Unilateral or Multilateral, you can't have it both ways

If W told the CIA that they had to obey him, as head of the government, and give him some bad intel so he could go to war; and if the meek, subservient bureaucrats (??!) at the CIA said, “OK, boss, here’s some bad intel, we got a whole basket of it for you, have a good time at the war”; what did W do to make the KGB go along with that? The Russians have been trying to take over the middle east about as long as there have been Russians, so they don’t need to depend on our CIA for what is going on there. I think that the main reason why it is even necessary to mention that point after all this time is that we tend to speak in generalities about the FrenchGermansRussians, or the current leaders of those countries, who are not the well known household names that Stalin was, and most Americans don’t grasp the point that the other countries made their own independent determination about the WMD. As the late Lloyd Bentsen might say, I remember Joe Stalin; Stalin was an enemy of mine; this Putin is no Joe Stalin. When we think of the KGB, most Americans remember them from the cold war as something to be feared and respected. In 2003, those sovereign states did not claim that Iraq had no WMD; they only argued with us over what to do about them.

When W took strong action against Iraq without making sure that every country in the world was going in there with us, his political enemies complained that we were a rogue state acting unilaterally. Now that W is organizing several countries to participate in negotiating with North Korea, his political enemies complain that we won’t act unilaterally. Condie Rice on the news recently had an answer, that a bilateral agreement with North Korea wouldn’t amount to much, and with more countries on board, there is at least a better chance. Essentially the same situation exists with Iraq. And, although some say that our credibility has suffered with the failure to find large quantities of WMD in Iraq (never mind that nobody can find the thousands of tons of conventional munitions that disappeared during the war, we are supposed to be able to find a vial of microorganisms the size of a pencil, or a stack of notebooks and blueprints the size of a shoebox) it doesn’t take much credibility to convince people that there is a threat of such weapons in Iran - and especially in North Korea. Further to WMD, it seems strange to me that top level Iraqi generals say publicly that the WMD were moved across the border into Syria and other countries, but the conventional wisdom today is that they never existed. What do we suppose the Iraqis were planning to make in those mobile fermentation facilities in trailers - maybe beer, or wine, or yogurt? At least the yogurt isn’t prohibited for them.

Similarly, there is a lot of criticism of the USA for not going in and protecting the refugees in Darfur - some of it from the same people who criticize the USA for disturbing Saddam Hussein’s fun and games in Iraq. I asked my son, the one in the Marines, how many people it would take to go into Darfur and kill a lot of those murderers - if one platoon would do some good - and he said that they could do quite a bit in a conflict like that with less than a platoon. We didn’t take the time to go into a lot of detail about what kind of vehicles and air support he would want, but I definitely have the impression that cost is not the problem there, the problem is that the UN is supposed to be our means of dealing with that kind of trouble and it doesn’t work. As Maggie Thatcher said about the problems in Yugoslavia, there are times when no amount of diplomacy without firepower will get the job done.

When W talked about missile defense, his political enemies talked about suitcase bombs and said we shouldn’t bother with missile defense. When W talked about WMD in Iraq (see tagline) his political enemies said not to worry because Iraq didn’t have a big air force with intercontinental bombers, as if they had never heard of smuggling. From time to time we do hear about the great importance of inspecting every cargo container that arrives here, as if nobody knows that we inspect most of them in their country of origin; they also overlook the fact that if somebody had a nuke and wanted to nuke New York or any other port city, they really wouldn’t have to unload the container off the ship before pushing the button. The same applies to passenger airliners, air freight, and general aviation: just load the nuke and the suicide bomber (or the remote detonator) onto the plane, fly it to the target and fire it before the plane lands. Secure borders would be nice, but carrying the war to the enemy and keeping the pressure on them will do more to keep us safe than any amount of fortification of the borders.

