdogan came to Washington in 2009, he sounded almost like the ambassador from Iran. Now he sounds quite different…After a period of suspicion, Turkey and the United States have come closer together," said Stephen Kinzer, a visiting professor of international relations at Boston University.

Turkish officials insist relations with Tehran remain strong. Turkey buys around 30% of its oil from Iran and is the second-largest consumer of Iranian gas, after Russia. Official data shows that Turkey's bilateral trade volume with Iraq in 2011 jumped by nearly 50% on the year to $11 billion, with much of the increase coming in the Shiite-dominated areas around Baghdad and in the South.

In an interview inside Iraqi Kurdistan this month, Mr. Hashemi said that while his political bloc had received advice from Turkey and others, it was no tool for outside powers. "I am not part of the Turkish geopolitical project," said Mr. Hashemi. He criticized Mr. Maliki's "conspiratorial" mind and said that his frequent visits to Turkey last year were mostly private.

Still there is little disguising the building tensions between Ankara and its Shiite neighbors, including Tehran.

In December, Ankara sought an explanation from Tehran after Hussain Ibrahimi, chief of the Iranian parliament's national-security committee, told an Iranian newspaper that if Iran were to be attacked, its first retaliatory strike would be against the NATO missile defense radar in eastern Turkey.

Earlier, in October, a key aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini told Iran's Mehr news agency that Turkey should radically rethink its policies on Syria, the NATO missile shield and promoting secularism in the Arab world. Otherwise, Ankara would face trouble from its own people and neighbors, he said.

Governor Who Took On Unions May Face a Closely Watched Recall Election

2012-01-16T06:49:00.000-05:00

From The New York Times:

Democrats and union supporters . . . say they will submit at least 720,000 names on petitions to recall Gov. Scott Walker, the Republican who curtailed collective bargaining rights for public workers, leading to a face-off in this state.

Only two governors in the nation’s history have lost their jobs in recalls, but Mr. Walker himself acknowledges that, presuming there are no major flaws in the petitions, a recall election appears likely. That puts his removal, which would have a vote in late spring or early summer, within the realm of possibility.

Politicians and political operatives far beyond Wisconsin will be watching closely, not just for what the recall effort may imply for other state’s leaders who are considering cuts to workers’ benefits and union powers as a way to solve budget problems, but also as a sign for the presidential race. Wisconsin was one of several pivotal Midwestern states that gave Barack Obama solid victories in 2008 but then elected Republicans, including Mr. Walker, in significant numbers in 2010. Money from outside the state is certain to pour in from both sides for the recall vote.

The Theological Differences Behind Evangelical Unease With Romney

2012-01-15T09:02:00.003-05:00

From The New York Times:

Mormons consider themselves Christians — as denoted in the church’s name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yet the theological differences between Mormonism and traditional Christianity are so fundamental, experts in both say, that they encompass the very understanding of God and Jesus, what counts as Scripture and what happens when people die.

“Mormonism is a distinctive religion,” David Campbell, a Mormon and an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in religion and politics. “It’s not the same as Presbyterianism or Methodism. But at the same time, there have been efforts on the part of the church to emphasize the commonality with other Christian faiths, and that’s a tricky balance to strike for the church.”

On the most fundamental issue, traditional Christians believe in the Trinity: that God is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all rolled into one.

Mormons reject this as a non-biblical creed that emerged in the fourth and fifth centuries. They believe that God the Father and Jesus are separate physical beings, and that God has a wife whom they call Heavenly Mother.

It is not only evangelical Christians who object to these ideas.

“That’s just not Christian,” said the Rev. Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, a liberal Protestant seminary in New York City. “God and Jesus are not separate physical beings. That would be anathema. At the end of the day, all the other stuff doesn’t matter except the divinity of Jesus.”

The Mormon Church says that in the early 1800s, its first prophet, Joseph Smith, had revelations that restored Christianity to its true path, a course correction necessary because previous Christian churches had corrupted the faith. Smith bequeathed to his church volumes of revelations contained in scripture used only by Mormons: “The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ,” “The Doctrine and Covenants” and “Pearl of Great Price.”

Traditional Christians do not recognize any of those as Scripture.

Another big sticking point concerns the afterlife. Early Mormon apostles gave talks asserting that human beings would become like gods and inherit their own planets — language now regularly held up to ridicule by critics of Mormonism.

But Kathleen Flake, a Mormon who is a professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt Divinity School, explained that the planets notion had been de-emphasized in modern times in favor of a less concrete explanation: people who die embark on an “eternal progression” that allows them “to partake in God’s glory.”

“Mormons think of God as a parent,” she said. “God makes the world in order to give that world to his children. It’s like sending your child to Harvard — God gives his children every possible opportunity to progress towards this higher life that God possesses. When Mormons say ‘Heavenly Father,’ they mean it. It’s not a metaphor.”

It is the blurring of the lines between God, Jesus and human beings that is hard for evangelicals to swallow, said Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., who has been involved in a dialogue group between evangelicals and Mormons for 12 years and has a deep understanding of theology as Mormons see it.

“Both Christians and Jews, on the basis of our common Scriptures, we’d all agree that God is God and we are not,” Mr. Mouw said. “There’s a huge ontological gap between the Creator and the creature. So any religious perspective that reduces that gap, you think, oh, wow, that could never be called Christian.”

Mormons tend to explain the doctrinal differences more gently. Lane Williams, a Mormon and a professor of communications at Brigham Young University-Idaho, a Mormon institution, said the way he understands it, “it’s not a ‘we’re right and they’re wrong’ kind of approach. But it’s as though we feel we have a broader circle of truth.

“My daily life tries to be about Jesus Christ,” he said. “And in that way, I don’t think I’m much different from my Protestant friends.”

In a Pew poll released in late November, about two-thirds of mainline Protestants and Catholics said Mormonism is Christian, compared with only about a third of white evangelicals. By contrast, 97 percent of Mormons said their religion is Christian in a different Pew poll released this month.

Mr. Mouw said that only a month ago he was called to Salt Lake City to mediate a theological discussion about Mormonism among four evangelical leaders who had collaborated with Mormon leaders to pass the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage in California. After two and a half days of discussions, the group was divided on Mormon theology, Mr. Mouw said.

“Two concluded that while Mormons are good people, they don’t worship the same God,” Mr. Mouw said. “Two concluded that Mormons love Jesus just as the evangelicals do, and they accepted the Mormons as brothers and sisters in Christ.

“That’s the split,” Mr. Mouw said, “and it’s very basic.”

The Battle for South Carolina - Rick Santorum will have appeal, but he's voted against right-to-work legislation, and South Carolina is a big right-to-work state.

2012-01-15T08:50:00.000-05:00

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

Newt's a battering ram who'll wind up in splinters, but he can do plenty of damage along the way. The candidate people immediately speak of here when talk turns to the GOP primary is a man named Romneybut. "I like Romney but I could change my mind." "I like Romney but I like Santorum too."

[I]f Mitt Romney wins here, he will win the nomination. And it's likely he will win here—that Romneybut will become Romney. But it's a real question how much damage will be done to him along the way.

***

People don't embrace Mr. Romney, they circle back to him. They consider him, shop around for something better, decide the first product they looked at will last longest and give value, and buy.

The non-Mitt candidates continue, fracturing the conservative vote. Because no one dropped out after New Hampshire, no consolidation of the non-Mitt vote can begin here and get in the way of the buying. Newt Gingrich, tops in state polls a few weeks ago, has damaged himself by the means and manner of his campaign. Rick Santorum will have appeal, but he's voted against right-to-work legislation, and South Carolina is a big right-to-work state. Ron Paul will have appeal too, not only in the coastal cities but among active and retired military personnel, who've been fighting the wars the past 10 years.

ABC heavies were pitiful in debate Sat. night. I like George Stephanopoulos, but he embarrassed himself on national television with questions plainly intended to embarrass the Republican candidates. Diane Sawyer was no better; she is just plainly still not ready for big-time.

2012-01-10T07:05:00.000-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

A funny thing happened on the way to the New Hampshire primary: ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos embarrassed himself on national television with questions plainly intended to embarrass the Republican candidates.

On Saturday night, Mr. Stephanopoulos stepped outside the role of honest interlocutor when he pursued Mitt Romney with the issue on nobody's lips or legislative agenda: whether states have the right to ban contraception. Likewise, fellow moderator Diane Sawyer, who asked Republicans what they would say, "sitting in their living rooms," to a gay couple.

In New Hampshire Newspaper, Gingrich Gets Coveted and Ferocious Supporter - Muskie destroyed his candidacy by breaking down and appearing to cry at paper's offices

2012-01-09T07:15:00.001-05:00

From The New York Times:

Newt Gingrich may not have much money to spend on advertising here. But he does have Joseph W. McQuaid, the publisher of New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, The Union Leader. And Mr. McQuaid will happily spill barrel after barrel of ink trying to tear every other candidate down.

“Our job is to say, ‘Here’s our guy. Here’s why he’s the best, and why all the others are the worst,’ ” Mr. McQuaid said in a recent interview. He had just finished a front-page editorial for Sunday’s paper that ripped into Mitt Romney, who leads Mr. Gingrich by double digits in the polls. “Romney may be the WORST candidate,” he wrote.

“There’s no reason to be subtle,” Mr. McQuaid said.

Subtle is not how many people would describe The Union Leader or Mr. McQuaid. Mr. Romney is “plastic” and “desperate,” he said. Ron Paul is a dangerous elf from the “Island of Misfit Toys.” And Rick Santorum? “Is he running for something?” Mr. McQuaid said, flashing an impish grin.

Mr. McQuaid and his newspaper are the Siberian tigers of political journalism: ferocious and endangered. At a time when editorials and newspapers themselves are playing a smaller role in American politics, the brash and biting Union Leader still commands the attention and respect of the country’s most prominent politicians. Every four years, they flatter and pay homage to the newspaper in hope that they can secure what remains one of the most coveted endorsements of the presidential election.

People have feared and loathed The Union Leader ever since the days of the curmudgeonly William Loeb III, who bought the paper in the 1940s and bullied a generation of politicians with vitriolic front-page editorials. Mr. Loeb headlined an article about Henry A. Kissinger’s appointment as secretary of state with an anti-Semitic slur. Edmund S. Muskie became “Moscow Muskie” and a flip-flopper. Mr. Muskie destroyed his candidacy by breaking down and appearing to cry while denouncing Mr. Loeb at a news conference outside the paper’s offices.

The newspaper’s average in picking winners suggests that Mr. Gingrich should not start writing his victory speech just yet. Though it endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980 and John McCain in 2008, Steve Forbes got the newspaper’s nod in 2000, and Pat Buchanan in 1992. Americans never got to see a President Pierre du Pont (endorsed in 1988) or a President Samuel Yorty (1972).

Crying Foul: Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to FCC Cussing Crackdown

2012-01-09T06:53:00.001-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

Should broadcasters be able to air whatever the &#%@ they want?

Nine years after Cher used a swear word during a live awards show, the U.S. Supreme Court is finally addressing the constitutional issues behind that question. On Tuesday, the court will consider whether the Federal Communications Commission's efforts to police the U.S. airwaves for dirty words and images violate broadcasters' right to free speech and due process.

The court's decision, expected by June, could affect the broadcast-television industry, which has been losing viewers to cable channels, Internet video and other forms of entertainment that by law can't be touched by the FCC's indecency cops.

Obama closes the book on the 9/11 era

2012-01-07T16:20:00.000-05:00

David Ignatius writes in The Washington Post:

When you ask Obama administration officials to explain their foreign policy agenda for 2012, they point first to the defense budget. That’s where they want to make a “pivot” in U.S. strategy — away from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and toward the 21st-century priority of China and the Pacific.

To underline the importance of this rebalancing, President Obama went to the Pentagon on Thursday for the budget announcement. He began by declaring victory in what used to be known as “the long war,” offering a string of valedictory phrases: The United States is “turning the page on a decade of war”; “we’ve succeeded in defending our nation”; “the tide of war is receding.”

Rhetoric about new strategies is standard fare, especially in an election year. But these claims should be taken seriously. The Pentagon budget cuts will make a difference, at home and abroad. They mark a genuine shift, one of the most important since 1945.

What will change? First, the administration is cutting ground forces sharply because it doesn’t expect any new Iraqs or Afghanistans. Obviously, it’s premature to declare victory in Afghanistan when that war is far from over. But the White House thinks that it can play the endgame effectively even if it maintains a steady drawdown of troops.

It was easy to miss the impact of Obama’s words: He was declaring that the era that began on Sept. 11, 2001, is over. Al-Qaeda’s top leader is dead, and most of its cadres are on the run; secret peace talks are under way with the Taliban. And across the Arab world, the United States is talking with Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist organizations that a few years ago might have been on terror lists. It’s a process that’s similar to the way Britain ended its long war with Irish terrorists, by engaging in negotiations with the IRA’s “political” wing.

What else will the shift mean? The Pacific focus inescapably means fewer resources for the traditional Atlantic partnership, symbolized by NATO. U.S. troops will be coming home from Europe, probably in larger numbers than expected. And given its recent economic jitters, Europe may feel abandoned. Will the Germans respond by drawing closer to Russia? Watch that space.

Obama’s pivot turns U.S. power toward China, and Beijing is understandably nervous. U.S. officials keep repeating that this won’t mean a policy of “containment” and that the United States accepts a rising China as a 21st-century inevitability. An Obama emissary was in Beijing last week, delivering that message of reassurance. But the Chinese aren’t stupid; they know that America is moving forces their way.

A period of rivalry and tension is ahead in the Pacific. One early test is whether the United States can expand on its recent opening to Burma. Another will be the delicate leadership transition in North Korea, which should be an area for Sino-American cooperation but might be the opposite. A third area will involve trade relations: Obama is pushing a “Trans-Pacific Partnership” that would create NAFTA-style links across the Pacific. But how realistic is this for an America that already has trade jitters?

As the United States changes its defense priorities, the wild cards are Pakistan and Iran, two countries powered by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of anti-Americanism. Pakistan, after years of chafing against U.S. tutelage, seems serious about reevaluating its ties, with its top general making a symbolic “we don’t need you” visit last week to the other superpower, China. For once, the United States wasn’t chasing after the Pakistanis trying to lecture and plead our way back to the status quo. That’s good, but Washington still needs a cooperative relationship with Islamabad, especially in settling the Afghanistan conflict.

As for the Iranians, they seem for the first time in years to be genuinely nervous — not because of U.S. or Israeli saber-rattling but because economic sanctions are causing a run on their currency and the beginnings of a financial panic in Tehran. And more sanctions are on the way this year. At some point, the Iranian regime will actually be in jeopardy — and it will punch back. That’s the scenario the White House must think through carefully with its allies. If the current course continues, a collision with Iran is ahead.

We’ll be seeing the details of the Pentagon cuts over the next few weeks, and the whining from Congress (let alone Europe and China) will begin in earnest. Don’t think this is a rerun of the usual budget follies. Thursday’s Pentagon announcement marked a real change, with big strategic consequences.

A Long History of Political Brawling for Santorum - “He was a bully who was not a potent enough force to be a bully.”

2012-01-07T16:03:00.001-05:00

From The New York Times:

"[Rick Santorum] would attack people in a smug way that was harder-edged and more insulting than was necessary, said Mark Salter, the former chief of staff to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, adding that lawmakers in both parties shared this view. “He was a bully who was not a potent enough force to be a bully.”

From the start of a legislative career that included two terms in the House and two in the Senate, Mr. Santorum earned a reputation for throwing haymakers with no regard for custom, sacred cows or his own newcomer status.

But in general, Mr. Santorum has tried to be more conciliatory in this election (a “good guy,” in wrestling parlance). He has not attacked Republican rivals in debates or campaign ads, he said — mostly true, although he has had almost no money to buy any ads. He spoke of working with Democrats in the Senate and winning elections in Democratic-leaning Pennsylvania. He urged compromise when possible. “The American people expect us to act like adults,” he said at a campaign stop in Perry, Iowa, on Monday, “not spoiled children.”

Former colleagues from his years in Washington, though, still remember his belligerence. One of Mr. Santorum’s first acts in the Senate was to attack Mark Hatfield, an Oregon Republican, for opposing a balanced-budget amendment that Mr. Santorum advocated, even suggesting that Mr. Hatfield, a veteran lawmaker, be sacked as chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

The late Senator Robert C. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat and one of the most devout traditionalists in the chamber, was appalled by Mr. Santorum. After the younger man accused Mr. Clinton of speaking “bald-faced untruths,” Mr. Byrd delivered a blistering speech in which he derided his colleague’s “insolence” and “rude language” and suggested that Mr. Santorum might be better-suited to “an alehouse or beer tavern.” He lamented that he had lived long enough “to see Pygmies stride like colossuses” in the august chamber.

Boston Globe Endorses Huntsman

2012-01-07T10:49:00.000-05:00

From The New York Times:

The Boston Globe has endorsed Jon M. Huntsman Jr. for the Republican nomination, the candidate announced Thursday night at a rally at a high school here.

Though from a Democratic-leaning editorial board, the endorsement nonetheless provides a potentially major boost to Mr. Huntsman’s dark-horse candidacy before a primary in which independents can prove pivotal.

With little money left in his campaign bank account and relatively low if slowly rising poll numbers, Mr. Huntsman has been hoping to be the latest candidate to catch fire as the leading alternative to the
front-runner, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, much as Senator Rick Santorum did just before the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday.

It is the second time the paper has snubbed its former home-state governor: In 2008 it endorsed Senator John McCain, the nominee that year, who endorsed Mr. Romney on Wednesday. In the Democratic primary, The Globe endorsed Barack Obama.

The major newspaper in New Hampshire, The Union Leader of Manchester, has endorsed Newt Gingrich, who has seen his candidacy slide in the polls in recent weeks.

(1) After Santorum Left Senate, Familiar Hands Reached Out; & (2) Santorum plays down long history as Washington insider

2012-01-07T10:41:00.000-05:00

There is an article in The New York Times about how when he lost his 2006 re-election bid, Rick Santorum built a lucrative career in the private sector based largely on income from businesses his work in Congress had benefited.

The Washington Post has an article about while Rick Santorum has vaulted to the front ranks of the Republican presidential nomination race in part by depicting himself as a religious family man of lowly beginnings who would bring needed change to Washington, that characterization leaves out two decades in which Santorum was a central and often high-ranking player in Washington politics, with connections to K Street lobbyists and a lucrative consulting career that made him a millionaire.

A John McCain reminder from the Newt Gingrich Super PAC

2012-01-05T07:49:00.005-05:00

From Jim Galloway's The Political Insider in the ajc:

In celebration of U.S. Sen. John McCain’s endorsement of Mitt Romney today, Winning Our Future, the Super PAC affiliated with Newt Gingrich, this afternoon offered this flashback from McCain of 2008:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IS33Hkgnls4#t=0s

Paths of surging Santorum, fading Gingrich again cross

2012-01-05T07:30:00.001-05:00

From The Washington Post:

In 1990, when Rick Santorum was a political novice running a long-shot bid for Congress, he would drive around western Pennsylvania listening to the political preachings and teachings of a leader he barely knew, a congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich.

That fall, in an otherwise dispiriting midterm election for the GOP, Santorum shocked a seven-term Democratic incumbent in a campaign that became a model for Republicans over the next two cycles.

Four years later, Gingrich used the same strategy to engineer a 54-seat pickup in the House and give Republicans their first House majority in 40 years.

For movement conservatives anxious about Mitt Romney’s conservative credentials and still hoping to put one of their own in the Oval Office, the choice is an increasingly simple one: Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich, two close friends from the original Republican revolution.

Gingrich and Santorum were central players in what has come to be known as the Gingrich revolution, and both are using the same confrontational tactics in the current campaign for president, hoping to appeal to conservatives hungry for an alternative to Romney. A few weeks ago, Gingrich was viewed as the greatest threat on Romney’s right flank, but his standing wilted under a barrage of negative advertising. Santorum came from nowhere in Iowa to finish in a virtual tie with Romney on Tuesday, setting himself up as the latest option for the anti-Romney bloc.

As attention shifts to New Hampshire, the question is whether Santorum and Gingrich’s long friendship will help or harm each of them going forward. Will they train their fire on each other or combine their attacks on Romney?

Their fortunes have already been closely linked. One key factor in Santorum’s rise in Iowa was Gingrich’s implosion amid the flurry of negative ads from allies of front-runner Romney. Many of the most conservative voters fled the former speaker into the arms of Santorum, leaving Gingrich in a disappointing fourth place in Tuesday’s caucuses. Still, their combined totals outpaced the number of votes Romney received.

As the campaign heads into more complicated terrain, the teacher-pupil relationship could be tested and fray. Or they may decide, as in the past, to join forces to make an ideological point.
The fading Gingrich this week branded Romney “a liar.” If Gingrich chooses to play the role of conservative pit bull, that could allow Santorum to stay above the fray and consolidate conservative voters while appearing to be the most positive of the candidates.

Perhaps foreshadowing such an effort, Gingrich’s concession speech Tuesday night offered laurels for Santorum while casting a thinly veiled jab at Romney. “I want to take just a minute and congratulate a good friend of ours, Rick Santorum,” Gingrich said. “He waged a great, positive campaign. And I admire the courage and the way he focused, and I admire how positive he was. I wish I could say that for all candidates.”

For both men, this campaign has been a political revival. Both were left for dead politically long ago because their aggressive styles eventually wore thin. Both were ousted from Congress.

Santorum, now 53, first met Gingrich, now 68, in Santorum’s first race ever, the 1990 campaign. A lawyer at a white-shoe firm in Pittsburgh, Santorum jumped into the race with little support from local party leaders or those in Washington. Gingrich, the House minority whip, had built an aggressive political operation outside the main establishment structure, called GOPAC. The group sent its tapes to Santorum and offered other support, propelling him to a key victory.

Gingrich steered Santorum onto the prestigious House Ways and Means Committee, which gave Santorum the opportunity to draft the GOP’s proposal for welfare reform. Always most comfortable as an agitator, Santorum joined with six other young Republicans to expose a scandal in the House bank, in which lawmakers were allowed to overdraw from their accounts without penalty. Along with another key Gingrich disciple — Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), almost two decades before he became speaker — Santorum and the rest of the “Gang of Seven” pushed the scandal into the political spotlight.

