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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (8600)	9/19/2003 7:39:14 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793690

Bill will have to give up dancing to monitor the thread. Never hoppen, GI!

To: JohnM who wrote (8600)	9/19/2003 7:44:30 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793690

Why am I not surprised? They will overturn the decision next week. Maybe order some extra poll watchers, etc, to make it look good. Appeals Court Will Reconsider Recall Delay By DAVID STOUT - NEW YORK TIMES ASHINGTON, Sept. 19 — A federal appeals court in San Francisco today effectively dissolved a decision by three of its member judges to postpone the Oct. 7 gubernatorial recall vote in California, meaning the election is on again, unless the full court or the United States Supreme Court rules otherwise. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said it would rehear the case on Monday, at 1 p.m. Pacific time in San Francisco. The Ninth Circuit said a majority of the court's active judges had voted to review the three-judge panel's decision. There are 26 active Ninth Circuit judges; a panel of 11 judges will hear the case on Monday. The Ninth Circuit announcement made no comment on the merits of the case. But the fact that a majority of the judges wanted to take another look at the panel's decision could be a good omen for the forces that want the recall vote to go ahead as scheduled on Oct. 7. Some political analysts believe that Governor Davis's chances of holding on to his office will improve if the vote is not held on Oct. 7. They theorize that the more time that goes by, the more the anger that has driven the recall movement will dissipate. Others believe that a delay will hurt him because over the next few months he will have to deal with thorny state issues like the budget. Governor Davis, who has taken no position on how a delay in the election may affect its outcome, offered a measured response to the latest news from the Ninth Circuit, and said that in any event his antirecall campaign was gaining momentum. "I have assumed from the outset that this election will be on Oct. 7," he said. "My attitude is, let's just get this election over with." The anti-Davis forces have contended that the recall vote ought to take place on Oct. 7, as expressed by the hundreds of thousands of Californians who signed petitions to put the issue on the ballot. The American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of a number of minority groups to postpone the election on grounds that too many people, especially members of minority groups, could be disenfranchised because the punch-card voting machines used in several counties with large minority populations were vulnerable to malfunction. The A.C.L.U. opposed a rehearing by the Ninth Circuit and said that if any court was to review the three-judge panel's ruling it should be the United States Supreme Court. Whoever loses before the 11 appellate judges may try to get a hearing before the United States Supreme Court, with the first step to ask Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to undo whatever decision the Ninth Circuit ultimately reaches. But instead of doing that on her own, Justice O'Connor would probably refer the matter to the full Supreme Court, which would be expected to decide fairly quickly whether to review the Ninth Circuit decision or let it stand. Even veteran Supreme Court watchers can be surprised by the justices, but two factors may make it less likely that the justices would review the California decision. One is the special case that is already on the justices' workload, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which was argued before the full court in a special session on Sept. 8. The law is so complicated that the arguments took four hours, versus one hour for a typical case, and the justices may not be willing to add another highly charged case to what is supposed to be their off-season. A second factor that seems to make it less likely that the court would take up the California matter is the relatively lack of urgency. Governor Davis's critics notwithstanding, the state has a functioning government in place, and Mr. Davis's future could be decided March 2, a regular primary election day in California. Besides Chief Judge Mary Schroeder, the members of the panel that will hear the case on Monday are Judges Alex Kozinski, Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain, Andrew J. Kleinfeld, A. Wallace Tashima, Barry G. Silverman, Susan P. Graber, Mary Margaret McKeown, Ronald M. Gould, Richard C. Tallman and Johnnie Blakeney Rawlinson. Except for the chief judge, the panel members were chosen by lot. Eight of the 11 judges were appointed by Democratic presidents — 7 by Bill Clinton and one by Jimmy Carter — and 3 by Republicans — 2 by Ronald Reagan and one by the first President Bush. nytimes.com

To: JohnM who wrote (8600)	9/19/2003 8:00:47 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793690

