Category: Politics

Lobbyists (and former legislators) Phil Isenberg and Patrick Johnston are helping Gov. Davis with the budget, and purists are in an uproar:

The special access given to Phil Isenberg and Patrick Johnston sparked criticism from consumer activists and political reform advocates, who said neither man should be allowed to take part in closed-door budget talks where they can quietly help their clients and shape state policy without public scrutiny.

Welcome to the consequences of term limits. In the Golden Age of state government, Isenberg chaired the Assembly Judiciary Committee and was an expert on the actual consequences of many aspects of subtle public policy, while Johnston ran the Senate Appropriations Committee and understood the cost of everything. Term limits forced these two out of the legislature, but it didn’t eliminate the need for their expertise. So they’ve stayed in the Sacramento orbit in the only good-paying job in town, lobbyist, continuing to lend expertise as it’s needed.

Opponents of term limits predicted that it would increase the power of legislative staff and lobbyists, because these folks don’t get run out of town after a brief tour of six years in the Assembly or eight in the Senate, and this is just exactly what’s happened. Consumer activists and reform advocates who complain about this display a remarkable ignorance of the consequences of their own deeds, of course.

And it’s a damn good thing these guys are still around – an Assemblyman with only four years under his or her belt can’t begin to appreciate the complexity of state government and its interaction with social policy and the economy.

As the five-year clock runs down on welfare in California (and elsewhere), welfare rights groups are advising recipients on the loopholes that they can exploit to collect benefits instead of working. The best of these is to cry “domestic abuse”; you’re automatically taken seriously, and the checks keep coming.

Carla Rivera reports on this program in the LA Times: (Recipients Scramble to Retain Welfare Benefits)

“Each month a victim suffered domestic abuse potentially means an extra month of aid,” said Quinn, who added that the county will try to verify such claims but mostly will rely on the word of victims. “We will also try to find counseling services for them after the fact. Domestic violence is not the only clock-stopper, but it’s one we’re extremely sensitive to and we want to bend over backward and take people at their word.”

There’s a long history of abusing the abuse exception to keep welfare coming, going back at least to the arguments welfare rights groups made against the reform back in 1996. One of their tools was a collection of studies, published by the Taylor Institute (now called the Project for Research on Welfare, Work, and Domestic Violence), in which welfare recipients were push-polled into crying abuse after they were told about the loophole.

With so much deliberate distortion going on, we’re unlikely ever to know what the overlap between domestic violence, child abuse, and welfare really is.

Some of the most bizarre (and hilarious) comments ever posted to this blog came in over the last few days in response to Glenn Reynolds’ Carville denial. The facts of the story are pretty straightforward, and supported by Kausfiles and NRO: Lott sucked-up to Strom Thurmond for years about his failed presidential bid, but it wasn’t news until Sid Blumenthal, James Carville, Josh Marshall, and Gene Lyons (Clinton operatives one and all) made it news through an e-mail and CNN campaign. So the bloggers who made the Lott Pandergate story a big deal in Blogistan were in fact doing Carville’s bidding, although, as I’ve already said, they didn’t know it at the time. Nobody wants to be made out to be an unwitting dupe of a clever cabal of operatives, so Reynolds wants to position this revelation as something odd. This is really silly, of course.

The only interesting questions about Carville’s Pandergate fiasco have to do with what the hoped-for goal was, and whether it’s really backfired. The obvious theory is that he was shooting for Lott’s resignation from the Senate, which would have created a 50/50 split once again. According to this scenario, the episode backfired, because Lottt didn’t step down and the Reeps reacted with honor, etc, etc. But Carville is a devious bastard, and he’s got a history of reaching out to the racist, Southern voter in creative ways: during Clinton’s ’92 campaign, the KKK outreach took the form of the infamous Sistah Souljah speech, the shunning of long-time Clinton bud Jesse Jackson, and highlighting welfare reform as a central campaign issue.

Alongside Poppa Bush, this strategy made him the more Klan-friendly candidate. Now that Lott has been badly treated by his party, according this scenario, KKK and CCC-oriented voters will once again return to the Democratic Party fold.

