Giving Exercise A Black Eye

What in the world happened to Harry Reid?

The Senate’s Minority Leader didn’t appear on Capitol Hill for the opening of the new Congress because he was staying at home on doctor’s orders.  He did release a video, however, that showed that he had suffered extensive facial trauma.   A spokesman said Reid had  sustained broken ribs, broken facial bones, and a concussion; Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who met with Reid, said the injuries Reid suffered were like those of a passenger who went face first through the windshield in a car accident.  Yikes!

A statement released by Reid’s office said he was exercising at home when a piece of equipment that he was using to exercise broke.  The New York Times reports that Reid was using a rubber exercise band that snapped, hit him, and caused him to fall.  It makes you wonder precisely what the circumstances of the injury were and whether Senator Reid had been properly instructed on how, and where, to use such a band.  Resistance bands typically are used to try to increase the strength of specific muscles as part of a rehabilitation program, and aren’t viewed as highly dangerous potential projectiles.

After seeing the aftermath of Senator’s Reid’s incident, I think I’ll just stick to walking.

Outsmarting Themselves

One of the more unappealing qualities of our political classes is the vicious, cover-your-ass mentality that you see from so many politicians and their anonymous staffers.  No one wants to get tagged with a failure.  Everyone wants to be seen as the smartest, savviest guy in the room, too.  So they leak, and back-stab, and give not-for-attribution quotes.

We saw that ugly side of the inside-the-Beltway mentality again this week, in a terrific piece in the Washington Post about how the Republicans swept to victory on Tuesday.  David Krone, current Senate Majority Leader’s chief of staff, basically laid the blame for the loss of control of the Senate at the feet of President Obama and his staff.  The President wouldn’t do enough to raise money for vulnerable Senate Democrats, he said, and in the meantime those Democrats were getting dragged down by an increasingly unpopular President who was increasingly seen as mishandling and mismanaging serious problems, like the healthcare.gov website and VA health care.

Of course, the Post piece doesn’t note that Harry Reid’s own strategy made it impossible for the vulnerable Democrats to separate themselves from the President, because Reid consistently refused to allow bills to come to the Senate floor for debate.  As a result, Democratic Senators weren’t permitted to offer amendments or articulate positions that differed from those of the President on controversial issues, and the vast majority of votes taken were of the party-line variety, such as to confirm judicial nominees.  That approach allowed Republicans to launch devastating TV ads noting that the vulnerable Democrats voted with President Obama 97, 98, or 99 percent of the time — percentages that wouldn’t have been so outlandishly high if Reid had actually allowed the legislative process to work as intended.  The “smartest guys in the room” outsmarted themselves.

If only Harry Reid and the other Beltway brainiacs had stopped trying to micromanage the messy political process, Democratic Senators might have avoided a near-total wipeout.  I hope that the Republican Senate leadership learns a lesson from this, loosens the spigots on legislation, and starts debating, amending, and voting on bills to send to the President.  Otherwise, the Republicans, too, might be needing to engage in a little CYA come 2016.

The First Amendment, Revisited

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission has provoked a lot of critical comment. Much of the criticism has been directed at the majority opinion, which struck down aggregate limits restricting how much money a donor may contribute to candidates for federal office, political parties, and political action committees.

In McCutcheon, the Court held, by a 5-4 vote, that the limits violate the First Amendment and rejected arguments that the limits could be justified by a governmental interest in preventing either political corruption or the appearance of such corruption. Critics argue that the decision will lead to a political process dominated by wealthy oligarchs who shovel money to their preferred candidates and causes and thereby control American public policy. That’s the position of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for example.

The dissenting opinion in McCutcheon is at least as interesting as the majority ruling, however. In the dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by three other Justices, articulated a concept of “collective speech” and asserted that “the First Amendment advances not only the individual’s right to engage in political speech, but also the public’s interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters.” It’s not entirely clear what Justice Breyer means by “collective speech,” but he obviously believes that the interest in “collective speech” can override individual First Amendment expression.

Over the years, the meaning and scope of the First Amendment has been shaped by a series of Supreme Court decisions. The jurisprudence has long since moved past the concept that “speech” is limited to the spoken or written word; it is well established that acts — like burning a draft card or wearing a protest t-shirt — are protected. Contributing money to a political candidate whom you agree with, or to a cause that you support, is similarly a protected act of speech.

