Politics: Onward from New Hampshire

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Has Cheney not completely divested?

Besides, as I understand the gov't rules, having a stock, and then putting it in a trust designated as "blind" does not make the trust blind for purposes of that stock, only for assets acquired subsequent to the trust's creation.

It is my understanding that Cheney's divestment from Halliburton was going to take some time. I don't know if it has been completed or not, but it wasn't happening overnight.

Someone correct me if I am wrong, since I think the source for this is idle chatter at a cocktail party.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Has Cheney not completely divested?

Besides, as I understand the gov't rules, having a stock, and then putting it in a trust designated as "blind" does not make the trust blind for purposes of that stock, only for assets acquired subsequent to the trust's creation.

That's not my understanding, but I could be wrong. As I understand it, the "blindness" is judged by who has voting and dispositive control over the stock (i.e., for you left brain types, the power to vote and control timing of sales).

[edited for grammer]

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
What is acknowledged at this point by Halliburton is that they overbilled the governmnet, and what has been suggested by others is that favoritism has been shown by governmental officials because of some past special relationships (and, it is expected, some large equity positions in certain blind trusts). But no one has shown the latter yet, at least that I am aware of.

Wait, I thought this had been cleared up and the only pending allegations was kickbacks to individual employees?

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
It is my understanding that Cheney's divestment from Halliburton was going to take some time. I don't know if it has been completed or not, but it wasn't happening overnight.

Someone correct me if I am wrong, since I think the source for this is idle chatter at a cocktail party.

I suspect you are right. Otherwise, he would take a substantial hit by dumping all of his holdings at the market at the same time (assuming they were substantial), and the company's price would drop.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

According to the AP, Dean has demoted campaign manager Joe Trippi -- who then quit -- and has replaced him with "a longtime associate of former Vice President Al Gore."*

This sort of thing worked for Kerry, right?

Wonkette's take:

• So Dean has told the architect of his instantly legendary grassroots success, Joe Trippi, to get out -- which we sort of understand. The Scream and whatnot. The losing. But here's the funny part: Dean is replacing him with Gore's advisors. Because, uhm, yeah, they did such a great job for Gore. To review: Joe Trippi helped bring Dean from being an obscure governor of a tiny state to a national front-runner. Al Gore's advisers managed to fumble one of the surest bets in campaign history.
  
  Dean could have done worse only if he had tapped Scalia and Rehnquist to be his campaign managers.

* Oh, that Al Gore.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
According to the AP, Dean has demoted campaign manager Joe Trippi -- who then quit -- and has replaced him with "a longtime associate of former Vice President Al Gore."*

This sort of thing worked for Kerry, right?

Wonkette's take:

• So Dean has told the architect of his instantly legendary grassroots success, Joe Trippi, to get out -- which we sort of understand. The Scream and whatnot. The losing. But here's the funny part: Dean is replacing him with Gore's advisors. Because, uhm, yeah, they did such a great job for Gore. To review: Joe Trippi helped bring Dean from being an obscure governor of a tiny state to a national front-runner. Al Gore's advisers managed to fumble one of the surest bets in campaign history.
  
  Dean could have done worse only if he had tapped Scalia and Rehnquist to be his campaign managers.

* Oh, that Al Gore.

I don't know Neel. I know Trippi from past campaigns, and frankly thought he was way over his head on this campaign. I also hadn't realized until now that he was being credited as the architect -- if so, it is the best work he has ever done.

As an operative, Trippi is not even close to Whouley or some of the other Kerry campaign pros. Note that Gore did have some great people on staff - he just put most of them in the wrong positions. At the end of the day, Gore had some of the best hands out there answering to some second-stringers.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

This post (internal links not duplicated) from Brad DeLong's blog captures a lot of how I feel about the Bush Administration:

Jeffrey Frankel (and Others, Including Me) Lose It and Find Ourselves Off in the Alpha Quadrant

Jeffrey Frankel, my friend and high Clinton administration economic policymaker, is bitter and angry. He's not Joe Stiglitz or Ken Rogoff angry: he's not out there in the Gamma Quadrant. But he is definitely out there: the Alpha Quadrant, perhaps.