If this sounds totally paranoid to you, you don’t know how campaign managers think. One such person of my personal acquaintance once managed to secure an NRA endorsement for a candidate in a race in a very touchy-feely district in order to drive voters to her opponent; this sort of reverse-dunk thinking is actually commonplace. All it takes to pull it off is a few naifs who believe politics is about principle rather than counting votes, and Blogistan is full of such characters.

In future campaigns, the ability to manipulate Blogistan will become an important predictor of political success.

So Lott’s out as Majority Leader and Frist is in. Still no word from the blogger shock troups who did James Carville’s bidding: Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and Virginia Postrel. Don’t accept any “blogger triumphalism” since the fingerprints of Carville and Sidney Blumenthal have been found on their keyboards, and don’t be surprised if this ends up being a plus for the Republicans.

This little story makes the Frist Scenario seem much more likely:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee is exploring a possible bid to replace Trent Lott as their chamber’s incoming majority leader and Assistant Republican Leader Don Nickles of Oklahoma will likely back Frist, sources said on Thursday.

Frist has long been our man, but we want Lott to have a nice, soft landing when it happens.

Lott Pandergate architect and chief string-puller James Carville sends a bizarre fax accepting Lott’s apology:

Carville, also a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” faxed a letter to Lott’s office Wednesday, both accepting the senator’s apology and pledging not to criticize him further for comments made recently or for comments Lott has made in the past on the issue of race.

E-mail, Jimmy Bubba.

via Kausfiles, the best source for Pandergate string-pulling news, if not analysis.

It turns out my little Christmas fantasy was right on target after all. See: Timothy P. Carney & Trent Lott & the Courts on National Review Online

The Lott turmoil was entirely manufactured by Democratic operatives — namely by unrepentant Clintonite James Carville, who first made an issue of the remarks the same night on Crossfire — and then pushed the story behind the scenes wherever they could, explaining to pundits and politicians how this could be used to sock it to the GOP.

If Carville wins — if the bar for branding someone a racist is lowered to a single careless comment, an unreflective childhood in the south, and a belief in states’ rights — that puts every Republican politician or nominee in a little more danger. It expands the media’s definition of “extremism.” Anyone whose voting record or ideology resembles that of “disgraced former Majority Leader Trent Lott” will be suspect — and vulnerable.

This means any judge who ever used the concept of federalism in his decisions will be attacked for “using the racist codeword of ‘states rights’.”

It’s a lose-lose situation — and a checkmate for the attack dogs of personal destruction.

So here’s the chain: Carville talks it up on CNN, and then gets ABC to cover it in The Note, where Atrios sees it. Then Sidney Blumenthal (or Carville again) gets Josh Marshall to blog it. Glenn Reynolds first saw it on Marshall’s blog, and we know the rest.

Is there anything more elitist and racist than the anti-gun lobby’s demonization of cheap handguns? This article in Slate mouths the typical platitudes:

Not surprisingly, it was the makers of Saturday Night Specials — poorly made guns selling for $35-$150, which frequently ended up in the hands of criminals — who were most culpable.

If cheap handguns aren’t for sale, only rich people will have guns, and who really needs them more, pampered liberals in gated communities patrolled by armed response companies, or poor black people living next to crack houses in neighborhoods where police response is a joke?

This kind of racism flies right under the radar completely unnoticed every day, and now that Rod Wright has left the California Assembly, nobody’s going to be carrying the message. Rod, who used to represent the poorest Assembly District in the state, South Central Los Angeles, is an ardent gun advocate who could be counted on to raise these points against the left-wing’s anti-gun jihad.

The comparison of neighborhoods isn’t an exaggeration, either. I walked precincts for a candidate in West LA’s Woodland Hills, the area that elected Chicago 7 guy Tom Hayden and other anti-gun people. The homes typically sported warning signs about their Armed Response Services, and their cars did patrol the area. This is your classical low-crime area, therefore.