Of course, in 2002 we weren’t really asking our supposed friends to go to war beside us, just to stand up and be counted on the side of making Iraq cooperate with the weapons inspectors instead of playing shell games and generally stonewalling. With just a little more Solidarity, we wouldn’t have needed a war. What W’s political enemies don’t seem to understand is that no amount of normal diplomacy could persuade our supposed friends to rock the boat and disturb their comfortable commercial relationship with Iraq - especially those who were on Saddam’s payroll through the Oil For Bribery billions. Isn’t it strange (Kafkaesque, perhaps?) that it was really those who opposed action, rather than those who tried to promote action, who allowed their commercial interests to dominate their foreign policy, and yet so many still criticize the USA and think we went to war for oil?

Having seen firsthand the high energy prices in Europe, I think that the danger of allowing a dictator like Saddam to obtain control of the rest of the middle east oil is not anything to do with a new embargo against the USA, but the ability to use the oil weapon against the Europeans and other countries, building a coalition against the USA in international organizations. We could survive an embargo against our own country much better than many other countries, but we might not survive the secondary effects of an embargo against them. It’s like the online problems with hackers, who can’t cause much trouble by themselves but can create a distributed denial of service incident and shut down a large organization.

BTW, according to my own survey, Japan is not going to go nuclear. I happened to run into a couple of Japanese friends of mine recently, and I commented that there is talk that Japan could go nuclear very quickly if they chose to do that, and one of them said that Japan would never do that, and the other did not dispute that conclusion. How’s that for analysis in depth? :-) OTOH, when I suggested that Japan is widely respected for technological expertise, so its enemies should understand that if Japan chooses not to have nuclear weapons it is not because they can’t make them, they did not disagree with that.

Finally, I listened to your interesting discussion of the environment for a little while before I had to disappear off to work. (Work is the curse of the drinking class, and it raises H with political activism, too:-) According to someone who was cited in a National Geographic article a couple of years ago, it would take 40 times what the Kyoto accords could accomplish to really do much good. If they had said 2X, that wouldn’t seem so bad, and it might be worthwhile to take the first step, in hopes of finding ways to do better as we go along. If the figure is really anywhere near 40X, then we should quit beating that dead horse and look outside the box for a real solution. I predict that if we fail to solve the global warming problem, it will be not because conservatives demanded the freedom to buy big cars (when I had a wife and children, we really enjoyed our full size van where we could all be comfortable) but because environmentalists insisted on punitive solutions and fought against anything else.

And, I have heard some of your co-workers in the environmental movement talk about converting the Carbon dioxide from burning coal to a liquid and hiding it in various places; I think Senator Clinton is one who was advocating that. I don’t know what the process was that she had in mind, but I ran through some back-of-the-envelope calculations and it appears that in order to condense the carbon dioxide directly from the flue gas to a liquid, the compressors would use more power than the plant produced. I am not denying that there could be a solution; indeed, I can think of ways that do not seem to have been tried; I am, however, saying that W (like your guest in the recorded interview you played last Wednesday morning) may not be all that much better at engineering than Hillary, but at least he knows he doesn’t have the answer.

Dick Hatzenbuhler
Deering, NH

EDUCATION FUNDING AND 11/06 ELECTION

By Ed Mosca

USEFUL IDIOTS

Lenin is credited with coining the term “useful idiots,” which he supposedly used to refer to supporters of the Soviet Union living in Western democracies. They were idiots because they unwittingly were supporting a cause that would destroy the freedoms and prosperity they enjoyed under democratic governments. When it comes to education funding, the term fits those candidates running for State office who want to define an adequate education “so the Supreme Court doesn’t do it for us.”

Obviously, their line of thinking is predicated on the notion that, if only the Legislature and Governor “finally” were to define an adequate education, the Court would then defer to this definition and the corresponding determination of the cost. A brief history lesson is in order because, as the saying goes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

The Court first asserted that the representative branches needed to define an adequate education in Claremont I, which was issued in 1993. It provided no guidelines for doing so, telling the representative branches that they were free to choose from a “wealth of historical data … spanning more than three hundred years.”

