The Yin Blog

Is this a good idea?

President Obama is calling for more school for kids -- a longer calendar, and a longer school day.  One can only assume that he is speaking aspirationally, as opposed to setting a new federal agenda.  Then again, maybe the Commerce Clause is broad enough to allow Congress to regulate public school hours and calendars.  After all, poorly educated kids make for poor workers, which when aggregated makes for a less effective national workforce, which impacts the national economy.  Oh, wait.

Is this a good idea?  There's something not quite right about our secondary school educational system, since we have the best universities in the world, but our high school students don't do very well in comparisons against our peer nations.  But running the school day to 5 pm seems a bit much.  The longer calendar makes more sense to me, at least if we're talking about primary school -- as it is, this last summer, we sent my older son (who just started Kindergarten) to a bunch of summer daycamps (nature, science, zoo, safety, etc.) for the enrichment and educational value.  I could see how more school would fill that role.

Sotomayor, Supreme Court nominees, and a suggestion for Obama

If the Senate Judiciary Committee vote is any indication of things to come, it looks like Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed handily, but with nowhere near the commanding votes that Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Breyer got (well over 90%).  Instead, it'll probably be something like 65-35, with a few Republicans breaking ranks to vote to confirm, but most voting against her.

I think that's too bad, as she's plainly well-qualified to be a Supreme Court justice.  It's especially good that, unlike the rest of the Court, she actually has trial-level experience, not just as a former district court judge, but also a federal prosecutor.  Perhaps someone with trial-level experience will keep the Court from issuing opinions like Clinton v. Jones that exhibit an alarming degree of cluelessness about the way modern litigation works.  However, as many have noted, President Obama can hardly complain if Sotomayor gets a bunch of "no" votes, as he himself voted against John Roberts and Samuel Alito even though both of them were well-qualified as well.

My view is that elections matter, and the President is entitled to a large degree of deference in his selection of Supreme Court nominees.  If the President nominates someone who's simply not up to the job (e.g., Harriet Miers, not because she hadn't been a judge or "only" went to SMU law, but because she couldn't even answer the Senate's questionnaire intelligently), the Senate should feel free to vote down the nominee.  And someone who doesn't have the right judicial temperment could also be voted down.  But pure ideological disagreement shouldn't be a reason to vote against the nominee.

There's a way for Obama to make a grand gesture -- he could publicly say that his votes against Roberts and Alito (especially the former) were mistakes.  He might even apologize to them.  By owning up to a mistake, he could began to break the cycle of increasing partisanship in Supreme Court confirmation votes.

Sarah Palin and "Prison Break"

For some reason, when I first saw that Sarah Palin was quitting as Governor of Alaska, I wondered if it was an instance of life imitating art -- specifically, "Prison Break"'s season 2, episode 19 ("Sweet Caroline"), in which President Caroline Reynolds surprisingly announces her resignation.  Why?  She was being blackmailed by both the Company and protagonist Michael Scofield, and resigning was the only way out of her dilemma.

Of course, I don't really think this, but the hasty announcement does make you wonder . . . .

Waterboarding, foreigners, and Americans abroad

The other morning, I was listening to a discussion on "On Point" on NPR about the release of the formerly classified torture memos, and one of the program guests -- I think it was George Washington law prof Jonathan Turley -- asserted that if another country had treated Americans the way we treated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah (i.e., allegedly waterboarding them a combined 200+ times), we would be outraged.

I'm not so sure.

Just to be clear, I'm not intending in this blog post to defend how we treated those two al Qaeda members, nor am I intending to argue that waterboarding is not torture.  I'm simply exploring the counterfactual offered above.

Suppose that a foreign country captured two American citizens that it claimed had planned and executed a terrorist attack that killed more than 3000 persons.  And then for interrogation or retributive purposes, that country had subjected the two Americans to 200 instances of waterboarding.  Would we jump so fast to defend our fellow citizens?

