A Washington Post editorial today gives Al Gore a rough slap ("Negative Al Gore"). Predictably, I guess, the Post
is the repository of this city's most easy-thinking conventional wisdom.
In a rebuke to the former vice-president's attack on White House economic
policy the Post writes ...
President Bush's main economic policy -- the large tax cut of last year -- was not responsible for any of the current damage. Indeed, given the twin shocks of 9/11 and the post-Enron stock market decline, the short-term stimulus created by the tax cuts has turned out to be fortuitously well timed. To be sure, parts of the tax cut that have yet to be implemented, especially the repeal of the estate tax, are unaffordable and ought to be repealed.
Mickey Kaus chimed in with "WaPo acknowledges what Krugman won't about the Bush tax cuts."
But does the Post's remark even make logical, 
let alone substantive, sense? The Post
begins by saying that the Bush tax cut -- which must be what they mean by
his "main economic policy" -- is not responsible for any of our current economic
situation, by which they mean, in large part, the rapidly ballooning federal
deficit.
With respect to the deficit, this is largely true. This year's
deficit is caused to only a fairly limited degree by 9/11 or (as opposed
to the deficits for the rest of the decade) the Bush tax cut. The culprit
is a flagging economy and what one must imagine is a virtual surcease in
the fat capital gains tax revenues which floated the federal budget through
the end of the last decade.
So far so good.
But then the Post says that "the short-term stimulus created
by the tax cuts has turned out to be fortuitously well timed." This makes
no sense. Very little of the tax cut has even been implemented yet. That's
why the White House -- and the Washington Post -- can accurately say that the administration is not responsible for this year's deficit. Is the Post talking about the stimulus which Republican flacks sometimes claim comes from the expectation of future tax cuts?
It's true that some of the tax cuts have kicked in -- largely the
middle-class rebate checks foisted on the president by Senate Democrats,
which are rather small. But, in any case, one can either have real stimulus,
which might get some credit for buoying the economy, and also ballooning the deficit. Or one can have neither. The Post picks and chooses to sustain the logic of their editorial.
It's an example of the crying sin of much recent political journalism
and commentary -- not bias of the right or the left, but reflexive special-pleading
on behalf of the Bush White House.
--Josh Marshall
There is a chilling, even terrifying story unfolding in Washington, DC, though I don't know how much play it's getting outside of this area.
Yesterday morning someone shot and killed five people in the Washington,
DC suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland. Unfortunately, shootouts and
other flurries of violence happen not that infrequently. So that in itself
might not sound so striking. The details tell the story ...
To all appearances none of the five had any connection to each other
beside the fact that they were all out in the open Thursday morning in the
area in question. Each was shot dead with a single shot. Police speculate
that the killer used a high-powered rifle. And since police reports don't
seem to contain any instances of people hearing gunshots or seeing the shooter,
it would seem that the shooter was firing at some distance.
So you have someone on the loose who is apparently a very
good marksman -- able to kill five people with single shots at seemingly
great distances and not be seen. The mix of accuracy, stealth, and knowing
where to shoot is unsettling, to put it mildly.
Police now believe that the shooting spree began Wednesday evening
with a single shot through the window of an arts and crafts store in Washington.
Less than an hour later a man walking across a crosswalk at the intersection of Randolph Road and Georgia Avenue was shot dead in a manner similar to that of those killed the next morning in Montgomery County.
From the facts at hand it really sounds like someone who has training
as a sniper, though certainly anyone who was an accomplished marksman could
probably pull it off.
The police are obviously taking this all extremely seriously. But they don't seem to have that much to go on. And as you can imagine, if someone can conceal themselves and shoot from a sufficient distance that no witnesses can connect the shooter and the victim, it can be really difficult to catch the guy or even know where to start. Suddenly I'm not feeling so bad that I'm going to be home working this weekend ...
--Josh Marshall
Nothing sounds quite so tinny as self-righteous indignation. Until you come to Republican self-righteous indignation.
TPM continues to be inundated by a flurry of Republicans' emails howling about the outrage of New Jersey Supreme
Court decision allowing a change in the election ballots. The normally sensible
Senator Bill Frist -- who walked the Republicans' appeal over to the Supreme
Court today -- was ridiculous enough to charge that Democrats were trying
to "steal an election they could not otherwise win."