Despite over 200 years of history and precedent to the contrary, the representative branches took at face value this absolutely incredible proposition that the words a “duty to cherish public schools” were really code for a “duty to define an adequate education,” and through the State Board of Education defined an adequate education. And how did the Court respond? Only four years later, in Claremont II, it ruled the State Board’s definition was unconstitutional, claiming that it did not “sufficiently reflect the letter or spirit of the State Constitution’s mandate.”

What’s more, no longer were the representative branches free to define an adequate education based on a “wealth of historical data.” Now the constitution required the definition to be based upon seven “aspirational guidelines” articulated in a 1986 decision by the Supreme Court of Kentucky.

Rather than asking the obvious question what the aspirations of Kentuckian judges could possibly have to do with the New Hampshire constitution, the Legislature and Governor virtually bent over backwards to comply with Claremont II. Committees were formed, forums were convened and experts were consulted. Ultimately, a study prepared by Augenblick & Myers was used to set the cost of an adequate education.

And then what happened? The Claremont plaintiffs immediately returned to court, claiming that the Legislature had not correctly calculated the cost of an adequate education. Among other things, they claimed that the formula didn’t use the proper assessment tests to gauge student performance and didn’t contain enough money for transportation and capital costs.

While the Supreme Court declined to adjudicate these claims, it did not do so out of any deference to the representative branches. Rather, it wanted the plaintiffs to bring these claims in the trial court first for the development of a factual record.

If history is any guide then, defining an adequate education in a manner that “allows for an objective determination of costs,” which is the Court’s latest rendering of what the “duty to cherish public schools” supposedly requires, will lead to more litigation and more judicial micromanaging of education policy. As soon as the ink is dry on the next definition, you can be sure that those who don’t like the result will call upon the Court to answer such age-old jurisprudential questions as what is the true cost of the three years of high school English the definition requires, whether three years allows an adequate read of Shakespeare and, most importantly, whether Macbeth can be adequately taught by teachers whose salaries are not commensurate with those in Massachusetts.

And if history is any guide, you can be sure that the Court will be more than happy to answer such questions.

There is a bigger issue, however, than whether defining an adequate education will appease the Court. It is what type of government we will live under. Those now advocating that the Legislature and Governor define an adequate education should consider the views expressed by Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address: “the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, … the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

What do Worldcom and the Republican Governors Association have in common?

by Liz A Mair (Editor, WWW.GOPPROGRESS.COM) Click here for a clue.

If you still don't get it, the answer is this: the heads of of both have used organization resources for their own personal purposes.

And, quite simply, it is not OK.

I first focused in on this issue-- or rather just how serious it has become-- when I read Chris Cillizza's The Fix first thing this morning.

Chris saw the RGA ad linked to above.  Of course he knows full well that Romney has been using the RGA (rightly) to shell out huge amounts of cash to candidates and incumbents who have a hope of getting, or keeping, a Governor's seat this fall, yet he noted that Kerry Healey is bound to lose, and that she is far from being in need of RGA funding-- she has huge personal wealth and has promised to throw $15 million of her own money at the campaign if required.  So, he asked, why would the RGA throw money-- $900,000 for ads, to be exact-- at this particular race?

Anyone who has watched the ad will have noticed how little face time Healey, i.e., the candidate, gets.  And how much Romney (that other candidate) gets.

Romney supporters have said this is likely because Romney wants to lend the weight of his huge popularity in the state to Healey's campaign.  Yet I find that argument utterly uncompelling.  

If anything, from what I hear, Romney's groundwork for 2008 has been hurting Healey.  One wonders how someone whose heightened media presence is apparently hurting her could end up helping her by, er, appearing in an ad that is supposed to benefit her?

The answer is he couldn't-- or at least not much.

However, what's more interesting is what Romney could do.

By featuring prominently, more prominently even than Healey herself, in the ad, Romney could keep himself on TV on a daily, maybe even hourly basis, in Massachusetts, and, ever so conveniently, New Hampshire-- whose residents receive the same, exact broadcasting as Boston.