Will McCutcheon open a new frontier in the evolution of the First Amendment, and if so should we be more concerned about the concepts underlying the majority opinion or the dissent? Floyd Abrams, a lion of the First Amendment bar who has been involved in many cases addressing free speech issues, has posted an interesting article that argues that the conceptual underpinnings of the dissent are “deeply disquieting.” Abrams notes that the concept of protecting “collective speech” seems to be inconsistent with prior Supreme Court decisions and is a slippery notion that could allow the government to restrict the amount of speech about which candidate or cause to support — a result that seems inconsistent with the First Amendment rather than in furtherance of it.

The First Amendment is the first item in the Bill of Rights. That context indicates that it is intended to protect individual rights, not “collective speech.” When a First Amendment issue arises, I tend to support the notion of more speech rather than less — with the decisions about what to say, and when, left to individuals, not to the government or to some vague notion of what furthers the “collective” good.

Offhand Ultimatums

The issue of the United States’ response to the apparent use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government has been on the front burner for weeks now.  After fruitless efforts to build an international coalition, followed by vows to go it alone, then by a decision to seek congressional approval, it seems late in the game for a new proposal.  But that’s what happened yesterday.

Secretary of State John Kerry, in response to a question at a news conference, said Syria could avert a U.S. attack by placing its chemical weapons under international control — whatever that means.  The Obama Administration said Kerry’s response was a “rhetorical argument” that wasn’t meant to make a diplomatic overture, but that was how it was treated.  Russia, Syria, and others in the international community immediately expressed support for the idea, as did congressional Democrats who don’t want to vote on whether to authorize the President to use military force.  By the end of the day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Senate vote on the issue would, in fact, be delayed.  And when President Obama last night sat for interviews in a TV blitz designed to build support for a limited strike, he was responding to the news, rather than making it.  In view of the reaction to Kerry’s comment,  the President said he would put plans for a military strike on hold if Syria put its weapons stockpile under international control — although he expressed skepticism it would happen.  Of course, the obvious question is:  if the President is skeptical, why would the Secretary of State make the proposal in the first place?

Tonight the President is supposed to make a speech to the American people about the Syrian issue.  Perhaps he will take the opportunity to explain his Administration’s confusing approach to the issue, with the American position seemingly swaying in the wind created every time John Kerry speaks.

The President and his supporters profess to be mystified by why Americans aren’t supporting their policy on Syria, whatever it is.  It’s not that Americans aren’t sickened by the use of chemical weapons.  Instead, it’s that this Administration has little credibility when it says that America needs to act, alone if necessary, to address the situation.  We don’t understand why this should be our job, and we simply don’t credit the Administration’s increasingly outlandish promises — like Secretary Kerry’s statement yesterday that the military effort needed to “degrade” the Assad regime’s chemical weapons capabilities would be “unbelievably small.”   We also see what has happened in Libya and Egypt and don’t believe that some kind of thread-the-needle air strike can “degrade” chemical weapons capabilities without creating more chaos in an already chaotic region.  The credibility gap isn’t helped by the Administration’s shifting positions and heedless issuance of offhand ultimatums that apparently weren’t intended to be ultimatums in the first place.

Hey Harry, Mitt Paid Taxes!

Today Mitt Romney released his 2011 tax returns.  They show that the Republican nominee earned more than $13.5 million — mostly from investments — and paid $1.9 million in taxes.  He has his wife also gave generously to charities.

In addition, Romney also released a summary of his taxes going back to 1990.  The summary reported that, during the period from 1990 to 2009, the Romneys paid taxes every year, with an average annual effective federal tax rate of 20.2 percent.  Romney has now provided information about 23 years of tax returns, including releasing the tax returns themselves for 2010 and 2011.

Let’s not forget that the abominable Harry Reid claimed back in August that an anonymous source had told him that Mitt Romney had not paid taxes for 10 years.  It was appalling that the Senate Majority Leader would rely on an unnamed source to launch such serious and slanderous accusations, which have now been shown to be false.  Do you think there is any chance that Harry Reid will apologize to Mitt Romney for making such reckless and unfounded accusations?  That’s what any decent person would do.  Unfortunately, any person of character would never have made the unsupported accusations in the first place, so I wouldn’t bet on old Harry doing the decent thing.  Instead, he’ll just endure another blow to whatever shreds of credibility he might still possess.

I hope Romney’s release of his tax returns takes that silly issue off the table, and lets the candidates and the American public focus on the big issues in the race — like who is better equipped to get our economy going, and how we can get people back to work and bring this unending recession to a long-overdue end.