Maybe.  But the closest analogy I can think of is the 1994 caning punishment inflicted on American teenager Michael Fay in Singapore.  Fay had been charged with vandalizing a number of vehicles, and after pleading guilty, he was sentenced to six caning strokes across the butt.  President Clinton asked Singapore officials for clemency of some sort, but all the Singapore government would do was reduce it to four caning strokes.  Although President Clinton decried the punishment as extreme, a significant percentage of Americans, as AsiaWeek reported at the time:

But according to a string of polls, Fay's caning sentence struck a chord in the U.S. Many Americans fed up with rising crime in their cities actually supported the tough punishment. Singapore's embassy in Washington said that the mail it had received was overwhelmingly approving of the tough sentence. And a radio call-in survey in Fay's hometown of Dayton, Ohio, was strongly pro-caning.

Of coure, caning is not the same as waterboarding, and Fay did receive due process in the sense of a judicial proceeding, so the two situations aren't exactly alike.  However, my point is that many Americans appeared to see Fay as getting what he deserved according to the laws of the country in which he was then residing.  In the same way, I'm not sure that all Americans would protest if another country were to punish Americans for pretty heinous acts in ways that would offend our laws and constitution.

Moving to Canada to escape the Republicans?

This is a pretty funny "Canadian commercial" for people who say they're going to leave the United States if a Republican wins the White House.

Tim Russert, RIP

I never watched "Meet the Press," but I've been impressed with Tim Russert's appearances on MSNBC during the primary coverage.  I was heading out to fill the car's gas tank (heh, "only" $3.89/gallon) when I heard about Russert's death by heart attack.  In my view, it's a big loss for political news junkies.  He was a really good interviewer and analyst.

Any relatively young death is unfair, of course, but what's especially unfair here is that Russert won't get to see the end result of the 2008 election.

HRC's "assassination" comment

Olbermann pretty much says it all:

You have to wonder, at some point, does she violate enough core values of Democrats that they'll break free of party loyalty and actually consider whether they'd "win" if she took the White House?

Who's the real "4 more years of George Bush"?

I hear the constant refrain from the Clinton and Obama campaigns that John McCain can't be allowed to win, because that will be just 4 more years of the Bush Administration.  It's not an implausible argument, given that McCain has started to repudiate some of his past views on taxes, for example.

However . . . this is focusing purely on political issues.  Now, I'm not downplaying the importance of issues, since for many people, such things as Supreme Court appointments, tax policy, Iraq, and so on are key points.  But I can't escape feeling that on a procedural level, the candidate who would represent 4 more years of the Bush Administration is . . .  Hillary Clinton.

How can I say that?  Let me explain.

Obviously, I don't mean that Clinton, if President, would duplicate Bush's policies.  Rather, what I mean is that she strikes me as most likely to replicate the Bush Administration's approach to dealing with the opposition and the public: a malleable understanding of truth and reality; and questionable judgment about and excessive devotion to blindly loyal subordinates.

Malleable understanding of truth and reality

As far as I can tell, nothing ever matters except what the Clinton campaign says at this very moment; certainly, not anything that was said in the past by any member of the Clinton campaign.  The best example of this is the "3 am ad" that Clinton ran against Obama in the days leading up to the primaries in Texas and Ohio.  The ad asked voters to consider whether the person in White House would be up to answering the phone at 3 am to deal with a national security crisis. 

The suggestion here is that Obama is not ready, and the country would suffer if he were the President.  Yet, in 2004, Bill Clinton, when campaigning on behalf of John Kerry, told a crowd that if one candidate was selling fear (i.e., Bush) and one was selling hope (i.e., Kerry), you better vote for the one selling hope(!). 

Is this at all consistent?  Of course not, because all that matters is the present, and in the present, Clinton needed to sell fear.

There are so many other examples of this kind of malleable, "reality is what we say it is" attitude, including:

She admits here that she said some things she knew not to be true.  Why?  If she's willing to lie about something this trivial, what else would she lie about that matters to her?  What is especially galling about the Bosnia sniper lie is that it was so brazen -- as if to say that the public is a bunch of dupes who wouldn't possibly find out the truth.

Another example of Clinton's reality: Florida and Michigan.  As we know all too well, the DNC voted to strip Florida and Michigan of its delegates as punishment for those states' decisions to violate party rules "by moving up their contest dates before Feb. 5."  Clinton pledged with the other candidates not to campaign in those states.  Yet, after she "won" those states, she started calling for the results to be counted and the delegates to be included.