What is he bitter and angry at? The Bush administration, of course. Why? Because:

• The [Bush] Administration has flubbed its [task of]... international leadership... there were alternative feasible policies that would have made a lot more sense than what they have done... across the board of issue areas: trade, management of crises in emerging markets, management of the dollar, fiscal policy, energy policy, and so on.

The fact that the Bush administration flubbed it in a critical situation--for the post-911 situation was and is a critical one--compounds the seriousness of the Bush administration's policy crimes:

• The war on terrorism should have presented George W. Bush with the same opportunity for international leadership [as] the Cold War... the American people were primed to be told what difficult steps would have to be taken... what economic sacrifices.... It would have been relatively easy after September 11 to explain to the American public why we needed to free up imports of textiles and apparel from Pakistan... why we needed to... [tax] fossil fuels to reduce dependence; why we needed to support multilateral negotiations.

Jeffrey Frankel is not, by nature, a bitter or a partisan person. Yet today a huge number of people who--like me--do not think of themselves as by nature bitter or partisan neverthless find that we are bitter, very bitter, and have become partisan, very partisan. Consider that back before the George W. Bush administration even a figure like Paul Krugman was careful to stay even-handed: to balance a criticism of the supply-siders in the Republican Party with one of the strategic traders in the Democratic Party, to balance a condemnation of the Republican establishment for thinking that boosting corporate profits solves all ills with a condemnation of the Democratic establishment for thinking that neoliberal reforms in developing countries solve all their ills.

Why do so many of us who worked so hard on economic policy for the Clinton administration, and who think of ourselves as mostly part of a sane and bipartisan center, find the Bush administration and its Republican congressional lapdogs so... disgusting, loathsome, contemptible? Why are we so bitter?

After introspection, the answer for me at least as clear. We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn't ignore it, didn't shrug our shoulders, didn't assume that it would be someone else's problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all--just for the hell of it. Reading Suskind's The Price of Loyalty shows just how casual and unthinking it was. As the Economist writes:

• On the other side of the Atlantic, the budget is even less balanced--thanks in part to three rounds of tax cuts enacted since President George Bush took office--and the controversy just as bitter.... Paul O'Neill, Mr Bush's former treasury secretary... laments Mr Bush's style of leadership (disengaged), his case for invading Iraq (disingenuous) and his fiscal record (dismal). The last of those flaws has excited the attention of the International Monetary Fund, which gave a warning in a report last week that America's deficits, if left unchecked, posed a gathering threat to America and the world. Mr O'Neill says that when he raised his concerns about fiscal profligacy with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, he was told "deficits don't matter." The IMF insists they do. The decade of deficits that lies ahead for America will put upward pressure on interest rates, crowd out private investment and erode longer-term productivity growth...

And every single senior Republican economic policy appointee comes out of a look back at the past three years looking very badly. X fails to organize meetings so that the long-run budgetary consequences of short-run policy moves are properly considered. Y pirouettes in midair and transforms from a deficit hawk into a deficit dove so as not to offend White House Media Affairs. Z lowballs the interest rate effects of higher deficits--and manages not to talk about the savings and investment effects at all. W mutters in the privacy of his own office about the importance of maintaining a surplus--but doesn't have the nerve to say "Boo!" to a goose (let alone to George W. Bush) once he steps outside his office door. V remains silent while the clown show that is the Bush economic policy process--a process he cannot view with equanimity--rolls forward. U cuts his own agency staff off at the knees and shows no interest in the very important and interesting work on the long-run fiscal options that they have done. Outsiders like R who assured me back in the fall of 2000 that Bush understood and would tackle the long-run problems of funding entitlements and the social-insurance state manage not to emit a public peep of complaint. Q talks about how much the president wants to reduce the deficit without daring to put his own position on the line within the administration by demanding that words like "deficits are bad" be accompanied by an actual plan to reduce the deficit. Every one. Every single last one.