Harry Reid Is An Embarrassment

One reason many of us are troubled about the future of our country is that we don’t seem to have many capable, credible people in positions of authority.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is a good example.

Lately Reid has been claiming that an unnamed person, or persons, have told him that Republican candidate Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years.  Never mind that Romney has released returns for the last two years that show he paid substantial sums in taxes.  Never mind that those returns reflect financial affairs that make it highly unlikely that Romney had zero tax liability in prior years — so unlikely that the Washington Post gave Reid four “Pinocchios” for his dubious claim.  And never mind that Reid himself has not released his own tax returns, arguing that he provides sufficient financial information through congressional disclosure processes.  Reid sees no double standard or unfairness in any of this, and says the burden is on Romney to disprove Reid’s allegation.

We should all be deeply troubled by Reid’s recklessness.  Making public charges based solely on alleged anonymous information, refusing to disclose its source, and then putting the burden on the accused to disprove the unsubstantiated allegations sounds like McCarthyism or the tactics employed in the Soviet Union.  No American should be treated so unfairly, and the fact that Mitt Romney is a presidential candidate for the opposing party doesn’t relieve Reid of his obligation to act with decency and propriety.

Harry Reid has been an ineffective leader of the Senate during a time when that body has been even more inert than normal.  He is a Lilliputian figure in the history of this country, but his latest stunts are revealing disturbing things about his character.  If he wants to pursue the issue of Mitt Romney’s taxes, he should disclose his sources by name, state precisely what they told him, and let everyone judge the credibility of that information.  If he doesn’t want to do so, he should do us all a favor and shut up.

Spinning A Special Election

Republican Bob Turner prevailed over Democrat David Weprin in yesterday’s special election to fill the seat vacated by the resignation of scandal-plagued Congressman Anthony Weiner.  The result, in a district in the Brooklyn and Queens boroughs of New York City, takes what had been a safe Democratic seat for decades and turns it over to the Republicans.

It’s only one seat of 435 in the House of Representatives, of course, and simply adds to an already existing Republican majority in that chamber.  The question, however, is whether the outcome reflects broader shifts in the views of American voters — and already the spin game seeking to influence the answer to that question has begun.  Republicans say the vote is a referendum on President Obama and his economic policies and note that Turner urged voters to send a message to the President.  Democrats say the race was decided by unique local issues — like a large presence of conservative Orthodox Jews who are angry with President Obama’s position on Israel — and add that Weprin was just an inept candidate.  As a result, they argue, the result is no reflection whatsoever on voters’ opinions of President Obama.

The spin game is an effort to control the message to the gullible schmucks like us, the great unwashed who make up the general electorate.  The real group to watch is the Democrats now in Congress, who are fully capable of separating spin from reality.  They may look at the results of NY-9 and see a race where national Democratic committees spent more than $500,000 in a futile effort to save a supposedly safe seat seat and where all of the get-out-the-vote machinery was activated — and the Democrat still lost.  If those Democrats currently serving see President Obama as an albatross who will lead them and their party to disaster in November 2012, they may stop following that lead, no matter what congressional Democratic leaders like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi say.

Professional politicians tend to be very protective of their own political skins.  If we see more Democrats who are up for election in 2012 peeling away from President Obama in the weeks and months to come — in connection with the President’s current jobs bill, for example — their actions will send a more profound message than the silly political spin game ever could.

Our Gilded Congress

Congressional disclosure forms were released yesterday and they show that our elected public servants are doing very well, indeed.

The wealth in Congress knows no party-line boundaries; Republicans and Democrats alike are doing well.  According to the reports, the Minority Leader and Majority Leader in the Senate are both multimillionaires who saw their wealth rise in 2010.  So did the the Speaker of the House and the House Minority Leader.  Other Members of Congress reported on gifts they received and, in one case, a member of Congress paid herself some hefty interest on a loan she made to her own campaign committee.

There are exceptions, of course, and I am not suggesting that only paupers should be elected to the Senate and the House of Representatives.  But when Americans wonder why Members of Congress, at times, seem out of touch with bread-and-butter issues like jobs and housing prices, they might do well to reflect on the vast personal wealth in Congress and the deferential and preferential treatment our elected representatives receive as a matter of course.  It’s easy to downplay the effect of high gasoline prices or unsold homes in middle-class neighborhoods if you have millions of dollars in personal investments to reflect upon as a fellow Senator gives you a ride on her private jet.

The Republic Is Saved!

A budget deal has been struck (at the last minute, of course)!   So today, the federal government is open for business!  History has been made!  The National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade can go forward!  The Republic is saved!

