Entries for December 2008

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

As a New Year's gift to the Democratic Party, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has appointed former state Attorney General and Comptroller Roland Burris to the U.S. Senate—although Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White says he won't sign the certificate of appointment. Senate Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, have said they wouldn't seat anyone Blagojevich appoints. But as I understand it, the Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that the House of Representatives couldn't bar Rep. Adam Clayton Powell from being seated. The reasoning was that Powell had been elected according to law and must be allowed to take his seat, even though under the Constitution there was no doubt that the House could vote, once he was seated, to expel him for misconduct. Is the Senate bound by different rules?

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Many writers, including me, have compared George W. Bush to Harry Truman. In my Creators Syndicate column for this week, I compare Barack Obama to Dwight Eisenhower. Apt?

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

I wholeheartedly endorse the position taken by this lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal urging George W. Bush to pardon Scooter Libby. Libby was a dedicated and hypercompetent public servant who was brought down by a prosecutor investigating a scandal that wasn't a scandal. The investigation purportedly was an attempt to discover who had told Robert Novak that Valerie Plame was a CIA "operative" (Novak's word). But prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew before the investigation began that the leaker was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. It is astonishing that Armitage and his friend and boss Secretary of State Colin Powell didn't inform Bush of this and allowed two of his top aides, Libby and Karl Rove, to be harassed by Fitzgerald for months and years.

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

In his townhall.com column, Hugh Hewitt cites my recent blogpost on Interior Secretary-designate Ken Salazar and raises the question of how Salazar will deal with polar bears. Yes, polar bears. As Hewitt points out in this column and as he has written on his blog at hughhewitt.com, environmental restrictionists want to use the threat that supposed global warming poses to polar bears as the basis of legal suits to stop economic development not just in Alaska but throughout the United States. This sounds outlandish, but it's true. No economic growth because it might raise temperatures in the Arctic, which might in turn reduce the number of ice floes that these attractive carnivores jump on.

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

The model for our current economic crisis should be, economic historian Scott Reynolds Nelson writes, not the Great Crash of 1929 but the Great Depression of 1873. Read it, and see if you're not convinced. And thanks to Tyler Cowen, who linked to this on his Marginal Revolution blog. In another interesting post, Cowen argues that fiscal stimulus has never revived the macroeconomy, anywhere, anytime.

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

Matt Labash has written a moving article on Detroit. Please read it all.

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Caroline Kennedy gets poor reviews on her quick trip to Upstate New York, where she met the mayor of Syracuse. The attitude of many people in New York City is probably: Who cares? Upstate is the boondocks. Kennedy can be elected to a full term because she'll carry New York City by a huge margin and can probably run about even in the four suburban counties—Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Rockland—all of which Barack Obama carried this year.

To which I say: not so quick.