And it is worth pointing out that it's not just the economic policymakers. The same holds true of all the other executive-branch Republican political appointees: defense, international affairs, science policy, social policy. Is there anybody (with the exceptions of John Donaldson and Mark McClellan) who has emerged or well emerge from this administration like a reputation? And it's all the Republican senators and members of congress as well. People who used to have some claim to respect--paging Pete Domenici, anyone?--have simply rolled over and played dead.

"Is George W. Bush the worst president ever?" is the question that George Akerlof asks. A fish rots from the head, yes. But this fish is rotted all the way down to the tail.

So we sit here out in the Alpha Quadrant, bitter.

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by bilmore
No. That was Kerrey, Neb Senator.

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Oh my. How embarassing.

Now, don't feel bad. If you had erroneously accused John Kerry of having committed Bob Kerrey's war crimes* and whatnot, then you should feel bad. {Thanks, Wonkette!}

*NY Daily News. Scroll to bottom.

[Atticus Grinch]

"It turns out we were all wrong," he said, "and that is most disturbing."

In his evidence to the Senate armed services committee, Mr Kay repeated his assertion that there were no illegal weapons stockpiles in Iraq.

"I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarised chemical weapons there," he said.

BBC. I chose this because I like the way they spell "WMD programmes" and whatnot, and because it would give us something to talk about if the BBC reporting is biased in favor of, um, David Kay?

ETA: I just realized --- we were "all" wrong? There's a good chunk of the world, and a huge swath of people here in the U.S., who are saying speak for yourself, Kemosabe. Hans Blix, for example, was not "all" wrong.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone_Slothrop
This post (internal links not duplicated) from Brad DeLong's blog captures a lot of how I feel about the Bush Administration:

Jeffrey Frankel (and Others, Including Me) Lose It and Find Ourselves Off in the Alpha Quadrant

Jeffrey Frankel, my friend and high Clinton administration economic policymaker, is bitter and angry. He's not Joe Stiglitz or Ken Rogoff angry: he's not out there in the Gamma Quadrant. But he is definitely out there: the Alpha Quadrant, perhaps.

What is he bitter and angry at? The Bush administration, of course. Why? Because:

• The [Bush] Administration has flubbed its [task of]... international leadership... there were alternative feasible policies that would have made a lot more sense than what they have done... across the board of issue areas: trade, management of crises in emerging markets, management of the dollar, fiscal policy, energy policy, and so on.

The fact that the Bush administration flubbed it in a critical situation--for the post-911 situation was and is a critical one--compounds the seriousness of the Bush administration's policy crimes:

• The war on terrorism should have presented George W. Bush with the same opportunity for international leadership [as] the Cold War... the American people were primed to be told what difficult steps would have to be taken... what economic sacrifices.... It would have been relatively easy after September 11 to explain to the American public why we needed to free up imports of textiles and apparel from Pakistan... why we needed to... [tax] fossil fuels to reduce dependence; why we needed to support multilateral negotiations.

Jeffrey Frankel is not, by nature, a bitter or a partisan person. Yet today a huge number of people who--like me--do not think of themselves as by nature bitter or partisan neverthless find that we are bitter, very bitter, and have become partisan, very partisan. Consider that back before the George W. Bush administration even a figure like Paul Krugman was careful to stay even-handed: to balance a criticism of the supply-siders in the Republican Party with one of the strategic traders in the Democratic Party, to balance a condemnation of the Republican establishment for thinking that boosting corporate profits solves all ills with a condemnation of the Democratic establishment for thinking that neoliberal reforms in developing countries solve all their ills.

Why do so many of us who worked so hard on economic policy for the Clinton administration, and who think of ourselves as mostly part of a sane and bipartisan center, find the Bush administration and its Republican congressional lapdogs so... disgusting, loathsome, contemptible? Why are we so bitter?

