Brian Beutler

Rove the erudite

Supposedly an intellect for the ages, Karl Rove appeared on Fox News Sunday this morning and said this about himself and the controversies he's created: "Let’s face it. I mean, I’m a myth, and they’re — you know, I’m Beowulf. You know, I’m Grendel. I don’t know who I am. But they’re after me.”

My diagnosis--no doubt tinctured by the fact that I think Karl Rove is a bad, bad man--is that Rove is a diletantte who often tries to impress people with literary references that don't necessarily make sense. Beowulf and Grendel, after all, battled each other. Presumably, Rove sees himself as Beowulf and perhaps feels under attack--like the city of Heorot--by Grendel. But I think the allusion he was looking for here was Moby Dick. He's the White Whale (a great description for Karl Rove if ever there was one) and congressional Democrats are Ahab. Or something to that effect.

Either way, Think Progress has the video. Give it a looksee and then carry on with your Sunday secure in the knowledge that Karl Rove isn't nearly as smart as he wishes he was or as others give him credit for being.

The physics of economics

As a physicist, I think this is sort of an interesting way to look at economies and economic development. As a blogger, though, I think it confirms a pretty banal point: that regions of the world without diverse or fungible resources don't tend to have strong economies.

Politicizing government

Here's yet another reason why McClatchy deserves millions of devotees:

Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.

Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings — all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006....

Under the Hatch Act, Cabinet members are permitted to attend political briefings and appear with members of Congress. But Cabinet members and other political appointees aren't permitted to spend taxpayer money with the aim of benefiting candidates.

During the briefings at Treasury and Commerce, then-Bush administration political director Ken Mehlman and other White House aides detailed competitive congressional districts, battleground election states and key media markets and outlined GOP strategy for getting out the vote.

Commerce and Treasury political appointees later made numerous public appearances and grant announcements that often correlated with GOP interests, according to a review of the events by McClatchy Newspapers. The pattern raises the possibility that the events were arranged with the White House's political guidance in mind.

I don't want to say too much here, because I'll probably be following this stuff pretty closely for The Corporate Masters. But the issue with the Hatch Act is that unless the Congress is willing to impeach the cabinet members in violation, then enforcement falls to the president. And as is clear from his record, George W. Bush takes the Hatch Act seriously sees the Hatch Act as a minor nuisance and is perfectly willing to let his administrators sit in obvious violation. So unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't really see any recriminations coming down the pipe.

But here's yet another example of McClatchy using its resources exactly as a news agency should. One is tempted to suggest that Marisa Taylor and Kevin Hall deserve to be elevated to high positions at major national papers. But then again, one is also tempted to suggest that that might mean the end of their opportunity to do serious journalism.

Katrina health care

I'm fairly confident that if Medicare was universalized tomorrow--if, say, Dennis Kucinich, were king and he could do that sort of thing--it would be a huge disaster. I think critics ignore Kucinich's plan not just because he's so far back in the polls, and not just because his idea isn't politically feasible, but because it's also not a very good idea. Yet.

Starting from here, though, one can take the position that the bureaucracy should be fixed so that, in the longer-term, government is providing all people with health care, or one can take the position that the federal government shouldn't be any more involved than it already is in peoples' lives. This is, I think, the essential difference between John Edwards and Mitt Romney on health care. Edwards' idea is that Medicare should be allowed to compete with private insurers in a mixed public-private system that will almost surely see Medicare slowly grow and outperform its competitors (and then draw in more people, etc.) That is a good way to prime Medicare and wary citizens for its eventual universality. And the flip side is that if Medicare happens to perform terribly when it's expanded, then, hey, to the spoils will go the victors in the market. Everybody will still be insured, but only the suckers (and old people) will have Medicare.

Romney, by contrast, doesn't see a role for expanding Medicare at all. And as a Republican, you can't count out the possibility that he'll at some point try to actually scale it back. These are important differences. And I think they explain where the two men are coming from when they use this rhetoric. Via Benen:

• Edwards: "Do you think the American people want the same people who responded to Hurricane Katrina to run their health-care system?"

• Romney: "I don't want the guys who ran the Katrina cleanup running my health care system."

These statements, it turns out, are completely consistent with both men's philosophies on expanding  access to health care. The difference is that Edwards wants to see the federal bureaucracy, the Katrina bureaucracy, mature to such a degree that it can handle 300,000,000 people on its Medicare roles. Romney, by contrast, sees the federal bureaucracy degraded to the FEMA level and thinks that's just fine as long as the private sector steps in to pick up the slack.

Friday

It seems like earlier I had intended to do something interesting with my Friday. What I did instead was troll the YouTube comedy category in, I guess, a feeble attempt to enjoy myself on the cheap. Instead, I learned that YouTube's comedy category isn't even the tiniest bit funny. Seriously, this stuff is picked by editors who work at frickin' YouTube, world's most awesome corporation. You'd think they'd be pretty hilarious people. You'd be wrong, though. This is the best clip I found. Happy weekend.

