Jim Miller on Politics

In many ways, Gov. Christine Gregoire's 23-member Cabinet looks a lot like her predecessor's — same number of minorities, a similar average age, even some of the same appointees.
. . .
In all, Gregoire's Cabinet will earn about $256,000 a year more than the previous Cabinet when Locke stepped down.

And that comes on top of big raises that Locke gave many Cabinet members last year as enticement to stay on through the end of his administration.

Another way of looking at it: Since 2003, the average salary for Cabinet members has soared from less than $108,000 to almost $125,000 — nearly a 16 percent increase.

Gregoire and the Democratic majorities in Washington state's House and Senate puzzle me.   I expect politicians to try to win re-election.  But Gregoire and the Democrats in the legislature act as if they wanted to lose.  There are few things that will provoke voters more than a tax increase after a politician has promised to oppose one.  But that is just what Gregoire did; she had campaigned against an increase in the gas tax and then immediately broke her promise once in office.  Equally provocative are pay raises for high officials, and she has done that.  Such pay raises can even provoke civil servants.

By comparison, rank-and-file state workers will see their wages grow by 4.8 percent over the next two years, their first pay raises in four years.

And I don't think I am the only one who has noticed that the money for these pay increases, and many other increases in state spending, come from a regressive tax package that hits the working poor hardest.  (Although I must admit that the Seattle newspapers have not exactly stressed that point when discussing the package.)

Not only have Gregoire and the Democrats provoked the voters with their taxing and spending decisions, but they raised social issues, notably gay marriage and racial preferences, that they must know are unpopular with majorities of the voters.  (Gay marriage was raised indirectly by the push to put gays on the protected list, along with racial and religious minorities.)

So what is going on here?  I honestly don't know.  Do the Democrats not understand how voters will react to tax increases, broken promises, pay increases, and leftwing social issues?  Have they forgotten what happened in 1994 when they lost their majority in the state house and saw their majority in the state senate reduced?  Do they think that they will lose no matter what they do, so they might as well enjoy their majorities for the next two years?  Or are they so out of touch that they think these policies can be sold to the voters?  Neither of these explanations make sense to me, but I can't come up with an alternative, either.

In many ways, Gov. Christine Gregoire's 23-member Cabinet looks a lot like her predecessor's — same number of minorities, a similar average age, even some of the same appointees.
. . .
In all, Gregoire's Cabinet will earn about $256,000 a year more than the previous Cabinet when Locke stepped down.

And that comes on top of big raises that Locke gave many Cabinet members last year as enticement to stay on through the end of his administration.

Another way of looking at it: Since 2003, the average salary for Cabinet members has soared from less than $108,000 to almost $125,000 — nearly a 16 percent increase.

Gregoire and the Democratic majorities in Washington state's House and Senate puzzle me.   I expect politicians to try to win re-election.  But Gregoire and the Democrats in the legislature act as if they wanted to lose.  There are few things that will provoke voters more than a tax increase after a politician has promised that they oppose one.  But that is just what Gregoire did; she had campaigned against an increase in the gas tax and then immediately broke her promise once in office.  Equally provocative are pay raises for high officials, and she has done that.  Such pay raises can even provoke civil servants.

By comparison, rank-and-file state workers will see their wages grow by 4.8 percent over the next two years, their first pay raises in four years.

And I don't think I am the only one who has noticed that the money for these pay increases, and many other increases in state spending, come from a regressive tax package that hits the working poor hardest.  (Although I must admit that the Seattle newspapers have not exactly stressed that point when discussing the package.)

Not only have Gregoire and the Democrats provoked the voters with their taxing and spending decisions, but they raised social issues, notably gay marriage and racial preferences, that they must know are unpopular with majorities of the voters.  (Gay marriage was raised indirectly by the push to put gays on the protected list, along with racial and religious minorities.)

So what is going on here?  I honestly don't know.  Do the Democrats not understand how voters will react to tax increases, broken promises, pay increases, and leftwing social issues?  Have they forgotten what happened in 1994 when Washington's voters threw out Democratic majorities in both houses?  Do they think that they will lose no matter what they do, so they might as well enjoy their majorities for the next two years?  Or are they so out of touch that they think these policies can be sold to the voters?  None of these explanations make sense to me, but I can't come up with an alternative, either.

