"Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty
July 23, 2010
In This Issue . . .
1. Rangel Entangled
2. Perhaps in a McCain Presidency, I Wouldn't Have Had to Get Up Early and Write This
3. Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Look Back at the Gulf Water
4. Addenda
Ordinarily, I would say "TGIF," but in the Washington area, the weekend is supposed to be as miserably hot and muggy as most of this week has been.
Jim
1. Rangel Entangled
AP gives us the news, and it's a shock only in that accountability in Washington seemed to disappear along with floppy disks and cassette tapes: "A House investigative committee on Thursday charged New York Rep. Charles Rangel with multiple ethics violations, dealing a serious blow to the former Ways and Means chairman and complicating Democrats' election-year outlook. The panel did not immediately specify the charges against the Democrat, who has served in the House for some 40 years and is fourth in seniority. The charges by a four-member panel of the House ethics committee sends the case to a House trial, where a separate eight-member panel of Republicans and Democrats will decide whether the violations can be proved by clear and convincing evidence. The timing of the announcement ensures that a public airing of Rangel's ethical woes will stretch into the fall campaign, and Republicans are certain to make it an issue as they try to capture majority control of the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi had once promised to 'drain the swamp' of ethical misdeeds by lawmakers in arguing that Democrats should be in charge."
At RedState.com, James Richardson attempts to offer "a list -- that is, unfortunately, in no way comprehensive -- of the 80-year-old lawmaker's ethics lapses":
Violating New York state and city zoning laws, Rep. Rangel rented in 2008 several rent-stabilized Harlem apartments and used one for a base of operations for his reelection effort.
Days later it was revealed Rangel had used congressional letterhead to solicit funds for his personal foundation, the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service.
The following month, in August of 2008, the New York Post reported that Rangel had failed to disclose income from renting his beachfront villa on a Dominican Republic resort. In total, Rangel failed to disclose $75,000 in rental income since 1988. Rangel secured a seven-year fixed rate loan at 10.5 % for the property, but two years later the interest on the loan, which was awarded by a company for which the congressman was an early investor, was waived. Rangel paid $10,800 in back-taxes for his 2004, 2005 and 2006 tax returns for the unreported rental income.
Rangel violated House rules and failed to report income to the IRS when he left his 1972 Mercedes in a House parking lot for several years without registering the car. The car, without license plates and covered by a tarp, occupied a space for several years valued a $290 per month.
In November 2008, the Post's muckrakers discovered that Rangel had improperly received a "homestead" tax exemption on a property he owned in Washington, D.C., while occupying his four rent-stabilized apartments in New York City.
Rangel secured tax benefits for a company whose chief executive he was courting as a donor for his private foundation.
And most recently, a House panel admonished the scandal-plagued congressman for wrongly accepting reimbursements for two Caribbean trips in 2007 and 2008.
At that point, Richardson collapsed from debilitating carpal-tunnel syndrome.
I like the way Jake Boot at BigJournalism.com identifies Rangel as "D, Tammany Hall" and suggests that he, "under a long-gathering ethical storm, knows the game is just about over," given the way the congressman groused at a reporter: "It doesn't even sound like MSNBC, asking these dumb questions."
A Democratic source told RealClearPolitics's Kyle Trygstad that Republicans should hold off on using the issue as an attack line: "If Washington Republicans want to have a debate on ethics, bring it on. Thanks to Jack Abramoff, there's a long line of Washington Republicans that are already in or soon will be in orange jump suits."
The source said "soon will be"? More Abramoff convictions? Come on. The indictment against Tom DeLay is so old it's written on stone tablets in Sanskrit. Entirely separate from what one thinks of DeLay (or his dancing moves), it is a disgrace to the American justice system that DeLay was indicted on conspiracy charges in 2005 and yet has never had a chance to defend himself, because no prosecutor has brought the charges to court. It's like he's being pursued by an amnesiac lynch mob.
2. Perhaps in a McCain Presidency, I Wouldn't Have Had to Get Up Early and Write This
John Fund digests the latest from Quinnipiac: "Democrats will be gulping this morning at the Quinnipiac Poll's latest results. For the first time in the survey's history, Americans believe by a 48% to 40% margin that President Obama doesn't deserve re-election. Almost as stinging, a plurality believe the country would have been better off if John McCain had beaten Mr. Obama in 2008. The Quinnipiac Poll is pored over by political observers because it has a good predictive record and because its large sample size of nearly 2200 people implies a much smaller margin of error than most surveys -- around 2 percentage points." His fantastic title: "Obama Girl Is Nowhere to Be Found."