Banal observation of the day: Canada edition

My big takeaway from Vancouver (my first visit as an adult) was that it's really, really nice there. It was recently named "most livable city" in the world and I guess I can understand that. California gives a similar award every year and invariably that award goes to a city like Thousand Oaks--perfectly nice if you're a 40 year old accountant with a couple of kids, but a bit bleached otherwise. If you're familiar with Seattle, then this comparison will make sense to you: Vancouver is a lot like Queen Ann Hill if Queen Ann Hill was its own megalopolis.

At the same time I did eat duck's feet. Twice. Fine, fine dim sum, if you like that sort of thing.

Tony Snow leaving?

That's what he hinted at to Hugh Hewitt:

Tony Snow is dropping hints that he might not stick around much longer as President Bush’s press secretary. In a radio interview with conservative talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday, Snow said he likely would bail out as White House press secretary sometime before Bush leaves office in January 2009.

“I’ve already made it clear I’m not going to be able to go the distance, but that’s primarily for financial reasons,” he said. “I’ve told people when my money runs out, then I’ve got to go.” He wouldn’t say when that might be.

Ok. God knows if anybody in the Bush administration has a real reason to step aside it's Tony Snow. But it can't be because he's going broke. Here his is at World Net Daily discussing his salary:

Q: If I could just ask you what, as a federal officer, you are paid now, I will not ask what you were paid before. How much did you sacrificed to take this job?

MR. SNOW: I think my salary's like $162,000 or $163,000.

I realize he was a media big shot GOP shill before he became a federally subsidized GOP shill, meaning he probably took a significant pay cut in the switch from Fox News to the West Wing. but between the salary and the benefits it's hard for me to imagine that he's losing money day in and day out as White House Press Secretary. Then again, I don't exactly have a sense for how Washington Republicans actually live. Large, obviously. Large enough, I suppose, that they have to destroy national policy in order to keep with it.

Iraq = 9/11 QED

On February 23, Dick Cheney sat down for an interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News. Here's what he said:

Q    Back in 1991, you talked about how military action in Iraq would be the classic definition of a quagmire. Have you been disturbed to see how right you were?  Or people certainly said that you were exactly on target in your analysis back in 1991 of what would happen if the U.S. tried to go in --

THE VICE PRESIDENT:  Well, I stand by what I said in '91.  But look what's happened since then -- we had 9/11.  We've found ourselves in a situation where what was going on in that part of the globe and the growth and development of the extremists, the al Qaeda types that are prepared to strike the United States demonstrated that we weren't safe and secure behind our own borders.  We weren't in Iraq when we got hit on 9/11.  But we got hit in '93 at the World Trade Center, in '96 at Khobar Towers, or '98 in the East Africa embassy bombings, 2000, the USS Cole.  And of course, finally 9/11 right here at home. They continued to hit us because we didn't respond effectively, because they believed we were weak.  They believed if they killed enough Americans, they could change our policy because they did on a number of occasions.  That day has passed.  That all ended with 9/11.

So this, as near as I can tell, would be his answer to any questions about the discrepancies between what he said so famously in 1994 and what he's saying now. Which is to say that he'd not answer the questions at all and instead attempt to implicate Iraq in the '90s bombings and in September 11. He'd also entirely ignore the fact that--no matter how many acts of terrorism America suffered--nothing changed about Iraq that would make overthrowing the regime any less of a quagmire.

Also that last bit: "They believed if they killed enough Americans, they could change our policy because they did on a number of occasions." I'd say we proved them wrong they were entirely correct in their assumptions. And to devastating effect for the United States. 

Gonzales lied, Mueller cried

New evidence was brought to light yesterday. Here's my take, up at Alternet.

Documents provided Thursday to House Democrats by FBI Director Robert Mueller reinforced the sense among Democrats and critics of the Bush Administration that Alberto Gonzales perjured himself before the Senate Judiciary committee about the physical condition of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, as the White House attempted to seek his reauthorization of a controversial warrantless wiretapping program....

In response to questions from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Gonzales insisted that Ashcroft seemed lucid in the hospital, where the White House aides sought his reauthorization of a domestic surveillance program.

"Obviously, there was concern about General Ashcroft's condition," Gonzales told Specter, "and we would not have sought, nor did we intend, to get any approval from General Ashcroft if, in fact, he wasn't fully competent to make that decision."

But Mueller's notes belie that contention. One sentence, in particular, indicates that Ashcroft was anything other than fully competent: "AG in chair; is feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed."

So much is still not known about the other sides of this controversy (most notably whether or not Gonzales perjured himself when he hinted at a distinction between the NSA's Warrantless Wiretapping Program and "other" surveillance activities). I'm not really actively reporting on that, but the two finest sources in probably all of journalism for information about just that question are Spackerman and the mysterious Anonymous Liberal. Read their work daily.

Being a bitch

I think Andrew can do better than this. Quoting a line from Dolores Claiborne:

"Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto." "Dolores Claiborne", not Hillary's forthcoming campaign slogan.