There are many problems with American elections, but none more serious than the rise of paperless electronic voting, whose results cannot be trusted.  Grass-roots reformers are in the middle of a two-day lobbying blitz on Capitol Hill in support of a House bill that would require that electronic voting machines in federal elections produce voter-verifiable paper records.  It is an important measure that should be passed without delay.

The Election Center, led by Doug Lewis, drew on the expertise of the men and women who actually run the voting process in this country and came up with a booklet full of suggestions, too numerous to detail here.  But the big ideas -- which may be controversial -- involve extending the voting period and centralizing the locations of balloting.

The group argued that there is no need to cram these exercises in democracy into a single 12-hour span on a Tuesday when most people are at work and many children are in school.  Expand the voting period in both directions, it said: early voting, which has become increasingly popular, and late voting, in the days immediately after Election Day.

The authors of this report also call for the creation of Election Centers, far fewer in number than the current precinct polling places, where professionally trained workers -- not citizen volunteers working long hours for a pittance -- would be on hand to process people arriving to vote.

Mainstream media have been reluctant, in all the coverage of treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, to mention that the al Qaeda training manual specifically instructs all of its agents to make false claims of torture.  The New York Times seems to have mentioned the manual's torture reference only once, in a short report from Australia.  Several other papers mentioned it as a one-line quote from a military spokesman who pointed it out.  But until the Washington Times ran a front-page piece last week, a Nexis search could find no clear and pointed article in the U.S. press like the one by Alasdair Palmer in the London Sunday Telegraph, with the headline "This is al Qaeda Rule 18: 'You must claim you were tortured.'"  He wrote that the manual doesn't prove "that the Britons were not tortured in Guantanamo.  But it ought to encourage some doubts about uncritically accepting that they were--which seems to be the attitude adopted by most of the media."

He bought two thousand shares of stock in a company that unsuccessfully wildcatted for oil in Wyoming.  He lost over $25,000 in a scheme to buy lobsters and hold them off the markets until prices rose; lobster prices failed to rise.  With Owen D. Young and others he started an enterprise to run dirigibles between New York and Chicago, but this soon proved to be, technologically, a misguided enthusiasm.  A chain of resort hotels, the harnessing by General Electric of tidal power at Passamaquoddy Bay, vending machines, commercial forestry, selling advertisement space in taxicabs — these and other schemes . . . conceived with the enthusiasm of an old-time investment plunger.

Millions of Americans despise Bill Clinton.  They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990's, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.

The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics.   It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office.  It is almost entirely personal.  In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush.  It surpasses even the liberals' longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon.  The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Since they were discussing, among other things, inflammatory attacks on Republicans by Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton, a Republican or two might have added to the discussion, I would think.   In their discussion, the panel agreed that what Dean and Clinton said was not true, but thought that these lies pleased ordinary Democrats and did no great harm.  Would the five have come to a different conclusion if the attacks had been directed toward Democrats by Republican leaders?  Sure.

Peggy Noonan makes that point forcefully in this column, where she tries to imagine how Democrats like Russert, Broder, Harwood, Ifel, and Woodward would react if President Bush used similar rhetoric.

Imagine Mr. Bush saying those things, and the crowd roaring with lusty delight.  Imagine John McCain saying them for that matter, or any other likely Republican candidate for president, or Ken Mehlman, the head of the Republican National Committee.

Can you imagine them talking this way?  Me neither.  Because they wouldn't.

Messrs. Bush, McCain, et al., would find talk like that to be extreme, damaging, desperate.   They would understand it would tend to add a new level of hysteria to political discourse, and that's not good for the country. I think they would know such talk is unworthy in a leader, or potential leader, of a great democracy.  I think they would understand that talk like that is destructive to the ties that bind--and to the speaker's political prospects.

You can find that kind of talk on the right, but to do so you have to go to the fringes.   Those who disagree with that argument are invited to cite a single statement from George W. Bush or Ken Mehlman as extreme as those from Dean and Clinton in the Noonan column.

Perhaps Russert thinks he is working for PBS or NPR.