Shapiro goes after Clark. "No Vison." Clark went generic where others defined campaigns By Walter Shapiro USA Today Despite the attention lavished on telegenic backdrops and gauzy imagery, spoken words still matter in politics. In a presidential campaign, no speech is more emblematic of a candidate than his formal announcement. So Wednesday afternoon in Little Rock, retired general Wesley Clark ended a year of suspense about his political intentions by delivering a cliché-filled 11-minute oration that brought to mind the Peggy Lee ballad, Is That All There Is? Yes, Clark is getting a late start, and his rhetoric probably should not be judged by the standards of his rivals for the Democratic nomination who have been honing their political personas for more than a year. But still it is hard to imagine that anyone other than draft-Clark true believers would have been inspired by applause lines like: ''We're going to run a campaign that is worthy of the historic times in which we live. We're going to run a campaign that will move this country forward, not back.'' The problem was not the lack of specific policy proposals in the Clark speech. Those can come later. Rather, what was lacking was a clearly expressed rationale for his unorthodox candidacy. In his big moment on the cable news shows, Clark offered pedestrian sentiments such as his promise, ''This 21st century is going to be our American century just like the 20th century was.'' It is impossible to escape the sense that during his year of will-I-or-won't-I mulling the former NATO commander never fully answered the pesky question of precisely what he would say if he were a candidate. The obvious point of contrast is John Edwards' announcement speech Tuesday in his hometown of Robbins, N.C. Edwards, who is still struggling to climb out of also-ran status, managed to beat the approaching hurricane but was still buffeted by the winds from the looming Clark candidacy. Even if the Edwards rollout was not the transforming event that his supporters had hoped for, his speech still conveyed a clear-eyed sense of why he was running and how he was different from the other Democratic contenders. Edwards, a wealthy trial lawyer first elected to the Senate in 1998, has built his candidacy around the belief that his hardscrabble upbringing uniquely equips him to understand the struggles of Democratic voters. Distilling the essence of the soft-edged populism that fuels his campaign, Edwards declared, ''We deserve a president who is close to our people, not the lobbyists -- who listens to our people because he knows them, he works for them. A president who hears them even when they cannot speak because they've lost their jobs, because they're caring for a child, or just because the simple struggle to make ends meet leaves them no time for anything else.'' Like Edwards, John Kerry waited until September to score the one-day media hit that comes with the formal launch of a campaign. Like so much about his candidacy, Kerry's speech in Charleston, S.C., defies easy summary. Laden with detailed issue positions on everything from Iraq to preserving middle-class tax cuts, the Kerry announcement was premised on his distinctive autobiographical selling point as a Vietnam War hero who returned home to oppose the continuation of the war. ''I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it,'' the Massachusetts senator said. ''I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service. But you don't have to go halfway around the world or march on Washington to learn about bravery or love of country. Again and again, in the causes that define our nation, we have seen the uncommon courage that is common to the American people.'' No Democratic contender has gotten more mileage out of his announcement speech than Richard Gephardt, who unveiled his candidacy in St. Louis back in February. Any Gephardt speech these days in Iowa or New Hampshire is filled with long passages that are lifted almost word-for-word from his rollout address. What this reflects is not only the discipline that powers his candidacy, but also the thought and preparation that was lavished on his announcement. As the lone Democratic contender who has run for president before, Gephardt instinctively understands the vital role that self-definition plays in the campaign. Unlike his rivals for the nomination, Gephardt has based his candidacy on a single big idea -- his $200 billion plan for expanding health insurance coverage. First in St. Louis and then repeatedly on the campaign trail, the Missouri congressman introduces his program by talking about his son Matt's battle with childhood cancer and the ''terror in the eyes'' of parents he met without health insurance. The Gephardt rollout speech ended with a passage that encapsulates the essence of his 26-year career in Congress. These words fit no other Democrat running for president, but they captured Gephardt's distinctive political identity: ''I'm not the political flavor of the month. I'm not the flashiest candidate around. But the fight for working families is in my bones. It's where I come from; it's been my life's work.'' The other leading Democrats also used their announcement speeches to stress an overarching theme designed to define their drive for the White House. Joe Lieberman, who rushed to declare his candidacy in January after Al Gore decided not to run, depicted himself as the embodiment of ''the American Dream.'' Bob Graham in Miami Lakes, Fla., stressed the symbolic and political importance of ''this land at the Southern tip of the United States.'' And Howard Dean, already riding high from his opposition to the war in Iraq, formally launched his candidacy in June back home in Burlington, Vt., by sounding a softer note about the need to restore ''the ideal of the American community.'' But Clark, despite his four-star résumé that is prompting some Democrats to swoon, failed his first vision test. It was telling that as the general's cap-in-the-ring speech drew to a close he talked about ''a future brightened by hope, courage and the determination that we can do better.'' That ''we can do better'' conceit is one of Dean's signature phrases. This borrowed fragment of rhetoric is a reminder that Clark has just four months before the Iowa caucuses to do better as a fledgling political candidate. usatoday.com