As Gingrich and Boehner drew up the 1994 “Contract With America,” Santorum challenged Sen. Harris Wofford (D). Defying critics who said he was too young, too brash and too conservative for a centrist state like Pennsylvania, Santorum narrowly won. “If you took ‘no’ out of the English language, he would be speechless,” Wofford said of his opponent during a debate.

While Gingrich became the face of the hard-charging House, Santorum epitomized a new guard in the Senate. He was both more conservative and more partisan than his peers, part of the first wave of former House members from both parties who would bring their sharper tongues and elbows to a relatively staid Senate that has now become a bickering legislative wasteland.

“He practiced the politics of passion,” said Eric Ueland, a former Senate leadership aide in the 1990s and early 2000s. “He was part of a generational change in the Senate Republican Conference. The heart of the party moved to a more reflective set of interests.” The Pennsylvanian “made colleagues uncomfortable in the Senate when he first got there,” Ueland said, but the conference moved in his direction and eventually awarded him with the No. 3 leadership post.

Santorum repeatedly clashed with the legendary West Virginia Democrat Robert C. Byrd, who won his Senate seat the year Santorum was born and went on to be the longest-serving senator in history. “In my 37 years in this Senate, I do not recall such insolence, and it is very sad that debate and discourse on the Senate floor have sunk to such a low level,” Byrd said in December 1995, lecturing the chamber about Santorum’s speeches.

Gingrich was ousted after the 1998 midterm elections. In political exile, he oversaw a group of nonprofit organizations and think tanks. Santorum kept up the charge and, after winning reelection in 2000, raised his profile even further.

By the time he ran again in 2006, Santorum’s staunchly conservative views placed him in a political bind in moderate Pennsylvania. Poised to move up in the Senate leadership to the No. 2 post if he could pull off a come-from-behind victory, Santorum did not waver on his conservative stances. He was defeated in one of the worst showings by an incumbent senator in recent decades, getting just 41 percent of the vote.

Five years later, again ignoring calls toward moderation, he told Iowans on Monday night not to waver from conservative principles. “You can do what Iowans tend to do,” he said. “You can ignore the pundit class. You can ignore the moderate Republicans, who say, ‘Oh, we need a moderate. We’ve got to win, we’ve got to win.’ And Iowa will stand up and say, ‘No. We need to be principled to win.’ ”

Sunday marks a decade of No Child. Did the law do any good?

2012-01-04T07:51:00.001-05:00

Although not on politics, everyday I read Maureen Downey's blog Get Schooled in the ajc. Today she writes about NCLB, a law whose time, I hope, came and has now gone.

Sunday will mark the 10-year anniversary of No Child Left Behind, the sweeping federal education law that President George Bush envisioned as his legacy.

Bush signed No Child into law on Jan. 8, 2002, explaining that “the fundamental principle of this bill is that every child can learn, we expect every child to learn, and you must show us whether or not every child is learning.”

Because the anniversary is looming, I am getting lots of statements on the law and its impact, most offering a mixed review of its effectiveness. I listened Tuesday to a panel by RAND Corporation education experts. I will write about the panel later this week, but the consensus was that the law was effective in directing attention to previously ignored students, but that it was too proscriptive and overly reliant on multiple choice testing that narrowed instruction.

But one group that sees little benefit from No Child is FairTest, which has issued a report maintaining the controversial law “failed badly both in terms of its own goals and more broadly” and led to a decade of “educational stagnation.”

Among the report’s contentions:

- NCLB failed to significantly increase average academic performance or to significantly narrow achievement gaps, as measured by NAEP. U.S. students made greater gains before NCLB became law than after it was implemented.

- NCLB severely damaged educational quality and equity by narrowing the curriculum in many schools and focusing attention on the limited skills standardized tests measure. These negative effects fell most heavily on classrooms serving low-income and minority children.

- So-called “reforms” to NCLB fail to address many of the law’s fundamental problems and, in some cases, may intensify them. Flawed proposals include Obama Administration waivers and the Senate Education Committee’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization bill

“NCLB undermined many promising reform efforts because of its reliance on one-size-fits-all testing, labeling and sanctioning schools,” explained FairTest’s Lisa Guisbond, the new report’s lead author. “A decade’s worth of solid evidence documents the failure of NCLB and similar high-stakes testing schemes. Successful programs in the U.S. and other nations demonstrate better ways to improve schools. Yet, policymakers still cling to the discredited NCLB model.”

A Gathering Storm Over ‘Right to Work’ in Indiana

2012-01-03T06:42:00.000-05:00

From The New York Times:

INDIANAPOLIS — Nearly a year after legislatures in Wisconsin and several other Republican-dominated states curbed the power of public sector unions, lawmakers are now turning their sights toward private sector unions, setting up what is sure to be another political storm.

The thunderclouds are gathering first here in Indiana. The leaders of the Republican-controlled Legislature say that when the legislative session opens on Wednesday, their No. 1 priority will be to push through a business-friendly piece of legislation known as a right-to-work law.

If Indiana enacts such a law — and its sponsors say they have the votes — it will give new momentum to those who have previously pushed such legislation in Maine, Michigan, Missouri and other states. New Hampshire’s Republican-controlled Legislature was the last to pass a right-to-work bill in 2011, but it narrowly failed to muster the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto by the Democratic governor; an Indiana law would re-energize that effort.

Right-to-work laws prohibit union contracts at private sector workplaces from requiring employees to pay any dues or other fees to the union. In states without such laws, workers at unionized workplaces generally have to pay such dues or fees.

Many right-to-work supporters say it is morally wrong to force unwilling workers to contribute to unions, while opponents argue that it is wrong to allow “free riders” not to support the unions that represent them in negotiations and arbitrations.

Right-to-work is also a potent political symbol that carries serious financial consequences for unions. Corporations view such laws as an important sign that a state has policies friendly to business. Labor leaders say that allowing workers to opt out of paying any money to the union that represents them weakens unions’ finances, bargaining clout and political power.

Organized labor has vowed to fight the Indiana bill, which it says would turn the state into the “Mississippi of the Midwest.” If the legislation passes, Indiana would become the first state to have such a law within the traditional manufacturing belt, a union stronghold that stretches from the Midwest to New England. Right-to-work laws exist in 22 states, almost all in the South and West, with Oklahoma the most recent to pass one, in 2001.

Right-to-work supporters say they can win quick passage because Indiana’s Republican governor, Mitch Daniels, backs the bill and Republicans have large majorities in the House and Senate.

Democratic and union leaders say they hope to block the legislation, in part by flooding the statehouse with thousands of protesters — exactly as unions did last year in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana in an attempt to defeat legislation that limited bargaining rights for public sector workers.

Democratic lawmakers in Indiana have also hinted that they might once again flee to Illinois, as they did last year, to block votes on anti-union bills.
Indiana’s Republican leaders are eager to pass the bill — and end any related commotion — before Feb. 5, when the national spotlight turns to Indianapolis for the Super Bowl.

In heading the legislative push, Brian C. Bosma, the Republican speaker of the Indiana House, argues that not being right-to-work is a big handicap when Indiana competes for jobs.

“Local economic development officers testified that 25 to 50 percent of companies looking to create employment, whether through expansion or locating a new facility, just took Indiana and other non-right-to-work states off the table,” he said in an interview. “This is stopping employers from coming to Indiana. We need to deal with that.”

In Indiana, 8.2 percent — or 178,779 — of the state’s private sector workers belong to unions, compared with 6.9 percent nationwide. That is down from more than 20 percent three decades ago as many unionized factories have closed and largely nonunion industries like finance and retail have expanded.

After Governor Daniels eliminated the ability of state employees to bargain collectively in 2005, Indiana’s public sector unions grew weaker. Over all, organized labor here does not have nearly the electoral or lobbying clout that it has in states like California and New York, where unions remain powerful.

Jon Huntsman - Democrats like him, a lot. New Hampshire has an open primary. Democrats can vote for him there. Maybe they will. But will that make him a contender or an oddity?

2012-01-02T22:37:00.000-05:00

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

So the first third of the Republican presidential race is ending. The first third is the introduction: "This is who I am, this is what I want to do, this is why you want to choose me."

The campaign is announced, organized, and goes forward in key early states.

The second phase is the long slog through the primary states to the convention next August in Tampa, Fla. The third and final is the election proper, in the autumn of 2012

The continuing mystery of phase one? The failure of Jon Huntsman to gain traction. It's not precisely a mystery—he didn't run as a successful conservative two-term governor but as a striped pants diplomat—but it is a frustration. Democrats like him, a lot. New Hampshire has an open primary. Democrats can vote for him there. Maybe they will. But will that make him a contender or an oddity?

What seemed true at the start of phase one seems true now. A number of the Republicans on the debate stage could beat Mr. Obama. But if there is a serious third-party challenger the president will likely be reelected.

This continues as one of the most amazing and underappreciated facts of 2012—the sitting president's own party doesn't like him.

2012-01-02T22:21:00.000-05:00

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

Every four years the potential nominees on either side look smaller than the sitting president who, whether or not you like him, is the president. You're used to him. He's on TV. They play Hail to the Chief when he walks in. The office is big and imparts bigness.

But less so this year than past years. There's a lot of 1980 in the 2012 presidential election, which doesn't mean it will end the same way, but still. The incumbent looks smaller than previous sitting presidents, as did Jimmy Carter. His efforts in the Oval Office have not been generally understood as successful. There's a broad sense it hasn't worked. And Democrats don't like him, as they didn't Jimmy Carter.

This continues as one of the most amazing and underappreciated facts of 2012—the sitting president's own party doesn't like him. The party's constituent pieces will stick with him, having no choice, but with a feeling of dissatisfaction. It is not only the Republicans who have been unhappy this year. All this will have some bearing on the coming year.

How Much Government Is Enough?

2012-01-02T15:49:00.001-05:00

Joe Klein pens a keeper in TIME:

And so we bid a fond farewell to the first phase of the Republican presidential campaign. It ends in Iowa on Jan. 3, leaving hilarity, outrage and occasional, blistering moments of clarity in its wake. I will not linger on the carnival aspects of the race, from Donald Trump to Herman Cain. Those have stolen far too much attention. A more substantive contest has been going on just beneath the surface--a campaign featuring two men who could plausibly serve as President and some worthy implausibles. More important, this slightly subterranean campaign has placed some basic questions about the future of the Republic on the table.

The two plausible Presidents are Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, although Huntsman's decision to stay out of Iowa has, up to this point, robbed him of the interest his campaign deserves. He is a far more creative and perhaps conservative candidate than Romney. He has proposed the most thoughtful roster of policy initiatives of any candidate in the race. He has proposed flatter--though still progressive--taxes, fewer loopholes and a far more aggressive program to combat Wall Street autocracy and rebuild the American manufacturing sector.

He has flipped none of Romney's flops on social issues but offended the Rush Limbaugh base of the party early on by refusing to sign no-tax (or any other) pledges and refusing to recant his beliefs in evolution and global warming. His foreign policy views are smart and subtle. I've actually learned things listening to him during this campaign--which is exceedingly rare in the hugger-mugger of electoral politics--especially when he's talking about China and the imminent revival of U.S. manufacturing. His chances of surviving past New Hampshire are minimal, which is a shame. His ideas deserve broader consideration.

Romney is the Republican default position. His economic policies are plain vanilla--not very different from Barack Obama's, in fact, except for his requisite Republican opposition to higher taxes for the wealthy. To prove his bona fides with the wingers, Romney has empretzeled himself with foolish positions on immigration and foreign policy. And he has been at times rather cheesy in his assertions. He will routinely criticize Obama for supporting an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that returns to the 1967 borders, without adding Obama's crucial caveat: "with mutually agreed-upon land swaps." (The President's stance is exactly the same as that of every other U.S. President since Richard Nixon.) But that sort of truthlessness can be written off as campaign blather. Romney's a moderate; he won't run the country off a cliff. The fact is, the people who have the most to lose with a Romney presidency are the Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Fox News brigades, who accrue much bigger ratings when the President is a secret Muslim socialist leading the country toward bankruptcy and Shari'a.

The other five Republican candidates--Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann--have been nonstop extreme and occasionally foolish, but collectively they have laid down a serious philosophical marker in this campaign. They have raised the question of the post-Roosevelt welfare state--the regulatory programs initiated by Teddy Roosevelt and the social safety net initiated by FDR. Paul offers this in its purest form: "[The Washington establishment] believes that if you have the freedom to keep what you earn and take care of yourself, you won't do it. They want to do it for you--and they've been trying for the past 70 years, since the Great Depression. But we've learned that government can't do it either."

Although none of Paul's fellow candidates put it as starkly, each has raised an aspect of this essential question: Have we taken the welfare state too far? There seems to be clear agreement among the Republicans that Europe has proved the inefficacy of too much social support and that the Democrats would swing us closer to a European-style model. They've overplayed this hand, positing Obama, a very moderate Democrat, as a crypto-European socialist--or worse, a "Saul Alinsky radical," as Gingrich insists.

When you strip away the silliness, though, the Republicans have waged their campaign around the most important questions facing the country right now: How much government is enough? Should we reform the welfare state? Can we update the clunky apparatus that was built for an industrial, assembly-line era and make it appropriate to our circumstances? How do we support our citizens in a volatile, global economy while encouraging them to take risks and innovate? These are questions that are worthy of a serious presidential campaign, and this memorably goofy crop of Republicans should, against all logic, be congratulated for raising them.

Shields, Brooks on Stopgap Payroll Tax Cut Deal

2012-01-02T12:30:00.000-05:00

A week late (from 12-23-11), but worth seeing if you missed. From the PBS News Hour.

The ethanol credit was on the books for 30 years before it finally died.

2012-01-02T09:26:00.003-05:00

From The Washington Post Editorial Board:

THERE MAY NOT have been a party in Times Square to celebrate, but two of the most wasteful subsidies ever to clutter the Internal Revenue Code went out with the old year. Congress declined to renew either the 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit for corn-based ethanol or the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol, so both expired Dec. 31.

Taxpayers will no longer have shell out roughly $6 billion per year for a program that badly distorted the global grain market, artificially raised the cost of agricultural land and did almost nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A federal law requiring the use of 36 billion gallons of ethanol for fuel by 2022 still props up the industry, but the tax credit’s expiration is a victory for common sense just the same.

The ethanol credit was on the books for 30 years before it finally died.

Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson won’t seek reelection to the Senate next year

2011-12-28T08:13:00.000-05:00

From The Washington Post:

Sen. Ben Nelson, the Nebraska Democrat who built an image as a moderating influence on his party, announced Tuesday that he will not seek reelection in 2012, improving Republican chances of winning the seat and taking control of the Senate in 2013.

The two-term senator and former governor said in a Web video that he wanted to spend more time with his family and look for other ways to serve the country.

While Nelson has often differed with his party’s position, he delivered the deciding vote for the health measure, Obama’s signature piece of legislation. Nelson negotiated some Nebraska-specific provisions into the law before he would agree to support it. Critics of the law have referred pejoratively to the deal that Nelson cut as the “Cornhusker Kickback.”

Early GOP advertising efforts have focused heavily on this arrangement, which included exempting his home state from paying billions in Medicaid expansion costs.

That vote was expected to make Nelson’s reelection a tough proposition, but questions remain about whether the GOP would have been able to field a candidate strong enough to defeat Nelson.
The Nebraskan is the sixth Senate Democrat to announce his retirement. Two Republicans are retiring, along with independent and former Democrat Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.).

A real keeper by Bob Woodward, and what goes around, comes around: In his debut in Washington’s power struggles, Gingrich threw a bomb

2011-12-26T12:09:00.000-05:00

Bob Woodward writes in The Washington Post:

On the evening of Oct. 4, 1990, Newt Gingrich and his then-wife, Marianne, were enjoying a VIP reception at a Republican fundraiser when they were suddenly hustled over to have their picture taken with President George H.W. Bush.

“I thought it was a bad idea,” Gingrich said in a series of interviews in 1992 that have not been previously published.

Days earlier, Gingrich had dramatically walked out of the White House and was leading a very public rebellion against a deficit reduction and tax increase deal that Bush and top congressional leaders of both parties — including, they thought, Gingrich — had signed off on after months of tedious negotiations. The House was to vote on the deal the very next day.

“We went over and I said [to Bush], ‘I’m really sorry that this is happening,’ and he said with as much pain as I’ve heard from a politician, ‘You’re killing us, you are just killing us.’ ”

The photo was snapped, Gingrich and his wife took their seats for dinner, “and both of us just felt like crying,” he said.

Gingrich’s revolt highlighted a rift that persists to this day within the Republican Party, between a pragmatic establishment open to dealmaking and a more rigid conservative base that prefers purity over compromise.

That split has benefited Gingrich at times during his political career, including in his current bid for president, as he is tied at the top of the Republican field with Mitt Romney, the establishment choice.

The party divide also played out on Capitol Hill last week, when a group of conservatives in the House attempted to torpedo a deal struck between Senate Republicans and the White House over payroll taxes. In that case, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) backed down in the face of political pressure. In 1990, Gingrich did not.

Gingrich’s actions both before and after his encounter with Bush showed a man willing, if not eager, to weaken the president and, as he put it, “to dismantle the old order.”

Gingrich, then the party whip and No. 2 Republican in the House, and his followers took down the deal the next day, severely undercutting Bush and highlighting the betrayal of his famous “Read my lips: no new taxes” pledge. In some key respects, Gingrich’s revolt set the stage for Bush’s demise and eventual defeat — as well as the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 that catapulted Gingrich to the speakership.

Gingrich’s defiance and high-visibility debut as provocateur in 1990 was a decisive moment for him. It was the first chance he had to exercise real political power, providing an early glimpse of the complexity and the contradictions that he has displayed since.

Bush’s budget director, the late Richard G. Darman, said that the White House was not given serious notice that Gingrich would balk at the deal and that his revolt was “an act of political sabotage.” In one 1992 memo, Darman wrote in capital letters of the “1990 GINGRICH STAB IN THE BACK.”

Gingrich was unrepentant, arguing that he had a higher purpose. “It was destructive,” he acknowledged, but necessary to stop Bush and others from making deals with Democrats.

Gingrich said that he was seeking to make such an approach “so unbelievably expensive that you couldn’t sustain it.”

Warming to his rebel role, he declared, “I am the leader, insider-revolutionary in this country,” adding that “if you’re writing the history of modern conservatism, I’m at least in one of the chapters.”

He defined the budget revolt as “a major turning point for the whole society” because it “deepened people’s anger.”

R.C. Hammond, the Gingrich campaign spokesman, said Saturday that he has discussed past actions such as the 1990 budget deal with Gingrich. “Don’t think because he did it one way in the past that is the way he would do it again. He learned things, and you figure out how to do it better,” Hammond said.

This account of the 1990 budget deal is based on a series of interviews conducted in 1992 with Gingrich, Darman and Vin Weber, then a House member from Minnesota who is now a high-profile supporter of Romney.

In the early 1990s, they were three of the most visible men in Washington — Gingrich, the leader of a bold, new brand of conservatism; Darman, the savvy insider who shaped tax policy in the Reagan and Bush administrations; and Weber, a young and trusted Gingrich lieutenant who was eventually called on to try to repair the fractured relationship between Darman and Gingrich.

The 1990 budget deal has also reemerged as a point of contention in this year’s presidential campaign after one of the key players involved, former White House chief of staff John H. Sununu, said earlier this month that Gingrich’s erratic actions back then were disqualifying now.

Bush himself raised Gingrich’s role in the budget deal when he announced his backing last week for Romney, whom he described as “mature and reasonable — not a bomb thrower.”

“I met with all the Republican leaders, all the Democratic leaders,” Bush told the Houston Chronicle about that day in 1990. “The plan was we were all going to walk out into the Rose Garden and announce this deal. Newt was right there. Got ready to go out in the Rose Garden, and I said, ‘Where’s Gingrich?’ Went up to Capitol Hill. He was here a minute ago. Went up there and started lobbying against the thing.”

“I’m not his biggest advocate,” Bush added.

Gingrich insisted in 1992 that the real problem wasn’t his revolt, but that the Bush White House was not tough enough and did not know how to negotiate.

“I believe there are a lot of things you can make work if you’re always willing to walk out of the room,” Gingrich said. “You can’t make anything work negotiating with your opponents if you have to have a deal.”

After a lengthy interview on Dec. 11, 1992, he sent a reporter a memo trying to explain the budget communications problem. It is a classic of Gingrich paradox.

“I was telling precisely the truth but by Washington standards I was lying,” he wrote. “They were lying but by Washington standards they were telling the truth. I thought I was being very precise in setting standards, they thought I was outlining a negotiating position. I knew I could and would walk. They knew I had to stay.”

In 1990, the country faced many of the same problems it faces now — a declining economy, rising deficits and a Washington at odds over what to do about it.

Then as now, Republicans wanted to make major spending cuts, particularly in entitlement programs. And, then as now, Democrats, who at the time controlled both the House and Senate, refused to do so without also raising taxes.

Darman, among others, pushed Bush to seek a compromise, even at the cost of breaking his 1988 no-new-taxes pledge, and in June the president announced that he was willing to raise taxes.

The initial deal included nearly $300 billion in Medicare and other spending cuts along with increases in gasoline, alcohol and other taxes that totaled $133 billion. Significantly, it did not include an income tax rate increase, often the red line for conservative Republicans.

Gingrich even agreed with this, saying, “I thought what the president’s pledge clearly meant in the end was [an] income tax rate increase.”
Darman believed that the impact of Gingrich’s revolt could barely be overstated, offering several reasons why it had an immense impact on Bush, the Republican Party and the broader spectrum of American politics.

First, after Gingrich’s opposition but before the House vote, Bush made a nationally televised appeal for support, citing “fears of economic chaos that would follow if we fail to reduce the deficit.” Nonetheless, the House rejected the deal, the federal government shut down briefly and a state of political turmoil ensued.

The defeat gave the Democrats significantly more leverage, and a second version was negotiated between Congress and the White House, again over Gingrich’s opposition. This time it included an income tax rate increase in the top bracket from 28 percent to 31 percent. It passed, and Bush signed it into law.

According to Darman, the whole psychology changed,with “the president not only presiding over a failure, but a revolt in his own party.” The White House strategy had been to make Bush seem like former president Ronald Reagan. Although Reagan had gone along with raising business taxes in 1982 and several other times, he was able to protest that he had been dragged kicking and screaming by Democrats. Instead, Bush was now exposed as a tax-increasing president.

