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A Tribute to a Bush Appointee: Dana Gioia, Head of the National Endowment for the Arts
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2008 CommentNot many presidential appointees have served through most of the Bush presidency. (Not many will have served through his entire presidency, since the vetting and confirmation processes now take many months more than they should.) One who has is Dana Gioia, head of the National Endowment for the Arts. Please read this well-deserved tribute to Gioia's work from Thomas Hibbs of Baylor University. I have been particularly impressed by Gioia's efforts to encourage performances of Shakespeare's plays throughout the country.
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The Mumbai, India, Terrorist Attacks Remind Us That Bush Is Still in Charge
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2008 Comment (8)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
While Barack Obama has taken pains to say that we have only one president at a time, his rolling pronouncements about the economy have prompted some commentators to wonder whether we might have two. But the terrorist attacks in India starkly remind us that while George W. Bush may be forgotten, he's not yet gone—we do indeed have only one president right now, and it ain't Barack Obama. (Bonnie's assertion of his irrelevance notwithstanding.)
Obama can make economic pronouncements and will next week introduce his national security team, but it's still Bush who calls the shots on U.S. response to the incident. If you have any doubts about a lame duck president's power, recall George H. W. Bush committing U.S. troops to Somalia in December 1992, a mission that would have huge repercussions months later in the Clinton administration.
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The Taliban Is a Drug Cartel and Should Be Attacked as Such
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2008 Comment (8)By Sam Dealey, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
The latest report on Afghanistan's opium economy from the U.N.'s drug tsar, Antonio Maria Costa, only confirms what sensible people foretold six years ago: that the Wars on Drugs and Terror are inexorably linked.
Briefly, here's the latest: Overall, opium cultivation is down significantly across Afghanistan. Ninety-eight percent of the country's opium last year was sourced to seven provinces in the south and southwest where Taliban control is strongest. The Taliban raked in as much as $300 million from the opium trade last year, but supply vastly exceeds demand and prices are falling. As such, there's anecdotal evidence that, just as it did in 2001, the Taliban is purposely curtailing opium cultivation to drive up prices on its significant stockpiles.
As I've written before, the West's failure to aggressively battle Afghanistan's drug trade has enriched the Taliban, institutionalized corruption, impeded government control, and cemented the trafficking routes that also carry weapons and fighters. Handing out wheat seeds and fatwas only goes so far, and eradicating farmers' plots is only a token gesture that hits too far down the food chain. With the opium trade now more concentrated in the hands of those who matter, the time for an assertive interdiction campaign is long overdue.
As Costa remarked, "Opium production and prices can both be kept down by destroying high-value targets like drug markets, heroin labs, and trafficking convoys." Interdiction like that requires muscle, and the handful of DEA agents and their mentored Afghan units can't do it alone. NATO forces—and particularly the Pentagon—should drop their bureaucratic objections and get involved. Like it or not, the Taliban is a drug cartel, and to ignore that means fighting only half a war.
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Despite Charlie Rangel's Tax Problems, He Might Help Republicans Keep Bush's Tax Cuts
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2008 Comment (21)It's looking like House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel is going to face an ethics committee investigation for, among other things, failing to report income on rental properties and supporting a tax law change favoring a big donor to an institute named after Rangel. I'm sorry to see this. I like Charlie Rangel, I think he's a decent person and a charming pol, and I'm inclined to cut him some slack because he served in the Korean War and survived some of the most horrific fighting that American men in arms have ever faced. I think it would be sad to see him lose the chairmanship of Ways and Means for sins which are more venial than mortal, just as I thought it was sad that his predecessor as chairman, Dan Rostenkowski, lost not only his chairmanship but also his seat in Congress and, for a while, his freedom for some small bits of chicanery that were dwarfed by his public policy achievements, notably in the enactment of the tax reform bill of 1986.
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The Irrelevance of George W. Bush
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2008 Comment (21)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
President Bush has been rather irrelevant for the better part of the last year. The country is over and done with him and IMHO he will go down as the worst president in American history. Bush and Nero have much in common. They both fiddled as their empires went down. President Bush could have cut spending, he could have avoided launching a useless war, he could have run roughshod over Wall Street so risky mortgages weren't bundled into investment vehicles and sold to investors backed by nonexistent insurance. But he did not. Here we are, and will be paying for his feckless leadership.
