Author: RB

L. A. Times columnist George Skelton touts Gray Davis’ attack ads on Richard Riordan:

…it’s easy to understand why Davis couldn’t resist smacking Riordan after he watched an old TV interview of Riordan calling abortion “murder.”

Riordan’s currently running in a primary where his opponents are hitting him for not being conservative and pro-life enough to be the Republican nominee for Governor, so all Davis’ ads are doing is helping him win the nomination. As for the charges that Riordan has donated to extreme causes, you can list Davis among them since Riordan gave him money as well.

I’m surprised Skelton is falling this this, since he’s the second-most respected political coomentator in California, after Dan Walters. Davis’ poll numbers continue to slide and he’s getting desperate, and doing stupid things. This man has “one-term governor” written all over him.

OnPolitics (washingtonpost.com)

Have a ball.

The President gave an excellent political speech tonight, charting a clear course for the nation, uplifting without being too sentimental or leaving any scraps on the table for the left to fuss over (read poor Oliver Willis for some insight into how demoralized they are.) Bush reached out to the crossover constituencies he attracted in Texas – women, blacks, Hispanics – without alienating the base. Prescription drugs, education, respect for women, protecting the savings of working people are all issues that have strong bipartisan support, but more important, they’re issues that the Democrats need desperately to call their own if they’re to gain ground in November. Doesn’t look like it’s going to be so easy for them now.

Comparisons with Clinton are easy – Bush is more sincere, more concise, more focussed; we saw none of the self-indulgent seducer playing to our weaknesses that we endured for the last eight years. And we certainly didn’t see any of the confused, pseudo-intellectualism of that guy who couldn’t carry his home state in the last election. But it’s ingracious to even mention those two saps, so let’s move on.

What impressed me the most about this address was the contrast to Bush 41, who wasn’t even in the audience. The themes the president stressed were in many ways right out of his father’s playbook – low taxes, self-sacrifice, military power, coalition-building, and a restoral of common decency. But when 41 talked about these things, he over-coated them with saccharin and made himself look weak and ineffectual: the “1000 points of light” is a nice coinage, and it sounds good on the lips of a Peggy Noonan, but it’s over the top when a male president uses it to evoke the spirit of volunteerism. Instead, the President asked for an achievable, quanitifiable amount of volunteerism: two years or 4000 hours in the course of a lifetime. That’s what a business school education will do for you.

Others have or will comment in more detail on the triangulation and political strategy genius of the Bush positions better than I can, so I’ll leave it with the general impression that the President is salvaging the decent side of masculinity, something that hasn’t been the style since Reagan.

He’s strong, and getting stronger. I’m impressed.

For those who wonder why analysts didn’t blow the whistle on Enron prior to the inglorious collapse, this Wall St. Journal article (requires subscription) explains it all:

Financial analysts who tracked Enron Corp. have taken a pounding for being company “shills” and for failing to concede they didn’t fully understand the Houston energy-trading concern’s complex finances.
Then there is Daniel Scotto.

The bond analyst in New York for BNP Paribas says he was forced out of the French securities firm because he told his clients in August that Enron securities “should be sold at all costs and sold now.” That warning came about two weeks after Enron Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling suddenly quit and a couple of months before Enron began the plunge that ended in federal bankruptcy court on Dec. 2.

Mr. Scotto, 49 years old, issued a research report on Aug. 23 to his clients that lowered his firm’s recommendation on Enron to “neutral” from “buy.” He pushed that designation even further by suggesting Enron might be a “source of funds.” Translation: Consider selling Enron securities to raise money for other investments.

One analyst changes his rating from “buy” to “neutral,” and he gets canned. And the canner, Paribas, covers-up the whole affair. This, coming on the heels of the Frontline report on the shenanigans in Silicon Valley around dot Com IPOs, makes me think our model of the stock market as a basically honest place, is fundamentally flawed. Traders on the Vancouver and Hong Kong exchanges don’t suffer with such an illusion – they know their financial markets are ruled by pirates, where it’s caveat emptor at every turn. Since the reality of the US markets is closer to the pirate model than we thought, it’s probably time to take the rhetoric down that path as well.

I invented the personal web log form back in 1994 in order to bring about the counter-spin Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan applied to the New York Times yesterday. Now I can die knowing that the world is a better place for my having been here, not that I’m planning to, although a vacation would be nice. Seriously, go read these stories – all the other blog material up today is crap, except for Andrew Hofer’s piece on stock analysts.

Joanne Jacobs has a revelation about the teachers’ union and Charter Schools in Welcome to readjacobs.com:

Teachers’ unions are trying to “absorb” the charter school movement, writes Michael Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency. He uses union strategy reports to make his case.

It’s really not an obscure connection: last year, San Franciso Assemblywoman Carole Migdon carried a bill that would have requirted Charter School teachers to pay union dues. It’s a clear stategy to kill the voucher movement by touting charters as the reform alternative, and then to hamstring the charter movement by touting its excesses and over-regulating it. Nobody messes with the teachers’ union in Sacramento and gets away with it.

In my lobbyist days, I was introduced to the union’s head lobbyist and told to make friends with them even though they weren’t at all relevant to my issue. It’s simply a matter of it being good to be seen with the powerful, especially if you aren’t one of them.

Here’s the source of Dr. McLaughlin’s insights into Enron and Kyoto: Enron’s secret energy plan

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Enron Corp. has been widely depicted as a free market swashbuckler leveraging its political power for deregulation. In truth, the Texas energy giant and its well-connected chief, Dr. Kenneth Lay, also constituted the most active corporate advocate of the Kyoto global warming treaty. Lay’s efforts last year reached into the Bush Cabinet to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

The Prince of Darkness still needs to connect the dots leading from Enron to Al Gore if we’re going to believe that the structure of the Kyoto Treaty was designed to screw over the US for the benefit of Enron. And while it’s easy to see Al Gore as a bungler, it’s not all that clear that he’s an out-and-out crook.

Nonetheless, for lovers of irony, it’s a juicy theory.