(Where these gun-slingers for the rule of law were when Mitt Romney
got a pass, and rightly so, on his Massachusetts residency requirement I
just don't know.)
Republicans have developed a lot of know-how in the last couple
years at stealing elections. But I must confess to a certain confusion about
how one steals an election by fielding a candidate. The idea seems to be
that for Doug Forrester, Frank Lautenberg is an unfairly strong candidate. And that Forrester is somehow damaged by Lautenberg's electability.
Giving it some thought, and considering the Supreme Court's decisions in Bush v. Gore, it even seems possible that this might be the basis of an equal protection claim for Forrester. Forrester
entered the race with the reasonable expectation that he would only face
a candidate either equally lame or more lame than him, but not less
lame. It's almost an implied contract he has with the state's electorate,
right? Putting a new candidate on the ballot now violates this insufferable
chump's right to coast into office without facing an actual opponent. But
I digress ...
I looked at the NJ Supreme Court ruling
and it struck me as a liberal, though not unreasonable, construction of the
statute. The court "determined that N.J.S.A. 19:13-20 [the statute in question]
does not preclude the possibility of a vacancy occurring within fifty-one
days of the general election ..."
Now I'm not a lawyer (and lawyers -- though several are very dear
to my heart -- rule the world and elections and so forth) so there's really
no point in my giving you my opinion on whether the decision passes muster.
But I'd say I feel pretty comfortable with the proposition stated here a
couple days back, that election laws should be construed expansively in the
interest of holding actual elections -- not just notional elections in which it's the Republican against the Green or Socialist candidate.
Most of the substantive arguments I've heard to the contrary strike
me as pretty weak. One commentator says the whole switch is wrong because
it deprives Jersey voters of the right to throw Torricelli out of office.
But of course that's just a dumb throwaway comment which means nothing.
The other argument one hears is that this decision will set off
a wave of candidates taking electoral hemlock days or weeks prior to an election
they are destined to lose. Can anyone who makes this argument have ever
spent any time around elected politicians? Not a chance. Especially these
days with weak parties there's really no institutional force capable of knocking
a candidate out of a race. And people who run for office just don't have
egos that work that way. To put it mildly.
The real public good question, it seems to me, is just what harm anyone has suffered through this decision. I can't see one, save Doug Forrester being forced to run against an actual candidate. Unfortunately, the appeal the Forrester
campaign has made to the United States Supreme Court turns on precisely the
same principle which the Court's 5-4 majority created out of whole cloth
in order to find a way to turn the 2000 presidential election to George W.
Bush. So consistency would dictate their intervention in this case too. Here consistency may be the handmaiden of travesty.
--Josh Marshall
The money quote from the New Jersey Supreme Court ballot case came from Justice Peter G. Verniero, a former Chief Counsel, Chief of Staff and later Supreme Court appointee of former Governor Christie Whitman. "Didn't Mr. Forrester call for Mr. Torricelli to withdraw?" he said in response to a protesting Republican attorney during oral arguments. "Was he expecting to run unopposed?"
That about sums it up.
The Forrester
campaign is now headed to the United States Supreme Court, the normal recourse
of Republicans who can't win elections with majorities but aren't inclined
to see that as the end of the story.
I've received a lot of emails in the last couple of days from people
saying I'm ignoring the importance of the deadline which prescribes that
in New Jersey candidates have to pull out 51 days before an election to have
another name put on the ballot. There's certainly a good argument there.
Just not the best argument. I'm reminded of earlier this year when Massachusetts
Democrats tried to knock Mitt Romney out of contention for the governorship
because there may have been some problem with his Massachusetts residency
status. I thought that was wrong; just as I think this is wrong for Republicans
to do. The unanimous decision of the New Jersey Supreme Court -- which is
heavily stacked with Republican appointees -- I think gives a lot of credence
to that view.
Some readers who have written in tell me that this is a recipe for
electoral chaos, that every time a candidate looks like he's going down the
tubes he can just pull out and bring in a ringer. There's a superficial
logic to the argument. But such arguments toward practical effect must withstand
some measure of logical scrutiny and this one really doesn't. When filing
deadlines come down how many candidates do you usually see rushing to cash
out their candidacies? Right, not many. The sort of people who run for
elective office just don't do that sort of thing. And in how many of those
cases is there another credible candidate waiting in the wings? Not often.
If there were, that other candidate probably would have won the primary.