But when I saw that result yearning for a McCain victory, I found myself on the same page as Smitty, writing at the site of Robert Stacy McCain: "It's all counter-factual. While unemployment might be lower, budget deficits would certainly be lower, and several trees would likely have been spared being turned into Danielle Steel novels unread legislation, let's float an important question: would there be Tea Parties? I, for one, probably would not have been so incensed as to get into blogging. Rather, I'd have put down Liberal Fascism, said 'Whew! Glad we dodged that bullet', and continued to fail to participate in preserving the country. No, that thud of the back against the wall is a fantastic motivator."
I think he's right. From January 1995 to January 2009 -- that is, most of my adult life -- Republicans controlled either Congress or the White House or both. To be a Democrat during that period meant you could make grandiose boasts that your policies would quickly create a utopia, a veritable golden age!, if you could just get them enacted. All of our lives would be so much better if it weren't for Newt Gingrich or Ken Starr or Trent Lott or George W. Bush or Dick Cheney.
Well, the excuses are gone, and today's circumstances make the last era of all Democratic rule -- the early '90s of the Hillarycare attempt, Jocelyn Elders urging schools to teach masturbation, the O.J. Simpson case, a canceled World Series, and a brief national obsession with some ice-skating brawl involving a guy named Gillooly -- look like good times.
A President McCain would probably have spent less, but the deficit would still be a problem. We wouldn't have had Obamacare, but it's not unthinkable that Maverick would have enacted some milder version sent his way by a Democratic Congress, in the name of "bipartisan cooperation." You can imagine less golf, a slightly faster response to the Gulf, and full-throated support for the Green revolution in Iran. But all of that would have come at the price of Democrats continuing to believe in their self-deception that governing is easy, that their policies work and work quickly, that the economy is a goose that will lay golden eggs no matter what you do, and that the world will love us if we're just nicer to them.
This is liberal governance, America. If you don't like it, don't ever elect these guys again. And believe me, in another ten to twelve years, when the current mess is a distant memory, there will be some other young charismatic liberal on the scene, claiming that President Obama did it wrong, that he compromised too much, and that this time the Left's agenda is certain to work, because they've finally worked out all the bugs.
3. Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Look Back at the Gulf Water
We're going to need a bigger expletive.
USA Today lays out the latest variation on Murphy's Law: "A tropical storm approaching the Gulf of Mexico forced an evacuation Thursday of those working on oil cleanup operations and efforts to seal the well, federal and BP officials said. [Thad] Allen ordered an evacuation Thursday night 'due to the risk that Tropical Storm Bonnie poses to the safety of the nearly 2,000 people responding to the BP oil spill at the well site.' However, the cap that stopped the flow of oil into the Gulf a week ago will remain in place 'even if the well is unattended,' Allen said. . . . The disruption of work at the well site began Tuesday, when ship crews involved in monitoring the well, drilling two relief wells, and preparing to permanently plug the well, began preparing for evacuation, Wells said. The break in activities will last 10 to 12 days, Wells said. Cleanup operations also have been affected, said Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, the federal on-scene coordinator for spill response. Fifteen heavy offshore skimmers have pulled away from the well site and 1,300 fishing boats and private vessels involved in placing boom and skimming operations have been ordered to seek shelter, Zukunft said."
Some thoughts from Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and Rush Limbaugh: "JINDAL: They don't understand in Washington, DC. They literally said to us, the administration said to us, 'The rigs will just come back.' The rigs will just come back, like you could turn off and on a switch. They don't understand, once these rigs go they're gone for years. In Louisiana alone, we'll lose 20,000 jobs. Across the Gulf Coast tens of thousands of additional jobs. That's why today is so important. We need our voices to be heard. We need them to understand if they hear nothing else from us today, they need to hear us say this: let us go back to work. We don't want a BP check. We don't want an unemployment check. We want to go back to work powering the American economy.
"RUSH: That represents the majority of thinking throughout this country, not just Louisiana, not just down in the Gulf of Mexico. The story on this is from the Advocate Acadiana Bureau: 'Thousands Protest Drilling Moratorium at Rally -- Thousands attended a rally in Lafayette Wednesday aimed at convincing the Obama administration to lift the federal offshore drilling moratorium, which officials said could further endanger the state through the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. The Rally for Economic Survival was held at the Cajundome and drew about 11,000 people, some dressed in their oil industry uniforms, others in shirts bearing messages of "Drill Baby Drill" and "No Moratorium." . . . Lt. Gov. Scott Angelle served as master of ceremonies and fired up an already lively crowd, proclaiming that "it is time to quit punishing innocent American workers to achieve some unrealistic political agenda."' If I'm not mistaken he's a Democrat. Jindal, of course, is a Republican, and 'one of 12 speakers at the two-hour event, pleaded with President Barack Obama to "let our people work." The rally was in opposition to the Obama administration's ongoing efforts to temporarily block deep-water drilling.'"
4. Addenda
I think on Monday I'll offer my spoiler-filled thoughts on Inception, so if you haven't seen it yet and want to, you have this weekend to catch up."
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