Now go down to South Central and you’ll see no Armed Response signs, and you will see crackhouses and street gangs. You’ll also most likely notice that calls to 911 don’t get exactly the same speedy service they do in Woodland Hills. So how do you protect your family against armed gang-bangers and drug lords in South Central? Why, you can read Gandhi and pray, but you’d better have a peace maker in the house. And if you don’t draw a six-figure income, it had better be inexpensive. That’s where Saturday Night Specials come in.

That name, by the way, is a subtle takeoff on “Niggertown Saturday Night”, and isn’t something a polite, Lott-bashing, Blumenthal-serving pub like Slate should be using, if they want to be even slightly consistent.

Speaking of left-wing racism, Larry Elder’s latest column is superb.

It looks like Trent Lott has the votes to remain as Senate Majority Leader, in which case the coup attempt by Blumenthal, Marshall, the ardently pro-Israel neocons, clueless blogoholics, et. al. will have failed. So Lott’s future is his to decide, and he’s probably ornery enough to remain where he is, at least long enough to rub the noses of his critics in his victory for a while. But supposing he wants to be gracious and let Bill Frist try his hand at the rudder, I’m guessing he would land as Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. The current ranking Reep member is Ted Stevens of Alaska, which may explain his support for Lott remaing Leader.

Appropriations would be a good gig – it’s the most powerful committee, and would enable him to reward his friends and punish his enemies. And since pork-barrel Klansman Bobby Byrd will be the Ranking Member and Fritz Hollings is also a member, whatever racism one wants to attribute to Lott won’t be remarkable in the company he’d be keeping. A further bonus is that Mississippi is a small and poor state, which won’t require a lot of pork to satisfy its appetites, leaving some for the rest of the country.

Given Lott’s nervousness with the media, it would probably be a much more fun gig that his current one. But he needs to time the switch to save face, like anybody would.

So I posted this little fantasy a couple days ago about how a certain close-to-Clinton Demo Party hack got the Pandergate scandal started, right? Well, just replace “James Carville” with “Sidney Blumenthal” and you’ve got the story reported in Sid’s Secret?Triumph: By Mickey?Kaus

Is it an accident that the Democratic bloggers all pounced on the Lott tidbit buried in “The Note”? Think that if you like! My instinct tells me there is a tenth planet at work here, a hidden force behind the blogosphere’s rising influence. What is that force? E-mailers. People who send out tips and clips to bloggers, who in turn blog about them to the world.

And what highly active e-mailer was at work in this case? I think I know, and Podhoretz might be disturbed to learn his identity. His email address begins with the letters “sb …” which Democratic insiders will immediately recognize as belonging to Sidney Blumenthal, the controversial journalist and former aide to President Bill Clinton.

Sid was definitely responsible, in part, for Noah’s early pick-up of the Lott gaffe in Slate — Slate editor Jacob Weisberg got a Sid mass e-mail that relayed the “Note” item, and Weisberg forwarded it to Noah. What about Marshall? “I don’t disclose my sources,” he told me this morning. A wise policy! But I smell Sid there too. The mysterious Atrios e-mails to say “I’ve never communicated with Blumenthal. The first I saw of it was on the Note.” My guess is Sid is batting two for three here. Not bad. (That’s assuming, of course, that Atrios isn’t Blumenthal!)

So now that we know who was really pulling the strings of the Blogoshere, one of the pullees, Andrew Sullivan, claims the Lott supporters are really doing Bloomie’s work:

And the way in which some Democrats are gleefully using this to advance the notion that the GOP is synonymous with bigotry will only provoke the Republican Party’s instinctual self-defense. And so the paleos could acquire partisan support and the split could deepen. Maybe this is all part of Sid Blumenthal’s master-plan. If so, then Ann Coulter is dancing to Sid’s tune perfectly.

This is the most disingenuous thing I’ve read on the web in a long time, but what do you expect from a so-called conservative who’s been caught doing the other side’s dirty work? Hysterically over-the-top emotional reaction, mainly.