Say what you will about what happened here, it's hardly likely to become
a pattern.
--Josh Marshall
And so after a long intermission we return to the case of Richard Perle, meddler.
As TPM noted,
almost a year ago to the day, Perle is a long-time heavyweight in neo-conservative
foreign policy circles. He is also the Chairman of something called the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. The DPB used to be a rather out-of-the-way
affair, but Perle's transformed it into an important advisory council within
today's Pentagon. By any real measure, he's a member of this administration.
Yet around this time last year he was going on virtually every chat show
there is and attacking Colin Powell for disloyalty to the president. And
he was getting unwary chat show producers to identify him merely as an 'assistant
secretary of defense' from the Reagan administration.
Point being, Perle was trying to have it both ways, being an administration
player one day and an outside critic the next. And the administration was
letting him get away with it.
Numerous embarrassments followed.
It was Perle who invited the off-kilter, former Lyndon LaRouche follower
Laurent Murawiec to give a presentation at the Pentagon advising the US essentially
to declare war against Saudi Arabia. As we noted at the time, the real crime
of Murawiec' presentation -- which was later published by Jack Shafer in Slate
-- wasn't so much the controversy it created as the fact that it had all
the appearances of being written by a precocious nine-year-old. But, alas,
I digress ...
Now Perle is at it again. According to the Iranian news agency IRNA, Perle just gave an interview to the German daily Handelsblatt
in which he said Gerhard Schroeder, the recently re-elected German Chancellor,
should resign because of the allegedly anti-American campaign he recently
ran. A Pentagon official saying something like that is a big deal.
It's actually rather similar to the article he wrote about exactly one year ago in Britain's Daily Telegraph derisively attacking the British Foreign Secretary.
This is foreign policy freelancing -- irresponsible and often shameless
behavior. Beside the behind-the-scenes mischief Perle cooks up, these comments
of his are routinely reported in the foreign countries in question as comments
of a 'senior Pentagon advisor' or some similar formulation and -- as Perle
clearly intends -- the comments carry the impression that he is speaking
in some capacity for the administration. It's shabby behavior and low intrigue. An administration of pros wouldn't tolerate it.
--Josh Marshall
A couple months ago I
told Nick Confessore that I doubted the Democrats would be in much danger
of losing control of the Senate come early October. An article questioning
why Democrats weren't making more of an issue of that danger or why they
weren't trying to nationalize the election around fears of unfettered, one-party
control of the federal government, I told him, might fall on deaf ears.
Well, chalk one up for Nick Confessore.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not pessimistic about Democrats chances
of holding the Senate. But a number of factors -- the crisis over Iraq primarily,
but also a number of curveballs from left-field -- have really thrown the
contest wide-open.
And now Nick's new article -- which is the cover piece in the new issue of the Washington Monthly -- looks uncomfortably on target and relevant.
--Josh Marshall
A few days back New Jersey Republican Senate candidate Douglas Forrester called on Bob Torricelli to resign. Now Torricelli's in effect done that and Forrester says it's not fair and that no new, clean
Democrat should be allowed to take his place on the ballot. He's complaining.
The heads of the Republican Senate committee are complaining. Everybody
with a parenthetical 'R' after their name is complaining.
From what I can tell, the legalities of getting a new name on the
ballot at this late stage are unsettled. But I was disappointed this morning
when I saw some people who should know better claiming that it was somehow
an outrage for the Democrats to try to field a candidate and give New Jersey
voters an actual election next month.
Election law -- as we saw in Florida two years ago -- is the most
vexed kind of law in a democratic society since it sets such powerful interests
against each other -- the rule of law and democracy. In a democratic society,
the presumption in favor of putting significant questions before voters should
almost
always prevail. If New Jersey law is crystal clear on this point, and it
specifically bars any means of putting another name on the ballot, then so
be it. But if there's a legal way to do it, then it should happen.
This is the advantage Democrats do have and should have in this
case. In a democratic polity, the absence of black letter law to the contrary,
the interests of democracy -- having real elections -- always trump procedural
squabbling.
The rather shabby truth here is that Republicans understand that Forrester could only get elected in a state like New Jersey not simply if he were facing a bad candidate but essentially no candidate.