Darman also said that the Gingrich revolt helped launch the primary challenge of former Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan in 1992. With the economy stalled, Buchanan jumped into the race, aiming his harshest rhetoric at Bush for abandoning his no-new-taxes pledge.

Robert Teeter, Bush’s pollster, produced data showing that the 1990 deal had dramatically damaged Bush’s credibility with voters. In March 1992, while running for reelection, Bush declared publicly that the deal had been a “mistake.” Darman, as much as anyone the author of the deal, was upset and offered to resign, an offer Bush refused.

And Darman concluded that the entire debate undermined Bush, creating a public confidence problem, and a sense that the institutions of government had failed.

“I don’t know if [Bush] thought I’d betrayed him or not . . . others have said he does not trust me,” Gingrich said in 1992, while Bush was still president. “But I think that’s reasonable. I think in their world it was so inconceivable (a) that I would walk, and (b) that I would fight actively and (c) that I would fight publicly. . . . they [the Bush White House] just go, ‘That son of a bitch.’ ”

In a long interview on May 4, 1992, devoted almost exclusively to the topic of Gingrich, Darman concluded that Gingrich was “an unstable personality” who talks about four or five great people in history, including Pericles and himself. “Psychologically, he has got to go against the reigning establishment . . . . The establishment has to fail visibly.

“No matter what you’re going to do, he’s going to bomb it,” Darman said. “He will find his way to the most inflammatory part of anything.”

In 1992, Darman said that Gingrich’s ambition was limitless. “Newt is on a path for himself to be president of the United States, not just speaker of the House.”

Just 2¹ / ₂years later, after the Gingrich-planned and led Republican takeover of the House succeeded, he was elected speaker. And now, nearly two decades later, he is trying to become the Republican nominee for president.

Gingrich was elected minority whip just a year before he took on Bush, winning an 87 to 85 vote on his promise to undertake a more confrontational brand of conservatism.

“I’d been whip for about a year,” he said, “and it was a heady experience and this was my first chance to see how it worked.”

In hindsight, he acknowledged, “I may have been too passive all the way through, again because I was still learning.” He said that when Bush first agreed publicly to renege on the no-new-taxes pledge, “at that point I should have blown up. I should have walked.”

Instead he sent memos indicating he would go along. Three months before he bolted, in a July 20, 1990, memo to his Republican colleagues, he said, “I believe House Republicans will consider appropriate revenue increases.” He also went further, telling budget negotiators that he was “prepared to sponsor and support” modest tax increases, according to news accounts at the time. (“Rep. Gingrich ‘Prepared’ to Back Increase in Taxes” was the headline in The Washington Post on July 20, 1990.)

Gingrich said he made one thing clear, telling the White House that he would go along only with a deal that included a cut in the capital gains tax.

On Sept. 28, just two days before the initial version of a budget deal had been worked out, Gingrich wrote the White House asking for a commitment that House Republicans would get “a detailed summary of the agreement at least 12 hours before you expect a public commitment from the Republican leadership to support a package.”

He added, “With a good agreement, and full partnership in the decision process on the other items, the Republican leadership and membership will work hard.”

On the eve of a deal, the clear implication was that Gingrich was going to support it.

Gingrich had been warned about this moment. He said that a group of senior Republicans who had served in previous administrations told him he would have to cave in when a deal was struck.

“They all said, ‘Well [the White House and the congressional Democrats] will in the end cut a deal and they will in the end call you in a room and they will tell you, you have to agree.’ And I said, ‘Boys, there’s not a chance in hell I’m going to agree . . .’ And they all said, ‘Yes, you will, you just don’t understand, yes, you will.’ ”

But Gingrich was moving in another direction — his own. He said he checked out a copy of “Advise and Consent,” the novel by Allen Drury about a Senate confirmation battle with a president. “I thought the odds were better than even money I was going to end up fighting the president, and I wanted to go through the drill of thinking about what it’s like to fight a president who you like a lot and who’s very powerful.”

Gingrich said that on Sept. 29, he was told that an agreement had been reached. “They told me the deal they’d cut. I called my daughter, and my wife talked to her mother. Both my daughter and mother-in-law thought it was nuts.”
The next day he went to the White House, where the deal was laid out to Republican leaders. Everyone went along except Gingrich. “They walked into the Rose Garden, I walked the other way” — a public act of defiance that was captured live on CNN.

Weber said that Bush later said that it was Gingrich’s revolt, and not the deal itself, that cost him. Without the high-profile rebellion, Bush concluded, “he would have paid no political price for it.”

Gingrich said that immediately after he walked out, key anti-tax conservative Republicans who had served in the House and were then holding some of the highest positions in the Bush administration called him with private words of encouragement, secretly cheering him on.

According to Gingrich, the first call was from Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense. “ ‘Richard,’ I said, ‘I can’t tell you how much it helped me to go back and look at the courage you showed in 1982 when you opposed [Reagan’s business tax increase]. And that one of the things that strengthened me in this decision was knowing that I’d have your firm moral leadership.’ ”

Cheney chuckled and said he had promised Bush he would make a pro forma call to criticize Gingrich, but he indicated that his heart was not in it. “I’ve made the phone call,” Gingrich quoted Cheney as saying, “how are you doing?”

Jack Kemp, Bush’s housing secretary, also called. According to Gingrich, Kemp said, he was “calling to say that you really shouldn’t be doing the heroic and exactly correct thing you’re doing, which I’m very proud of you for doing, but as a member of the Cabinet I do want to check in with you and say I hope you’ll do it in a positive way and not be too hostile.”

Then it was Vice President Dan Quayle’s turn: “Newter, just sort of thought I’d check in here. . . . I want to keep the bridges open, when this thing’s over, we’re all on the same side.”

Quayle later said that he also told Gingrich he didn’t have to vote with Bush, “but I do think it’s an act of irresponsibility to openly criticize and lead the revolt against the president on something this fundamental.”

Gingrich and Darman, two of the most cerebral, outspoken and ego-driven figures in Washington at the time, had a deeply complicated relationship, particularly after the Gingrich revolt.

In November 1990, after Bush signed the second budget deal, Gingrich called for Darman’s resignation if he didn’t recant an attack on some new conservative thinking.

The next morning, Darman called Gingrich. Darman made notes of the conversation, in which Gingrich told Darman “you’ve got to go” and said that he wanted Bush to be defeated.

Gingrich did not dispute Darman’s version of the conversation, but he said he later told him that he had changed his position and did not want to knock off Bush. “I am a loyalist,” Gingrich said, adding that he worked hard for Bush’s reelection in 1992.

Darman was not impressed. He called Gingrich a “neo-media-pop-opportunist” who is “interested in personal power, media attention, aggrandizement.”

The split between the two was so great that Darman asked Weber to mediate. At about 3 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 3, 1990, Gingrich and Darman were sitting on separate couches in Weber’s office in the Cannon House Office Building.

“It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life,” Weber said, “because I never intended to be either a psychiatrist or marriage counselor. And the sessions were very much of that magnitude. They both should have been laying down!

“I had this very strong sense that I was dealing with a couple of people that had grown up without any friends . . . a couple of kids that were the smartest kids in their school class but nobody liked them.”

Weber said the two did not have real discussions or disagreements about policy. Instead, Gingrich and Darman spent the whole session, along with other meetings, talking about their personal relationship. “I got pretty bored with it all, to be candid, sitting there listening to these guys talk about, you know, ‘Well I thought you liked me, if you liked me, why did you say that about me?’ ” Weber said.

The meeting ended just as he knew it would, Weber said, with the two agreeing to more meetings and a closer relationship.

“I know Newt didn’t want Dick Darman to resign,” Weber said. “Newt wanted Dick Darman to sit down and spend hours and hours talking with him. And set up a process of communication that would make sure that everybody knew that, you know, Newt had Darman on the phone any time he wanted him and had his ear on anything he wanted to.”

Weber portrayed Gingrich in various ways throughout the 1992 interview, at one point calling him “a high-maintenance friend and ally, needy” and at another saying that “Newt, as you know, views himself as the leader of a vast, national interplanetary movement.”

But, in the end, Weber concluded that Gingrich was not as he often appeared.

“Gingrich is viewed as this hard, tough ideologue, and he’s not an ideologue, but beyond that he’s the easiest guy in the world, if you understand him, for people to buy off.”

Payroll tax fight leaves Hill Republicans divided and angry

2011-12-26T11:23:00.000-05:00

From The Washington Post:

Congressional Republicans leave Washington for the holidays divided and embittered over the last round of December’s payroll-tax fight, and their lingering unhappiness could complicate negotiations starting in January on a deal for a full-year tax holiday.

Some House Republicans say they feel sold out by their counterparts in the Senate. For their part, Senate Republicans had worried that their House colleagues were harming the GOP’s chances of winning back their chamber by risking a tax increase if House members didn’t get concessions they wanted.

In the House, some rank-and-file House conservatives are deeply disappointed in their own leaders, who in the face of intense political pressure Thursday accepted a two-month deal that House Republicans had almost unanimously rejected just days earlier.

Perhaps no one was more dismayed at the outcome than the nearly 90 freshmen Republicans who came to Washington in January on a tea party wave promising to change the town. Many felt that the year ended with a temporary tax fix that was the epitome of business as usual.

“The House Republicans made a firm, sound point. And when push came to shove, we lost our way,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), a freshman. He said Republicans missed the opportunity to use their new House majority this year to force major entitlement changes, overhaul the tax code and shrink government dramatically.

The tax fix, he said, “was bitterly consistent with what happened all year long.”

Though approved on a bipartisan 89 to 10 vote in the Senate, the 60-day tax deal had been crafted behind closed doors largely by two men: Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

It was a fallback solution brokered because Reid and McConnell couldn’t agree on how to pay for extending the tax cut for a full year. Twin deadlines were fast approaching: the expiration of the one-year measure that had cut the payroll-tax rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent and the start of lawmakers’ holiday recess.

The temporary deal extended a tax cut many freshmen believe had been embraced by President Obama and Republican leaders merely because it was popular. Opponents argued that it would not stimulate the economy as Obama had maintained. They also said it could harm Social Security funding over time.

“When you start making decisions based on elections, then you run the risk of having the mess we just did,” said Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.)

Congressional Democrats on Friday reveled in their success in forcing Republicans to yield on tax cuts, one of that party’s signature issues.

“I hope this Congress has had a very good learning experience, especially those who are newer to this body,” Reid said after the Senate voted Friday to approve the deal. “Everything we do around here does not have to wind up in a fight.”

Instead, a number of newer members said Friday the message they had gotten was that they must fight even harder in 2012 — and encourage their leaders to stand beside them.

“Here’s my lesson learned: Clearly it demonstrates that common sense doesn’t get in the way of political necessity,” said Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.). He said the two-month agreement makes no sense for businesses that prepare payrolls on a quarterly basis. “We’re again seeing the lack of an ability to make hard decisions about long-term issues.”

To get a full-year deal on the payroll tax — as well as to extend unemployment benefits and avert cuts in Medicare rates, which are in the same package — Democrats and Republicans will have to bridge a deep divide over whether such items should be funded through cuts in spending or higher taxes on wealthy people.

It’s the same kind of split that bedeviled the 12-member deficit “supercommittee,” which disbanded in failure last month.

Republicans will likely try to eke out concessions from Democrats, knowing that Obama has made the continuation of the tax cut a top priority. In the deal approved Friday, Republicans already got one major win — a requirement that the administration make a speedy decision on whether to allow construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

But their bargaining hand will not be strong, because a deal is now more important for the GOP. That’s because party leaders have spent the past week insisting that a full-year cut is necessary for the economy. And they have gotten a taste of the political consequences of letting Obama portray them as willing to let taxes rise for 160 million workers, as he has in recent days.

The $33 billion package was approved Friday in voice votes in the House and Senate, each lasting only a couple of minutes, and signed into law immediately by Obama.

In brief remarks after the bill’s passage Friday, Obama praised Congress for ensuring that Americans’ payroll taxes will not rise next month. And he said lawmakers should move quickly in January to extend the tax cut for a full year.

“When Congress returns, I urge them to keep working, without drama, without delay, to reach an agreement that extends this tax cut, as well as unemployment insurance, through all of 2012,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do because more money spent by more Americans means more businesses hiring more workers. That’s a boost for everybody, and it’s a boost we very much need right now.”

“Aloha,” he concluded, departing the White House to join his family in Hawaii for a Christmas vacation he had delayed because of the tax fight.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who stood alone at the microphones Thursday night to announce that he would accept the two-month deal in exchange for a promise from Reid to immediately begin negotiations over a full-year deal in January, presided over the brief House session.

And then he left the Capitol, without offering further comment.

This month’s debate revealed a deep division among Republicans about whether the payroll-tax cut has been a good idea. Those voices are likely to grow stronger in January because of unhappiness with how leaders handled the fight this month. In particular, many House Republicans say they feel betrayed by colleagues in the Senate.

As the week wore on, a steady stream of Republican senators came forward to say the House should abandon its demand for further negotiations to get a full-year deal that might include elements such as a continued pay freeze for federal employees.

Boehner’s hand was ultimately forced by McConnell, who after days of silence emerged Thursday to urge the House to back the 60-day fix in exchange for Reid appointing negotiators to start new talks in January.

“I feel really let down by the Senate Republicans,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). “We were under the impression that we were strengthening the Senate’s hands and that by passing this tough bill it would give Mitch McConnell more room to negotiate.”

Instead, he said, McConnell “just rolled over to get his belly itched.”

2011-12-22T07:17:00.001-05:00

Click on this link to Doonesbury to read this better.

I worry about this also: In Islamic Law, Gingrich Sees a Mortal Threat to U.S.

2011-12-22T06:58:00.001-05:00

From The New York Times:

Long before he announced his presidential run this year, Newt Gingrich had become the most prominent American politician to embrace an alarming premise: that Shariah, or Islamic law, poses a threat to the United States as grave as or graver than terrorism.

“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in July 2010 devoted to what he suggested were the hidden dangers of Islamic radicalism. “I think it’s that straightforward and that real.”

Mr. Gingrich was articulating a much-disputed thesis in vogue with some conservative thinkers but roundly rejected by many American Muslims, scholars of Islam and counterterrorism officials. The anti-Shariah theorists say that just as communism posed an ideological and moral threat to America separate from the menace of Soviet missiles, so today radical Islamists are working to impose Shariah in a “stealth jihad” that is no less dangerous than the violent jihad of Al Qaeda.

“Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence,” Mr. Gingrich said in the speech. “But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad, and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Shariah.”

Shariah (literally, “the path to the watering place”) is a central concept in Islam. It is God’s law, as derived from the Koran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad, and has far wider application than secular law. It is popularly associated with its most extreme application in societies like Afghanistan under the Taliban, including chopping off a hand as punishment for thievery.

For Democrats in Hawaii, Unease in an Oasis

2011-12-22T06:49:00.003-05:00

From The New York Times:

Hawaii should be a happy outpost for the Democratic Party. It has a Democratic governor. Democrats overwhelmingly control the Legislature. It has Barack Obama in the White House and all the prestige that brings, most recently an Asia-Pacific economic summit meeting with the president as its host, packing this city’s streets, restaurants and hotels with international leaders.

Yet these are hardly happy days for Hawaii Democrats. The governor, Neil Abercrombie, is ending his first year under a storm of criticism; he referred to himself the other evening as “the most unpopular governor in America.” Mr. Obama’s struggles in Washington have cast a bit of a pall here.

And the Republican Party suddenly has a shot of picking up a United States Senate seat that has been in Democratic hands for more than 30 years, with the announcement by Linda Lingle, a Republican former governor, that she will seek the seat held by Senator Daniel K. Akaka, the retiring Democrat. A Republican victory here would be a serious embarrassment to Mr. Obama (though that could be the least of his problems on election night) and would make it that much more likely that Republicans take back the Senate.

Ron Paul becoming serious contender in Republican presidential race

2011-12-21T09:20:00.000-05:00

From The Washington Post:

As the first votes in the Republican presidential race approach, Rep. Ron Paul has become a serious force with the potential to upend the nomination fight and remain a factor throughout next year’s general-election campaign.

Although few think the congressman from Texas has a realistic shot at winning the GOP nod, he has built a strong enough base of support that he could be a spoiler — or a kingmaker.

In a muddled field, Paul could win the Iowa caucuses. While other candidates have been hesitant to commit to the state or have had trouble sustaining their initial bursts of support, Paul has been methodically building an organization and a growing corps of followers.

Perhaps most fearsome to Republican leaders is Paul’s refusal to rule out a third-party presidential bid that would steal votes from the Republican nominee and make President Obama’s path to reelection considerably easier.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, for instance, indicates that Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney would be locked in a dead heat in a one-on-one contest. But in a three-way race with Paul, Obama would hold a wide advantage. The survey also suggests that Paul on his own would pose at least as much danger to Obama as Gingrich would.

“The reality is Ron Paul is poised to become a major figure in the Republican Party if his momentum continues and he’s able to win in Iowa,” said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, who managed the campaign of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the party’s 2008 nominee. “The open question is: How much durability does he have over the balance of the race?”

The congressman’s libertarian views and longtime opposition to increased federal spending and government interference have inspired a committed following of activist supporters who turn out for rallies and organize online.

Until now, though, rival candidates and Republican leaders have largely ignored Paul, considering him more of a political eccentric than a viable opinion leader, much less a credible presidential candidate.

Many Republicans have long been uneasy with Paul’s views on foreign policy, which fall far outside the GOP mainstream. He opposed the Iraq war, wants to pull the military out of Afghanistan and says conservatives are overstating the nuclear threat from Iran to start a war in the region. He opposes foreign aid, including support for Israel — a point of particular concern within the party — and has said that U.S. actions overseas helped spur the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

After his 2008 presidential bid, Paul wasn’t even granted a spot at the Republican National Convention. He held his own shadow gathering instead.

Now, party officials and other candidates are being forced to reckon with him as a purveyor of policy and, in some respects, the leader of a political movement that the GOP would like to harness.

A major factor is Paul’s relative strength with younger voters, who make up the core of his energetic and growing activist base. In the new Post-ABC survey, Paul is best positioned to cut into Obama’s support among young voters, with 44 percent of registered voters who are younger than 40 backing him in a hypothetical matchup against Obama, while Romney wins 41 percent and Gingrich gets 37 percent.

“Ron Paul is the most consequential guy running for president,” said Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist and Republican organizer. “All the other guys are basically saying the same things, and one gets to be the nominee. But Ron Paul has changed the nature of the modern Republican Party and brought into it discussions not only of non-interventionist overseas policy but monetary policy.”

Norquist addressed Paul’s alternative 2008 convention and calls it “one of the McCain era’s tactical errors” not to embrace the congressman and his supporter base that year — in effect discounting a potentially energized group of campaign volunteers. He said Paul, unlike his rivals, was drawing new people to the GOP, just as Pat Robertson helped lure millions of evangelical voters into the party with his 1988 presidential bid and the tea party movement attracted more activists in 2010.

Paul’s organization is expected to be a key advantage in dealing with a new set of Republican Party rules that allow for proportional awarding of convention delegates in many states.

The Paul rise underscores the volatile nature of today’s Republican Party, which through its presidential nominating contest is struggling to balance the ideological views of its newly energized tea-party base with a deep desire to find the best candidate to defeat Obama.

If Romney is the pragmatic choice for voters who are worried about electability, Paul is the pick of a certain breed of ideological purists who have grown skeptical of both parties. And other contenders who might have tapped into that strain — Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann, for instance — have fallen back or stepped aside.

In the short term, Paul’s presence seems most beneficial to Romney.

Tom Friedman on Iraq: The End, for Now

2011-12-21T07:42:00.000-05:00

Tom Friedman writes in The New York Times:

With the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from Iraq, we’re finally going to get the answer to the core question about that country: Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is — a collection of sects and tribes unable to live together except under an iron fist. Now we’re going to get the answer because both the internal iron fist that held Iraq together (Saddam Hussein) and the external iron fist (the U.S. armed forces) have been removed. Now we will see whether Iraqis can govern themselves in a decent manner that will enable their society to progress — or end up with a new iron fist. You have to hope for the best because so much is riding on it, but the early signs are worrying.

Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track? After 9/11, the idea of helping to change the context of Arab politics and address the root causes of Arab state dysfunction and Islamist terrorism — which were identified in the 2002 Arab Human Development Report as a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge and a deficit of women’s empowerment — seemed to me to be a legitimate strategic choice. But was it a wise choice?

My answer is twofold: “No” and “Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.”

I say “no” because whatever happens in Iraq, even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it. And, for that, I have nothing but regrets. We overpaid in lives, in the wounded, in tarnished values, in dollars and in the lost focus on America’s development. Iraqis, of course, paid dearly as well.

One reason the costs were so high is because the project was so difficult. Another was the incompetence of George W. Bush’s team in prosecuting the war. The other reason, though, was the nature of the enemy. Iran, the Arab dictators and, most of all, Al Qaeda did not want a democracy in the heart of the Arab world, and they tried everything they could — in Al Qaeda’s case, hundreds of suicide bombers financed by Arab oil money — to sow enough fear and sectarian discord to make this democracy project fail.

So no matter the original reasons for the war, in the end, it came down to this: Were America and its Iraqi allies going to defeat Al Qaeda and its allies in the heart of the Arab world or were Al Qaeda and its allies going to defeat them? Thanks to the Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq, and the surge, America and its allies defeated them and laid the groundwork for the most important product of the Iraq war: the first ever voluntary social contract between Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites for how to share power and resources in an Arab country and to govern themselves in a democratic fashion. America helped to midwife that contract in Iraq, and now every other Arab democracy movement is trying to replicate it — without an American midwife. You see how hard it is.

Which leads to the “maybe, sort of, we’ll see.” It is possible to overpay for something that is still transformational. Iraq had its strategic benefits: the removal of a genocidal dictator; the defeat of Al Qaeda there, which diminished its capacity to attack us; the intimidation of Libya, which prompted its dictator to surrender his nuclear program (and helped expose the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear network); the birth in Kurdistan of an island of civility and free markets and the birth in Iraq of a diverse free press. But Iraq will only be transformational if it truly becomes a model where Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, the secular and religious, Muslims and non-Muslims, can live together and share power.

As you can see in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain, this is the issue that will determine the fate of all the Arab awakenings. Can the Arab world develop pluralistic, consensual politics, with regular rotations in power, where people can live as citizens and not feel that their tribe, sect or party has to rule or die? This will not happen overnight in Iraq, but if it happens over time it would be transformational, because it is the necessary condition for democracy to take root in that region. Without it, the Arab world will be a dangerous boiling pot for a long, long time.

