Political Interest

As If to Prove Kerry's Point

Another Bush crony was arrested yesterday.

Until Friday the Administrator of the office was David Hossein Safavian.

Today he was arrested on a three count indictment.

This, from the DOJ press release ...

David Hossein Safavian was arrested today based on a three- count criminal complaint filed at federal court in Washington, D.C. The complaint charges Safavian with making false statements to a GSA ethics officer and the GSA-OIG, along with obstruction of a GSA-OIG investigation.

Safavian also seems to have lacked any relevant experience...

Kerry: Katrina Failure Part of a Pattern

It looks like John Kerry is getting right with the Democratic activists.  According to the Washington Post, Kerry and Edwards both blasted the administration Sunday.  The important part of Kerry's speech was his effort to tie the Katrina failures to others which have gotten less universal condemnation over the last five years:

Using the nickname Bush used for Brown, Kerry said, "Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq, what George Tenet is to slam-dunk intelligence, what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad, what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy, what Donald Rumsfeld is to basic war planning, what Tom DeLay is to ethics and what George Bush is to 'Mission Accomplished' and 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'

According to a text of Kerry's speech made available in Washington, he said Katrina had provided an "accountability moment" for the administration.

..."This is about the broader pattern of incompetence and negligence that Katrina exposed and beyond that a truly systemic effort to distort and disable the people's government and devote it to the interests of the privileged and the powerful," he said.

Kerry also charged that the administration is pursuing politics as usual in its prescription for rebuilding. "The plan they're designing for the Gulf Coast turns the region into a vast laboratory for right-wing ideological experiments," he said, citing private school vouchers, subsidies to business and other proposals.

Whatever Kerry's political motives, and I'm not convinced he's running again, this is pretty much just what Democratic leaders should be doing, tying Katrina to the larger, and ongoing, incompetence within the Bush administration, and increasing the scrutiny of the on-going recovery efforts.

Business As Usual

Sebastian Mallaby gives reiterates the prime reason to be skeptical about the Bush administration's purported Katrina Recovery efforts and the need for Congress to impose real oversight and a special, out if the White House, authority to over see it.  The Bush administration is sick with cynicism on domestic matters and stacked with cronies in the positions they've even bothered to fill.

If Bush used this moment as he used the aftermath of Sept. 11, some of this spending could be forgiven. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon exposed the nation's complacency about terrorism; Bush stepped forward and changed that. In a similar way, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complacency of our business-as-usual attitude toward domestic government. Bush has barely noticed.

The complacency begins with the appalling state of federal staffing. It's not just that the hapless former boss of the Federal Emergency Management Agency knew more about horses than floods. It's that the government agencies that must now manage relief are missing senior officials, either because their confirmations have been held up in the Senate or because the administration has yet to appoint anyone. As The Post reported last week, seven of the top positions at the Department of Housing and Urban Development stand vacant. Perhaps it's no surprise that the administration has cooked up its crazy shantytown proposal.

This staffing crisis is well known; two months before the 2001 attacks, about half of the national security positions stood empty. But Katrina creates an opportunity to tackle the problem. The federal government needs to be returned to an earlier era, when more executive-branch positions went to career civil servants who didn't need to be confirmed and didn't owe their jobs to college roommates. Bush hasn't even raised this issue.

Back When We Had a President

Bill Clinton was a guest on This Week on ABC on Sunday.  Everytime I see him it reminds me of the fact that a President can actually be intelligent, informed and capable of more than script read emotions. 

The New York Times has some good quotes where Clinton lets Bush have it over Katrina:

Mr. Clinton argued that lower-income Americans had done better under the economic policies of his administration than they are doing now, saying the storm highlighted class divisions in the country that often played out along racial lines.

"It's like when they issued the evacuation order," he said. "That affects poor people differently. A lot of them in New Orleans didn't have cars. A lot of them who had cars had kinfolk they had to take care of. They didn't have cars, so they couldn't take them out."

"This is a matter of public policy," he said. "And whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the 80's; that's what they've done in this decade. In the middle, we had a different policy."

Bush Exposed

Frank Rich lays into President Bush today with a gloves off column which echos EJ Dionne's End of the Bush Era piece in the Washington Post a few days ago.  According to Rich, Katrina has finally exposed Bush as the fraud he's always been:

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

Boxers, Briefs or "Special"?

Amy Sullivan thinks Mitt Romney's Mormonism will be a major problem for Mitt in the primaries. 