And before anybody says that I'm attributing a nefarious motive to Romney that is unjustified, let's not forget where his-- oh, I mean the RGA's-- biggest expenditures have thus far occurred: Iowa and Michigan.

Sure, both have the opportunity to have their Governorships go Republican-- that's a good reason to spend there.  But so is the fact that both states have a crucial position on the Presidential primary calendar.  And the state parties there have received nearly $1 million from the RGA.

Of course, the $900,000 he's spending on ads for "Healey" tops the $750,000 he's spent in Iowa thus far-- could the extra money be because he is lagging so badly in the New Hampshire polls, perhaps?

Let's be clear about this.  What Romney appears to be doing is using the RGA much like certain crooked CEOs used the assets of their companies, which have now fallen into bankruptcy or otherwise gone down the toilet: it's called using money, set aside for the organization's purposes, for your own ends.  It's called using organization money as your own personal slush fund.  It's called bad news, and bad behavior.  Very bad behavior, indeed.

NH Pension Crisis Threatens Local Budgets

Across New Hampshire, city and town officials are getting a clear message from taxpayers. The costs of local government are running out of control at the same time as families’ incomes are stagnant. Taxpayers are increasingly insisting that elected officials manage the budget so local taxes don’t go up faster than taxpayers’ own incomes.

Unfortunately, there’s a ticking time bomb in Concord that threatens to blow local budget discipline right out of the water. It’s called the New Hampshire Retirement System – the pension plan for state, local and school employees.

New Hampshire ’s pension plan is in deep trouble. The plan has a “funding ratio” – the ratio of assets to obligations – of just 66%. For each dollar of pension obligations, the pension fund has assets of only 66 cents. This puts New Hampshire among the financially weakest of all public pension plans in America.

With 80,000 pension participants statewide, the funding gap adds up to big numbers. The financial hole at the heart of the NH pension plan is a whopping $2 billion, or5% of the state’s annual economy.

The pension bailout hasn’t been announced by Concord, but it’s already well underway. Under the funding system designed by the state legislature, the bulk of the bailout costs fall squarely on city, town and school districts. Local budgets and local taxpayers are getting hit hard by pension bailout costs. This is squeezing out other spending priorities.

The numbers tell the story. Today’s mandatory city, town and school district contributions to the state pension fund are at the highest level in more than 20 years. And the new contribution rates taking effect in 2007 shoot still higher -- up 57% for teachers, and up 28% for general municipal employees.

These are budget-busting numbers. Consider my town, Milford. From 2003 to 2007, Milford’s annual pension costs (town only, not school) will more than double from$220,000 to $480,000. Pension costs are already locked in at 8% of every taxpayer’s town tax bill. With these huge mandatory pension bills, it’s a lot harder to pay for roads and other customary town priorities.

And it’s about to get even worse. A few months ago, the NH pension fund estimated that city, town and school pension contributions will need to double again for the next 15 years in order to bring the pension plan back to financial solvency. For Milford, this means another $500,000 added to the town budget each year for the next 15 years. Town pension expense will run at an unbelievable $1 million annually, with 15% of every town tax dollar going to pensions.

It’s time for New Hampshire’s cities, towns and school districts to “just say no”. There are alternatives to the open checkbook.

Corporate America and an increasing number of states and municipalities have realized that old-style pensions – with their lifetime, cost of living-adjusted payouts for retirees -- are simply unaffordable. The new pension bill just signed in Washington recognizes the inevitable shift toward 401(k)-style, employee-controlled retirement plans. These plans are more cost-effective and let employees take control of their own retirements.

New Hampshire needs to bring our pension policy into the 21st century. We need serious structural reforms to our pension system, and we need them now. Continuing the shell game and secretly pushing huge pension bail-out costs onto local taxpayers won’t work much longer. The state legislature must step up to the plate.

Jim Dannis is a selectman in Milford. For more information on the pension issue, see http://jimdannis.blogspot.com.