What rational person would conclude that the results would be meaningful?  (To be fair, she later called for some sort of re-vote, and it may be that the Obama campaign obstructed any effort to come up with an acceptable re-vote, but that is a different issue.)  This is especially true in Michigan, where Obama's name wasn't even on the ballot!

Questionable judgment about and excessive devotion to blindly loyal subordinates

One of the key complaints that I've heard about the Bush Administration is that it made mistakes in appointing people like former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, and of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.  It compounded those mistakes by not listening to "good" appointments, like former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the generals who advised the President not to invade Iraq, at least not without committing 500,000 troops.

Let's look at what we know of Clinton.  I've already blogged before about Clinton and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, so I won't repeat what I said except to say that I think so little of the association that it was a major motivating factor in leading me to change my support initially from Clinton to Obama.

Then there's her former campaign director, Mark Penn, who was able to keep his day job as the CEO of his lobbying firm, Burston-Marsteller.  Of course, he was fired when it became known that, while Clinton was opposing a free trade deal with Colombia, Penn was representing Colombia in that same deal.  Why didn't Clinton think that it was a problem to have Penn continuing to work as a lobbyist while running her campaign?  Heck, even Dick Cheney resigned as the CEO of Halliburton!

Is this an example of what her "35 years of experience" has led her to conclude is an acceptable arrangement without a conflict of interest?!?

Of course, she didn't even fire Penn -- he remains on her campaign as an advisor!

Speaking of questionable judgment about subordinates, I have to end with this observation.  We have a mess in Iraq in part because Bush did not listen to the generals who warned him about invading.  Lesson: military commanders might know what they are talking about.

Redux:

Hillary Clinton declared Thursday she will begin withdrawing troops from Iraq within 60 days of becoming president, regardless of what her military advisers say about the situation on the ground at the time.

True, invading and withdrawing are different.  But the bald-faced willingness to dismiss what military commanders have to say evinces a similar attitude of disrespect toward the professionals and a ruthless desire to advance one's own agenda regardless of the facts.

***

Again, I realize that political policies matter to people, and there would obviously be differences between Hillary Clinton and John McCain on a range of issues.  But that is focusing on what the President does, and ignoring how the President will do it.  Both are important, and when it comes to replicating how the Bush Administration is perceived to do things, I see the danger as coming from Hillary Clinton more than John McCain.

Howard Dean to me: The Democrats are doing the Republicans' job

Well, that's not exactly what he said:

We can't let John McCain get away with it.A recent report by the Associated Press has revealed that the Republican National Committee is pulling together a joint fund with John McCain called the "Victory Committee." Its goal is to raise $120 million -- which they're sure to spend trying to destroy our candidates.

We've seen this before -- we know they're already launching attacks on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Hmm, you mean, Senator McCain might use the money to launch an attack:

- "in which several unidentified people described as [] supporters talk about how insulted they felt by what Obama said" about rural voters being bitter and clinging to guns and religion?

- criticizing Clinton as a flip-flopping on NAFTA: "Here's what you can't do. You can't spend the better part of two decades campaigning for NAFTA and PNTR for China, and then come here to Pennsylvania, and tell the steelworkers you've been with them all along.  You can't say you are opposed to the Colombia Trade deal, while your key strategist is working for the Colombian government to get the deal passed"?

- criticizing Obama as having "condescending views of Americans living in small towns"?

- mocking Clinton as pretending to be "Annie Oakley," "running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment"?

- calling Obama "out of touch" with mainstream Americans and an "elitist"?

Heck, if I were a Republican (which I'm not), I don't think I'd contribute a penny to the GOP right now.  Why would I, when Clinton and Obama are the ones making these attacks on each other?

Experience to be President

If Hillary Clinton's main claim to the Democratic nomination over Barack Obama is her greater "experience" (in what?), then can we safely assume that she also believes that the country made a mistake in electing her husband in 1992?

After all, Bill Clinton had only been governor of a small state, while his opponent:

(1) was the sitting President of the United States -- itself no doubt the best experience for being President of the United States;

(2) had been a United States Ambassador to the United Nations;

(3) had headed the Central Intelligence Agency; and

(4) had served two terms as the Vice President of the United States -- a position at least comparable to Senator Clinton's eight years as the First Lady.

If you want to talk about experience, George H.W. Bush's record dwarfed Bill Clinton's . . . .