Quite apart from any political message conveyed one way or another, I found this picture pretty funny.
--Josh Marshall
Who is Allen Raymond, the GOP phone bank marketeer who arranged the shutdown of Democratic phone banks in New Hampshire on election day last November? Who else has he worked for? And, most interesting, what other Republican campaigns did he work for in 2002? One clue: it doesn't stop in New Hampshire. More to come on each of these questions very soon ...
--Josh Marshall
Here's a story that deserves a lot of attention. Did this happen anywhere else?
The Executive Director of the New Hampshire Republican party, 
Chuck McGee, has just resigned because the state party hired a telemarketing firm to jam the phone lines of the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation last election day. The immediate cause of his resignation actually appears to be the fact that he lied to The Manchester Union Leader for the article they published breaking the story in this morning's paper.
Now, in the free-for-all world of political telemarketing, there's what you might call an evolving standard for what's just playing hardball and what's way out of bounds. (What sounds criminal to some, is just ... well, 'innovative' to more creative minds.) But I think this clearly qualifies as way, way out of bounds. Indeed, it may have broken New Hampshire state laws against phone harassment. And New Hampshire authorities, in addition to pursuing the matter themselves, have passed the case on to the Justice Department.
The New Hampshire GOP hired 'GOP Marketplace' -- a Virginia-based telemarketing firm run by a Republican operative named Allen Raymond -- to do the deed. Actually, they subcontracted the deed to a phone bank shop out in Idaho, Milo Enterprises.
Now the New Hampshire GOP still seems to be claiming that they hired GOP Marketplace for their own get out the vote efforts. The argument seems to be that the state party paid for get-out-the-vote. But by the time the word got passed on to Milo Enterprises it had turned into instructions to make countless five-second hang-up calls to phone numbers of the Democratic coordinated campaign offices as well as the offices of the Manchester firefighters union, which was also doing get-out-the-vote work that morning. The state party's story still seems to be evolving.
Now, to refresh my memory, I went back and looked up the point spread on Senator John Sununu's close-call victory over out-going Governor Jeanne Shaheen. He won with 51% to her 47% with a Libertarian candidate picking up the other 2%. Honestly, that's too big a spread to overcome with solid phone banking, especially because this effort seemed to get cut short after a couple hours when Verizon intervened.
But cheating isn't okay just because you probably would have won anyway. What's more, was the New Hampshire GOP really the only state party getting these services from 'GOP Marketplace'? This sounds like an 'innovation' that a go-getter firm like 'GOP Marketplace' would want to peddle all over the place. There were a lot of close races last November. Did this happen anywhere else? Who else got help from 'GOP Marketplace'?
--Josh Marshall
Many Iraq hawks claim that once Saddam had a serious WMD capacity (i.e., more than just some nerve gas) he'd use it against the United States. I've never bought that. What I do think 
is that he might threaten it, or more likely use it to threaten our allies in the region with it, and that would make him extremely difficult for us to deal with.
Now, one of the central premises of the realist/containment viewpoint on Iraq ("he's not suicidal, he could be deterred") is that Saddam may be evil but he's fundamentally a rational actor. I haven't thought through all the implications of this, but it occurs to me that we're now seeing a pretty clear partial refutation of that thesis.
We're about to go to war with Iraq. It may be a terrible idea. It may go badly for us. We may get bogged down there for years. But one thing is absolutely certain: it will go terribly for Saddam Hussein. His regime won't survive. And he probably won't survive personally either.
He could prevent this by making a credible show of disarming. But he's not. He's quite literally courting his own destruction. Yes, one can figure issues of pride, national honor, unwillingness to lose his WMD capacity, etc. But at the end of the day he's courting his own destruction, sealing his fate. How does that square with the idea that he's purely a rational actor, most interested in his own survival?
--Josh Marshall
I try not to navel gaze too much on TPM about writing TPM and why I started TPM and so forth. Well, I try not to at least. But if the subject interests you, Kevin Drum at the CalPundit website just did an interview with me about all things TPM ...
--Josh Marshall
The few ... the proud ... the four remaining North Carolina Republicans in the House of Representatives 
who still haven't insulted some ethnic or racial group.
You can see the honor roll here. So far Howard Coble (calls internment of Japanese-Americans appropriate and says "for many of these Japanese-Americans, it wasn't safe for them to be on the street"), Sue Myrick (referring to Arab-Americans, "Look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country") and Cass Ballenger ("segregationist feelings") are all out of the running.