From the self-congratulatory tone of some the public statements of the participants, you’d think our elected representatives had discovered a cure for cancer, rather than just belatedly completed a job that should have been done last year.  I’m glad that the ludicrous spectacle of a federal government shutdown was avoided, but forgive me if I don’t join in the hosannas for President Obama, Speaker John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress.  If progress can be made on reducing spending, shoring up revenue, balancing the budget, and eliminating our federal debt only by incremental steps, after weeks of invective and name-calling, when everyone’s back is to the wall, we are in for a long period of ugly contentiousness.

Now, on to the next last-minute, bruising battle, about raising the national debt limit.

Budget Chicken

We are a few hours away from the point at which the federal government will run out of money and have to shut down — at least in certain respects.  President Obama, House Republicans, and Senate Democrats are trying to hammer out a deal as the witching hour draws ever closer.  It is like a huge game of chicken, where each side hopes the other will blink.

In the meantime, the competing factions posture in an effort to assign the blame for any shutdown on the other party.  Today House Republicans passed yet another stopgap bill that would fund the Defense Department for the rest of the year and give negotiators another week to try to work out a deal.  Even though the President has signed other continuing resolutions to provide interim funding, he says this one is a mere distraction and, if it is presented to him, he will veto it.  Senate Democrats say House Republicans are in thrall to “extreme” elements, like the “tea party” movement, that makes reaching an agreement impossible.  Finger-pointing rules the day.

How fractured and ridiculous our governmental processes have become!  Our politics are so polarized that we can’t do anything without having our backs to the wall and disaster looming just ahead.  Consider that the budget being discussed now is the current budget, and is an issue only because last year Congress and the President didn’t enact a budget when they were supposed to — and that was when the process was totally controlled by one political party, with a Democrat in the White House and huge Democratic majorities in each House of Congress.  If agreement wasn’t possible then, what chance do we have now, where Democrats control the Senate, Republicans control the House, and President Obama has already announced that he is running for reelection?

Regardless of their political beliefs, every American should be disgusted and concerned about what is happening right now.  This is not “good government.” Small groups of legislators, aides, and administration officials are engaging in closed-door negotiations, cutting the kinds of back room deals and unholy bargains that inevitably make us cringe.  Crucial decisions are being made under enormous time pressures, without the kind of careful consideration and public scrutiny that help politicians make sound judgments.  In this kind of super-heated atmosphere, can anyone have confidence that the strutting negotiators will reach reasonable and rational decisions?  And if agreement is not reached, and a shutdown occurs, we can be sure of one thing:  the bickering and bitterness that will occur in the wake of that failure will make the current hyper-partisanship look like the group hug in the last episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Cowboy Poets And Harry Reid’s Passions

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has the grim outward demeanor of an undertaker.  But internally, beneath the dull-as-dishwater exterior, he burns with blazing passion about certain topics — one of which apparently is cowboy poetry.

Yesterday, in a speech on the Senate floor, Reid railed against the”mean-spirited” budget proposed by House Republicans.  As an example of such hardheartedness, he lamented that passage of the Republicans’ budget proposal would eliminate National Endowment for the Humanities funding for an annual cowboy poetry festival in Elko, Nevada.  Reid believes that the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, and similar programs, create jobs.

Reid’s citation of funding for the cowboy poetry festival epitomizes the challenges involved in bringing our out-of-control federal budget back into balance.  There are countless examples of locally targeted federal funding in the budget, and every one probably has its ardent congressional defenders.  The question is not whether cowboy poetry is good or bad, but whether our federal government can afford to subsidize every local festival, every poorly conceived, over-budget weapons program, and every geriatric drug purchase — among countless other federal departments, programs, and projects.

I applaud those hardy souls who feel the poetic muse around the campfire on the open range, and people who want to celebrate their doggerel.  But getting our “fiscal house in order” will require tough choices.  If we can’t make the easy decision to cut federal funding for Elko’s cowboy poetry festival, and similar programs, we have no chance of closing our trillion-dollar budget gap.

 

On The Cusp Of A Change

The old, tired year 2010 is getting ready to exit stage right, and the bright, shiny year 2011 is getting ready to crawl onto the national stage.  Today we will get the last of the stories looking back at what has happened over the last 12 months.  Tomorrow the focus will be on what might happen over the next 12 months.