The best-case scenario for Iraq is that it will be another Russia — an imperfect, corrupt, oil democracy that still holds together long enough so that the real agent of change — a new generation, which takes nine months and 21 years to develop — comes of age in a much more open, pluralistic society. The current Iraqi leaders are holdovers from the old era, just like Vladimir Putin in Russia. They will always be weighed down by the past. But as Putin is discovering — some 21 years after Russia’s democratic awakening began — that new generation thinks differently. I don’t know if Iraq will make it. The odds are really long, but creating this opportunity was an important endeavor, and I have nothing but respect for the Americans, Brits and Iraqis who paid the price to make it possible.

Lawmakers Deadlock Over Tax Cut. Many - including the Cracker Squire - don't believe that the payroll tax cut is an effective way to spur economic growth anyway. What we see now is a stalling action on the part of those who were never for a payroll tax cut in the first place. Dyfuction is returning and some might argue working.

2011-12-20T01:50:00.002-05:00

Rep. Allen West (R., Fla.) criticized the Senate's legislation Monday.

From The Wall Street Journal:

At issue is a bill that would extend for two months the lower payroll-tax rate that workers currently pay to fund Social Security, as well as federal jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed and a measure to extend current Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors.

If Congress doesn't reach a deal by the end of the year, workers will see their payroll taxes revert to 6.2% of earnings, from the current 4.2% rate.

At the core of the Republican opposition was the cadre of tea-party-backed freshmen who have made it hard all year for Mr. Boehner to steer his party to compromises dictated by divided government.

"This freshman phenomenon that happened in 2010 is beginning to flex its muscle and let its voice be heard," said one member of the group.

Healing Medicare - Unfortunately, instead of welcoming the effort reflected in the Wyden-Ryan plan, the White House chose to stomp on it.

2011-12-18T08:57:00.003-05:00

From the Editorial Board of The Washington Post:

IN THE MAELSTROM of dysfunction and partisanship better known as the 112th Congress, it is always surprising and gratifying when lawmakers from opposing parties manage to work together. That is particularly true when their collaboration involves an issue as politically charged and substantively complex as Medicare. So we begin by congratulating Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for having the tenacity to try again, with a revamped version of Medicare reform unveiled last week.

Some will read the last sentence and chuckle knowingly about its seeming naivete. After all, Mr. Ryan’s more radical Medicare plan exposed him and his party to devastating attacks from Democrats who warned of “ending Medicare as we know it.” Is the new and much more improved model an effort to defang those attacks and use Mr. Wyden as political cover? Perhaps, but the unavoidable fact is that “Medicare as we know it” — with an exploding population of aging beneficiaries and inadequate controls on growth — cannot continue if the government is to perform the rest of its functions and avoid being saddled with ever more growth-inhibiting debt. Mr. Wyden and Mr. Ryan are under no illusions that their approach will be enacted anytime soon. But they deserve praise for trying to jump-start the conversation.

The essence of the Wyden-Ryan plan — and a similar proposal unveiled Friday by Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici — involves a concept known as “premium support.” Rather than the current, open-ended entitlement, seniors and those with disabilities would be entitled to a benefit worth a fixed amount and could use it to buy insurance from private providers. There are major differences between Mr. Ryan’s old approach and the new version. First, beneficiaries who want to stick with traditional fee-for-service Medicare would be allowed to do so — although, if the costs of that program rise disproportionately, better-off seniors might have to pay higher premiums. Second, rather than limiting the growth of the government-provided benefit to inflation, which would have quickly made the amount inadequate to purchase reasonable coverage, the Wyden-Ryan plan would let the amount rise at the growth in gross domestic product per person plus 1 percent — a target already embedded in the new health-care law. Third, seniors would not be left to the vagaries of the market but would choose among competing plans in regulated exchanges like those in the new health-care law.

There are legitimate questions about the proposal, even if, as we have said, premium support is a promising part of the reform debate. Would sicker seniors flock to traditional Medicare, driving up its costs? Does requiring that private plans offer “actuarially equivalent” packages — rather than a set of specific benefits — guarantee seniors necessary care? Are poor seniors adequately protected? Would promised savings materialize?

Unfortunately, instead of welcoming the effort, the White House chose to stomp on it. Invoking a phrase used by Newt Gingrich during the 1990s, communications director Dan Pfeiffer warned that the “Wyden-Ryan scheme”could let traditional Medicare “wither on the vine,” hiking premiums and forcing seniors onto private plans. This is not a constructive or adequate response to a serious proposal.

Des Moines Register endorses Mitt Romney

2011-12-18T08:41:00.004-05:00

From The Washington Post:

The Des Moines Register, the largest and most influential newspaper in Iowa endorsed the presidential candidacy of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney Saturday evening.

In endorsing Romney, the Register also had harsh words for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who it called “an undisciplined partisan who would alienate, not unite, if he reverts to mean-spirited attacks on display as House speaker.”

When magazine covers attack

2011-12-18T08:19:00.000-05:00

From The Washington Post:

For those who have yet to see it, the conservative National Review magazine is out Thursday with a damning, multi-article takedown of Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign

Perhaps more importantly, though, it is paired with an equally damning cover of the former House speaker.

The National Review’s illustration of Gingrich as Marvin the Martian, like so many memorable political magazine covers before it, crystallizes what’s already on everyone’s mind with the assistance of no — or relatively few — words to accompany it. The words say one thing — “Newt’s World” — but the message is essentially this: This guy is out there.

Remember Mitt Romney’s attack at Saturday’s debate criticizing Gingrich for wanting to mine the moon for minerals? Remember when Romney called Gingrich “zany” on Wednesday? The National Review essentially caricatures that very argument.

And the fact that this review is coming from a conservative publication makes it even more damning in a GOP presidential primary.

All of this combines to make the Gingrich cover one of the more memorable magazine covers of the 2012 election, and potentially one that could actually affect the race.

So what are some examples of other magazine covers that have defined politicians, and what do they have in common?

Gingrich, of course, has been fodder for this kind of thing before. In fact this isn’t even the first time he has been portrayed as a popular evil fictional character. Time magazine once drew him as Uncle Scrooge, which Newsweek matched by turning him into the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Those marked the early years of a speakership that eventually turned bad in part because of Gingrich’s abrasive leadership style.

The Marvin the Martian caricature is very much along the same lines. By drawing Gingrich as any of these characters, he is being de-humanized and held up as somewhat of a bumbling, unsavory character. Which is pretty close to how his enemies see him.

The same ability to make a picture worth a thousand words is also a big reason why Newsweek’s cover picture of Rep. Michele Bachmann earlier this year was such a big deal. The magazine drew criticism for using a photo of a wide-eyed (crazy-looking?) Bachmann and labeling her the “Queen of Rage.” A week later, she won the Iowa straw poll, and ever since then, her campaign has fallen off a cliff.

[The Cracker Squire's 8-10-11 post on this cover noted showed the cover along with a more conventional shot, and noted: "Although the woman is a lightning rod, the Newsweek photograph might be a bit over the top."]

Similarly, before the 2008 election, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover photo of now-Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) that many thought made the former governor look deliberately … well … ugly. Warner was thought to be a presidential contender at that point, but wound up seeking a Senate seat.

A sampling of some other memorable covers:

* Time labeling President George H.W. Bush the “Incredible Shrinking President” in 1992 after his approval rating plummeted fast.

* A 2000 Esquire cover photo of Bill Clintontaken at crotch level with the outgoing president beaming down, which to many evoked the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

* Time’s “Man of the Year” photo of a two-faced George H.W. Bush, suggesting the duality of the president.

* The New Yorker’s cartoon of President Obama in Muslim garb and his wife with a rifle strapped to her back as both do the so-called “terrorist fist jab.” This poked fun at the increasingly ridiculous rumors floating around about the Obamas in a way that seemed to mitigate their effect.

* Newsweek’s cover of Sarah Palinin her running gear seemed to trivialize her as not a serious politician — a portrait of her that has stuck to this day.

* The Nation ran a cover photo of George W. Bush as Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman during the 2000 recount, with a button on his jacket that said “Worry” rather than Neuman’s usual “What, me worry?” The caricature seemed to stick over the next eight-plus years, with Bush often being caricatured as a buffoonish character.

All of these magazines captured the moment — or at least a suspicion held by many — in a very succinct way, which is precisely why the National Review’s cover of Gingrich’s works.

I have always admired his intellect, but after this, I must say: he is way too risky & maybe even dangerous to ever have any power again. - Gingrich Takes Aim at Legal System.

2011-12-17T21:19:00.001-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich came out swinging Saturday against the nation's legal system, pledging if elected to defy Supreme Court rulings with which he disagrees and declaring that a 200-year-old principle of American government, judicial review to ensure that the political branches obey the Constitution, had been "grossly overstated."

Politicians often attack the judiciary for decisions they perceive as unpopular, a relatively painless tactic because judges, unlike electoral opponents, don't fight back. But Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker, has gone further than any major candidate in recent memory, with scalding rhetoric rarely seen since the 1950s and '60s, when Southern politicians excoriated the Supreme Court for ordering the end to racial segregation, something many then argued exceeded the judiciary's constitutional power.

Mr. Gingrich referred to that era in campaign literature declaring that the Supreme Court's rationale for ordering states to obey its Brown v. Board of Education ruling to desegregate public schools was "factually and historically false."

If a President Gingrich were to follow through with his plans, he would almost certainly provoke a constitutional conflict with the head of the federal judiciary—Chief Justice John Roberts, who, as it happens, Mr. Gingrich has cited as one of his favorite justices. It already has divided him from leaders of the conservative legal movement, including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who told Fox News that some of Mr. Gingrich's ideas are "dangerous, ridiculous, totally irresponsible, outrageous, off-the-wall and would reduce the entire judicial system to a spectacle."

Regardless of their approach to constitutional interpretation, Supreme Court justices have jealously guarded their prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government, particularly a foundational ruling that Mr. Gingrich sought to diminish, Marbury v. Madison.

Stemming from a constitutional conflict during the presidential transition from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, the 1803 decision by Chief Justice John Marshall clarified the federal judiciary's function in the constitutional system. The ruling's famous holding, that "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," is carved in marble on the wall of the Supreme Court.

Rather than follow the Marbury precedent, Mr. Gingrich said Saturday he proposes "a floating, three-way constitutional system" in which any two of the three branches of federal power—the executive, legislative and judicial—could effectively overrule the other.

_______________

This is from Monday's Wall Street Journal.

Thanks, I needed that: Romney picks up one of most coveted endorsements in the GOP race.

2011-12-17T10:08:00.001-05:00

From The Washington Post:

Mitt Romney swooped into South Carolina on Friday to pick up the endorsement of Gov. Nikki Haley, a tea party star whose backing was intended to signal growing acceptance of Romney among conservative Republicans.

Newt Gingrich: The GOP’s eccentric big thinker and bomb-thrower

2011-12-14T07:40:00.006-05:00

A long article from The Washington Post begins:

He’s the smart one.

That’s what Newt Gingrich has been hearing since he was little Newtie, the boy who, his stepfather said, had read much of the Encyclopedia Americana by age 12. He’s the smartest guy in the room, the professor-pol, the eccentric big thinker of the Republican Party with the near-textbook recall and the lawn-sprinkler spray of ideas.

Huntsman Backers Bank on Dogfight

2011-12-14T06:49:00.001-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

Margaret Brodhead came to hear Jon Huntsman Jr. on Sunday night at her local high school and decided she liked him. "He sounded non-ideological," she said, "like he really understands the problems."

But Ms. Brodhead, a 55-year-old secretary from nearby Keene, wasn't ready to commit to voting for the former Utah governor. "I'm not convinced," she said.

So it goes with Mr. Huntsman. The former ambassador to China has staked his candidacy on New Hampshire, where he has held 120 campaign events and built a significant statewide organization. Still, polls show him hovering at just under 10% support.

But some Huntsman supporters argue that their candidate is positioned to ride a wave created by intensified tussling between the top two candidates in the GOP field, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

Mr. Huntsman's supporters say he is the kind of even-keeled candidate who will draw new attention from voters, especially if Messrs. Romney and Gingrich spend the next few weeks tearing each other down.

Court to Weigh Arizona Statute on Immigration

2011-12-13T17:31:00.004-05:00

From The New York Times:

In the space of a month, the Supreme Court has thrust itself into the center of American political life, agreeing to hear three major cases that could help determine which party controls the House of Representatives and whether President Obama wins a second term.

The court announced Monday that it would decide whether Arizona was entitled to impose tough anti-immigration measures over the Obama administration’s objections. The case joined a crowded docket that already included challenges to Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the 2010 health care overhaul law, and a momentous case on how Texas will conduct its elections.

The Texas case, which on Friday the court agreed to hear, could cause as many as four seats in the United States House of Representatives to change party control.

“It’s not just that these are big cases, but these are big cases that echo in the political arena,” said Nathaniel Persily, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University. “There is now a judicial forum for airing these political disputes.”

The health care and immigration decisions are likely to land in June, in the heat of the presidential campaign.

The court must act much faster in the Texas case, where its decision on Friday to stay the use of a set of election maps, created by federal judges, has thrown election planning there into disarray. Political observers believe that the new maps would increase the influence of Hispanic voters and thereby increase the number of Democrats in the House.

The court’s precedents point both ways in the health care case, and it is hard to say what the outcome will be. In the Arizona and Texas cases, recent decisions suggest that a majority of justices may look favorably on the positions of state officials, which would entail upholding the Arizona immigration law and rejecting at least a part of the court-drawn maps in Texas.

In May, the court upheld a different Arizona law, one that imposed harsh penalties on businesses that employed illegal immigrants. In a 2009 decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, expressed skepticism about the continuing vitality of a part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the court in Texas relied on in substituting its own maps for ones drawn by the Legislature.

Veteran Health-Care Executives Say It Has All Been Tried Before, With Mixed Results .

2011-12-13T17:23:00.002-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

As hospitals, doctors and health insurers pursue integration strategies to squeeze costs and strengthen their positions, veteran health-care executives warn that nearly all the strategies were attempted decades ago, with decidedly mixed results.

In the 1990s, hospitals bought doctor practices, merged with each other and tried taking on insurance-style risk, sometimes launching their own health plans. Then and earlier, some insurers tried similar approaches from the other side, seeking to own or control providers. Health-maintenance organizations were seen as the future of care, squeezing costs by limiting consumers' access to certain providers.

Today's efforts at integration are "déjà vu all over again," says Paul M. Wiles, chief executive of Novant Health, a 13-hospital system based in Winston-Salem, N.C. One of the system's predecessors launched an HMO insurance product in 1986, then sold it off in 2001. It held its own financially, but "we found it to be a pretty significant distraction from the core business" and a source of internal tension, Mr. Wiles says.

Indeed, many earlier deals failed because of the clashing interests involved in soldering together different businesses. HMOs and the reimbursement system known as capitation, under which doctors and hospitals often received a set allotment for patients regardless of whether they got sick, triggered a backlash from consumers who feared they were being denied access to needed care. Many hospitals lost money on their doctor-practice acquisitions because of overly rich prices and some doctors' tendency to ease up their workloads after selling out.

Humana Inc., one prominent company that combined insurance and providers, spun off its hospitals in 1993 after rival health plans steered patients to competitors.

Perhaps the most dramatic flameout was the Allegheny Health, Education, and Research Foundation. Starting in the mid-1980s, it was built from a Pittsburgh hospital into a statewide system through hospital and doctor-practice acquisitions. In 1998, AHERF, as it was called, became the U.S.'s largest health-care nonprofit bankruptcy. Its debts became unsustainable after it piled on too many money-losing assets, failed to manage the new primary-care physicians successfully, and lost money on capitated business, according to an account published in Health Affairs in 2000.

The hospitals' moves in the 1990s "did not improve quality, they did not reduce costs. In fact they increased everyone's spending," partly because some hospitals eventually used their bulked-up leverage to push for higher rates, says Lawton Robert Burns, a Wharton School professor and the AHERF history's lead author. "Nobody's showed me we're going to do it a whole lot better this time....To expect that with one piece of legislation, everyone's going to sit around the campfire and sing kumbaya, forget about it."

Of course, some integrated systems, then and now, are seen as successful. Among them: the California-based Kaiser Permanente system, Pennsylvania's Geisinger Health System and Intermountain Healthcare in Utah.

These are the examples that today's deal makers emphasize as they say they're doing things differently this time around. They point to new technology such as electronic medical records, which allow for better real-time tracking and crunching of data. Today's models are less rigid and more focused on quality of care, health care executives say. They also cite cultural shifts, including doctors' increasing disenchantment with owning their own practices.

Indeed, Humana is now stepping back into the provider business, though it's steering clear of hospitals this time. And one provider that emerged from the AHERF bankruptcy, West Penn Allegheny Health System, is being acquired by insurer Highmark Inc. "It's not like we don't understand what we are getting back into here," said Michael B. McCallister, Humana's CEO, at an investor conference. "But things have changed."

The Future of U.S. Health Care - What Is a Hospital? An Insurer? Even a Doctor? All the Lines in the Industry Are Starting to Blur

2011-12-11T23:36:00.015-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

Call it the united state of health care.

Amid enormous pressure to cut costs, improve care and prepare for changes tied to the federal health-care overhaul, major players in the industry are staking out new ground, often blurring the lines between businesses that have traditionally been separate.

Hospitals are bulking up into huge systems, merging with one another and building extensive new doctor work forces. They are exploring insurance-like setups, including direct approaches to employers that cut out the health-plan middleman.

On the other side, insurers are buying health-care providers, or seeking to work with them on new cooperative deals and payment models that share the risks of health coverage. And employers are starting to take a far more active role in their workers' care.

Such shifts have been gathering force for a while, but the economic downturn has accelerated the push for efficiency. The federal legislation, which creates new health-insurance marketplaces and requires most people to carry coverage, may unleash additional demand for health care once it fully takes effect in 2014. Even if the Supreme Court unwinds part of the law, the changes occurring now aren't likely to stop because the pressure to reduce the price of health coverage won't go away.

"We're seeing a marketplace reacting to an economic imperative," says Michael O. Leavitt, a former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services who is now chairman of a health-information company. "The new delivery models are far more integrated.

"The trends have crystallized over the past year in a series of high-profile deals and quiet, under-the-radar developments. For a close look at what they mean, here are snapshots of five people—a doctor, a hospital CEO, an insurance-company official, a human-resources executive and a patient—on the front lines as much of the $2.6 trillion U.S. health-care industry tries to remake itself.

Their stories show where health care is trying to go. The picture wouldn't be complete without a reminder of where it has been. Many of these same efforts were attempted in the 1990s, and they often failed. Experts caution that there are many signs the current flurry of activity could result in the same problems, with less margin for error in today's unforgiving economic environment.

Getting the Doctors On Board

Ultimately, the success or failure of efforts to change the health-care system may hinge largely on doctors like Dan McCullough.

As a family physician, Dr. McCullough, who works for a hospital system in Beverly, Mass., is on the front lines of efforts by health-care providers and insurers to boost preventive care and rein in costs. Hospitals and insurers are both rushing to employ and ally with primary-care doctors in all of their new schemes to blend their various functions and integrate the health-care system.

But doctors, the gatekeepers of the system, often react sharply to efforts to control their practice styles. A survey this spring of medical administrators and doctors by health-staffing firm AMN Healthcare found that doctor and staff cooperation was the most frequently cited "serious obstacle" to creating accountable-care organizations.

In Dr. McCullough's case, around 28% of his pay for the fiscal year ended in September was tied to patient-satisfaction, quality and efficiency goals, a mix of his own results and those of the entire physician group affiliated with the hospital. The quality portion involves measures like patients' blood-pressure control and preventive care like mammograms. The efficiency part is tied to statistics including how often doctors refer patients to specialists outside the system and how often their patients go to the emergency room. But much of the rest of Dr. McCullough's pay is still tied to his productivity, a typical style of doctor compensation that parallels the traditional fee-for-service model.

Dr. McCullough's current pay structure took effect last year, when he started working under a contract with the state's biggest insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, that enables providers to effectively earn more if they keep costs down and meet quality goals. Upping the ante, Dr. McCullough's employer, Northeast Health System, ties an additional chunk of his pay to quality and patient-satisfaction measures.

Dr. McCullough, 44 years old, says he likes the incentives. It used to be true that "quality doesn't pay the bills," he says. Now he focuses more on closely tracking the care of patients with chronic conditions, including hiring a new case manager. He says the new payment method also makes him think twice about allowing some services or specialty care from doctors outside his hospital's network. In the past, he "would just rubber-stamp the referral," he says.

"Recently, he got a call from a doctor's office because one of his patients had gone there seeking surgery for chronic heartburn. Dr. McCullough refused to sign off. Instead, he called the patient and asked him to come in for an appointment. After he prescribed a stronger heartburn medication, the man, who had seen the surgery advertised, decided he no longer needed the procedure.

Dr. McCullough, who has a master's degree in medical ethics, says he doesn't skimp on care that he believes will help patients. Indeed, many aren't even aware that his compensation has changed. Sometimes, though, patients question his motives. One woman wanted an ovarian-cancer test because a friend of hers had suffered from the disease, but Dr. McCullough refused to order it. The patient was "a little miffed," and she said "it's because the insurance company doesn't want to pay for it," Dr. McCullough says. He responded that there was no evidence she needed it. Still, he says, such encounters are "not the highlight of my day."

An older, recently widowed patient who kept going to the emergency room when he ran out of his asthma medication got a house call from Dr. McCullough, whose office then helped get the man into adult day care. The traditional fee-for-service model has no reward for that, he says. But "we got really aggressive with him not just because it's the right thing to do, but because we were incentivized to do it."

Mergers Help Hospital Bulk Up

Jim Taylor, the chief executive of the University of Louisville Hospital, says his institution's future depends on an ambitious statewide merger with two other hospital systems. Now, he has to persuade others that he's right.

In June, Mr. Taylor helped unveil a plan to merge with nearby competitor Jewish Hospital & St. Mary's HealthCare and Saint Joseph Health System, an eight-hospital group based in Lexington, Ky., that is part of Catholic Health Initiatives of Englewood, Colo.