Who will be next? It's sort of like The Bachelorette or Joe Millionaire. Should this be a new reality show?
--Josh Marshall
According to this article on CNN, the Pentagon is investigating General Tommy Franks, head of Centcom (the Mideast regional command). The investigation is about the standard mumbo-jumbo, whether he properly repaid the Army for his wife's flights on military aircraft, and so forth.
Now, abusing perks of office is no good. And I've got no brief for Tommy Franks one way or another. But Tommy Franks is the guy in charge of US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. He's a bit busy.
Whether or not he paid for his wife's travel correctly, do we really want to distract this guy from what he's doing? Even if you're a die-hard against military operations in Iraq, you still don't want the general in command to be worried about some investigation. Just in the national interest, wouldn't it be better to shelve this investigation for a bit? At least until things calm down a little? Can't the president or Rumsfeld just make an executive decision on this one?
--Josh Marshall
Several times in the last month or two I've mentioned that I've been giving the better part of my time, of late, over to the 17th century rather than the 21st. Specifically, I'm making a final push to finish my doctoral dissertation which is about 17th century New England, Indians and English settlers, their economic interactions and basically how they were always managing to whack each other. It's the main reason the posts have been a bit sparse.
In any case, I've had a number of readers write in and say I should discuss what I'm writing about on TPM. Now, I've -- I think wisely -- chosen not to do that. It's arcane stuff and it's not, nor will it be, what this site is about. But tonight when I was working through a database of journal articles I came across an article I wrote -- disturbing as it is to admit even to myself -- about ten years ago. I wrote it during my first semester of graduate school. And it was published a couple years later, in the Fall of 1995, in the New England Quarterly. A couple years later it was anthologized in a book called New England Encounters: Indians and Euroamericans, Ca. 1600-1850, an anthology of articles about New England Indians getting knocked around by European settlers over the course of two hundred or so years.
So, this is something I wrote a while before I even started the dissertation project. But it's what got me interested in the subject. And it's broadly similar to what the dissertation is about: same topic, same region, some of the same cast of characters. This article -- the title is ... ahem .. "'A Melancholy People': Anglo-Indian Relations in Early Warwick, Rhode Island, 1642-1675" -- is about a small town in New England, during the first couple decades of settlement, where Indians and English settlers lived more or less right on top of each other. (Click here to download the pdf file, which is on the large side.) The quote in the title is a line from a letter written by Roger Williams, and it's a reference to how bummin' the Indians were sharing turf with the settlers.
Needless to say, it's not your standard TPM fare. But if you're interested ...
--Josh Marshall
Did Miguel Estrada tell a fairly obvious untruth at his Senate hearing last Fall?
Last week a New York Times editorial said that when "asked his views of Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, Mr. Estrada responded implausibly that he had not given enough thought to the question."
Now I was curious: what was the actual statement they were referring to?
I looked through the transcript and I imagine they must be talking about this exchange he had with Senator Diane Feinstein ...
MR. ESTRADA: The Supreme Court has so held and I have no view of any nature whatsoever, whether it be legal, philosophical, moral, or any other type of view that would keep me from [sic] apply that case law faithfully.SEN. FEINSTEIN: Do you believe that Roe was correctly decided?
MR. ESTRADA: I have -- my view of the judicial function, Senator Feinstein, does not allow me to answer that question. I have a personal view on the subject of -- of abortion, as I think you know. And -- but I have not done what I think the judicial function would require me to do in order to ascertain whether the court got it right as an original matter. I haven't listened to parties. I haven't come to an actual case of controversy with an open mind. I haven't gone back and run down everything that they have cited. And the reason I haven't done any of those things is that I view our system of law as one in which both me as an advocate, and possibly if I am confirmed as a judge, have a job of building on the wall that is already there and not to call it into question. I have had no particular reason to go back and look at whether it was right or wrong as a matter of law, as I would if I were a judge that was hearing the case for the first time. It is there. It is the law as it has subsequently refined by the Casey case, and I will follow it (italics added).
Now statements like these are carefully crafted by handlers and preppers. And their obvious purpose is to allow the speaker to muddle through without really answering the question. Or, perhaps, tell an untruth which can never quite be exposed as an untruth.
But for what it's worth, what does this statement actually mean?
As nearly as I can figure, Estrada is saying that though he has personal views about abortion and is familiar with the legal questions involved, he has never been in a position -- as a judge would be -- of having to sit down, review an actual case with an open mind, read all the relevant cases, and so forth. Now that's implausible on its face. But it turns out also to be almost certainly untrue.