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Thanks for the New York Times's Enduring Commitment to Journalism
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2008 Comment (8)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
This is why I love the New York Times.
Last week, as its stock dipped toward the price of a Sunday paper and the company slashed its dividend, it was reported that Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, 28, the son of the publisher, was returning to New York to go to work at the mother ship.
It was noteworthy news. What was especially revealing was where young Sulzberger was returning from.
One might think that, in these days when the newspaper industry is in a crisis, bleeding jobs and folding print editions, the Times would be grooming its future leaders by placing them with Google or Apple or Netflix—you know, some company that knows how to make money online.
Not the Times. Young Sulzberger will be leaving Portland, Ore., where he spent the last two or three years working at the Oregonian, a wonderful, quirky little newspaper known for its belief in the majesty of the lyrically written word.
It was important to the Sulzbergers not that Arthur be grounded in the manipulation of hedge funds or sales of consumer appliances but in journalism: in the hard, sacred work of bringing news to the world in honest and well-crafted dispatches, without fear or favor.
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One Word for New Auto Industry Business Plan: Green
Tweet Share on Facebook November 26, 2008 Comment (9)Congress should not go easy on GM if it does approve a bailout, but Congress has shown no sign of going easy on the auto giant. The idea of setting auto executives scurrying to produce a business plan is nothing short of brilliant. I've got suggestions for what such a plan should include. But first and foremost, it should be focused on one word and one word alone: green.
No more SUVs and gas guzzlers. Even in the truck division, GM could make its heavy-duty vehicles much more fuel efficient and price them so that they could only be purchased by commercial ventures. Private citizens who want to drive guzzlers should be priced out of the market and should instead be forced into low-mileage cars. GM got into this mess because instead of leading the consumer market in the right (read that: green) direction, it catered to America's sick addiction to gas guzzlers. Now's the time to lead, not cave in.
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Barack Obama's Church of Choice
Tweet Share on Facebook November 26, 2008 Comment (6)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
MSNBC is doing a segment right now about where the Obamas should worship, and are reporting that churches around town are angling to host the (sigh) first worshippers. Seriously? "What church?" is like "what school?"—barring a really crazy Obama decision (sending the kids to a Pakistani madrassa in the one case or bringing Jeremiah Wright to town for special Oval Office sermons in the other) people should lay off and let them make what are ultimately personal decisions without the benefit of excessive public scrutiny. As Sam said the other day: Butt out.
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If We Bail out Citicorp, Why Not Bail Out GM, Too?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 26, 2008 Comment (4)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
It will be years before we know whether government bailouts of financial and other institutions were a good idea or not. My Thomas Jefferson Street colleague Michael Barone has some crackling commentary on the topic.
While we're in the midst of bailing out the planet (or so it seems) one question comes to mind. If Citicorp, why not GM? Congress will hear from the big three automakers this coming Tuesday on whether to bail out the auto giants and their executives, meanwhile are devising a business plan to explain to members of the House and Senate how taxpayers' dollars will keep the companies, including GM, alive. But if the U.S. government is going to bail out Citicorp, the once-largest bank in the country, why not do the same for GM, the once-largest automaker in the world?
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has some riveting thoughts on the topic. In a commentary for Marketplace he notes Citicorp has lost a huge chunk of market valuation, which hurts the company's executives, shareholders and creditors. But if it went into Chapter 11, mutual fund shareholders and people holding Citicorp CDs would have their assets protected. If GM tanks, on the other hand:
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The Right Way to Address Charles Rangel's Scandals
Tweet Share on Facebook November 26, 2008 Comment (19)Yesterday's New York Times exposed yet another scandal involving Charles Rangel, the chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and Republicans are making hay of it.
In an apparent quid pro quo last year, Rangel killed a tax bill that would punish U.S. companies for relocating to lower-tax countries after a CEO pledged $1 million for the future "Charles B. Rangel School of Public Service" at the City College of New York. Previously, Rangel had supported the bill.