If the deal is approved by the state's governor and the local Catholic archbishop, the nonprofit Catholic Health Initiatives will provide a $320 million infusion of cash and will hold 70% of the combined system. The merger would create Kentucky's biggest hospital network, with 14 facilities stretched across the state and $2.5 billion in annual revenue. It would also account for 22% of the acute-care beds in Louisville and 13% of those statewide.

Mr. Taylor says the money, along with the better bond rating the merged combination will get because of Catholic Health's backing, will provide a vital buttress for University Hospital. "We couldn't grow, and our role was going to decline as we face revenue pressures" from declining government reimbursement, says Mr. Taylor, 64, a second-generation hospital executive.

Mr. Taylor says University is in the black now but can't afford to buy advanced electronic medical records or upgrade and expand its main facility, built in 1980. University, which is the region's only adult trauma center and main safety-net hospital, is routinely overcrowded, particularly its emergency department, a spokesman says. Over the years, executives have drawn up plans to build a new $150 million patient tower and spend $33 million to expand emergency capacity, among other options, but had to shelve them. Mr. Taylor and other executives say the merger will achieve savings when duplicated functions are consolidated.

Nonprofit hospitals had their slowest revenue growth in at least two decades last year, according to Moody's Investors Service. The financial challenge is leading many to merge in hopes of cutting expenses and gaining leverage in negotiations with insurers. In the first three quarters of this year, there were 71 hospital mergers, compared with 53 at that point last year. The full number for 2010, 75, was already the highest since 2001.

Hospital deals can touch a nerve, because of the institutions' central economic and emotional position in their communities. Often, the debate centers around whether a for-profit company based elsewhere will continue to provide charity care and meet other local needs.

In Mr. Taylor's case, the controversy has mostly focused on whether University Hospital will be affected by Catholic care guidelines, which ban or restrict various reproductive procedures including abortion and sterilization. The buzz-saw of resistance has put Mr. Taylor in an unaccustomed spotlight after 15 years as the hospital's CEO. A community forum on the deal drew more than 200 questions. There are also dueling lawsuits over whether University Hospital merger documents are covered under state public-records laws.

"I don't think a hospital that belongs to the people of Kentucky should be
merged and be dictated to by people who put restrictions on certain procedures," says Rep. Tom Burch, a Democrat who chairs the health and welfare committee in the state's House of Representatives. "It has hit a sore spot with people."

Mr. Taylor says the merger won't significantly affect service offerings at his hospital, which doesn't currently provide elective abortions. University Hospital has made arrangements for women who want tubal ligations to get them at a different facility, he says.The new network will have more than 3,000 doctors. Though University Hospital doesn't employ its own physicians, the other two merger partners have significantly expanded their employed doctor staffs in recent years, including primary-care doctors, a common pattern in U.S. hospitals recently.

The new system will be able to integrate patients' care and to take on the financial risk tied to overseeing groups of patients, says Paul Edgett III, a Catholic Health Initiatives senior vice president. It will look at "warranty"-style payments, he said, under which a set sum is paid for an episode of care, including any complications. Such setups, under which hospitals can sometimes lose money if costs run too high, move hospitals into a space that has largely been the purview of health insurers.

Mr. Taylor said that on its own, his hospital is "poorly positioned" to do such deals, because it's "too small, too limited."

An Insurer Partners With Hospitals

Negotiations between health insurers and hospitals typically focus on clashes over payment rates. Chris Day, an executive with Aetna Inc., is supposed to change that.

Mr. Day, 36, spearheads Aetna's efforts to create new cooperative deals with health-care providers. The details vary, but the main idea is that Aetna and the provider try to work together to trim costs and track the quality of care. In the most ambitious cases, they are creating jointly marketed health plans that effectively blur the line between insurer and provider.

Instead of Aetna simply paying the hospital for services, the two exchange patient data and may share the risk of coverage, acting more like an integrated company. These plans aim to leverage the hospital's local brand-name recognition and the insurer's back-office know-how.

They also may be the insurer's best shot at competing in many of the new state-based health-insurance marketplaces where some 24 million people are eventually expected to buy coverage. Chief Executive Mark Bertolini recently highlighted the new "HMOs on steroids" as a key Aetna initiative at an investor conference.

But after years of head-butting between the two industries, a warm-and-fuzzy partnership isn't always an easy sell. "When I walk in that room, I'm seen as a health-plan person," says Mr. Day, who estimates that he has met with more than 100 medical providers around the country. Sometimes he breaks the ice by referring to his own background, which includes running a sleep clinic and an early stint as a hospital data-entry clerk.

Aetna recently unveiled a jointly marketed health plan with Banner Health, a not-for-profit 23-hospital system based in Phoenix, Ariz., after more than a year of talks. At one point early on, Mr. Day had to keep some locally based Aetna executives out of key strategy meetings with Banner. After one of them raised the idea that Banner might need to grant some rate discounts, a Banner official suggested "we needed to find ways to keep the conversations strategic," Mr. Day says.

On the other side, Chuck Lehn, vice president of managed care for Banner Health, says Mr. Day earned his trust by sharing closely held information, including certain details of how the insurer sets premiums. Aetna also agreed it wouldn't build a guaranteed profit margin into providing administrative services for the new product, he says, though both sides will share its earnings.

"We shared a lot more information than we normally would" with an insurer, including detailed cost and utilization data, Mr. Lehn says. "I remember thinking, 'I'm putting my total trust and faith that they're not going to use this'" against Banner to winch down rates.

The two sides zeroed in on areas where they could potentially shave costs and improve care, such as relatively high use of imaging scans by some Banner doctors, Mr. Lehn says.

During a different effort to strike a deal with a provider, Mr. Day's talks broke down for months because a separate contract-rate negotiation between the hospital system and local Aetna executives got so contentious that details leaked to the local media. In another case, a mistrustful hospital executive demanded written pledges that his company's patient information wouldn't be used in setting the patients' insurance rates.

Like other insurers, Aetna is making moves into the business of providing services to providers partly to prepare for another change tied to the federal overhaul law. It requires health plans to spend a set share of premium dollars on health-care expenses, which can crimp insurance profits.

An Employer Gets Into Health Care

A few years ago, Robert Jacobs, a human-resources executive at MasterBrand Cabinets, felt he was running out of options to blunt annual double-digit health-coverage price increases. Employees had already shouldered as much as they could bear, he felt. He had hit the limit of discounts from health providers. Wellness programs like free health-club memberships had shown little impact.

Then Mr. Jacobs read a research report that said about three-quarters of health costs are linked to lifestyle-related conditions. That persuaded him to try a radical new tack: Last year, MasterBrand, which has some 7,000 U.S. employees, started tying their insurance-premium contributions to their health-risk factors. Those who score poorly on measures such as cholesterol, blood pressure, body-mass index and tobacco use pay more each week.

"We had to do something more," Mr. Jacobs says. After wood and salaries, health care is the company's third-biggest expense, and "I can't pass that along to my customers in prices on kitchen cabinets."

The program at MasterBrand, a unit of Fortune Brands Home & Security Inc., is an example of companies' growing willingness to push workers toward better health, a role once left to health-care providers. MasterBrand, like others, offers the health tests right at the offices and factories where its employees work.

A survey this year by consulting firm Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health found that 13% of U.S. employers are tying financial incentives to health outcomes like cholesterol-test results, and another 33% plan to do so. Forty-three percent of the biggest employers are taking an even more direct path into health care by offering onsite clinics, according to a survey by Mercer.

Some of these efforts are controversial. In a letter to federal regulators in March, groups including the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association and the American Cancer Society's advocacy arm said such programs were backed by little evidence and risked discrimination against people based on their health.

Mr. Jacobs, a blunt-spoken 60-year-old who himself is managing elevated blood pressure, says he is giving employees accountability. "It's almost like going to a risk-based insurance like automotive," he says. "If you have a health risk you're not managing, you'll pay a little more."

So far, MasterBrand hasn't set very stringent standards, he says. Also, the most a worker has to pay extra based on test results is $10.50 a week, while a person with the best health indicators gets a $2-a-week discount.

The program is administered by Bravo Wellness LLC, a vendor that oversees an appeals process that is supposed to let workers opt out without penalty or aim for alternative goals if they have a medical condition that makes it impossible to achieve the targets. Those who choose not to participate without a medical excuse pay an extra $37.50 a week in premiums.

Around a half-dozen workers got urgent calls after they took the health tests, warning they were in imminent danger of heart attacks, Mr. Jacobs says, and a couple had heart-related surgery.

He also points to employees like Sandra Kaufman, 47, who works in shipping at a MasterBrand facility in Goshen, Ind. She says she initially thought the program was "an invasion of my privacy." But she couldn't afford the penalty for refusing to participate, so before it launched two summers ago, she went to a doctor for the first time in years. When she learned she had high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol and diabetes, Ms. Kaufman started dieting and exercising, and she says she has lost about 50 pounds.

Mr. Jacobs says he fielded complaints when the program was started. One man asked him angrily, "Why are you doing this to us?'' The worker didn't think the company should be imposing health standards. "That's personal,'' he said, according to Mr. Jacobs, who says he responded that MasterBrand had a stake as well, since it was paying around 80% of the cost of workers' health coverage.

The worker is now a "willing participant'' in the program, Mr. Jacobs says.

A Patient Gets Care From His Insurer

On a recent day, Louis E. Kauder Jr., an 86-year-old suffering from advanced diabetes, arrived at a storefront clinic in La Mirada, Calif., for his weekly checkup.

Nurse Eugenia Chang looked at his blood-sugar result and started quizzing him. What had he eaten? Mr. Kauder confessed to a dinner the night before of macaroni and cheese and chocolate chips. "Your sugar is a lot higher than normal," she chided, urging him to avoid desserts and eat more protein.

Then she zeroed in on his toe, which had a small sore. Was he wearing the protective shoes the clinic provided? She painted the toe with a disinfectant and wrapped it in gauze.

Finally, she examined a gaping six-inch-long wound on Mr. Kauder's left calf. That was improving, she said, and she would continue the daily home visits from a nurse to dress it.

Hospitals and doctors are increasingly promoting this type of health care – close, constant monitoring, with strong efforts to push preventive measures – as the best way to treat chronically sick patients.

But Mr. Kauder's clinic is different: It's owned by a health-insurance company, CareMore Health Group, that offers Medicare Advantage plans. CareMore says it can improve patients' health and save money in the long run by taking an active hand in their care.

It's a bet that more insurers are making, hoping to trim costs and lock in some doctors in case the influx of newly insured consumers leads to a shortage. CareMore was bought in August for slightly less than $800 million by WellPoint Inc. The big insurer said it plans to more than double the number of "care centers" that CareMore operates and spread it across the country.

Last December, Humana Inc. spent $790 million for Concentra, an operator of urgent- and occupational-care clinics. And Humana late last month announced it would buy SeniorBridge, which focuses on care for complex chronic conditions.

UnitedHealth Group Inc.'s Optum health-services arm recently purchased the operations of Monarch HealthCare, an Irvine, Calif., association that includes some 2,300 doctors, the latest of several doctor groups in which the company has taken ownership stakes. Cigna Corp. announced in October that it would spend $3.8 billion to buy HealthSpring Inc., a Medicare Advantage carrier that works closely with doctors and owns some of its own clinics.

CareMore says the heavy upfront investment it makes in preventive care for patients like Mr. Kauder pays off because its members end up spending less time in the hospital than most traditional Medicare beneficiaries. They have fewer readmissions and lower rates of events like heart attacks, says the company's chief medical officer, Ken Kim.

A hospital stay can run $3,000 or more a day, Dr. Kim says. Amputation of a limb for a patient with advanced diabetes like Mr. Kauder can cost about $16,000, he says, and CareMore's amputation rate is about 60% lower than the average for traditional Medicare.

"We get to them at the front end" and keep medical conditions from worsening to catastrophic levels, he says. As a result, CareMore is more profitable than many rival Medicare plans, he adds.

Mr. Kauder started with CareMore last October. "They really take care of me," he says. He doesn't pay a premium for the CareMore Medicare Advantage plan, and he doesn't have out-of-pocket fees to see CareMore staff, though he does pay charges for some other things, like certain medications.

His case illustrates many of the challenges of managing chronically ill patients. After repeated medication tweaks and sessions with a nutritionist, Mr. Kauder's blood sugar level has improved, but it's still not at CareMore's target. The retired auto mechanic also has heart problems, and he had a bypass operation a few years ago.

A CareMore staffer asked a visiting wound-care nurse whether his home, where he lives alone, showed signs of neglect such as rotting food. On another occasion, when a visiting nurse spotted Mr. Kauder trying to clamber over a wall in his backyard, she informed clinic personnel. A case manager phoned Mr. Kauder to make sure he wasn't showing signs of dementia and booked him for an immediate checkup.

Still, Mr. Kauder's major leg lesion has lingered since February, a common circumstance for someone with advanced diabetes. It became infected, and his home-visit nurse started administering an intravenous antibiotic. In June, he ended up in the emergency room after he tripped and opened up the wound, which bled heavily. Doctors at the hospital urged him to consider amputating the limb below the knee.

"I said, no way," says Mr. Kauder, whose mother lost a leg to diabetes. After a night in the hospital, where CareMore doctors visited him, he returned home. Since then, he hasn't been in the hospital, and the wound has improved. He's off the IV antibiotic. The clinic tracks the wound's progress with weekly digital pictures.

Dr. Kim, the CareMore chief medical officer, who wasn't personally involved in Mr. Kauder's case, says the care almost certainly saved his leg.

Redistricting is fixing to get hot: Supreme Court blocks redistricting plan for Texas

2011-12-10T09:43:00.001-05:00

From The Washington Post:

The Supreme Court Friday night blocked a redistricting plan for Texas drawn by a panel of federal judges, putting the justices in the middle of a partisan battle over how the state’s electoral maps should change to recognize the state’s burgeoning minority population.

Texas had objected to the judicially drawn maps, which analysts said would increase chances for Democrats and minorities, and favored maps drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature. Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) requested the Supreme Court’s intervention; the justices will hear arguments Jan. 9.

The Republican Primary Campaign in Iowa Is Right at Home on Fox News

2011-12-10T09:27:00.001-05:00

From The New York Times:

“You don’t win Iowa in Iowa, you win it on this couch,” is how the Republican commentator Dick Morris put it on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday. Mr. Morris said that the Republican debates and Fox News had forged a national primary that “imposes itself on Iowa.”

It’s certainly obvious in Iowa that candidates are investing a lot more time in television interviews than they are on the campaign trail. It’s a safe bet: a recent New York Times/CBS News poll of likely Iowa Republican caucus participants showed that 37 percent said they get most of their information from Fox News, that’s compared with 27 percent who cited broadcast news and a mere 2 percent who said they relied on MSNBC.

Accordingly, caucus and primary voters have a voice on Fox News. All the networks, broadcast and cable, are closely covering the campaign, but Fox News practically owns and operates it: its viewers are seeing the world through the eyes of a Tea Party activist in Davenport, or a small business leader in Ames — my own private Iowa.

Fox News is known for ambush interviews, but it doesn’t have to lie in wait for Republican candidates. Many news organizations took a telling clip from a recent interview that Mitt Romney gave to the Fox News anchor Bret Baier in Florida that showed the usually imperturbable former Massachusetts governor looking rattled and jumpy when asked about health care. The full interview was long, thorough and even more tense — Mr. Baier also pressed Mr. Romney on his changing views on amnesty for illegal immigrants with the polite insistence that candidates used to face from single-issue voters in Iowa kaffeeklatsches.

Mr. Romney wasn’t happy with the interview, but Fox News viewers don’t seem thrilled with him either. Nearly half of them said they would vote for Newt Gingrich if the state’s Republican presidential caucus were held today; only 12 percent said they favored Mr. Romney.

That could be because Mr. Gingrich is a much more familiar face on Fox News, having logged more than 50 appearances since the campaign began. Mr. Romney is playing catch-up, seizing every opportunity to appear on the channel. He took a break from a forum in Washington sponsored by the Jewish Republican Coalition to tell a Fox reporter that Newt Gingrich is for amnesty for illegal immigrants and against child labor laws, among other things. “The list will go on and on as we get a clear indication of exactly where the speaker stands,” Mr. Romney said, not cheerfully.

He also posed in front of flag-waving supporters this week while talking to Fox about his decision to snub a proposed Donald Trump-moderated debate at the end of the month. Mr. Gingrich and Rick Santorum agreed to attend, Michele Bachmann is undecided, and Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman declined. (Mr. Huntsman told Sean Hannity of Fox News that Mr. Trump “dumbs down” the process.) The question over whether to boycott Mr. Trump’s debate, if it indeed goes on as scheduled, is itself a subject of fevered debate on Fox, possibly because unlike taxes or health insurance, it’s one issue on which candidates openly differ.

Some candidates are reluctant to submit themselves to Mr. Trump’s ego (“I think I know the issues better than most if not almost all,” he said on Fox on Friday), but the Republican debates are a cheap, effective way to reach voters. Mr. Trump, however much of a self-promoter, gets ratings. Candidates have had access to so much free media that they are actually spending less money. Through September, the top nine Republican candidates spent $53 million, less than half as much as was spent at the same time four years ago.

Some Iowa voters may feel that their caucus has been shanghaied by Fox News, but the network’s national viewers are a little like Roman Catholics watching a televised Mass for shut-ins — it’s the next best thing to being there in person.

Noonan: Gingrich Is Inspiring—and Disturbing. This is a walk on the wild side.

2011-12-08T20:18:00.001-05:00

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

[Newt Gingrich is] a trouble magnet, a starter of fights that need not be fought. He is the first modern potential president about whom there is too much information.

What is striking is the extraordinary divide in opinion between those who know Gingrich and those who don't. Those who do are mostly not for him, and they were burning up the phone lines this week in Washington.

Those who've known and worked with Mitt Romney mostly seem to support him, but when they don't they don't say the reason is that his character and emotional soundness are off. Those who know Ron Paul and oppose him do so on the basis of his stands, they don't say his temperament forecloses the possibility of his presidency. But that's pretty much what a lot of those who've worked with Newt say.

Former New Hampshire governor and George H.W. Bush chief of staff John Sununu told The Wall Street Journal this week: "Listen to just about anyone who worked alongside Gingrich and you will hear that he's inconsistent, erratic, untrustworthy and unprincipled." In a conference call Thursday, Jim Talent, who served with Mr. Gingrich in the House from 1993 through 1999, said, "He's not reliable as a leader." Sen. Tom Coburn, a member of the House class of 1994, called the former speaker's leadership "lacking," and according to a local press report, he told Oklahoma constituents last year that Mr. Gingrich was "the last person I'd vote for for president of the United States."

Yet the reservations and criticisms of the politico-journalistic establishment are having zero effect on Gingrich's support. In a Quinnipiac poll this week he moved into a double-digit lead over Mr. Romney in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The antipathy of the establishment not only is not hurting him at this early date, it may be helping him. It may be part of the secret of his rise. Because establishments, especially the Washington establishment, famously count for little with the Republican base: "You're the ones who got us into this mess."

Republicans on the ground who view Mr. Gingrich from afar, who neither know nor have worked with him, are more likely to see him this way: "Who was the last person to actually cut government? Who was the last person who actually led a movement that balanced the federal budget? . . . The last time there was true welfare reform, the last time government was cut, Gingrich did it." That is Rush Limbaugh, who has also criticized Mr. Gingrich.

And that is exactly what I've been hearing from Newt supporters who do not listen to talk radio. They are older voters, they are not all Republicans, and when government last made progress he was part of it. They have a very practical sense of politics now. The heroic era of the presidency is dead. They are not looking to like their president or admire him, they just want someone to fix the crisis. The last time helpful things happened in Washington, he was a big part of it. So they may hire him again. Are they put off by his scandals? No. They think all politicians are scandalous.

Those who know him fear—or hope—that he will be true to form in one respect: He will continue to lose to his No. 1 longtime foe, Newt Gingrich. He is a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, "Watch this!"

What they fear is that he will show just enough discipline over the next few months, just enough focus, to win the nomination. And then, in the fall of 2012, once party leaders have come around and the GOP is fully behind him, he will begin baying at the moon.

There are many good things to say about Newt Gingrich. He is compelling and unique, and, as Margaret Thatcher once said, he has "tons of guts."

But this is a walk on the wild side.

Drone Crash in Iran Reveals Secret U.S. Surveillance Effort

2011-12-08T07:32:00.001-05:00

From The New York Times:

The stealth C.I.A. drone that crashed deep inside Iranian territory last week was part of a stepped-up surveillance program that has frequently sent the United States’ most hard-to-detect drone into the country to map suspected nuclear sites, according to foreign officials and American experts who have been briefed on the effort.

Until this week, the high-altitude flights from bases in Afghanistan were among the most secret of many intelligence-collection efforts against Iran, and American officials refuse to discuss it. But the crash of the vehicle, which Iranian officials said occurred more than 140 miles from the border with Afghanistan, blew the program’s cover.

Two officials said that the United States briefly considered going in to retrieve the downed drone, or to destroy it, as first reported Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, but the operation was deemed too risky. There are questions about whether Iran could reverse-engineer the technology, though they certainly could sell the vehicle to China, Russia or other countries with a deep interest in it.

For Turkey, Lure of Tie to Europe Is Fading

2011-12-05T07:28:00.001-05:00

From The New York Times:

As economic contagion tarnishes the European Union, a newly assertive Turkey is increasingly looking east instead of west, and asking a vexing question: Should Turkey reject Europe before Europe rejects Turkey?

When Recep Tayyip Erdogan , the charismatic prime minister, first swept to power in 2002, he made Turkey’s entry into the European Union his overriding goal. Determined to anchor the country to the West, Mr. Erdogan’s Muslim-inspired Justice and Development Party tackled thorny issues like improving minority rights and easing restrictions on free speech to move Turkey closer to Western norms.

But Turkey’s bid was greeted with skepticism and even disdain by some members of the union, not least because of Turkey’s large, almost entirely Muslim population. The negotiations dragged on endlessly without ever yielding a clear pathway to membership.

Now it is Turkey that has soured on the idea, analysts here say. With Europe shaken by a spiraling credit crisis and the tumult of the Arab Spring creating opportunities for Turkey to wield new clout as a regional power, people here are weighing a step that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago: walking away from the European Union altogether.

Noonan: The Comeback Kid of 2012 - Having long ago ruled Gingrich out, GOP voters suddenly rule him back in.