Here's why.
In the Fall of 1988 Estrada was a clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy. On November 8th, 1988 then-Solicitor General Charles Fried filed a brief with the Supreme Court urging the Court to take up the case which eventually became Webster and to use it to overturn Roe. On January 9th of 1989, the Court did finally grant cert, thus agreeing to hear the case.
Keep in mind that Kennedy was new on the Court and widely believed or at least, by many, hoped to be the one that would provide the decisive vote against Roe. Didn't turn out that way of course. But that's what people thought.
Keep in mind too that, according to Edward Lazarus's book Closed Chambers, the crop of clerks on the Court that year were particularly ideological. The conservatives among the clerks formed what Lazarus -- a clerk that year himself -- called "the cabal."
Now, Estrada left the Court I believe in early January of 1989, right about the same time that the Supremes agreed to hear the case, perhaps a few days before or a few days after. The relevant point, however, is that he was there for the entire period in which the decision was being made over whether to accept the case. At the time, Roe was the issue on the Court and Kennedy was the Justice on that issue. Estrada was clerking for one of the nine Justices who had to do exactly that 'judicial function' Estrada later described. As his clerk, doesn't that almost certainly mean Estrada pretty much had to do it too?
And there's more. It turns out there was another abortion related case being decided that Fall: the so-called "Michael H." case, a case which didn't itself have anything to do with the abortion issue, but which conservatives on the Court intended to use to open up a new line of attack against Roe. Scalia wrote the majority opinion in that case. And his first version, which would have been highly damaging to Roe was circulated in November 1988. Again, that's when Estrada was clerking for the guy who was in effect the Roe v. Wade Justice. (Note: Certainly different clerks work on different cases. In this case, a source tells me, the pool memo on whether to grant cert on Webster was written by a Blackmun clerk, ironically enough. And Kennedy was part of the pool. But in the Supreme Court, on a case of such magnitude, it's simply not credible that everyone there wouldn't have been chattering and thinking about this case and its disposition. Particularly Estrada.)
Nominees often say things that you pretty much know aren't true. But isn't this a case where Miguel Estrada said something that you can pretty much prove isn't true?
--Josh Marshall
Just where is the administration getting all that new money to prevent and treat AIDS in Africa?
There's certainly some new money. But a closer examination seems to show that there's also a lot of robbing from Peter to pay Paul.
There's a new policy analysis up on the Brookings website and it seems to show that a substantial amount of the new money is coming out of money we're already spending to wipe out other diseases in Africa. Here's a key passage (see the italicized section) which comes toward the end of the paper ...
Table 1 clarifies that for the combined total of the Global AIDs Initiative and the Child Survival and Health account (which includes the bulk of HIV/AIDs assistance in H.J.RES.2), the Administration’s request for fiscal 2004 shows no net increase relative to the fiscal 2003 funding in H.J.RES.2. This is because the Administration’s increase of $450 million for the Global AIDs initiative is offset by a $470 million shortfall in its Child Survival and Health request relative to the fiscal 2003 appropriations bill.
What's going on here? I give the administration its due. As the rest of the paper makes clear, there is some new money. But a lot of it seems to be coming out of money we're using to fight malaria, malnutrition and various diseases that can be prevented by vaccination. Why isn't more being made out of this?
--Josh Marshall
A good friend of mine who is terribly shrewd about foreign policy, and opposes an Iraq war from a foreign policy realist perspective, tells me that the problems in North Korea could be one of the consequences. The idea is that our hyperfocus on Iraq distracted us from our responsibilities in Asia, got us into this jam, and now keeps us floundering in it. Somehow though that just doesn't quite add up. I mean, I know it's supposed to be hard to fight two, simultaneous regional wars, as our war-fighting doctrine still envisions. But should it really be so hard to fight two simultaneous diplomatic offenses?
--Josh Marshall
It seems there's some question whether Colin Powell will try to link Iraq to al Qaida in 
his presentation at the UN. Let's hope not. Why? Because it's just not true. You only find anything to talk about if you set the bar for al Qaida connections so ridiculously low that you'd end up pulling in most of our allies in the region too.
I think there are a number of good reasons for seeking a military solution to the threat posed by Iraq. But some dingbat link to al Qaida isn't one of them. One might say that it's a bad idea to make such arguments because they weaken the credibility of the case against Saddam. But how about just not doing it because the stories are bogus?