On the national scene, there is a lot of uncertainty, which should make 2011 very interesting indeed.  President Obama had a tough 2010, with falling public approval ratings, a bad economy, and mounting public concern about spending and debt, and the Democratic Party took a shellacking in the 2010 election as a result.  But the President nevertheless managed to accomplish some of his initiatives in the lame duck session of Congress, leading some people to talk about a comeback.  In 2011, will we in fact see a comeback by the President and a resurgence of some of the passionate support he received in the 2008 election?

In Congress, the big story will be the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives and the increased Republican minority in the Senate.  In the past two years, House Republicans have been unified in opposing many of the President’s initiatives, but maintaining unity when you are running the show can be more difficult.  How will the new Speaker John Boehner and the House Republicans address spending and debt issues, and will they be able to affect the implementation of the “health care reform” legislation and some of the regulatory initiatives that are of such concern to members of the “tea party”?  In the Senate, where the rules and practices require consensus, how will Harry Reid and his slimmer majority deal with Republicans?  Will the two Houses of Congress, controlled by two different parties, be able to reach agreement on their competing versions of basic legislation like spending bills?  And will President Obama then wield his veto pen?

Pundits may be predicting what will happen, but the reality is that no one knows.  That is what will make 2011 such an interesting year.

How Will History Judge?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now describing the current Congress as the “most productive Congress in the history of the country.” He numbers among its accomplishments the “stimulus” legislation, the “health care reform” legislation, repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, new financial regulations, and the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts.

When you are in the moment, it is difficult to assess what the ultimate judgment of history will be.  I doubt that many Americans would put the current Congress up among the great Congresses of the past, however.  After all, voters just gave the boot to many of the Representatives and Senators who passed the legislation Reid touts, and Congress’ approval rating is a dismal 13 percent — its lowest level in decades.  And those people who are critical of Congress no doubt will point to the things that Congress didn’t do, like passing appropriations bills or making meaningful cuts to the federal budget.

History will make its judgment, as history always does.  In the meantime, there is something unseemly and profoundly unattractive about Senator Reid’s excessive pride.  His hubris exemplifies a significant problem with the current uninspiring crop of legislators:  they are oblivious to how they are being perceived outside the Beltway.

Our Senate, Our Shame

It is all so predictable, and yet still so infuriating.  Yesterday Senate Democrats unveiled a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill that would fund the government through fiscal year 2011.  The bill numbers 1,924 pages.  It includes more than $8 billion in earmarks for some 6,000 pet projects for Senators.  According to the Washington Post report on the legislation, it includes the familiar litany of pork barrel projects — millions for non-profits associated with deceased politicians, hundreds of thousands of dollars to study port dredging and swine management, and on and on.

In this instance, the Senate has failed to pass individual appropriations bills, which is one of its most basic responsibilities.  So, Senate Democrats have followed their game plan from the appalling debacle of the “health care reform” legislation, have combined a dozen individual spending bills into one massive bill that no outsider has had a chance to read, and then have announced that the legislation has to be enacted by the end of the lame duck session or the government will shut down due to lack of funds.  Why not?  Process and public scrutiny be damned.  They are the Senate, after all, and they can do what they want.  They obviously believe that they don’t need to concern themselves with the unmistakable message in favor of fiscal restraint that the voters sent on Election Day, or the effect of this tawdry, trillion-dollar exercise in vote-trading on the United States and its staggering debt problems.

The Senate used to fancy itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”  Those days are long since past.  As led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the current Senate appears to be a motley collection of political hustlers who avoid the hard work of legislating in favor of cheap theatrics and gimmicks designed to increase their leverage for getting federal money for their cronies.  At bottom, they just want to get theirs, and this obscene omnibus budget maneuver gives them a shot at doing so.  They have the souls of pirates, rather than the souls of statesmen, and our beleaguered country is suffering mightily as a result.

Expressions And Emoticons

Here’s an interesting story on a study that suggests that different cultures may read facial expressions differently, in a way that could lead to misunderstandings.

The study indicates that facial expressions indicating fear and surprise are among those most likely to be misunderstood. East Asian participants were much more likely to focus on the eyes, which are much more likely to be ambiguous, whereas Western participants looked at the entire face.

The study made me wonder how the participants would match the politicans pictured with this post with the following mental or emotional states:

*Disgruntled

* Uncomfortable

*Bewildered

* Slap happy

The eyes have it!

Another interesting aspect of the article is the difference in “emoticons” between those used in the U.S. and those used in Asia, with those used in Asia right-side up rather than on their side and with much more attention given to the eyes. I’ve never used an emoticon, but if I did I think I would use the Asian versions.