After introspection, the answer for me at least as clear. We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn't ignore it, didn't shrug our shoulders, didn't assume that it would be someone else's problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all--just for the hell of it. Reading Suskind's The Price of Loyalty shows just how casual and unthinking it was. As the Economist writes:

• On the other side of the Atlantic, the budget is even less balanced--thanks in part to three rounds of tax cuts enacted since President George Bush took office--and the controversy just as bitter.... Paul O'Neill, Mr Bush's former treasury secretary... laments Mr Bush's style of leadership (disengaged), his case for invading Iraq (disingenuous) and his fiscal record (dismal). The last of those flaws has excited the attention of the International Monetary Fund, which gave a warning in a report last week that America's deficits, if left unchecked, posed a gathering threat to America and the world. Mr O'Neill says that when he raised his concerns about fiscal profligacy with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, he was told "deficits don't matter." The IMF insists they do. The decade of deficits that lies ahead for America will put upward pressure on interest rates, crowd out private investment and erode longer-term productivity growth...

And every single senior Republican economic policy appointee comes out of a look back at the past three years looking very badly. X fails to organize meetings so that the long-run budgetary consequences of short-run policy moves are properly considered. Y pirouettes in midair and transforms from a deficit hawk into a deficit dove so as not to offend White House Media Affairs. Z lowballs the interest rate effects of higher deficits--and manages not to talk about the savings and investment effects at all. W mutters in the privacy of his own office about the importance of maintaining a surplus--but doesn't have the nerve to say "Boo!" to a goose (let alone to George W. Bush) once he steps outside his office door. V remains silent while the clown show that is the Bush economic policy process--a process he cannot view with equanimity--rolls forward. U cuts his own agency staff off at the knees and shows no interest in the very important and interesting work on the long-run fiscal options that they have done. Outsiders like R who assured me back in the fall of 2000 that Bush understood and would tackle the long-run problems of funding entitlements and the social-insurance state manage not to emit a public peep of complaint. Q talks about how much the president wants to reduce the deficit without daring to put his own position on the line within the administration by demanding that words like "deficits are bad" be accompanied by an actual plan to reduce the deficit. Every one. Every single last one.

And it is worth pointing out that it's not just the economic policymakers. The same holds true of all the other executive-branch Republican political appointees: defense, international affairs, science policy, social policy. Is there anybody (with the exceptions of John Donaldson and Mark McClellan) who has emerged or well emerge from this administration like a reputation? And it's all the Republican senators and members of congress as well. People who used to have some claim to respect--paging Pete Domenici, anyone?--have simply rolled over and played dead.

"Is George W. Bush the worst president ever?" is the question that George Akerlof asks. A fish rots from the head, yes. But this fish is rotted all the way down to the tail.

So we sit here out in the Alpha Quadrant, bitter.

What a piece of shit time-waster article from a Democratic lackey looking for a job. His comments about Reagan show he's always been partisan. The bitterness comes from the Ass Party not being in power

Ty, you owe me the last 2 minutes of my life back

[SlaveNoMore]

Of these Dem candidates, have any of them actually mentioned a single program for cutting government spending?

Because all I hear them doing is kicking around new entitlement programs and INCREASED spending. Now granted, they want to raise all of our taxes. But clearly, this alone wont pay for their new programs?

Lucy, 'splain?

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
This post (internal links not duplicated) from Brad DeLong's blog captures a lot of how I feel about the Bush Administration:

I was reading this with mild interest until I came across this:

After introspection, the answer for me at least as clear. We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc.

End of discussion for me.

Edited to Add:

Should have scolled and read Slave's post before posting. My bad.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Lucy, 'splain?

anyone who ghonna vote for them should see a phisiakiatrist.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
[ There's a good chunk of the world, and a huge swath of people here in the U.S., who are saying speak for yourself, Kemosabe. Hans Blix, for example, was not "all" wrong.

then the UN imposed sanctions just to flex its muscle. Atticus, it is a more vile institution that I previously could have imagined.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop

• The war on terrorism should have presented George W. Bush with the same opportunity for international leadership [as] the Cold War... the American people were primed to be told what difficult steps would have to be taken... what economic sacrifices.... It would have been relatively easy after September 11 to explain to the American public why we needed to free up imports of textiles and apparel from Pakistan... why we needed to... [tax] fossil fuels to reduce dependence; why we needed to support multilateral negotiations.

so Bush "failed" because he didn't turn into a Democrat? Someone help me.
does it matter, given how stupid most of america is, still voting for him, the worst President ever and all?