Isn't that enough of a reason.
--Josh Marshall
If you're wondering about the second half of the Ken Pollack interview, you didn't miss it. The plan was to run it over last weekend. But after the Shuttle break-up, we chose to hold it back for a few days so it didn't get lost in the shuffle. We'll be running the second half -- which actually has the juiciest stuff -- later this week. Stay tuned.
--Josh Marshall
Here's my second column for The Hill. The topic: the sad consequences of trying to run a manned space flight program on the cheap. Here's a snippet.
Critics contend that NASA is bloated and inefficient. And, to an extent, they’re right. Cost overruns are commonplace, and compared to old-fashioned rockets, the shuttle is very expensive to fly. But it’s possible for an agency to be bloated, inefficient and underfunded. In fact, the latter can sometimes lead to the former. The problem is like that of an under-capitalized business or a falling-apart old car that costs more money in upkeep than it would to buy a newer model.
As I am on Iraq, I'm probably a bit off the reservation in wanting big budgets for the manned space program. But there you have it. Click here to read the whole thing.
--Josh Marshall
You may have seen that in the Times today Fox Butterfield has an article about how a former gun company executive and lobbyist, Robert A. Ricker, has basically seen the light and admitted in an affidavit that, in the Times's words, "gun manufacturers had long known that some of their dealers corruptly sold guns to criminals but pressured one another into remaining silent for fear of legal liability."
Here's the key passage at the end of the article ...
Mr. Ricker said in the affidavit that the idea that all dealers operate legally because they have a license is a "fiction." He added that "the firearms industry has long known that A.T.F. is hampered" by its shortage of personnel and loopholes in the gun laws. For example, he said, the bureau can inspect a dealer only once a year as a result of a law supported by the rifle association.
This month's issue of The Washington Monthly has a dynamite article about how the gun industry helped keep those ATF inspection limits in place.
--Josh Marshall
If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Or, in our case, if there's a crisis on the Korean Peninsula and the White House doesn't pay any attention, does it even really matter? That is a proposition the Bush administration seems increasingly determined to put to the test.
Watch very closely what's happening.
According to American satellite intelligence, North Korea is now more or less openly hauling those 8000 spent nuclear fuel rods off to be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium and then, presumably, into nuclear warheads.
Let's be clear, this is exactly the act we were prepared to go to war in 1994 to prevent.
Now, why are they doing this? There are essentially two theories. One says that they want a deal, which would likely mean diplomatic normalization, various forms of economic aid, and some sort of non-aggression pact with the United States. Under this theory, they're upping the ante because they want to force us to bargain and bargain on their terms. In that case, making a big show of cranking up the nukes makes a lot of sense.
Then there's theory two: the North Koreans wouldn't mind having all those things too. But what they're really set on is getting the bomb, thinking -- not unreasonably -- that it's the one true guarantee against the military overthrow of their regime (and not a bad export crop either). They're using America's temporary distraction with Iraq to 'break out' of the nuclear box so that they can present the Americans with a fait accompli once we're done dealing with Iraq.
Actually, there's a subset of theory two. Some say the North Koreans were always determined to get nukes no matter what. Others point to the Bush administration's 'regime change' and preemption rhetoric as the trigger.
The truth is that we don't really know which of these possibilities is the case. In fact, the North Koreans probably don't either. We tend to over-determine the intentions of our adversaries. Most Korea experts think the North Korean leadership is divided between ardent militarists and others more eager for rapprochement, even at the expense of dumping the nukes. In truth, most think Kim Jong-Il probably tends toward that latter camp.
All of this is perhaps a long way of saying that this is a hell of a complicated situation.
But what are we doing about it? In a word, nothing.
The Bush administration has ruled out force as a means of solving the problem and pretty much ruled out talking too. And that leaves you pretty much with nothing. And that's what we're doing.
It would be one thing if this were a stand off and we could just wait them out. But it's hardly that. They are walking the ball down field in our direction. Each day we do nothing brings those nukes and plutonium one step closer. So again, what are we doing?
Nothing.
It's like that really, really uncomfortable phone call that you so don't want to make. So you just ... well, you just don't make it and you pretend the problem will go away.
The truth is that the administration has blustered its way into a box, ruling out its two basic options -- talking or fighting -- and giving the North Koreans time to strengthen their hand by advancing their plutonium production. They're putting on a cool demeanor like they've got a master plan, but by not admitting that what's happening is a crisis, they're simply letting the situation drift until a nuclear North Korea becomes a fait accompli.
At which point they'll blame it on Bill Clinton.
It's a pitiful situation.
Meanwhile, in a Saturday article which was quickly overwhelmed by the Shuttle catastrophe, the Washington Post reported pretty much exactly what TPM and The Nelson Report were reporting three weeks ago: that the Bush administration had known about the North Koreans' uranium enrichment program for two years before raising the matter with them.
--Josh Marshall
Washington is all abuzz over the nomination of Miguel Estrada to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The intensity of interest stems, in part, from the fact that many believe he is on the fast track to a Supreme Court nomination. The DC Circuit would be a stepping stone, as it often is, to a such a later appointment. In any case, there's a lot being said about Estrada's appointment both pro and con. On Crossfire Estrada's friend Ann Coulter told Paul Begala that, "the second [Estrada] gets in there, he'll overrule everything you love." But I'm not sure he's designated her an official spokesperson. In any case, what surprises me is that no one has raised the fact that Estrada was one of the lead lawyers on President Bush's legal team arguing the Florida recount cases. According to this article in The American Lawyer (helpfully reproduced on the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher website), Estrada was one of four other "lead partners" on the team Ted Olson put together to make now-President Bush's arguments about why to shut down the vote-counting in Florida. That's certainly something I'd want to know more about.
--Josh Marshall
An important point for me to add regarding the Easterbrook piece mentioned below. Definitely read it. It's important. But I don't share the lack of enthusiasm about manned space flight which comes through in his new piece today in Time.com. Nor do I agree with all the particulars in the exhaustive earlier Monthly article. Just wanted to make that clear. More soon.
--Josh Marshall
I was just flipping through the must-read Easterbrook article mentioned below when I came across this passage ...
The external fuel tank, for instance, is full of oxygen and hydrogen cooled to -400ƒ F. to make the gases flow as liquids. Ice will form on the tank. When Columbia's tiles started popping off in a stiff breeze, it occurred to engineers that ice chunks from the tank would crash into the tiles during the sonic chaos of launch: Goodbye, Columbia. So insulation was added to the tank. But while thermal cladding solves the ice problem, it adds weight. The entire vehicle, loaded, weighs 4.5 million pounds. Say you add one percent. Doesn't sound like much. One percent comes to 45,000 pounds. That's almost all of the payload.
Ugh ...
--Josh Marshall
I'd meant to do this post yesterday. But with the sad events of Saturday morning it seemed inappropriate.
We have our traffic statistics in for January 2003. Unique Visitors 141,660; Visits 379,311; Page Views 1,049,175. Those numbers are a shade off the December clip. But December was a big month, what with the Trent Lott business and all.
To give some perspective, those numbers are roughly twice what they were last October (73,629; 187,877; 550,035) and roughly three times what they were as recently as July (53,800; 122,974; 371,601).
(For what it's worth, 'unique visitors' and 'visits' are to some extent questions of definition, judged differently by different web statistics programs. So I guess the closest there is to a 'hard' number is 'page views.')
In any case, I'd like to thank everyone who has visited the site, even more those who've returned again and again, and still more those who've helped spread the word to others. A sincere thank you.
--Josh Marshall
One of the most chilling parts of yesterday's NASA news conference was one simple statement of fact, repeated again and again: Even if they'd known the thermal tiles on the underbelly of the shuttle had been fatally damaged, there was nothing they could have done about it anyway.
Nothing.
(It occurs to me that had they truly known something like this was going to happen, they could have housed the astronauts, on an emergency basis, on the space station until they came up with some way to get them down. I believe the Russians have unmanned capsules that bring supplies up and so forth. In any case, now it's moot. Late Update: It seems my surmise was wrong. I'm told there are at least two reasons why such a hook-up would not have been doable. A) The Columbia lacked the proper docking apparatus and B) Once in orbit, there was no way to get it to the Space Station.)
It turns out that back in 1980, while NASA was trying to work out the kinks on this particular ship, Columbia, Gregg Easterbrook wrote a lengthy article in The Washington Monthly questioning just how spaceworthy the whole design really was. Here's one passage ...
Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia's difficulties. "I don't think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems," Kapryan says. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)
The Monthly has a lengthy excerpt up now on their website (presumably the whole article is to follow). Definitely go take a look. Late Update: The complete Easterbrook article is now online at the Monthly website.
--Josh Marshall