How Mormon are you?" Sridhar Pappu asked Romney for his Atlantic Monthly profile. Romney's answer sounded like it could have come from George W. Bush: "You know, the principles and values taught to me by faith are values I aspire to live by. [They] are as American as motherhood and apple pie. My faith believes in family, believes in Jesus Christ. It believes in serving one's neighbor and one's community." That kind of vague answer works for Bush, but Bush is a Methodist. In his interview, Pappu continued to press Romney about the particulars of Mormon practice. Cornered, the governor replied tersely. I'll just say those sorts of things I keep private." At that point, Pappu dropped the issue. But the next reporter won't, nor the next, nor the next.

By now, reporters are used to Protestant candidates, but they eat up any chance to explore a new religious angle. They peppered Lieberman with questions in 2000 about whether he could campaign on the Sabbath and followed John Kerry to mass every week during the 2004 campaign to probe his views on the Eucharist. As the first serious LDS presidential candidate, Romney is an oddity. News outlets will feature charts comparing Mormon theology to Christian doctrine, and stories detailing various dietary and clothing restrictions. Again, this may help demystify Mormonism for average voters who may be generally uneasy about the faith, but it will only serve to remind evangelicals of the differences between the two religions. Indeed, Romney faces an unwinnable dilemma: The more information that circulates about the specifics of his faith, the more hesitant evangelical voters will be to support him.

I think she's probably right, which is too bad.  There are so many other reasons to oppose Romney; his lack of leadership as Governor, his cynical flip-flop on social policy, his trail of Governing by cronyism. 

But given his recent comments on Muslims, if religious prejudice keep him out of the Oval Office, so much the better.

Tail Spin

Dan FroomKin gets it:

All you really need to know about the White House's post-Katrina strategy -- and Bush's carefully choreographed address on national television tonight -- is this little tidbit from the ninth paragraph of Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson's story in the New York Times this morning:

"Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort."

These people get it:

A day late and a dollar short," said 18-year-old Wayne State University student Rachel Aviles in Detroit. "I think he's more responding to the negative media than responding to fix the problem."

Jason Sawyer, 30, added his sarcasm as he watched at the Eastlake Zoo tavern in Seattle. When the president offered toll-free help numbers, Sawyer responded: "Oh yeah, pick up that cell phone that doesn't work and call FEMA."

In Rochester, N.Y., students gathered around a television in a residence hall at the University of Rochester. Nat Powell, 21, wasn't confident the money to rebuild New Orleans will be well spent.

"It's going to be geared toward rebuilding the city _ it's not going to be geared toward building up the population, and that I think is the main problem," he said. "The poor are going to stay poor unless the problem of poverty is actually addressed."

Bush, of course, doesn't get it.  Despite their heroic efforts to bring generators in for dramatic lighting last night. A clear majority of Americans are on to him now, I doubt even Rove can spin him out of this one.

Bush Admin already Wasting Reconstruction Money

Go with a proven program administered by experts or no bid contracts to your crony's clients.  Which one do you think the Bush administration chose?

Kevin Drum has the Katrina housing story here.

Can't Buy Love?

It looks like Bush and the GOP leaders of congress are betting that the Beatles were wrong.  Bush is set to ask congress for $200 billion dollars in order to buy his and their lost popularity before the midterm elections, according to the Washington Post.

Bush and Republican congressional leaders, ...are calculating that the U.S. economy can safely absorb a sharp spike in spending and budget deficits, and that the only way to regain public confidence after the stumbling early response to the disaster is to spend whatever it takes to rebuild the region and help Katrina's victims get back on their feet.

...Since Katrina struck, Congress has already spent $62.3 billion, dwarfing the inflation-adjusted $17.8 billion that Congress spent on hurricanes Andrew, Iniki and Omar, which struck in 1992, and the $15.2 billion emergency appropriation for the Northridge, Calif., earthquake of 1994. The entire Persian Gulf War of 1991 cost less than $83 billion in today's dollars.

The libertarian Cato Institute warned yesterday of a looming "budget disaster." In meetings with GOP congressional leaders and White House aides, some Republican lawmakers have expressed alarm about the growing price tag and concern that vast sums could be wasted without proper oversight.

The Democrats need to find some GOP allies who take their fiscal responsibility with a hint of seriousness, if there are any left, and impose some serious oversight on this money.  Otherwise it will be wasted by this administration on boondoggles and cronyism, just like in Iraq.

Nasty, Brutish and, mercifully, Short

EJ Dione declares the End of the Bush Era here in the Washington Post:

The Bush Era is over. The sooner politicians in both parties realize that, the better for them -- and the country.

Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush's government doesn't work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.

Dionne goes on to hope that Bush, and I'd add the Republicans in congress, will recognize a need for a change in action and start working in a conciliatory way.  But, there is little chance of that from the Bush/Rove political operation and even less from Tom Delay. 

The only thing that will bring these guys to heel is a Democratic victory in 2006 mid-terms, until they're dealt a meaningful defeat don't expect anymore than a tactical retreat from their style and substance over the last four years.