The Foley Follies

http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com From Hotline editors Chuck Todd and John Mercurio: SPECIAL NEWS ANALYSIS: The Foley Follies It’s been a long 48 hours for the House Republican leadership. It all started when the media began reporting on the inappropriate email and instant message exchanges between now-ex-Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) and an underage teenager. Let’s first agree that what Foley did was wrong, predatory and possibly illegal. And the resulting decision by Foley to resign was not only appropriate, it may be the least of the punishment, depending on whether a criminal investigation is seriously pursued. But what’s given the House GOP leadership headaches today and possibly for the rest of the election cycle is the series of events that took place nearly a year ago when news of some initial questionable contact between an underage House page and Foley were first unearthed. The timeline of what Speaker Dennis Hastert knew and when he knew it, has seemed to change throughout the last 48 hours. Late 9/30 p.m., the Speaker’s office released a fairly detailed explanation of when Speaker’s office first learned of the complaint. (See below post). But the explanation doesn’t answer every question. For instance, clearly, Foley’s actions raised enough alarm bells that a number of investigating actions were started late last year and in early spring. In addition, ABC News reports that the 16-year-old page had been warned to watch out for Foley, suggesting that the congressman's behavior was an open secret among the folks that ran the page program. If this is true, it implies Foley’s behavior was more systematic and known. If so, how many members of the House GOP Conference aware? Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) was concerned. As he raised the issue with a number of key folks, including the clerk and NRCC Chair Tom Reynolds. Reynolds was concerned enough that he made sure to alert Hastert. Now, Hastert, even today, doesn’t recall the conversation with Reynolds but doesn’t dispute Reynolds’ recall. What isn’t clear is why no one other the clerk of the House and GOP Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), the member in charge of the Page program, directly spoke with Foley. More importantly, and this question may decide whether Republicans retain control of the House, how thorough was the investigation conducted by the clerk and Shimkus? What exactly did that "investigation" discover and/or conclude? It only took ABC News about a day to go from knowing nothing to knowing, well, too much about the contact Foley had with underage pages. Politically, how will this affect the Democratic effort to revive the "culture of corruption" mantra that had lost steam this summer? Let’s give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt. Then the worst the House GOP leadership is guilty of is a lack of curiosity and of maintaining a “culture of institutionalism” where members are always given the benefit of the doubt. But is the benefit of the doubt members are given the same standard the general public is held to under similar circumstances? And are voters really in the mood to give Congress anything close to a “benefit of the doubt?” Read carefully the details Hastert’s office released regarding how they investigated the allegation. Is it really the regular practice of the House GOP leadership staff to keep the Speaker out of the loop when it comes to questionable conduct by Members? Hastert is notoriously slow when encouraging a wounded member of his party to get going. From Tom DeLay to Bob Ney, Hastert never seems willing to push members into what needs to be done. Now, in all three recent cases (DeLay, Ney and Foley), the member eventually did the right thing -- but at a politically painful pace. Hastert, for better or worse, is an institutionalist. As the release below shows, he allows the system to work even when it appears the system doesn’t work very fast, and unfortunately for him, very well. A coach should know when a member of his team is in trouble. Hastert probably regrets that he didn’t speak directly to Foley and at least given Foley the chance to lie directly to his face. It’s important to note that when the House GOP leadership first apparently learned of something amiss with Foley and a page, the GOP leadership team was in flux. Roy Blunt was the acting Majority Leader fighting with John Boehner to keep the job permanently. Did the House GOP leadership vacuum that was created by DeLay’s departure lead to a situation where no one was calling the political shots? And did that sense of chaos create anxiety, preventing Republicans from taking the steps necessary to protect these underage pages? No doubt, every member of the House GOP leadership that knew of this Foley problem before this week regrets not pursuing a more thorough investigation. But isn’t the argument Democrats will now make when reviving the “culture of corruption” tagline (or even a “culture of arrogance of power” tagline) is that the House GOP leadership just doesn’t have the capacity or the intellectual curiosity to investigate questionable activity, whether it involves a member of their own caucus or more serious public policy concerns like the war in Iraq?