2011-12-04T08:45:00.000-05:00

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

This is the week it became clear that nobody knows anything. Pretty much all the conventional wisdom about the 2012 presidential race has turned out to be wrong. Newt rules, Cain's over, Romney's rocked. Nobody knows what's going to happen.

We'll start with the president:

Gallup. Obama down. Forty-three percent approval. Lower than Jimmy Carter at this point. The Democratic spin: This is good, with the economy so bad you'd think his numbers would be lower! Actually you'd think an incumbent nobody likes would be exactly where Jimmy Carter was before he lost in a landslide. More to the point, the president's numbers went downward, not upward. Why? Because the congressional super committee failed to cut $1.2 trillion out of $44 trillion in projected deficits.

Once again the president thought he was playing a shrewd game: The collapse of the super committee would serve his political purposes. Once again he misjudged.

What has occurred is an exact repeat of the summer's debt-ceiling fiasco. Then the president summoned a crisis, thinking people would blame it on the Republicans. Instead they blamed Washington, which is to say him, because he owns Washington. Immediately his numbers fell. As they did again this week.

The only way to win America right now is to govern selflessly and seriously. His top advisers, those knowing, winking bumpkins, cannot see this. America is in crisis. It knows it's in crisis. It cannot tolerate the old moves anymore, the "every problem is just an issue to be manipulated for gain." The president was once seen as an idealist. He was hired to be an idealist! His ignorant shrewdness, his small-time cleverness—it just won't do. Nobody wants it. It's why people want to fire him.

***

On Newt Gingrich: If you've seen this week's poll numbers from Iowa, Florida and South Carolina you know it doesn't look like an increase in his support but an eruption. It is as if something that had been kept down had quietly been gathering energy, and suddenly burst through its bonds. The entire Washington journo-political complex has been taken by surprise by something that not only wasn't predicted but couldn't have been. Newt had no steady movement in the polls. He was regularly dressed down by the base. His staff had fled en masse when he left the campaign for an Aegean cruise with his wife.

What happened is a better story than that the establishment didn't know what the base was thinking. It's that the base didn't know what the base was thinking.

All it knew was that it was only moderately enthusiastic about Mitt Romney. There were a lot of debates—they were history-changing this year, whatever happens. Six, seven or eight million people would watch them and talk about them afterwards, at work or in comment boxes and email groups. And after they said, "Romney held his own," and, "Perry's kind of a disappointment," they'd come to agreement on this: "I really liked what Newt said when he said they shouldn't bash each other and re-elect Obama." "I liked when Newt confronted the moderator." It was always at the end of the conversation that this got said. Because the base knew Mr. Gingrich couldn't win, so why waste the breath or bandwidth?

"He's incredibly lucky," said a friend of his. "Bachmann, Cain, Perry went away. But Newt didn't go away." The friend said part of the reason for his rise is that "he's been there forever. He's spoken at every GOP dinner. People say, 'I liked him back in '83!' It all accrued." He compared Mr. Gingrich to IBM: "He had more equity than we gave him credit for."

Mitt Romney is obviously taking it seriously. He's lost some of his equanimity. I knew he thought he was in trouble when he didn't look at his competitors in the last debate like they were lovely little frolicking gerbils.

Even Mr. Gingrich's biggest supporters begin conversations about him with, "Believe me, I know the downside, I understand the criticism." They stress his strong points: experience, accomplishment, intelligence. But they are to a man surprised by his new appeal—they didn't really know he had any—and they're surprised by his resurrection. They are impressed by his brains, and always have been, and impressed by his will. They also fear he will blow it, that he'll prove unsteady, impulsive.

He is grandiose—he compares himself to Lincoln, Henry Clay, Churchill: "I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher." There are always two choices to make in modern, media-driven politics: claim you are like Lincoln, or be like Lincoln. Claim you are something and repeat it so people will think of it when they see you, or actually be that something and hope someone will notice.

Mr. Gingrich tends to choose the first path. John Gaddis, in his biography of George Kennan, quotes him saying of himself: "I have the habit of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself." This sounds like Newt, though one writes it reluctantly, as he might hear about it and start saying "I am George Kennan."

He often seems to be playing a part in a historical novel he's dictating in his mind—Newt the underdog, Newt the visionary. He has a compulsion to be interesting, which accounts for some of his overheated language—things are always decayed, corrupt, sick, catastrophically tragic.

He also often sounds like a cable TV political analyst, which he's been for the past decade. He appraises his own candidacy instead of just being the candidate. The race used to be between "Mitt and Not Mitt," but now it is between "Newt and Not Newt," he says. He is "the only one who can win." This week in South Carolina: "I'm the one candidate who can bring together national-security conservatives and economic conservatives and social conservatives."

Candidates should let other people say that; serious candidates should let voters say it to exit pollsters. He shouldn't be making the grubby bottom-line calculations, he should be making an elegant case for his leadership.

His biggest problem? The millions he has made lobbying—sorry, teaching history—as a former Speaker, Capitol Hill insider and member of the permanent political class. Some of his paychecks came from the very agencies (such as Freddie Mac) that succeeded for 20 years in operating without proper oversight due to the influence and protection of Capitol Hill insiders and members of the permanent political class. That is the great scandal of our time, and it helped tank our economy. He has been part of it.

Second, what is known as the baggage problem. Its impact on voters is harder to predict, in part because many of them have lived through and fully experienced the past 40 years in America. Bill Clinton, if he ran for president tomorrow, would probably win in a landslide, and he has enough baggage to break the trolley carts of 10 Amtrak porters. Mr. Gingrich's people believe it won't harm him because it's all old news, he's addressed it.

On this, Mr. Gingrich may be helped by the current air of crisis, which itself may account for why he's burst through now: People feel America's problems are so huge, so scarifying and urgent, that personal judgments feel like an indulgence. "Can he help turn things around? Then hire him. Obama is a devoted husband and incompetent. Let it go!

Tom Friedman: The Arab Awakening and Israel

2011-12-03T11:45:00.001-05:00

Tom Friedman writes in The New York Times:

Israel is facing the biggest erosion of its strategic environment since its founding. It is alienated from its longtime ally Turkey. Its archenemy Iran is suspected of developing a nuclear bomb. The two strongest states on its border — Syria and Egypt — are being convulsed by revolutions. The two weakest states on its border — Gaza and Lebanon — are controlled by Hamas and Hezbollah.

It was in this context that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went before the Knesset last Wednesday and argued that the Arab awakening was moving the Arab world “backward” and turning into an “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave.” Ceding territory to the Palestinians was unwise at such a time, he said: “We can’t know who will end up with any piece of territory we give up.”

Netanyahu added: “In February, when millions of Egyptians thronged to the streets in Cairo, commentators and quite a few Israeli members of the opposition said that we’re facing a new era of liberalism and progress. They said I was trying to scare the public and was on the wrong side of history and don’t see where things are heading.” But, he told the Knesset, events had proved him correct. Netanyahu reportedly said that when he cautioned President Obama and other Western leaders against backing the uprising against Egypt’s then-president, Hosni Mubarak, he was told that he didn’t understand reality: “I ask today, who here didn’t understand reality?”

Netanyahu’s analysis of the dangers facing Israel is valid, and things could still get worse. What is wrong is Netanyahu’s diagnosis of how it happened and his prescription of what to do about it — and those blind spots could also be very dangerous for Israel.

Diagnosis: From the very start, Israeli officials have insisted that Obama helped to push Mubarak out rather than saving him. Nonsense. The Arab dictators were pushed out by their people; there was no saving them. In fact, Mubarak had three decades to gradually open up Egyptian politics and save himself. And what did he do? Last year, he held the most-rigged election in Egyptian history. His party won 209 out of 211 seats. It is amazing that the uprising didn’t happen sooner.

Israel’s fear of Islamists taking power all around it cannot be dismissed. But it is such a live possibility precisely because of the last 50 years of Arab dictatorship, in which only Islamists were allowed to organize in mosques while no independent, secular, democratic parties were allowed to develop in the political arena. This has given Muslim parties an early leg up. Arab dictators were convenient for Israel and the Islamists — but deadly for Arab development and education. Now that the lid has come off, the transition will be rocky. But, it was inevitable, and the new politics is just beginning: Islamists will now have to compete with legitimate secular parties.

Netanyahu’s prescription is to do nothing. I understand Israel not ceding territory in this uncertain period to a divided Palestinian movement. What I can’t understand is doing nothing. Israel has an Arab awakening in its own backyard in the person of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority. He’s been the most radical Arab leader of all. He is the first Palestinian leader to say: judge me on my performance in improving my peoples’ lives, not on my rhetoric. His focus has been on building institutions — including what Israelis admit is a security force that has helped to keep Israel peaceful — so Palestinians will be ready for a two-state solution. Instead of rewarding him, Israel has been withholding $100 million in Palestinian tax revenues that Fayyad needs — in punishment for the Palestinians pressing for a state at the U.N. — to pay the security forces that help to protect Israel. That is crazy.

Israel’s best defense is to strengthen Fayyadism — including giving Palestinian security services more areas of responsibility to increase their legitimacy and make clear that they are not the permanent custodians of Israel’s occupation. This would not only help stabilize Israel’s own backyard — and prevent another uprising that would spread like wildfire to the Arab world without the old dictators to hold it back — but would lay the foundation for a two-state solution and for better relations with the Arab peoples. Remember, those Arab peoples are going to have a lot more say in how they are ruled and with whom they have peace. In that context, Israel will be so much better off if it is seen as strengthening responsible and democratic Palestinian leaders.

This is such a delicate moment. It requires wise, farsighted Israeli leadership. The Arab awakening is coinciding with the last hopes for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli rightists will be tempted to do nothing, to insist the time is not right for risk-taking — and never will be — so Israel needs to occupy the West Bank and its Palestinians forever. That could be the greatest danger of all for Israel: to wake up one day and discover that, in response to the messy and turbulent Arab democratic awakening, the Jewish state sacrificed its own democratic character.

David Brooks: The Spirit of Enterprise

2011-12-02T08:41:00.001-05:00

David Brooks writes in The New York Times:

Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources — many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital.

It’s because many people in these countries, as Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.

This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and degraded.

Right now, this ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists diverting money on the basis of connections; they see traders making millions off of short-term manipulations; they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.

The result is a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. Social trust shrivels. Effort is no longer worth it. The prosperity machine winds down.

Yet the assault on these values continues, especially in Europe.

Over the past few decades, several European nations, like Germany and the Netherlands, have played by the rules and practiced good governance. They have lived within their means, undertaken painful reforms, enhanced their competitiveness and reinforced good values. Now they are being brutally browbeaten for not wanting to bail out nations like Greece, Italy and Spain, which did not do these things, which instead borrowed huge amounts of money that they are choosing not to repay.

The estimated costs of these bailouts vary enormously and may end up being greater than the cost of German reparations after World War I. Germans are being browbeaten for not wanting to bail out Greece, where even today many people are still not willing to pay their taxes. They are being browbeaten for not wanting to bail out Italy, where future growth prospects are uncertain.

They are being asked to bail out nations with vast public sectors and horrible demographics. They are being asked to paper over fundamental economic problems with a mountain of currency.

It’s true that Germans benefited enormously from the euro zone and the southern European bubble, and that German and French banks are far from blameless. It’s true that the consequences for the world would be calamitous if the euro zone cracked up. It’s true that, in a crisis, you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do; you do things that violate your everyday values.

But our sympathy should be with the German people. They are not behaving selfishly by insisting on structural reforms in exchange for bailouts. They are not imprisoned by some rigid ideology. They are not besotted with some semi-senile Weimar superstition about rampant inflation. They are defending the values, habits and social contract upon which the entire prosperity of the West is based.

The scariest thing is that many of the people browbeating the Germans seem to have very little commitment to the effort-reward formula that undergirds capitalism. On the one hand, there are the technicians who are oblivious to values. For them anything that can’t be counted and modeled is a primitive irrelevancy. On the other hand, there are people who see the European crisis through the prism of some cosmic class war. What matters is not how people conduct themselves, but whether they are a have or a have-not. The burden of proof is against the haves. The benefit of the doubt is with the have-nots. Any resistance to redistribution is greeted with outrage.

The real lesson from financial crises is that, at the pit of the crisis, you do what you have to do. You bail out the banks. You bail out the weak European governments. But, at the same time, you lock in policies that reinforce the fundamental link between effort and reward. And, as soon as the crisis passes, you move to repair the legitimacy of the system.

That didn’t happen after the American financial crisis of 2008. The people who caused the crisis were never held responsible. There never was an exit strategy to unwind the gigantic debt buildup. The structural problems plaguing the economy remain unaddressed. As a result, the United States suffers from a horrible crisis of trust that is slowing growth, restricting government action and sending our politics off in strange directions.

Europe’s challenge is not only to avert a financial meltdown but to do it in a way that doesn’t poison the seedbed of prosperity. Which values will be rewarded and reinforced? Will it be effort, productivity and self-discipline? Or will it be bad governance, now and forever?

GOP Latinos face questions over immigrant pasts

2011-11-27T22:22:00.001-05:00

From the AJC:

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez is forced to research and clarify her late grandfather's immigration status. Marco Rubio, Florida's GOP Senator, is accused of embellishing his family's immigrant story.

As more Latino Republicans seek and win elected office, their families' backgrounds are becoming subject to increased scrutiny from some Latino activists, a reaction experts say is a result of Latino Republicans' conservative views on immigration. It's a new phenomenon that experts say Latino Democrats rarely faced, and could be a recurring feature in elections as the Republican Party seeks to recruit more Latino candidates.

"It's a trend and we are seeing more of it," said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.

For years, most Latino elected officials were largely Democrats, except in Florida, where Cuban Americans tended to vote Republican. But recently, a new generation of Latino Republicans has won seats in Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, California and even Idaho. Those politicians have come under fire from some Latino activists for pushing for laws targeting illegal immigrants and for opposing efforts for comprehensive immigration reform — views that are in line with most Republicans.

In Florida, Rubio's official Senate website until recently described his parents as having fled Cuba following Fidel Castro's takeover. But media organizations reported last month that Rubio's parents and his maternal grandfather emigrated for economic reasons more than two years before the Cuban Revolution.

Noonan: At the end of the day, Obama didn't want to spend his political capital. That, ironically, is why his reputation seems increasingly bankrupt.

2011-11-26T22:08:00.005-05:00

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

The talk this week was of who was most damaged politically by the failure of the super committee. The first, admittedly earnest answer is: the country. We have a projected deficit over the next 10 years of $44 trillion. A group of Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in cuts. Just 1.2 out of 44. Not that hard. And they couldn't do it. Everyone says we will now fight out the basic issues on which the committee failed to achieve agreement, taxes and spending, in the 2012 election. And we will. Maybe the electorate will yield up a clear answer and produce an obvious mandate. But maybe not. Maybe the big muddle will continue. Which won't be good, because that way we sink deeper in the ditch.

Super committee success would have been important for this reason: It would have shown us, and the world, that we are not Greece. That we aren't helpless, incapable, deadlocked, that we can take at least baby steps in the right direction.

The second party most damaged by the failure was President Obama, that grand strategic thinker who's always playing long ball. It is a time of unprecedented and continuing economic crisis, and he went AWOL. He didn't put his public prestige behind a good outcome, didn't corral the Democrats on the committee, which could have made a real difference. He thought the super committee would likely fail on its own, and if it did, it only backed up his narrative—that dread word—about a do-nothing Congress dominated by Republicans in thrall to their billionaire slave masters.

What he doesn't understand is that Americans are tired of hearing the words "In Washington today," followed by the words, "another failure to . . ." They think: Another failure under Obama. Can't this guy get anything done? Doesn't anything ever work under him?

That is what will damage him. At the end of the day, he didn't want to spend his political capital. That, ironically, is why his reputation seems increasingly bankrupt. Maybe the most harmful aspect of the president's leadership style is that all of his political instincts were honed and settled before 2008, when he was rising. What he learned before he reached the presidency is what he knows. But everyone else in America knows the crash and the underlying crisis it revealed—on our current course, we are bankrupt—changed everything. Strangely, inexplicably, the president thinks the old political moves apply to the new era. They do not.

David Brooks: The Two Moons

2011-11-22T07:22:00.002-05:00

David Brooks writes in The New York Times:

In 1951, Samuel Lubell invented the concept of the political solar system. At any moment, he wrote, there is a Sun Party (the majority party, which drives the agenda) and a Moon Party (the minority party, which shines by reflecting the solar rays).

During Franklin Roosevelt’s era, Democrats were the Sun Party. During Ronald Reagan’s, Republicans were. Then, between 1996 and 2004, the two parties were tied. We lived in a 50-50 nation in which the overall party vote totals barely budged five elections in a row. It seemed then that we were in a moment of transition, waiting for the next Sun Party to emerge.

But something strange happened. No party took the lead. According to data today, both parties have become minority parties simultaneously. We are living in the era of two moons and no sun.

It used to be that the parties were on a seesaw: If the ratings of one dropped, then the ratings of the other rose. But now the two parties have record-low approval ratings together. Neither party has been able to rally the country behind its vision of government.

Ronald Brownstein summarized the underlying typography recently in The National Journal: “In Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor polls over the past two years, up to 40 percent of Americans have consistently expressed support for the conservative view that government is more the problem than the solution for the nation’s challenges; about another 30 percent have backed the Democratic view that government must take an active role in the economy; and the remaining 30 percent are agnostic. They are open to government activism in theory but skeptical it will help them in practice.”

In these circumstances, both parties have developed minority mentalities. The Republicans feel oppressed by the cultural establishment, and Democrats feel oppressed by the corporate establishment. They embrace the mental habits that have always been adopted by those who feel themselves resisting the onslaught of a dominant culture.

Their main fear is that they will lose their identity and cohesion if their members compromise with the larger world. They erect clear and rigid boundaries separating themselves from their enemies. In a hostile world, they erect rules and pledges and become hypervigilant about deviationism. They are more interested in protecting their special interests than converting outsiders. They slowly encase themselves in an epistemic cocoon.

The Democrat and Republican parties used to contain serious internal debates — between moderate and conservative Republicans, between New Democrats and liberals. Neither party does now.

The Democratic and Republican parties used to promote skilled coalition builders. Now the American parties have come to resemble the ideologically coherent European ones.

The Democrats talk and look like a conventional liberal party (some liberals, who represent, at most, 30 percent of the country, are disappointed because President Obama hasn’t ushered in a Huffington Post paradise). Meanwhile, many Republicans flock to Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich because they are more interested in having a leader who can take on the mainstream news media than in having one who can plausibly govern. Grover Norquist’s tax pledge isn’t really about public policy; it’s a chastity belt Republican politicians wear to show that they haven’t been defiled by the Washington culture.

The era of the two moons is a volatile era. Independent voters are trapped in a cycle of sour rejectionism — voting against whichever of the two options they dislike most at the moment. The shift between the 2008 election, when voters rejected Republicans, and the 2010 election, when voters rejected Democrats, was as big as any shift in recent history.

Sometimes voters even reject both parties on the same day. In Ohio last month, for example, voters rejected the main fiscal policy of the Republican governor. On the same ballot, by 31 points, they rejected health care reform, the main initiative of their Democratic president.

In policy terms, the era of the two moons is an era of stagnation. Each party is too weak to push its own agenda and too encased by its own cocoon to agree to a hybrid. The supercommittee failed for this reason. Members of the supercommittee actually took some brave steps outside party orthodoxy (Republicans embraced progressive tax increases, Democrats flirted with spending cuts), but these were baby steps, insufficient to change the alignment.

In normal circumstances, minority parties suffer a series of electoral defeats and then they modernize. But in the era of the two moons, the parties enjoy periodic election victories they don’t deserve, which only re-enforce their worst habits.

So it’s hard to see how we get out of this, unless some third force emerges, which wedges itself into one of the two parties, or unless we have a devastating fiscal crisis — a brutal cleansing flood, after which the sun will shine again.

For Deficit Panel, Failure Cuts Two Ways

2011-11-22T07:14:00.002-05:00

From The New York Times:

The latest Congressional failure to agree on a plan for balancing the government’s books could yield a surprising result: a sharp reduction in annual federal deficits, larger than anything contemplated by the special panel that reached its fruitless finale on Monday.

But the absence of an agreement also threatens to significantly slow growth in an already ailing economy by raising taxes on almost everyone while reducing government spending on almost everything.

Tax cuts passed in the Bush administration will expire at the end of 2012. By law, the panel’s failure triggers new caps on spending, cutting $1.2 trillion from the military, education, health care and other priorities over 10 years beginning next fall. The combined impact of higher tax rates and less spending would reverse the growth of annual deficits beginning in 2013, reducing by more than half the current $1.3 trillion gap between annual revenue and spending.

That has inverted the normal reality, in which spending rises inexorably unless Congress musters the political will to impose cuts. Now, although both parties say they are committed to more gradual approaches, an agreement is required to avoid the fiscal equivalent of shock therapy.

“There could be a bit of a silver lining,” said Rosanne Altshuler, an economist at Rutgers University who served on President George W. Bush’s 2005 tax reform panel. “It forces us to come to terms with cuts in areas that have been difficult to touch — the military and Medicare. We may not like how the cuts are going to be done, but we better start dealing with the fact that cuts are going to have to be made.”

The latest committee, created in August as part of a deal to let the federal government borrow more money, was charged with identifying at least $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. Its failure forces the same amount of spending cuts, with half the money coming from the military budget.

The immediate economic impact depends first on investors, who must decide whether they are now any more concerned about the nation’s financial condition. Any increase in the interest rates that the government must pay would widen the deficit, as would any decrease in economic growth. But while stock market indexes fell sharply Monday, with the Dow Jones industrial average down 248.85 points, investors continue to pay for the opportunity to lend money to the United States. Two credit rating agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, affirmed their ratings of United States debt securities on Monday and said the failure did not change their assessment of the government’s ability to pay its debts. Fitch, a third agency, said it was reviewing its ratings and hoped to make a conclusion by the end of the month. It said in August that a failure by the special committee would probably result in a negative rating.

A second, looming question is whether Congress will extend a payroll tax break for workers and continue supplemental benefits for the long-term unemployed, both scheduled to expire at the end of the year. The tax break reduces the amount that workers must pay for Social Security; the extended benefits provide support for 3.5 million Americans who have been out of a job for longer than 26 weeks. The government will spend about $168 billion on the two programs this year. Economic forecasters estimate that a decision to end the benefits would reduce the country’s economic growth next year by more than one percentage point.

