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Remembering the Troops This Thanksgiving
Tweet Share on Facebook November 26, 2008 Comment (2)There will be turkey tomorrow, brought in under fire by helicopter, if necessary, and served with sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and gravy. The military does Thanksgiving well.
There will be phone calls home; a lot of messages sent on the Internet; much loneliness, some fear.
Back here in the states, in the neighborhoods that surround the big military bases in Texas or California or Georgia—or anyplace where a guard unit has been deployed—there will be parents showing kids a photograph of a foreign landscape, with mom or dad, in uniform, maybe in Kevlar, maybe with a weapon.
In other homes, it will be a holiday of piercing sadness. The empty space at dinner will belong to one of the 5,000 who never made it home.
They have been at it for seven years now, and there is no immediate end in sight. And, so far, we have not forgotten their bravery. They are beloved, and honored, by the folks they protect, and serve.
And if our efforts to welcome them home, to heal their wounds and comfort them, are yet imperfect, let's resolve, tomorrow, that we will keep on trying to make it better. And never to take their sacrifice for granted.
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Barack Obama’s Fundraising and the Small Donor Myth
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (96)Barack Obama got his campaign money through tapping a huge small-donor network, right? Mmm, maybe not.
The Campaign Finance Institute released a new study that tallied "small donors," whose repeated contributions made them medium- or large-size donors. And the study—partially—punctures the myth of the small Obama donor. And it leaves a couple of questions unanswered.
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Democrats Seem Unwilling to Deploy President-Elect Obama in Georgia Runoff
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (3)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Polls in the Georgia runoff continue to show incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss with about the same small lead over Democrat Jim Martin that he had in the November 4 election. The realclearpolitics.com average, rounded off, is Chambliss 51 percent to 46 percent. By way of perspective, Chambliss beat incumbent Democrat Max Cleland in the considerably more Republican year of 2002 by a 53 percent-46 percent margin. Democrats hope for a disproportionately large turnout of young and black voters, but Barack Obama, busy building an administration with an eye to bipartisan acceptability, seems so far unwilling to deploy the one political asset—personal campaigning by the president-elect—that seems most likely to spark such turnout. I imagine there's some behind-the-scenes arguments among Democrats about whether Obama should (pardon the expression) march through Georgia. Bill Clinton's campaigning for incumbent Wyche Fowler in the 1992 runoff didn't help Clinton's prestige but rather signaled something in the way of political weakness, because Republican challenger Paul Coverdell won. I'm guessing that Obama wants to avoid a repeat of this outcome. And I'm guessing, with some basis, that at least some incumbent Democratic senators would rather not have 59 Democratic colleagues, lest they be put on the record for imposing policies like the abolition of secret ballots in union recognition elections.
- Click here to read more by Michael Barone.
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Barack O-Boring. Where Has Sarah Palin Gone?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (16)Geez. Who would have thought that the first black president of the United States was going to be so...boring.
A sensible cost-effective way. Budget reform is not an option; it's a necessity. This isn't about big government or small government; it's about building a smarter government.
And today's typically excellent, well-qualified, smart-as-a-whip appointee: Peter Orszag of Brookings, Princeton, and the London School of Economics to be the White House budget director.
It looks like the president-elect knows what he's doing. He has certainly got the presidential podium thing down. He had some moments today, and it was great, earlier in the month, when he called himself a mutt. That was pretty funny.
And I suppose, in these troubled times, that smart and boring can be good.
It's not like I miss Sarah Palin.
Well, OK, maybe a little.
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General Motors and the Citigroup Bailout
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (6)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Alex Taylor of Fortune provides a very interesting long-term take on General Motors. The structure of the company has proved to be a liability for many decades, but Taylor makes it clear that different executives have had different effects—and that alternative paths might have been taken at several junctures. He also helps me to understand why the GM board has stuck with CEO Rick Wagoner, under whom the stock price has fallen from $75 to $3.
Eugene Ludwig, comptroller of the currency (that is, a leading bank regulator) during much of the Clinton administration, has a smart article on the Citigroup bailout and the need to quarantine toxic financial assets in an Resolution Trust Corp.-like structure, where vulture capitalists can buy them for low prices and try to get more value out of them. This was, as I understand it, the original thrust of the argument Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made for the TARP bill passed by Congress October 3, although by that time Paulson had apparently decided to rely on capital injections into the banks rather than purchase of toxic assets. We have to do both, Ludwig argues, and with the terms of the Citigroup rescue, we now are.
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Barack Obama Backtracks on Tax Hike Pledge
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (3)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
I should just like to point out to my inimitable, irreplaceable and sui generis Thomas Jefferson Street colleague, Michael Barone, the dean of political journalists, that apparently President-elect Obama has decided to drop his pledge of hiking taxes on upper-income earners. That's one reason I have more hope for the Obama administration than I did while Sen. Obama was running for president.
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Charles Rangel Looks Like a Tax Cheat
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (25)By Sam Dealey, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
This morning's papers delivered two good thumpings to Charlie Rangel, the good-time jolly-wolly Democrat who likes to crack wise from the chairman's seat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
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Henry Paulson’s Bush Administration Bailout
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (3)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Investors excited about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's decision to bail out Citigroup are thrilled to see their portfolios rise in value, but some news media are reporting that taxpayers shouldn't be as thrilled:
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Google, Privacy, and the Rest of Us
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (7)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The New York Times's David Carr had an interesting column yesterday on Google's appeal: how one is willing to fritter away bits of privacy in exchange for Google's services. (Put another way: No, GMail is not "free"; neither are the Google Maps, Google Calendar, or the host of other popular services—but instead of a cash transaction, you're bartering away bits of information about yourself.)
Why don't we view Google as a malevolent corporate overlord in the manner of, say, Microsoft? Part of it lies in the answer one Google executive gave to Carr: You can pick and choose which bits of Google-ware you want to use; Microsoft got in trouble when it tried to bind you to all its products by making them one seamless group. Google can be seamless or modular. And Google grins goofily while doing it. But more on this answer in a second.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear: I'm a fan of Google. It is successful because its products work well. I asked Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, to write for us on a regular basis (too busy, alas). And God bless it, Google is the source of most of the traffic on the Thomas Jefferson Street blog (you, dear reader, probably got here by Google search, didn't you?). I use GMail and Google Maps. But . . .
I still found the answers Carr got about privacy concerns and dealing with one megacorporation unsatisfying.
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Sally Quinn’s Heap of Faith
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (1)By Sam Dealey, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Saturday's Washington Post carried the latest installment of Sally Quinn's occasional humor columns about "faith." In truth, the pieces aren't supposed to be funny and have nothing to do with faith, but Quinn has a knack for being incongruous. The self-proclaimed Washington Insider combines a doyenne's nosiness with a teeny-bopper's vapidity to produce musings that are at once deeply shallow. Herewith her latest delight:
