Archive for May, 2009

 Earlier this week I took a red-eye flight from Phoenix to the east coast.  I’m not a fan of red-eyes and try to avoid them, but this was one of those last minute things that come up.  It’s not that I haven’t flown a lot of red-eyes, I have.  For a number of years when I was going back and forth from Phoenix to D.C. I would take the red-eye because it didn’t burn up most of a day to travel.  I also am usually able to sleep on the red-eye.

Until this week.  I was in the second row behind bulkhead, in the window seat.  The guy in the middle seat was a “sprawler”, you know, the kind of person who takes up space from both seats on either side, using both armrests, knees pointed out, etc.  So that had me cramped up against the window to start.

They dim the lights in the cabin and I’m settling in and flash! the overhead light for the seat right in front of me comes on, and it. is. bright!  I try to ignore it for a few minutes and then look over the seat to see what’s going on.  The girl with the light on is on her laptop – which has a lighted screen – so there is no reason for her to have the overhead light on. Of course, I don’t say anything.

I try to settle back in and get some rest when, bam! the person behind me kicks the back of my seat… hard. I don’t think much of it until three minutes later it happens again and then again and again and again every few minutes.  Apparently, the girl had put her tray table down, curled into the fetal position, with her feet being supported by the tray table, but she was twitching and moving constantly and since her feet were right on the back of my chair, I felt every move she made!

I decided to put my tray table down and lay my head down so the seat movement wasn’t as disturbing.  Just as I’m relaxing I hear, ever so faintly, that sound… you know, the one that comes right before, well… that smell.  It came from the guy sitting in the middle seat in the row in front of me, and, unfortunately, with my head down on the tray table, my nose is uncomfortably close to the source.

So now I’ve got the bright light, the rocking chair, and this ongoing stench (he was just warming up).  I try to block the smell by putting my shirt over my nose, but it only helps marginally.  Despite the noxious distractions, I begin to relax and I’m just slipping into that fuzzy place between consciousness and sleep when, ZZZZZZZ! 

Now, this wasn’t just some wimpy snore, this was a monster snore – and it was coming from sprawler right next to me.

By this time, we’re almost two hours into the 4 hour flight, and I decided to just give up.  I pulled out my iPod, covered my nose and watched re-runs of Mad Men.

Remind me not to take another red-eye…

With Utah Governor Jon Huntsman on his way to China, I pontificated about the political brilliance of Barack Obama in a piece posted on The New Ledger. 

Here are a some excerpts.

His latest stroke of brilliance his is appointment of Gov. Jon Huntsman as Ambassador to China. Huntsman had begun to make noises about the possibility of running for President in 2012. He is one of the most popular governors in the nation. He was an early supporter of John McCain’s run for President (a major blow to fellow LDS member, Mitt Romney) and McCain could have easily turned his entire operation over to Huntsman, giving him instant national infrastructure reach. Huntsman also has piles and piles of money (by some measures more than Romney) to fund a serious operation for a presidential run.

All that came to a screeching halt when Obama tapped Huntsman for Ambassador to China. Yes, the argument can be made that Huntsman would have been ill-suited for the Republican primary process, but so was McCain, and he ended up the nominee. Huntsman would have put enormous counter-pressure on Romney because he would be better funded, “more” LDS (Huntsman is from Utah, not Massachusetts; he has not flip-flopped fundamental Republican positions), and none of the disadvantages of being a child of politics (his father has never admitted being “brainwashed” by the U.S. military).

***

Obama and his advisors have bought into the idea that if the Republican Party is going to survive and regain power that it needs to promote “moderate” leaders. It is why the Democrat talking point has been to claim that Rush Limbaugh is the head of the party. It is their calculation that a principled, conservative party is a dying breed. In Huntsman, Obama and his political advisors saw a real threat, a “big tent” Republican.

So Obama did what any good street-fighting Chicago pol would do — he co-opted his potential rival.

***

In short, Obama did himself a favor by appointing Huntsman as Ambassador to China. He took a potential opponent out of the mix, and got one of the most qualified people in the nation as Ambassador to China.

 

The Tucson Citizen published its last print edition on Saturday, ending one of the longest running papers in Arizona.  Proving that politicians think they know how to run businesses better than businesses do, Attorney General Terry Goddard pulled a bizarre legal maneuver by suing  to force the Tucson Citizen to continue publishing.

The paper was losing $10,000 per day with no change in site.   Yet Goddard was trying to impose the power of government to ensure that the business went further and further in the red.  In court, Goddard’s attorney’s initially tried to argue that this was a First Amendment issue – that the paper shutting down was silencing speech.  This is an absurd argument, given that the First Amendment protects the rights of the press from government intervention.  Talk about reverse reasoning.

Goddard also tried to argue that this was somehow an antitrust issue because it gave the Arizona Daily Star a monopoly.  If that is Goddard’s stance, then I fully expect that his next suit will be against Gannett to force them to resurrect the Phoenix Gazette, since the Arizona Republic is in a monopoly situation.

How out of touch with reality and how arrogant does a public official have to be to think that this is somehow “protecting rights” or engaging in good government.  This is exactly the kind of situation that belies the notion that liberal Democrats are not anti-business.  Is Goddard going to start suing McDonalds when it closes a location?  Will he sue Circuit City for closing their store on Happy Valley Road because the Best Buy across the street is now a monopoly?

Thankfully, Judge Raner Collins didn’t buy this nonsense and upheld the closure of the Citizen. The Arizona Daily Star is a well-run, solid paper that will continue to cover the news of the day, so Goddard should apologize for wasting everyone’s time and money.  Gannett and the Star should counter-sue for attorney fees.

I have two remaining burning questions: what was Goddard really thinking?  Where is Greg Patterson on this?

You have to hand it to the editorial board of the Arizona Republic. When they get it right, they NAIL it.  Today’s editorial on the fantasy of Pelosi’s memory is a tour-de-force of what we call “taking the bark off” – that is, peeling away the façade and exposing the harsh, raw, ugly truth that is Nancy Pelosi’s brain.

Look at the preposterous mess that was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s press conference last week as a cold splash of water to the face.

To avoid so much as a hint of responsibility for her duties as a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Pelosi has humiliated herself.

The CIA lied to her, she said on Thursday. She was not told about waterboarding in her briefings. Nor, for that matter, was she told directly about CIA interrogators using any enhanced interrogation techniques.

She was never briefed, she says, but was “told” about them by a staff member. As if there is a lick of difference between those split hairs.

And she raised no objections to what she learned because she was too busy trying to gain a majority for her party in Congress.

No other member of Congress who was briefed on the CIA’s interrogation techniques over the years – and there were plenty of Pelosi’s fellow Democrats among them – has ever accused the CIA of distorting the record of its actions, much less outright lying. We are to believe they chose to lie to Pelosi alone.

***

Numerous leaders of both parties – including, reportedly, Pelosi – worried fretfully in those days that CIA interrogators may not have been doing enough to extract information.

They did not raise those concerns alone. Legal experts like Alan Dershowitz and writers like Newsweek magazine’s Jonathan Alter, among other politically liberal voices, urged harsh treatment to gain information. As Jacob Weisberg of the online Slate magazine noted this month, Alter even pushed for “transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies.” Rendition, in other words, to countries where torture is not such an issue.

Now, Speaker Pelosi is compelled to pretend she maintained a moral purity about those days. She never felt the urge to trade an inch of the moral high ground to protect Americans.

There is another word for the moral purity Pelosi maintained during those difficult days. It is the same word that applies to her CIA tales.

Fantasy.

The buzz about Pelosi under fire continues.  As expected, Republican leadership had her in their sites for the weekend shows.

In a fascinating piece, former Hill leadership staffer John Feehery lays out how the whole episode has the makings of a coup against Pelosi.  He lists five components of a coup: a leadership rival, a disaffected base, a political liability to the majority-makers, micromanagement and press pile-on punctures credibility.  He adds great examples from Gingrich, Lott and what Pelosi faces today and then concludes:

With Pelosi, the press assumes she is both a hypocrite and a liar. Her various explanations of what she knew of waterboarding and when she knew it have been unconvincing at best. Her news conference was a complete disaster, and her credibility is in tatters.

Should Pelosi continue to mishandle this current crisis, and should she continue to make wild statements about the veracity of the CIA, don’t be surprised if somebody in the House says enough is enough. The conditions are ripe for a coup.

The one element that Feehery didn’t mention was that Pelosi does not have the backing of her President.  That’s not a good thing for her.  This will be interesting to  watch.

Proving once again that he has real political skill, Obama has selected Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman as Ambassador to China, which was announced Saturday at the White House.

This is a brilliant move by Obama, co-opting a potential (albeit long shot) challenger and putting probably one of the most qualified people in the nation in that position.

Of course this move affects me personally because it ruins a “plugged-in” I submitted to the Arizona Republic for publication on Sunday.  Here is what I wrote:

There is buzz about Utah Governor Jon Huntsman being a candidate for the GOP nomination for President in 2012.  The person most unhappy about this development is former Gov. Mitt Romney, who has made it abundantly clear that he is planning a re-run for the GOP nomination. Or maybe Romney is not unhappy, but welcomes this development, because Huntsman is “more” LDS (he’s actually from Utah, and has always been pro-life) and will divert fire away from Romney.  To wit, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says he fears Huntsman more than any other Republican. I’m not sure I buy that, but it shows that it’s going to be a long 3 ½ years.

I guess Plouffe really was nervous about Huntsman, and so they got him out of the way.

Today the controversy over what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it took a dramatic turn.  CIA Director Leon Panetta issued a memo saying that the CIA doesn’t mislead Congress. 

Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.  

This memo is a big deal.  This is an arm of the executive branch taking a direct shot (in return) at the sitting Speaker of the U.S. House.  There is no way this memo was written or released without the direct knowledge of White House COS Rahm Emanual and maybe even the President himself.

That’s what we call high stakes politics, and I’m guessing the boys from Chicago are going to win this against the Madame from San Francisco.  By the time the Sunday shows come around, there will be discussions about how long she can stay as Speaker.

The Arizona Clean Election Commission voted today to remove State Representative Doug Quelland from office for alleged campaign finance violations.  They also fined him $45,000.

Let’s assume that he did, in fact, violated campaign finance laws.  This warrants removal?  Yes, I know that’s what the law says, but I think the law is bad and needs to be changed.  Remember, it was a citizen initiative that put Clean Elections into place to begin with.  A provision as onerous as removal from office for a finance violation would have never passed a legislature or been signed by a governor.

This kind of action really throws the whole sense of proportionality. Think about it, Rep. William Jefferson got caught with $90,000 cash in his freezer from a direct bribe and not only was he not removed from office, he was reelected!

The proper place for the decision of removal from office should be with the body in which the person is a member.  Article 1 Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution reads:

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.

It’s time to get Arizona law more in line with the intent of our Founding Fathers and the Constitution.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to revise history.  In 2002 she was one of a very few member of Congress to be briefed by the CIA about various interrogation techniques.

Liberal Democrats are pressuring Obama to prosecute Bush Administration officials for employing such techniques, but that effort is severely undermined by Pelosi’s passive approval while she was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

So now Pelosi is making the absurd claim that the CIA “lied” to Congress. Really?  Not even Pelosi’s right hand guy, Democrat Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is standing by her on that one.

However, the number two House Democrat, Rep. Steny Hoyer, distanced himself from Pelosi’s statements, saying he had no reason to believe that the CIA had mislead Congress.

“I don’t have a belief of that nature. … And I certainly hope that’s not the case. I don’t draw that conclusion,” Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, said on the House floor after he was asked by a Republican whether he agreed with the speaker.

If you have any doubt about Pelosi trying to revise history, just watch this cringe-inducing clip from her press conference.

President Obama’s Arizona State University commencement speech was well-written, well-delivered and well-received.  It wasn’t soaring, but it wasn’t pedestrian either, and actually avoided some of the worst clichés common for these kinds of speeches.

Now that it’s over, was it really worthy of all the hype?  I’m just glad I was out of town.