The Obama administration had hoped to wrap extensions of both benefits into a broader agreement. It now faces the challenge of rescuing a smaller compromise from the ruins of the negotiations, with some Republicans in outright opposition and others demanding offsetting cuts in other federal spending.

President Obama plans to call for the extension of both programs in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Republican from Texas on the special negotiating committee, said on “Fox News Sunday” that its members had been “laser-focused on trying to get success” on the payroll tax measure. But, he added, “the bigger tragedy is we have unsustainable debt that is threatening our national security, is threatening our jobs, frankly, and is threatening our children’s future.”

The decisions that must be made by the end of next year over the future of the Bush tax cuts and the reductions in spending are far larger, as are the economic consequences.

The Obama administration wants to extend most Bush-era tax cuts while restoring higher rates for higher incomes. Democrats say they will not strike any agreement on spending cuts without an agreement to raise new revenue. Mr. Obama repeated on Monday that he would veto any legislation extending all of the cuts. Republicans say they will accept nothing less.

A Moody’s Analytics report warns that failing a deal, the combined impact will amount to a “historically extreme” reduction in the deficit that could push the economy into recession. It notes that under current law, federal revenue would increase as a share of economic activity by 3.7 percentage points over 2012 and 2013 — the sharpest rise since 1969, when, Moody’s says, sudden tax increases “helped set off a mild recession.” Combined with the required budget cuts, the deficit would shrink to $510 billion from $1.3 trillion by 2013.

“You’re seeing a very rapid depletion of the budget deficit,” said Ben Garber, an economist with Moody’s Capital Markets Research Group who wrote the report. “You’re taking a weak economy and removing a large part of potential demand, which could be enough to tip us into recession.”

There is still plenty of time for Congress to unlock its self-imposed handcuffs and renounce frugality. Next year’s elections also could produce a clear mandate for one party to reduce deficits according to its priorities without any need for compromises. Partisans at both ends of the political spectrum said they welcomed the failure of the current talks as an opportunity to win just such a mandate.

Over the last month, conservatives feared that the committee would settle for cosmetic cuts. They now see an opportunity to secure larger reductions, without tax increases, to encourage faster growth.

Liberals hope the Occupy Wall Street protests have shifted political debate from an overriding focus on the long-term danger posed by the federal deficit toward a focus on unemployment, income inequality and other immediate economic problems.

“This committee was created at a very different time, when the dialogue was that our deficits were too big and unsustainable,” said Martin Hart-Landsberg, a professor of economics at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. “This failure gives us time to help educate and change that dialogue, to focus on job creation and the direction of the economy.”

New York Times Editorial: Fixing Medicare

2011-11-21T07:05:00.003-05:00

From The New York Times:

There is no way to wrestle down the deficit without reining in Medicare costs. Ensuring that the program provides quality health care coverage to millions of older and disabled Americans is essential. These goals are not incompatible, but they require a judicious approach to policy making that is depressingly absent in Washington.

Medicare is nothing less than a lifeline for 49 million older and disabled Americans. It helps pay for care in a wide range of settings, including hospitals, nursing homes, outpatient clinics, doctors’ offices, hospices and at home, as well as for prescription drugs.

It is also hugely costly. The federal government spent about $477 billion in net Medicare outlays in fiscal year 2011 — 13 percent of its total spending. By 2021, it is projected to spend $864 billion — or 16 percent of the total — according to figures derived by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That rate of growth is not sustainable indefinitely.

Unfortunately, many politicians seem less interested in coming up with ways to fix Medicare than in how they might impose their ideology on the program or leverage the issue for their next political campaign. Members of both parties need to define more clearly for the public what Medicare’s true problems are and how they propose to address them. Here are some of the major issues:

NEAR-TERM COSTS There are three key drivers of Medicare spending: the spiraling cost of all health care as new technologies and treatments are developed; much greater use of medical services by the typical beneficiary; and an aging population. By 2020, the number of enrollees will increase to 64 million.

The current rancorous debate in Washington is focused on finding big immediate cuts to slow Medicare spending. We are skeptical that this can be done quickly without wreaking major havoc.

The health care reform law enacted last year calls for cutting more than $400 billion from Medicare over the next decade, primarily by slowing the rate of growth in payments to health care providers and phasing out unjustified subsidies to private Medicare Advantage plans that insure roughly a quarter of all enrollees. Republican leaders, who denounced those cuts in 2010, have since embraced Representative Paul Ryan’s proposal, which adopts virtually all of the same reductions. Even these will be difficult to achieve without driving out providers, according to the government’s nonpartisan budget analysts.

There is time to get this right. Since January 2010 the growth in Medicare spending has actually slowed to an annual rate of about 4 percent, less than half the annual rate for the previous decade. No one is quite sure why, but one theory holds that hospitals are scrambling to squeeze a lot of fat out of the system even before the health care reforms pressure them to do it.

LONGER-TERM SAVINGS The only way to make Medicare sustainable is to have it grow at the same rate as the economy that provides the tax base to support it. In recent years, Medicare spending has been growing faster than gross domestic product, by roughly 1.7 to 2 percentage points.

Policy experts of varied political stripes have proposed a host of ways to eliminate excess spending without harming beneficiaries or the medical system. Some would charge higher Medicare premiums for those able to afford them, or raise the age of eligibility, or increase cost-sharing by beneficiaries to deter unnecessary use of medical care. All such proposals have strengths and weaknesses that need to be carefully analyzed.

A more radical proposal, championed primarily by Republicans, is to stop providing Medicare payments for specified benefits no matter the cost and instead give beneficiaries a set amount of money to buy private insurance policies that might not provide the same benefits. These so-called premium-support or voucher plans come in many flavors — some good, some bad — and would need to be carefully vetted. The most extreme version, proposed by Representative Ryan, would save the federal government a lot of money mainly by shifting big costs to beneficiaries and driving up costs for the rest of the health care system.

FEE-FOR-SERVICE Experts across the political spectrum agree that Medicare’s system for paying health care providers is a big part of its spending problem. The traditional Medicare program pays doctors separate fees for each of 7,000 different services, such as a diagnostic test, office visit or surgical procedure. This encourages excess use of medical tests and procedures because the doctors get more income as their services proliferate and the patient has little reason to question whether another M.R.I. so soon after the last one is really necessary.

The solution, most experts agree, is to have Medicare pay doctors and other health care providers fixed sums to manage a patient’s care and then let the doctors decide which services are truly necessary. Close monitoring would be needed to ensure that doctors don’t deny medically important services to improve their bottom lines.

The reform law is making a start with pilot programs and modest changes in payment policies to encourage coordinated care management. More vigorous action is needed. This can be done by strengthening provisions in the reform law (unless the Republicans succeed in repealing it) or by adding additional measures that gain bipartisan approval.

BENEFITS Medicare reform should not just be about saving money. Medicare’s coverage has some glaring gaps that need fixing. There is no provision for long-term care in nursing homes or at home, forcing many middle-class people to impoverish themselves to qualify for Medicaid. And patients can be socked with very high or very low rates of cost-sharing depending on whether care is delivered in a hospital, nursing home, by a doctor or at home. This crazy-quilt pattern confuses patients about the costs they will have to pay and almost certainly complicates and drives up the costs of administering the program.

•

At this point, the supercommittee looks close to implosion. But the last time Washington tried for a quick fix of Medicare, in 1997, it did not turn out well. Congress devised a flawed formula that was supposed to hold down payments to doctors. Instead, many doctors simply expanded the number of services delivered to keep their incomes high, while Congress — after being lobbied — has postponed the payment cuts year after year. To catch up with the formula, Congress would have to cut physician reimbursements by 29 percent next year. That obviously shouldn’t happen and won’t.

That cautionary tale is in no way an argument for inaction. It is an argument for serious, unhurried analysis in a less polarized climate. That is the only way to fix this vital program.

Saudi Arabia expands its power as U.S. influence diminishes

2011-11-19T14:58:00.001-05:00

David Ignatius writes in The Washington Post:

in the Middle East — a role that seems likely to expand even more in coming years as the Saudis boost their military and economic spending.

Saudis describe the kingdom’s growing role as a reaction, in part, to the diminished clout of the United States. They still regard the U.S.- Saudi relationship as valuable, but it’s no longer seen as a guarantor of their security. For that, the Saudis have decided they must rely more on themselves — and, down the road, on a wider set of friends that includes their military partner, Pakistan, and their largest oil customer, China.

For Saudi watchers, this change is striking. The kingdom’s old practice was to keep its head down, spread money to radical groups to try to buy peace, and rely on a U.S. military umbrella. Now, Riyadh is more open and vocal in pressing its interests — especially in challenging Iran.

The more-assertive Saudi role has been clear in its open support for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is Iran’s crucial Arab ally. The Saudis were decisive backers of last weekend’s Arab League decision to suspend Syria’s membership (though they also supported the organization’s waffling decision Wednesday to send another mediation team to Damascus).

Money is always the Saudis’ biggest resource, and they are planning to spend it more aggressively as a regional power broker — by roughly doubling their armed forces over the next 10 years and spending at least $15 billion annually to support countries weakened economically by this year’s turmoil.

The enormous military expansion was signaled this past week by Gen. Hussein al-Qubail, the chief of staff. Because of “surrounding circumstances,” he said, the Saudis would spend more to achieve “the highest degree of combat readiness.”

Overseeing the arms buildup will be a new defense minister, Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, described by Saudis as a strong manager during his many years as governor of Riyadh. This contrasts with what foreign analysts say was the loose discipline (and occasional corruption scandals) under his predecessor, Prince Sultan, who died in October after 48 years as defense minister.

Saudi sources provided an unofficial summary of the defense buildup. The army will add 125,000 to its estimated current force of 150,000; the national guard will grow by 125,000 from an estimated 100,000; the navy will spend more than $30 billion buying new ships and sea-skimming missiles; the air force will add 450 to 500 planes; and the Ministry of Interior is boosting its police and special forces by about 60,000. The Saudis are also developing their own version of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command.

The doubling of ground forces is partly a domestic employment project, but it’s also a signal of Saudi confidence.

The Saudi shopping list is a bonanza for U.S. and European arms merchants. That’s especially true of the air force procurement, with the Saudis planning to buy 72 “Eurofighters” from EADS and 84 new F-15s from Boeing. The rationale is containing Iran, whose nuclear ambitions the Saudis strongly oppose. But Riyadh has an instant deterrent ready, too, in the form of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal that the Saudis are widely believed to have helped finance.

Big weapons purchases have been a Saudi penchant for decades. More interesting, in some ways, is their quiet effort to provide support to friendly regimes to keep the region from blowing itself up in this period of instability. The Saudis have budgeted $4 billion this year to help Egypt, $1.4 billion for Jordan, and $500 million annually over the next decade for Bahrain and Oman. They will doubtless pump money, as well, to Syria, Yemen and Lebanon once the smoke clears in those volatile countries.

“In outlays, we’ve budgeted $15 billion a year just to keep the peace,” says one Saudi source, adding up the economic assistance to Arab neighbors. But that’s hardly a stretch for a country that, by year-end, will have about $650 billion in foreign reserves.

The Saudis speak more charitably of the United States than they did a few months ago, after reassuring visits by Vice President Biden and national security adviser Tom Donilon, and close military and intelligence cooperation continues. But President Obama is seen as a relatively weak leader who abandoned his own call for a Palestinian state under Israeli pressure. The United States isn’t exactly the god that failed, but its divine powers are certainly suspect in Riyadh.

Now hear this; now hear this: Capitalizing on Collapse

2011-11-19T11:34:00.007-05:00

The National Debt Clock located off Avenue of the Americas in New York.

The following article, noting that many Republicans and Democrats have concluded that they will get more out of the failure of negotiations to cut the deficit than they would out of success, is from The New York Times:

A new political calculus is emerging on both sides of the aisle now that it looks as if the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction may fail to reach an agreement by Wednesday’s deadline.

Democrats, who have taken a beating since the 2010 election, are legitimately worried that Republicans will use the collapse of budget talks to pursue their own grand strategy.

Publicly, Republicans say they are determined to do everything possible to help the so-called supercommittee achieve its goals. Kevin Smith, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner, said, “Boehner recognizes we are $15 trillion in debt, we need to deal with that right now, and he does not think we can wait until next election.”

In private, however, a number of Republicans acknowledge that alternatives to action by the supercommittee look highly attractive, if risky.

Should the supercommittee fail, the wheels begin to turn on $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, which split evenly between domestic and military programs.

There is bipartisan agreement that these cuts make no distinction among meat, bone and fat. The key political factor, however, is that the cuts go into effect after the 2012 election. Just as important, the “temporary” Bush tax cuts — enacted in 2001, 2002, and 2003 — terminate at the end of 2012.

Here is the Republican gamble: Intrade, the political futures market, currently puts the odds at just under three to one in favor of both a Republican takeover of the Senate and retention of the House — 74.4 to 21.5 for the Senate, 72.2 to 28 for the House.

The big question is the presidential contest. According to an ABC poll, a majority of Americans, by a margin of 55 to 37, believe that the Republican nominee will be victorious. Republican voters are overwhelmingly optimistic about their chances for the White House, 83-13. Democrats, by the far smaller margin of 58-33 percent, think President Obama will win re-election. Independents, by a 54-36 margin, believe that the Republicans will take the presidency.

The chance of all three contests going the Republicans’ way is less than 50-50, but if they do, the payoff would be huge. The risk is outweighed by the benefits of winning. What’s at stake? The power to further tilt the tax code in favor of the affluent and to perform progressively more radical surgery on the welfare state.

Given long-range demographic trends – the growth of the minority electorate and the increasing numbers of unmarried, Democratic-leaning voters, especially single women – the 2012 election could prove to be the last chance for the contemporary conservative movement to put a decisive stamp on the government.

As a top Republican Congressional aide put it in a interview about the supercommittee’s deliberations, “Winning the trifecta — House, Senate and White House — in 2012 is a game changer. We would be in the driver’s seat.”

In this scenario, Republicans in the 113th Congress would swiftly enact a version of the budget proposal put forward by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, which was approved by the House, but only the House, earlier this year.

The Ryan budget, which includes making the Bush tax cuts permanent, would meet the required $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, eliminating the need for across-the-board cuts. The measure would be contained in budget “reconciliation” legislation so that it would not be subject to a filibuster in the Senate and could be enacted by simple majorities in both branches. A Republican president would be sure to sign it.

A central Democratic player in the supercommittee negotiations noted that “there is a lot of fear” that the failure of the supercommittee “is intentional, that the Republicans are waiting until January, 2013, after an election has taken place. Who is in control will have enormous consequence.”

Capitalizing on collapse is not the exclusive terrain of the right. There are some on the left who believe that simply taking no action whatsoever before this year’s November 23 and December 23 deadlines will force the expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012. The expiration of these cuts will produce an estimated $3.8 trillion in new revenue between 2013 and 2022 – enough to maintain many of the key safety net programs with relatively minor tinkering.

Of course, this strategy depends either on a Democratic chief executive to veto Republican legislation extending the Bush cuts or on the less likely event of Democratic retention of the Senate or a takeover of the House.

The risks to both sides of a do-nothing-for-now strategy are arguably outweighed by the many possible advantages. The economic policy gulf between the parties has become so wide that it seems impossible, barring the use of accounting gimmicks, for them to split the difference.

The anti-tax, anti-government ideology of the right cannot be legitimately reconciled the with pro-government, high-tax commitment of the left, and vice versa. On top of that, these competing ideologies have acquired a moral dimension that makes ordinary political give-and-take intolerable.

Notions of unilateral victory, whether through Republican domination of Washington or through the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, become increasingly attractive, no matter how fanciful, if the alternative is engaging in the processes of honest bargaining, accommodation, negotiation and compromise.

The above article is by Thomas B. Edsall, a professor journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics.”

Charlie Harper pens a keeper: It Has To Happen

2011-11-18T07:52:00.001-05:00

Charlie Harper pens another keeper in the Courier Herald Column (as found in Peach Pundit):

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood gave Governor Nathan Deal, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, and the rest of Georgia news they wanted to hear. After touring the Port of Savannah with the duo, LaHood addressed the delegation and reporters in tow saying “We’ll figure out how to get the federal dollars to make this happen. It has to happen.”

The endorsement is as much the beginning of a process as the culmination of one. LaHood promised to convene a meeting of relevant and interested parties in Washington to identify funding sources for the project. Thus far, only $600,000 of the roughly $600 Million needed has been appropriated to the Army Corps of Engineers, and that was for the final permitting and planning. Construction dollars have not been committed.

With Supercommittees and various “Gangs” in Washington wielding budgetary axes, the funding is still not guaranteed. But when the President’s cabinet member says “It has to happen”, one could reasonably expect that it will happen.

Deal and Reed have been pursuing the funds since Deal’s inauguration, with Reed being the friendly face in Washington when calling on the Democratically held White House and other executive agencies. The united front of Republican and Democrat, Atlanta and Savannah, has impressed many along the way. With Deal a Republican and Reed a Democrat, the victory can be said to be one of bipartisanship. That oversimplifies the issue. In reality, two men of very different political backgrounds and bases of support have worked together toward a common shared goal despite the differences.

It’s what is usually done when something “has to happen.” In today’s political environment, however, it’s also tragically rare. The ability to work with others across an aisle toward common purposes used to be considered a valued skill. The act is viewed as “compromise”, and is commonly considered an act of weakness, treason, or selling out core principals. Partisans on both sides like to play all or nothing games, and are often now content to view gridlock as the ideal condition where no harm can be done until their side has a supermajority and can deliver 100% of their agenda.

The reality is that we, as a state and as a nation, have many items that have to be done. The U.S. is currently spending well over a trillion dollars per year more than we take in, with the national debt now standing at a cool $15 trillion. Spending on entitlements and interest on the debt is growing, yet already consumes all tax dollars collected. The entire discretionary portion of the budget is financed with borrowed money. This cannot continue, and the budget deficit trends must be reversed. It has to happen.

Our nation has known for 40 years that we needed to end our dependence on foreign oil. We’ve largely ignored the problem, with one side demanding “drill here, drill now” but without offering meaningful alternative energy solutions nor conservation measures. The other side wants layers of carbon credit trading and an end to most domestic energy sources of both oil and coal. Meanwhile, we send hundreds of billions of dollars per year to countries that wish us harm while spending hundreds of billions more to send troops overseas to protect oil supply routes. For our national and economic security, we must adopt a sound and comprehensive energy policy. It has to happen.

At the state level, Georgians in the Atlanta area face some of the worst traffic and commute times in the nation. The quality of life that has attracted so many to the region for decades is deteriorating into gridlock. Yet no major regional infrastructure program has been initiated in the last two decades as the problems grow worse. If Atlanta is to continue to grow, then there must be a coherent regional traffic plan. It has to happen.

Georgia’s education system remains among the nation’s worst. Employers looking for a skilled labor force need a labor pool that meets more than just basic physical requirements. We will not attract employers to turn around higher than national average unemployment numbers without being able to provide 21st century skills though our K-12 schools, technical colleges, and universities. It too has to happen.

Government is not the sole solution in any of the above issues. But the limited government we have should be functional, competent, and dedicated to the overall policies that create an environment that lets individuals prosper. Too many within government are now more interested in protecting their fiefdoms, and of making sure that the other guy doesn’t win that we all end up losing. This can no longer be considered acceptable. Governor Deal and Mayor Reed have demonstrated how to work across party lines to accomplish big goals. Others need to follow their lead. This has to happen.

GOP’s loose lips sinking their covert options

2011-11-18T07:13:00.001-05:00

David Ignatius writes in The Washington Post:

The leading Republican candidates were weirdly overt with their promises in last weekend’s debate about waging covert war against Iran and even assassinating its scientists. Perhaps it’s a sign that foreigners don’t take U.S. politics very seriously, but the inflammatory talk created barely a ripple in this part of the world.

Or maybe the savvy, cynical Middle East believes that the covert war has already begun — with Israel’s Mossad conducting lethal operations of the sort Republicans are clamoring for the CIA to adopt. The danger is that if the other side thinks the conflict has already started, it will feel compelled to retaliate.

The language the GOP candidates used was astonishing, at least for people who assume that covert activities are ones that aren’t talked about openly — much less, touted in campaign debates.

With the easy talk about waterboarding and “taking out” Iranian scientists, it seemed, too, that the party was back to 2006 — recaptured by the hard-line policies of Dick Cheney and the neoconservative ideology that undergirded them. The hawkish GOP line echoed that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in recent weeks, according to Israeli press leaks, has been arguing the case for war.

This field of Republicans says strange things in debates, but it was still startling to hear the leading candidates’ statements. Mitt Romney said President Obama should have worked “on a covert basis to encourage the dissidents.” Herman Cain said he would “assist the opposition movement in Iran that’s trying to overthrow the regime.” Newt Gingrich promised “maximum covert operations . . . including taking out their scientists, including breaking up their systems. All of it covertly, all of it deniable.”

Romney also promised “covert activity” against Syria, while Gingrich argued for a “mostly covert” effort to topple the Syrian regime.

What is it about “covert” that the Republicans don’t understand? What would be the U.S. reaction to similar public threats against this country if they were made by Iranian or Syrian politicians? This kind of loose talk is one reason the world doesn’t take the CIA as seriously as it once did. Activities that are so glibly discussed lose some of their credibility, in addition to their deniability.

Here in the Persian Gulf, many leaders would secretly love to see the United States (and probably Israel, too) take a pop at Iran, so long as they don’t have to face the blowback. That’s the risk of secret war; the enemy can respond covertly, where and when it chooses. That’s why the Gulf states are so nervous about the Shiite opposition movement in Bahrain and the Shiite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq. They see them (not always correctly) as weapons in Iran’s secret arsenal.

Beyond the war talk of recent weeks, it’s clear that the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program truly is “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion,” to use Harvard professor Graham Allison’s memorable phrase. Either the Iranians agree to turn back their program or the West accedes to Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state. The alternative is a collision.

The question is starkly similar to what President John F. Kennedy faced in the October 1962 standoff: He sought a way to convey U.S. determination without outright war. The Pentagon generals were screaming that Kennedy had to bomb the Soviet missile sites in Cuba — in much the same way that Israeli hawks are agitating today for a bombing campaign against Iran. Kennedy wisely realized that it wasn’t all or nothing; he could operate along a continuum of power, in which bombing would be the last step, not the first.

