Entries for December 2007

Pakistan needs time to heal before finding a successor to lead Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party. Now it seems Bhutto is speaking from the grave. Her family this weekend held a news conference announcing that her 19-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, was named chair of the party in her will. Her widowed husband will act as caretaker and cochair until Bilawal completes his studies at Oxford University in three years.

This might otherwise be well and fine, except that Bilawal is returning to Oxford to study and won't be running for prime minister. His father, Asif Ali Zardari, is way too tainted by corruption to run for office. He has served prison time on corruption charges. His nickname is "Mr. Ten Percent" for the way he is alleged to have demanded bribes from people seeking government contracts during Bhutto's second term as prime minister.

As I was paging through the newspaper during this holiday season, my pleasant reverie is interrupted by this disconcerting headline: "Americans' debt woes expanding."

The Associated Press reports:

Americans are falling behind on their credit card payments at an alarming rate, sending delinquencies and defaults surging by double-digit percentages in the last year and prompting warnings of worse to come. An Associated Press analysis of financial data from the country's largest card issuers also found that the greatest rise was among accounts more than 90 days in arrears. Experts say these signs of the deterioration of finances of many households are partly a byproduct of the subprime mortgage crisis and could spell more trouble ahead for an already sputtering economy.

While other developed nations offer subsidies to women willing to have babies, the United States apparently needs no such incentive. A new estimate from the National Center for Health Statistics shows that the U.S. fertility rate hit 2.1 last year, "the first time since shortly after the baby boom ended that the nation has reached the rate of births needed for a generation to replace itself."

Just last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin directed his parliament to essentially bribe women to have children, in the form of a 10-year program offering financial incentives and subsidies to women willing to bear offspring.

Hillary Clinton's ahead. No, it's Barack Obama. Mitt Romney's up. No, it's Mike Huckabee.

Media attention to the less-than-critical Iowa caucuses reminds me of the pithy saw: "The more that's said and done, the less that's said than done."

The Iowa caucuses are first. But they're not important. No offense meant to the Iowans who participate. They are solid citizens doing their political duty. The problem is they do not represent U.S. voters as a whole and so are hardly prescient when it comes to divining who will ultimately win each party's nomination.

Years ago, comedian Jackie Mason said that if we want to get Congress to balance the budget, we should "put 'em on commission." That idea went out of fashion in the Clinton years when there was a balanced budget. But now that we're back in the red, it's a concept we may want to revisit. And while we're at it, let's impose on all members of Congress the alternative minimum tax. Perhaps during their incessant haggling over how to fix that blood-red, hanging nail of a tax code debacle, they'll be more sensitive to its need for reduction.

Clearly the fact that some 23 million from among 90 million American taxpayers are about to get caught in its costly net next year hasn't prompted members to get going.

Much ado about nothing. That's my take on the insider brouhaha surrounding Bill Shaheen's resignation as cochair of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Shaheen, married to former New Hampshire Gov. and would-be Sen. Jean Shaheen, made a dumb remark to a newspaper reporter about Sen. Barack Obama's drug use history. Clinton apologized to Obama about it. And then Washington insiders (aka pundits) kept yapping about it, so Shaheen stepped down.

The real problem here is Clinton's loss of front-runner status. She's now tied in the polls in the early states with rival Obama or trailing in some polls in Iowa. With Obama having stolen Clinton's thunder, it looked petty for Shaheen to tell the Washington Post that Obama's admitted cocaine use as a young man could be used against him by Republicans in the general election if Obama got the democratic nomination.

If you happen to be walking behind presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee, you might see a small trail of blood and hear a scraping sound. That's because his knuckles are dragging.

This darling of the evangelical right has proven himself to be every bit the caveman we mainstreamers believe him to be. Of course, that's all the more likely to increase his appeal to his flock. But should he win the GOP presidential nomination (every Democrat's cosmic fantasy), it would make him disastrously unelectable in the general election.