To: JohnM who wrote (8600)	9/19/2003 9:42:58 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793690

I love this review of Krugman's book. townhall.com Paul Krugman is an angry man Bruce Bartlett Bruce Bartlett is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a TownHall.com member group. September 19, 2003 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is an angry man. If he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears every time he hears someone say "tax cuts" or "George W. Bush" or "supply-side economics." All these things seem to set him off so much that he becomes just apoplectic, which he pours into twice-weekly columns that have become must reading for those on the left-wing fringe. Now Krugman, who moonlights as a professor of economics at Princeton, has turned some of his more inflammatory columns into a book, "The Great Unraveling." He hopes to cash in on the seemingly unlimited appetite that left-wingers have for books that bash Bush, Republicans and anyone who has ever said a nice word about them. They have already put Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" and other books like them on the best-seller list. Now, Krugman wants his millions, too. To promote his book, Krugman has taken off the semester from Princeton, although unfortunately he is still writing his column. In order to aid sales and further enrich the already wealthy Krugman, The New York Times Magazine was kind enough to publish an excerpt from his new book on Sept. 14. If it is representative of the quality of the rest of the book, those who pay for it are being short-changed. In the excerpt, Krugman is seriously bent out of shape by supply-side economics. What seems to bother him most is that it is a school of economic thought that didn't come out of the universities, like monetarism or Keynesianism. Rather, "It emerged in the pages of political magazines, not professional economics journals." This is basically correct. The reason is that university economics departments were (and still are) overwhelmingly populated by Keynesians, who thought that deficits were good, saving was bad and inflation didn't matter very much. The burden of taxation was an issue of little importance to their analyses, nor did they think that the money supply had any effect on anything. The result of government policies based on this thinking is what gave us double-digit inflation and interest rates in the 1970s. The Keynesian answer to these problems was to deliberately raise the unemployment rate to fight inflation, impose price controls and devalue the dollar. Supply-siders thought this was nuts. They saw stagflation as mainly resulting from an excessively easy Federal Reserve policy and a tax system that was not indexed to inflation. As a consequence, workers were being pushed up into higher tax brackets every time they got a cost of living pay raise, and investors saw their savings virtually confiscated by a capital gains tax that did not differentiate between real gains and those arising solely from inflation. It just didn't pay either to work or invest. Under the circumstances, there was no time to write articles for obscure academic journals that might take years to get into print, organize scholarly conferences and do all the things necessary to get the grudging respect of people like Paul Krugman. Supply-siders went directly to policymakers and the media with their ideas, bypassing the academics the same way Gen. Douglas MacArthur went around Japanese strongholds in the Pacific, leaving them isolated and ineffective. In any event, it wasn't as though supply-side economics was made up out of whole cloth or lacked academic supporters. It was based firmly on neoclassical economics. Krugman even concedes this point: "The starting point of supply-side economics is an assertion that no economist would dispute: Taxes reduce the incentive to work, save and invest." The problem is that in the 1970s, many economists did dispute this point. They argued that the only economic impact of taxation was on disposable income; marginal tax rates were of no importance whatsoever. Mainstream economists also argued that when taxes went up, this actually encouraged people to work harder, not less. Because people had a target level of after-tax income, they said, a reduction of that income due to higher taxes would force people to try to raise their before-tax income in order to reach their target level of after-tax income. Economists call this the "income effect." In effect, Krugman, for all his hatred of supply-side economics, has learned from it. Had his simple statement about incentives been made in 1977 instead of 2003, he would have been attacked by mainstream economists in The New York Times, praised by The Wall Street Journal editorial page and lumped in with the very supply-siders he now hates. In effect, Krugman wants it both ways: to concede the truth about supply-side economics without giving supply-siders any credit. townhall.com