Category: Politics

It seems that I have to scoop the un-scoopable Andrew Sullivan on his appearance on Washington Journal with Christopher Hitchens. The boys were clearly the worse for wear owing to the unseemly hour at which the show is shot, but they managed to keep a stiff upper lip and soldier on. The most significant event was Hitch’s admission that he’s no longer a socialist, a question that host Brian Lamb has been taunting him with for some ten years now. He equivocated a bit, declaring that it’s not really possible for anyone to be a socialist these days since there’s no world-wide socialist movement, no prospect of one in the future, and no coherent socialist critique of capitalism, so it’s not really a personal choice.

The only areas of disagreement between the two were religion and health care; Sully’s a Roman Catholic and Hitch is an “anti-theist.” They traded the standard strawmen on this question in a particularly amusing way. Sully’s big on the free-market system of health care we have in the United States, and credits it for the anti-HIV drugs that are keeping him alive, while Hitch is nostalgic for the National Health, which was working fine twenty years ago when he left England.

Finally, the call-in audience was true to form for Complaint-Span: loony as all get-out. It was a fun show.

Fed Status for Fetus Spurs Debate

Abortion rights supporters said the change could help lay legal groundwork establishing the rights of a fetus and lead to a reversal of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade (news – web sites) decision that legalized abortion.

“It undermines the whole premise of Roe v. Wade by giving legal status to a fetus from the moment of conception,” said Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center.

The left’s position on abortion is inconsistent with its position on capital punishment and its alleged concern “for the children,” as their outrage over pre-natal care and punishment of fetal murder clearly shows. Tommy Thompson and the administration have brought these inconsistencies to the surface, and helped the poor at the same time.

What Mr. Bush did with that speech Tuesday night was akin to Chuck Yeager strapping the entire Democratic Party into an X-1 and taking the whole lot of them up to 80,000 feet at Mach 2. They were in ideological air they’d never breathed before.

“Let’s roll,” the president announces. First he talks about hunting down thousands of human time bombs. Then he heads to North Korea, Iran and Iraq and rolls them through a 360 around the “axis of evil.” About now, Tom Daschle’s smooth smile is touching the back of his neck. But he won’t stop; now the president is saying “I will not wait on events while dangers gather.” Sweat is running down Joe Biden’s legs. Teddy shifts, thinking his seat in the House is starting to come apart; surely this guy is going to ease off.

Instead, the one-year president invokes History itself, which “has called America and our allies to action,” and says that “it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.” Barbara Boxer thinks her head is being pulled through the Capitol dome. A voice inside Hillary’s helmet is saying, “We’re going to survive this; see if you can move your hands and applaud.”

Finally, the speech ends, the party is back on terra firma, and Mr. Gephardt makes a few remarks on what he’s just experienced. He says: “Our values call for protecting Social Security, and not gambling it away on the stock market. Our values call for helping patients and older Americans, not just big HMOs and pharmaceutical companies. Our values . . .”

Listening to this, I had one thought: The Democratic Party is shrinking. Maybe not in numbers; it got half the popular vote in 2000. But ideologically, culturally, in the ways a political organization should keep its politics alive and wired to the turbines of national life, the Democratic party is winding down.

Read it all in: Opinion Journal – it speaks for itself.

Here’s another link on Daniel Scotto, the analyst fired by Paribas for accurately predicting Enron’s collapse Conflict for Dain analyst? (1/30/2002)

And Daniel Scotto, a bond analyst for BNP Paribas, told the Wall Street Journal that he was forced out because he told clients in August that Enron securities “should be sold at all costs and be sold now.” The company said Scotto’s departure was unrelated to his research.

Now contrast Scotto with Mark Easterbrook of Dain:

He not only termed Enron a buying opportunity on Oct. 23 — a day after the SEC request became public knowledge — he also was among the last analysts to downgrade Enron’s stock, issuing an “underperform” on Nov. 29 with the stock trading at 61 cents.

The possibility that Easterbrook may have been less than objective in his assessment of Enron’s stock is easy to understand.

Dain, of course, was one of Enron’s underwriters. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the scandal at Enron isn’t so much about politics or accounting as it is about conflicts of interest on the part of brokerage houses.

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.