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A Moving Article on Detroit, Home of the Big Three
Tweet Share on Facebook December 22, 2008 Comment (3)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Matt Labash has written a moving article on Detroit. Please read it all.
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Barack Obama's Failure to Appoint More Women to His Government Is Blunder
Tweet Share on Facebook December 22, 2008 Comment (5)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I've never been a quota kind of guy. Big organizations are soul-deadening even in the best of straits. Compulsory race and gender scales can make a workplace downright poisonous.
And so, as my Thomas Jefferson Street colleague Bonnie has raged these past few weeks about the lack of female faces in the top ranks of the incoming administration, I was tempted to pick a fight with her. Diversity, thy name is Obama, I thought. Give him time. Hey, wasn't Hillary named secretary of state?
Wisely, I held off. Because when the final round of cabinet appointees was announced on Friday and we got a look at the whole lineup, I had to say, Bonnie was right.
Five women in the 22 top positions of government? This is the best the Democrats can do? For what, arguably, is their most important constituency?
Gimme a break. What a blunder.
I hope Obama's team has been vetting female legal scholars. By shortchanging gals in the executive branch, he's just ratcheted up the pressure to name a woman—maybe two or three women—to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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On Caroline Kennedy: If She’s to Be Anything Like Clinton, Schumer, or Her Uncle RFK, She Better Look North
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2008 Comment (18)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.
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Barack Obama’s Cabinet Appointments: More Women Needed
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2008 Comment (29)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Now that the Obama cabinet selection process is about over, the final tally is close to what I expected it to be, and disappointing to a number of the president-elect's key constituencies. There is one cabinet-level appointment yet to be announced, out of 15 cabinet positions (filled with today's announcements) and at least seven cabinet-level appointments. From among these 22 coveted jobs, five appointees are women. Since women are 52 percent of the U.S. population and Obama's transition team promised a cabinet that "looked like America," one would have to say that, in terms of gender, Obama has failed.
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George W. Bush Looks Back at His Presidency
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2008 Comment (5)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I was there yesterday morning when George W. Bush appeared before an American Enterprise Institute audience at the Mayflower Hotel. Here is the video and here is the transcript. It was not the usual format. Bush and AEI's outgoing president, Chris DeMuth, were seated on the dais and spoke extemporaneously. Bush delivered some remarks, then DeMuth asked him questions; altogether, the program lasted for a little more than an hour.
One question DeMuth asked struck a chord with me, a question about Eliot Cohen's book Supreme Command. Cohen argues that civilian commanders in chief have to engage directly and even abrasively with their military commanders, to challenge and often to overrule them, in order to produce an effective strategy in war. He cites the examples of Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion. I thought Cohen's ideas were important and should be brought to the attention of the Bush White House. I wrote a review of the book for the Weekly Standard, and its editors made sure that multiple copies were sent to the White House. Word came out later that Bush had read the book. His initial response to DeMuth suggested that the book made little impression, although his further words suggested to me that he recalled the book and its argument but didn't want to answer the question directly. Instead, he launched into a riff I've heard before in meetings with journalists where I've been present.
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Bush Rescues the Automakers? Strange.
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2008 Comment (4)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
OMG! President Bush has actually done something good. Finally! You know what they say about stopped clocks. Early today the Bush administration agreed to bail out the two worst-off of the Big Three automakers:
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The Auto Bailout Shows Bush Is a Lame Duck With Power
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2008 Comment (4)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Bush's auto bailout was announced Friday morning. Who wants to be the Grinch the week before Christmas? Not George W. Bush. Yet at the same time, he did not give General Motors and Chrysler a blank check. He imposed conditions, including the bondholders' haircut and reducing labor costs to the levels of those of foreign automakers in the U.S. This presumably will require negotiations on the bondholders' haircut and the UAW's contract, and the March 31 deadline means it will be the Obama Treasury Department that will determine whether the conditions have been met. This sounds to me much like the approach taken by Sen. Bob Corker in the Senate, an approach that was vetoed by the UAW and therefore by Democratic senators. It shows that there is still serious power in a lame duck White House—but also that its work is only temporary and to some extent can be undone by the incoming administration. This looks less like a solution and more like a continuing story, with lots of twists and turns available. But evidently the dire cash positions of General Motors and Chrysler prevented them from holding out until January 20, when a new Democratic administration and Congress could have voted them the money without requiring any concessions from the UAW beyond those it made (and in fairness they're not trivial) in their fall 2007 contracts.
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Barack Obama, Gay Marriage and the Rick Warren Inaugural Fight: Letting Him Talk is Smart Politics
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2008 Comment (91)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Here is a bit of calculated political advice for gay Americans. You can take it or leave it.
I think you should drop the Rick Warren attacks.
Not that Rev. Warren, a professed Christian with a large religious audience, doesn't deserve to be taken to task for his un-Christian behavior. And that goes for the other mainstream faiths which, not content to dictate the definition of marriage within their churches, want to apply it to the rest of us.
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Deflation Might Just Be a Good Thing
Tweet Share on Facebook December 18, 2008 Comment (9)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Why is the whole economic world dreading deflation? Just today, Reuters reported:
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher said on Thursday that the U.S. central bank's duty now was to do everything it could to prevent deflation and it could worry about inflation later.
"Price pressures now are in the other direction," he said in response to a question at a World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth luncheon about potential future inflation. "We have to do everything we can to lift the economy up and prevent deflation from taking (hold)."
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Bush Leaves Obama a Financial Crisis, but Doesn’t Want to
Tweet Share on Facebook December 18, 2008 Comment (8)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
CNN just ran some video this morning of President Bush speaking at the American Enterprise Institute and of him responding to a question about the auto industry bailout. It was a surprisingly candid moment, and the president actually seemed to be at ease and reasoning thoughtfully—a rare view of him.
Bush shared his thoughts about whether or not to bail out the industry. His concerns included not allowing a ripple effect to hurt the average American (if the industry were to fail) and not throwing "good money after bad" if the government were to bail out the Big Three and it still went bankrupt at some not-too-distant point in the future.
His last concern, however, was the most unexpected. He said he had thought about what he would feel like if he were just becoming president now and inheriting the current financial mess. And he said he did not want to leave an economic catastrophe (my words, not his) behind. Good thinking! Just about eight years too late.