--Josh Marshall
Democratic hopes for the United States Senate have taken a real hit. It's not so much Bob Torricelli's decision to drop out of the New Jersey Senate race today as the revelations last week which seem to have made the decision inevitable. Torch's decision to bail out may be a blessing for the Dems in as much as it at least creates the possibility that that seat -- which really should be a Dem seat -- can be salvaged.
As emails from friends have streamed in over the course of the morning, I keep thinking of the stabbing scene in Julius Caesar. Not a perfect analogy, mind you. But it's hard to exaggerate the sheer number of people who can't wait to slip their own private dagger into this guy now that they see the blood in the water or, perhaps better to say, the body on the ground. Former staffers, old opponents, old friends, old girlfriends, miscellaneous pols, campaign workers, donors, house pets, you name it. Torch always ran his show on fear, bravado and muscle. The denouement is going to be ugly. It already is.
--Josh Marshall
Rumors are swirling in DC and New Jersey that Senator Bob "Torch" Torricelli is about to pull the plug on his embattled Senate reelection campaign.
--Josh Marshall
If you're a new reader of TPM you may be surprised to know that in addition to regime change and Iraq and George Orwell and the South Dakota Senate Race, TPM also has a bizarre but abiding interest in the Chandra Levy case. He was sort of an early adopter, you might say.
(Don't criticize: everyone has their failings.)
Today the Washington Post published an article -- expected for some time -- reporting that DC police have refocused interest on an El Salvadoran immigrant named Ingmar A. Guandique.
Guandique attacked two women in Rock Creek Park not long after Levy disappeared. And he was later sentenced to ten years in prison under a plea bargain under which he pled guilty to attempted robbery. While awaiting trial a prison inmate told police that Guandique had confessed to the crime. But the snitch failed a polygraph and Guandique passed one. So in the absence of other evidence police scratched him from the list.
Now, according to the Post, police are considering Guandique again after questions were raised about whether the polygraph should have been administered by a bilingual examiner rather than through a translator. Perhaps imprecision in translation led to a bad test result. (Others who've followed this case speculate that questions were just getting asked about why the *#$% the DC cops never solved this case. And Guandique was convenient.)
But there are still a few pretty basic problems with the new theory. In fact, the Post article addresses some of them, even if it does sorta bury them.
In May, authorities played down Guandique as a suspect because Levy had been killed before his attacks on the joggers -- who fought back and escaped without serious injury. They theorized that someone who already had killed would have been more violent with the later victims. Also, the two joggers looked strikingly similar, tall and blond, while Levy was a petite brunet.But investigators now believe that opportunity, not how the women looked, was a key factor in the attacks, according to law enforcement sources. They still are not sure why Levy was in the park, because family and friends say she was not a jogger and didn't like to go there alone. Some investigators have speculated that she went for a long walk, possibly to see the Nature Center, or was in the park to meet someone.
...
[D.C. Superior Court Judge Noel A.] Kramer said Guandique never stole anything from the women, not even their portable tape players, items he told police he was trying to take when he attacked them. "There is more here than a Walkman," the judge said.
In a similarity noted by law enforcement authorities, Levy's Walkman also was found with her remains.
Here we have two very basic problems which -- in the absence of any direct evidence inculpating Guandique -- still seem to me hard to overcome. It seems improbable -- though certainly not impossible -- that a serial killer would quickly dispatch his first victim and then flub the next two. As the Post piece says, one imagines you'd get better at it, not worse.
Still more problematic is just why Levy would have been in the park. Levy was not only not a jogger, she was not a jogger -- according to friends and family -- specifically because she didn't think it was safe to jog outside in a city like DC. If that's true, why on earth would she go to an isolated and sorta scary place like that to jog?
There are some other small details militating against the jogging hypothesis. But I'll spare you those.
Secondly, if you consider where she lived and where her body was found this would have been a very, very long jog on a hot summer day. At least it seems that way to a pitiful jogger like TPM. But we don't have to go into that.
This issue of the eerie similarity of no one having their Walkman stolen is really just too moronic to even comment on.
Now, there is always the Kafkaesque -- well, not exactly Kafkaesque, but work with me, I can't think of another word -- scenario in which Condit, or some rent-a-goon he hired, lured Levy into a secluded part of Rock Creek Park to tell her it was over, positively over, and she better not think of making any trouble. Then he leaves her there. Chandra is crushed and despondently drifts off into some wooded section of the park only to get whacked by Guandique.
It would be just Condit's luck.
--Josh Marshall