The option Kennedy chose deserves some discussion now. He decided, against the advice of most advisers, on a “quarantine” of Cuba to prevent the nuclear missiles from becoming operational. It was a step well short of war (or even lethal covert action), and it left the Soviets room to maneuver. It also avoided the political fallout across Latin America that would come from bombing Cuba (similar to the destabilizing effect that bombing Iran would cause for the United States and Israel).

A quarantine of Iran’s nuclear program could take many forms, along a ladder of escalating seriousness. It would seek to enforce U.N. resolutions, peacefully. If crafted wisely, it would have the support of most U.S. allies.

As America chooses its tools along the continuum of power, it will undoubtedly continue (and perhaps augment) its covert activities against Iran. But they lose their impact and rationale if they become a topic for facile domestic political debate.

Supreme Court’s planned review of health-care law shocks Medicaid advocates

2011-11-17T22:35:00.001-05:00

From The Washington Post:

While there was no surprise over the Supreme Court’s decision Monday to review the 2010 health-care act’s insurance mandate, supporters of the law are reeling over the justices’ announcement that they will also consider a long-shot challenge to what many consider an even more central provision of the statute.

That provision is the extension of Medicaid to cover a greater number of the poor. Twenty-six states say the expansion amounts to an unconstitutional coercion of state governments, which provide part of Medicaid’s funding.

“The decision on this issue is probably the most important the Supreme Court will be making on the Affordable Care Act,” said Ronald Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a consumer advocacy group that backs the law, referring to the statute by a common shorthand.

“Probably the most important achievement of the law is that it is going to reduce the number of people who don’t have health insurance by tens of millions. . . . About half of these people will gain their coverage through the Medicaid expansion. So the review of this provision goes right to the heart of the major accomplishment of the Affordable Care Act,” Pollack said.

Specifically, the law vastly broadens the minimum eligibility requirements for Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the poor and disabled with a combination of federal and state dollars.

Obama Shift on Insurance Mandate May Be Health Bill’s Undoing

2011-11-15T13:09:00.003-05:00

From The New York Times:

As Barack Obama battled Hillary Rodham Clinton over health care during the Democratic presidential primaries of 2008, he was adamant about one thing: Americans, he insisted, should not be required to buy health insurance.

“If things were that easy,” Mr. Obama told the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres in February of that year, “I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”

Now President Obama may wish he had stuck to those words. On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to take up a constitutional challenge to his landmark health care bill, and a decision could come in the midst of Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

At the heart of the challenge is “the mandate” — a provision requiring nearly all Americans to buy coverage or pay a penalty — that he so vigorously opposed as a candidate. If it is struck down, much of his signature legislative achievement could fall with it in a decision that would undoubtedly be construed as a rebuke to the president.

Polls show the mandate is by far the most unpopular provision of the 2010 bill, and now Mr. Obama, who ultimately embraced the idea, is in the awkward position of defending something he once rejected.

“I think his political instincts were right,” said Paul Starr, a health policy expert at Princeton University who argues it is possible to expand coverage by other means. “I think he saw that there could be a backlash against a mandate and that there needed to be some other kind of approach. So in a way, I’m sorry he didn’t stick to his original position.”

The theory behind the mandate, according to its proponents, is this: Requiring coverage brings both sick and healthy people into the pool of those insured, which is essential because premiums paid by the healthy offset the cost of covering the sick. Otherwise, healthy people wait until they are ill to buy insurance, which leads to what policy analysts call a “death spiral” in which premiums skyrocket out of control.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama did favor requiring all children to have insurance. Once he took office, his top aides began examining other options, said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health policy adviser to Mr. Obama. The aides studied the experience of Massachusetts, which has a mandate, and health laws in other states that do not. They considered voluntary incentives to get healthy people to enroll.

Their internal modeling, Dr. Emanuel said, showed that a mandate would extend coverage to 32 million uninsured people. Without such a requirement, he said, the administration estimated it could cover 16 million people at three-fourths the cost of covering the 32 million. Mr. Obama reversed himself.

“I don’t think it was a slam-dunk,” said Dr. Emanuel, now a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania and a regular contributor to the New York Times Op-Ed page. “The president did take very seriously his reputation for following what he said, so he was very reluctant to change his opinion unless he was very convinced.”

Health insurers also insisted on a mandate, as did the Democrats who controlled Congress. In July 2009, Mr. Obama told CBS News that he was “now in favor of some sort of individual mandate as long as there’s a hardship exemption” for people who truly could not afford to buy insurance.

While the White House may have been prepared for the public unhappiness over the provision, it appears to have been caught off guard by the constitutional challenge — in part because Obama advisers regarded the mandate as a conservative notion. The idea gained currency in the early 1990s, when some Republicans proposed their own version of an “individual mandate” as an alternative to the “employer mandate” in President Bill Clinton’s health plan.

Polls show the individual mandate is hugely unpopular. The Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks public opinion on the health measure, reported in March that 74 percent of Americans would keep, rather than repeal, the law’s provision barring insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. But only 27 percent would keep the mandate. (A CNN poll released Monday found 52 percent support the mandate, up from 44 percent in June, though unlike Kaiser CNN did not explain that failure to comply would result in a fine.)

The Obama administration insists that if the mandate falls, so does the provision on pre-existing conditions. “The mandate,” said Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has advised the administration, “is the spinach you need to get the chocolate you want.”

Chris Jennings, a former health policy adviser to Mr. Clinton, makes much the same point. “Health reform without an individual requirement,” he says, “is like driving a train without tracks; you can still move, but you can’t get to your coverage destination and it will be a rougher and far more costly trip.”

But not all economists agree. Some say the government has other ways to make sure enough healthy people buy insurance and offset the cost of the sick. One option is “auto enrollment,” in which the government would automatically enroll citizens in insurance plans, but give them the chance to opt out. Mr. Starr, the Princeton professor, who helped draft the Clinton health bill, proposes a system of penalties and incentives to get healthy people to enroll. For instance, people could be given a choice: Sign up now, or wait another five years.

Of the four appeals courts that have weighed the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, only one has struck it down. The most recent decision, issued last week by the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, upheld the law. The Supreme Court decision will almost certainly thrust health care back into the public debate next year. But its effect on Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign remains to be seen.

Professor Starr says a finding that the mandate is unconstitutional would be “a severe blow” to the act, and the Obama presidency.

But Drew Altman, the president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, said health policy rarely affected election outcomes. “If any health care issue is a voting issue,” Mr. Altman said, “it’s not health reform, it’s Medicare.”

Some experts say that if the bill had imposed a tax on Americans who did not have insurance — rather than requiring them to buy a policy — the entire legal fight might have been avoided.

“It’s a little bit surprising that the constitutional arguments weren’t out there sooner,” said Mark McClellan, who ran Medicare under President George W. Bush. “They could have written it in a way that would have better overcome the constitutional challenges.”

That may be what the Supreme Court orders. But for Mr. Obama, it may be too late. The Republican leaders in Congress want to repeal the bill, not rewrite it.

Herman Cain on Libya

2011-11-15T08:03:00.000-05:00

Westmoreland, Kingston to introduce immigration bill - Stay tuned, this is going to be interesting and may gain traction rapidly.

2011-11-12T15:43:00.004-05:00

From The Newnan Times-Herald:

U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland says to buy Vidalia onions.

"You better buy all you can this year," he told about 50 people at a Town Hall meeting in Senoia on Thursday. Next year, he predicted, "there's not going to be anybody to pick them."

Immigration was one of the topics discussed by Westmoreland at the meeting sponsored by the Senoia Tea Party Patriots.

Westmoreland said he and U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Savannah) are introducing a bill that will address both illegal and legal immigration.

"It's going to be politically uncomfortable for a lot of people. The truth is the truth. It may be ugly sometimes, but at the end of the day it's still the truth," Westmoreland said.

Westmoreland said the program that allows farmers to legally hire Mexican migrant workers needs to work better. That law allows foreign workers to pick produce with the employer providing transportation and housing.

Too often, getting those applications processed is difficult, and there are instances where workers arrive later in the season than they are most needed.

"We need to make sure our farmers, our ranchers, our apple growers have the people they need," Westmoreland said. "We have an illegal immigrant problem because we have a legal immigrant problem."

Westmoreland said immigrants have been "doing work that the average American is not going to do." Initially, "the people who came up here, came up here strictly to work."

The illegal immigrants were often spending $2,500 just to go back and forth to Mexico or farther south. Being in America meant earning $8-$10 per hour instead of a dollar a day. The workers began to bring their wives and children.

They could get "the best education for their kids" and could not be turned away when they went to hospital emergency rooms for medical care, Westmoreland said. "Every child born here was an American citizen."

Westmoreland said the guest worker program needs to work more efficiently. He also said guest workers should not be allowed to bring their families with them.

He said illegal workers initially kept to themselves and were largely unseen except at work. Now they have emerged "out of the shadows," Westmoreland said. "We even have them protesting now."

The worst debate moments ever

2011-11-11T08:09:00.003-05:00

Obviously, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s “oops” moment Wednesday night was one of the biggest debate gaffes of all time. But how does it fit into the long history of debate slipups?

See others in this article from The Washington Post.

Obama's Virginia Defeat - Democrats were trounced in Tuesday's state legislature election - New Dominion is looking like Old Dominion

2011-11-11T07:03:00.004-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama was the first Democrat to win Virginia since 1964; he beat John McCain by seven percentage points; and he did so on the strength of his appeal to Northern Virginia's many white-collar independents. Along with victories in North Carolina, Colorado and Nevada, the Obama Old Dominion win in 2008 inspired a flurry of stories about how Democrats had forever altered the political map.

So the White House is pouring resources into what Tim Kaine, the state's former Democratic governor, now pridefully refers to as Democrats' "New Dominion." The Obama campaign has held some 1,600 events in the state in the last half-year alone. Only last month Mr. Obama hopped a three-day bus trip through Virginia and North Carolina. Obama officials keep flocking to the state, and Tuesday's election was to offer the first indication of how these efforts are succeeding.

Let's just say the New Dominion is looking an awful lot like the Old Dominion. If anything, more so.

For Romney, 2005 Was Key Year of Policy Shifts - Obama campaigned aga. mandate that everyone must buy health ins., saying it should be limited to kids

2011-11-11T06:37:00.009-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

To win election as governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Mitt Romney made a truce with liberal activists and cast himself as a moderating force within the Republican Party. If he becomes the GOP nominee for president, it may be because of steps he took to change those alliances during a few months of 2005.

Mr. Romney had once said he didn't "line up" with the National Rifle Association, but in May 2005 proclaimed "The Right to Bear Arms Day.'' He had rejected the label of either pro-choice or pro-life, according to an abortion-rights activist, but in July 2005 wrote: "I am prolife." He helped lead talks on a pact to control emissions but in December 2005 surprised some staff members by pulling out.

A "flip-flopper" tag has long dogged Mr. Romney. Less known is that his reputation as ideologically elastic was cemented over a 10-month stretch in the second half of his term as governor. Conservative interest groups that had once received a cold shoulder were extended a glad hand, while liberal groups often got iced out.

To people who served in his administration, 2005 was the year his mission changed. For the two previous years, the problem-solving, ideologically ambiguous governor was tackling the issues of a state in deficit, clogged with infrastructure problems and sprawl, and struggling with the uninsured

"You have to understand, Mitt Romney is very pragmatic, and I think what happened was the issue became, 'How do I win the presidency of United States?'" said Rob Garrity, a Republican environmentalist and Romney supporter who served in his administration. "Positions changed."

His repositioning prepared him to be a plausible candidate for the GOP beyond liberal-leaning Massachusetts, while showing him ideologically nimble enough to still appeal to voters in the political center. It is that appeal that supporters say makes him the most electable of the Republican contenders.

Changes of positions are hardly unique to Mr. Romney, and he isn't the only one running for president who has to wrestle with shifts in policy or tone. President Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 against a mandate that everyone must buy health insurance, saying it should be limited to the purchase of health coverage for children. He switched as the health bill wound its way through Congress, and now the mandate is the center of political and legal battles over the health-care law.

Hillary Clinton established her reputation as an activist liberal when she was First Lady. After she was elected to the Senate, she set out to re-establish herself as a political moderate ahead of her own White House run.

Republican candidate Herman Cain has offered shifting explanations of his position on abortion. Rick Perry has retreated from a position he took as Texas governor that the state should order girls to be vaccinated against the HPV pathogen.

All have been criticized from within their own party for such moves, and, like Mr. Romney, often attribute the shifts to changing circumstances or argue the moves are alterations of tone more than substance.

Mr. Romney as governor pressed forward with a health-care law that he saw as his legacy, a market-driven approach that was in vogue with many conservative thinkers at the time. Now, it appears he may have miscalculated: The Massachusetts health-care law remains a major burden on his quest for the Republican nomination.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on MSNBC's Morning Joe urging super committee to 'go big' on deficit

2011-10-31T19:29:00.003-05:00

U.S. Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit From Iraq

2011-10-30T08:13:00.000-05:00

From The New York Times:

The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.

The plans, under discussion for months, gained new urgency after President Obama’s announcement this month that the last American soldiers would be brought home from Iraq by the end of December. Ending the eight-year war was a central pledge of his presidential campaign, but American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.

After unsuccessfully pressing both the Obama administration and the Iraqi government to permit as many as 20,000 American troops to remain in Iraq beyond 2011, the Pentagon is now drawing up an alternative.

In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.

With an eye on the threat of a belligerent Iran, the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.

EEOC sues South Georgia farm, alleges discrimination against U.S. workers

2011-10-29T14:56:00.001-05:00

From the AJC:

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing a large South Georgia vegetable farm in federal court, alleging it discriminated against U.S. workers and fired them in favor of Mexican guest workers.

Hamilton Growers/Southern Valley Fruit and Vegetable Inc. also fired black American workers because of their race and national origin, the EEOC says in the complaint it filed last month.

The EEOC filed suit after releasing a decision in July that says the Norman Park-based farm engaged in a "pattern or practice of regularly denying work hours and assigning less favorable" work to U.S. workers in favor of foreigners participating in the federal H-2A guest worker program.

Hamilton has denied the allegations and accused the U.S. workers of violating attendance rules, loitering and failing to keep up with the work, EEOC records show. Hamilton also said all its workers are guaranteed the same wages, but some earn more because they work faster.

“Hamilton Growers is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic, including citizenship status, race or national origin,” Terri Stewart, an attorney for Hamilton, said in a prepared statement.

Obama’s bite-size initiatives reminiscent of Clinton reelection

2011-10-29T14:44:00.001-05:00

From The Washington Post:

The series of economic initiatives announced by President Obama in recent days reflects a strategic and tactical shift that White House officials hope will guide the president’s governing and political agenda in the months ahead.

The new effort, carried out through unilateral executive actions, was agreed upon weeks ago and is strongly reminiscent of a successful campaign deployed by Bill Clinton in the run-up to his 1996 reelection.

Almost every day this week, Obama rolled out a program aimed at some troubled sector of the economy: mortgage relief for homeowners Monday, tax credits to spur job growth for veterans Tuesday, college loan relief for students Wednesday, regulatory and information shortcuts for small businesses Friday.

The plan-a-day strategy is an approach designed to portray Obama as decisive as the White House complains about Congress’s failure to pass his jobs bill. Senior administration aides said they expected the effort to continue as long as Congress balks at his proposals.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) predicted that the president’s effort will fail, saying that the economy will need more help to recover than can be accomplished through unilateral White House action.

“If the president wants to put people back to work, he’s going to have to engage in the legislative process and work with us to find common ground. It’s that simple,” Boehner said. A Boehner aide said the speaker had not been notified in advance about the executive actions.

In Clinton’s case, the initiatives were derided for being small — “McIssues” — and for pandering to the political center. Yet they worked, helping him overcome the doubts about his presidency raised by the sweeping Republican victory in the 1994 midterm election.

Nancy-Ann DeParle, the deputy chief of staff for policy, is leading the effort to find polices that do not require congressional approval, aides said. Bruce Reed, who is chief of staff to Vice President Biden, White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler and Stephanie Cutter, a top adviser, were other early participants.

White House officials said Obama is not abandoning large ambitions in favor of smaller ones or becoming, as Clinton was sometimes known, an “incremental president.” Obama is still pressing for his $447 billion jobs package, they said.

But the Obama White House is beginning to deploy the technocratic skill that Clinton became famous for, and the imprint of the Clinton veterans on Obama’s staff members is apparent. At least two of them — including Reed, who was director of Clinton’s Domestic Policy Council — helped guide Clinton’s incremental successes more than a decade ago.

The bite-size initiatives — although the White House hates that term — are helping solve an inherent problem with Obama’s reelection campaign: With the economy in crisis, the president is not in a position to talk about his sweeping plans for a second term.

Obama has barely mentioned a second term, except to say, as he did on the road this week, that he has fulfilled 60 percent of his 2008 campaign promises and will “get the other 40 percent done in the next five years.”

Obama is expected to press forward on immigration if he wins reelection. Some other potential priorities — such as making changes to Social Security and Medicare, pursuing peace in the Middle East or perhaps endorsing gay marriage — would be politically risky for him to discuss in an election season.

Do as I say, not as I do: Obama Backers Tied to Lobbies Raise Millions

2011-10-28T06:11:00.001-05:00

From The New York Times:

Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid.

It appears our next president will be a politician without a core

2011-10-27T05:44:00.003-05:00

From The New York Times:

Mitt Romney’s critics are quick to accuse him of being a flip-flopper on important issues, part of an effort by Democrats and his Republican rivals to establish him as a politician without a core.

Mr. Romney gave them new ammunition on Wednesday by appearing to waffle on whether he supports tough anti-union legislation in Ohio that is up for a vote on a referendum in that state.

Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, had supported the union rules, imposed by the state’s Republican governor, John R. Kasich, several months ago. Then on Tuesday, in an appearance in the state, he suggested that he would remain neutral on the referendum. And on Wednesday he apologized for “confusion” and said he supported Mr. Kasich and the rules “110 percent.”

The result of the 24 hours of back and forth was a renewed push by Mr. Romney’s political opponents to highlight what they call his routine repositioning on the issues.

Questions about Mr. Romney’s willingness to change his positions have dogged him since he began seeking the presidency more than five years ago. Rivals have focused in particular on what they say are his changing positions on abortion, immigration, taxes and what they call “Romneycare,” the health care overhaul he ushered in as governor of Massachusetts.

In his second bid for the White House, Mr. Romney has generally been more disciplined, pointing to his book “No Apology” as the definitive explanation of his policy positions.

But Mr. Romney’s remarks about the Ohio union legislation were a reminder that he remained vulnerable to incidents that seemed to reinforce the established narrative.

Long Island Sees Upswing in Immigrants

2011-10-27T05:28:00.002-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

Long Island's immigrant population has more than doubled in the past three decades, with nearly one in five Long Islanders now born abroad, according to a new report released on Thursday.

About a third of all immigrants on Long Island are now Hispanic, making it the biggest group of foreign-born Long Islanders, according to a report by the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute based on U.S. Census Bureau data. But an influx of Asians has also helped change the demographics of Nassau and Suffolk counties, two of the nation's wealthiest suburbs.

The report highlights how immigration trends in the New York City suburbs have been shifting for decades. Generations ago, immigrants came to areas such as Manhattan's Lower East Side to begin new lives before leaving for Long Island.

"Nowadays they are moving directly to the suburbs," said Lawrence Levy, executive dean at Hofstra University's National Center for Suburban Studies.

Noonan: People, including the president, continue to compare Occupy Wall Street to the tea party. It is not the tea party.

2011-10-24T05:54:00.003-05:00

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

We turn briefly to Occupy Wall Street, because people, including the president, continue to compare it to the tea party. It is not the tea party. The tea party was a middle-class uprising that was only too happy to funnel its energy into the democratic process. They took their central concerns—spending, taxes and regulation—and followed the prescription of Joe Hill: Don't mourn, organize. They did. They entered politics and helped win elections. They did the Republicans a big favor by not going third-party but working within the GOP—at least for now.

Occupy Wall Street is completely different. They mean to gain power and sway by going outside the political system. They are a critique of the political system. They went to the streets and stayed there.

They are not funneling their energy into the democratic process because there is no market for what they are selling: Capitalism should be overturned, I am angry that my college loan bills are so big, the government is bad, and the answer is more government. You can't win elections in America with that kind of message. So they will stay in the streets, where they can have an impact by stopping traffic, inconveniencing people going to and coming from work, and appearing to be an amorphous force that must be bowed to.

The difference between the occupiers and the tea party is the difference between acting out and taking part.

Where is Mr. Obama in all this? He has made sympathetic sounds about Occupy Wall Street, probably seeing it as ultimately part of his base. Beyond that, he's out campaigning. Sometimes he is snarky about Congress: He's giving them "another chance" at voting on his jobs bill. Sometimes he is self-justifying. He told ABC's Jake Tapper that "all the choices we've made have been the right ones." Sometimes he lectures America. But he doesn't buck it up, and he must know in his heart that it's coming for the keys.

Let's come home ASAP: Maliki Takes Hard Line on American Withdrawal

2011-10-23T08:58:00.000-05:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

[Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday] it would be solely up to Iraq to decide how many trainers it needed. He added that the trainers would enjoy no immunity and would be confined to Iraqi bases. He also quashed the possibility for collaboration with the U.S. in the fight against terror groups like Al Qaeda in arrangements similar to those with countries like Pakistan and Yemen.

"That's what the Iraqi side will decide from a technical standpoint: the required number, without immunity and present inside Iraqi camps for training only," he said. "As for operations and taking part in operations, that's finished."

On Saturday Mr. Maliki sought to ease concerns that Baghdad would firmly move into Iran's orbit of influence after the full withdrawal of American forces and said that Iraq still seeks a special relationship with the U.S.

"We speak about our interest as Iraqis first and we do not speak about the interest of others," he said, without naming Iran.

Ghassan al-Atiyyah, a London-based Iraqi politician and academic, said the breakdown of negotiations between Iraq and the U.S. over immunity sends a message that Washington has lost leverage over the current Iraqi government and opens the door to greater interference by Iraq's neighbors Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia at a very tumultuous and dangerous period for the entire region.

"American withdrawal in this manner, given that Iraq is unstable, opens Pandora's box," he said adding that this could bolster an eventual "Damascus-Baghdad-Tehran axis" in the region.