Cross posted at Oh, That Liberal Media.

(*Isn't the Journal a conservative publication that usually supports Republicans?  The editorial pages are conservative, but the news pages are about as liberal as those of the New York Times or the Washington Post.  And Harwood's comments made it quite clear that he prefers donkeys to elephants.

Fox News Sunday has more balanced panels than its competitors at ABC and NBC.  (I don't watch the CNN or CBS talk shows often enough to know whether they include more than a token Republican on their panels.)  Nearly always Fox has two Democrats and two Republicans on the panel.  Recently, they brought in Chris Wallace, who I have been unable to categorize, as moderator and interviewer, making the program even more balanced.

Few scientists fabricate results from scratch or flatly plagiarize the work of others, but a surprising number engage in troubling degrees of fact-bending or deceit, according to the first large-scale survey of scientific misbehavior.

More than 5 percent of scientists answering a confidential questionnaire admitted to having tossed out data because the information contradicted their previous research or said they had circumvented some human research protections.

Ten percent admitted they had inappropriately included their names or those of others as authors on published research reports.

And more than 15 percent admitted they had changed a study's design or results to satisfy a sponsor, or ignored observations because they had a "gut feeling" they were inaccurate.

"Scientists say, 'This is nuts,' so they break the rules, and then respect for the rules diminishes," [Raymond] de Vries said. "If scientists feel that the process isn't fair and the rich get richer and the rest get nothing, then perhaps we have to think how we can reallocate resources for science."

If you wanted to see the perfect example of the ethical and moral collapse of the Mainstream Media, you could not do better than a long article in the New Yorker of May 23, 2005.  The article is entitled, "The Spy Who Loved Us."  Written by a teacher at the University of Albany, named Thomas Bass, it's about a man named Pham Xuan An.  Now very old, An was -- among many other things -- a correspondent in Saigon during the Vietnam War for Time magazine.  He was apparently considered a particularly brilliant and well-informed correspondent and very well liked by his colleagues in the Western press corps during the war.

He was also a Communist spy, working for the North Vietnamese, informing them of what he knew about American military plans, troop movements, political agendas.
. . .
When the war ended, An offered to go to the U.S. and continue spying for the Communists there.   The offer was denied and he lives quietly in Ho Chi Minh City, where, among other pets, he keeps fighting cocks -- a practice generally considered barbaric in the circles of New Yorker readers, but another sign of his cuteness to Professor Bass.  In fact, the whole article is about how cute and smart and clever and brave a guy An is.  A lovable, brilliant, brave man who sent Americans and innocent civilians to their deaths.  Bass even explains that almost all of An's former colleagues in the Western press still love the guy after learning he was a spy for America's enemy in the Vietnam War.  They even gave money to bring him here for an auld lang syne visit not long ago.

In this article, which I would guess to be about 8,000 words or more, there is not one hint, not one whisper, of sympathy for the American soldiers who fought and died or were maimed in Vietnam.  Not one sliver of anger at a man who took American money and helped kill Americans.  Not a word about the mass murder of civilians during Tet

Bass notes that almost all the journalists who worked with Pham are united in their support of him.   Peter Arnett praises him as a "bold guy".  Frank McCulloch, who was the head of Time's Asia bureau when he hired Pham said he was "absolutely not" angry when he learned of Pham's spying and said, "It's his land, I thought.  If the situation were reversed, I would have done the same thing."

McCulloch, says Bass, remembers Pham with "tremendous fondness and respect" and says it was a great pleasure to raise thirty-two thousand dollars to send Pham's son to journalism (!) school in America.

We have become so used to this sort of thing that it no longer shocks.  But use the obvious analogy and ask whether these journalists would have had the same reaction.  Suppose An had been one of our World War II opponents, that he had worked for Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany, rather than Communist North Vietnam.  Would these journalists have at least mixed feelings about him?  Would Professor Bass?  I hope so.

As a bonus, the Senate will confirm on Thursday Michigan nominees David McKeague and Richard Griffin, nominated to the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati, said Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

While those two weren't part of the deal to avoid a fight over judicial filibusters, Democrats withdrew their objections to their confirmation during the back-and-forth negotiations