Two Points of View

As some of you know, Obama is no longer planning on passing a windfall profits tax on Oil Companies, which was a campaign promise. Well here are some responses to this choice, the first by David Sirota.

Between this move and the move to wait to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, it seems like the Obama team is buying into the right-wing frame that raising any taxes - even those on the richest citizens and wealthiest corporations - is bad for the economy. Of course, that frame is debunked by history. And while sure, it's OK to rack up deficits so as to spend our way out of the economic crisis, it's sorta silly to ignore the tax moves that could be implemented to limit those deficits where possible.

Oh, and one last thing - if oil prices are down and oil industry profits are truly down, what's the harm in passing a windfall profits tax?

And here's a contrasting view by Josh Marshall

I'm not sure I get the response to Obama's apparent decision to shelve the windfall profits tax on the big oil companies. As the name implies, windfall profits taxes are intended to tax windfall profits. But the cost of oil has now dropped to something like a third of what it was when this idea was floated. So I'm really not getting how this is breaking a promise or currying favor with the oil companies. This seems like a pretty straightforward case of adjusting policy to take account of demonstrable and undeniable changes in the economic picture.

I think the factor both gentleman leave out is the political capital which must be expended to keep this promise, which causes me to lean a bit more towards Marshall's point of view.

Why Clinton Is Still Running

This is from a post from the consistently brilliant Talking Points Memo a few days ago.

Hillary doesn't want to run for president in 2nd or 3rd gear. It's beneath her dignity. And I don't mean that sarcastically. It really is. She's a powerful United States senator, former First Lady, etc. She wants to win. And if she's still in it she wants to run full bore with the money you need to run a serious campaign, the crowds, poll numbers, etc. She's not some Huckabee figure who's going to hang around with little chance of winning

It really is all or nothing. You've got to convince your supporters, donors and to at least some degree the media that you're really in it, and in it with a shot. Otherwise you face the classic problem of a cascade failure. Poor fundraising generates bad press stories, which depress turnout at rallies, which create more bad press stories and eventually no press stories, etc. It's no different from the precarious position any campaign faces when the odds aren't looking good.

And so we have this vicious cycle in which the longer Hillary's odds become the further she has to up the ante to keep her candidacy credible -- in other words, the more forcefully she has to question the legitimacy of the nomination process and the more aggressively she has to push the idea that Obama can't win the general election or is not qualified to be president.

There it is. Clinton can't afford to play nice; if she stays in she has to play to win. And since she's determined to stay in, she's going to bloody Obama up before the election pretty good.

Interesting Comments

Hugh Hewitt is talking about the Senator from Idaho that has gotten in trouble soliciting sex in an airport bathroom. Apparently the Senator plead guilty on the theory that this would be the quick way to solve this problem (or that is what he is claiming now). Well Hewitt doesn't think much of that theory.

. . . even if I did believe him, this would make his judgment too flawed to be in the United States Senate in a time of war. He has to go.

It would be interesting to consider who else's judgment is to flawed to be in the US Senate in a time of war. Probably everybody to the left of Lieberman I would guess.

Josh Marshall also commented on this story with a point worth considering as well.

Look, I wouldn't want to bring my 4-year-old son into the airport bathroom and stumble across two people having sex, gay or straight. It's tough enough getting in and out of the john without him touching every dirty surface or contributing to the mess with an errant aim. But sex didn't happen here. Even the propositioning is murky at best. And short of a proposition involving sex for money, what is illegal about inquiring about sex? Tactless, maybe. But criminal?

That's a fair question, in all honesty.

Stop Punching Yourself!

As you know, President Bush, following his buddies in the conservative pundit class, made the following statement in the State of the Union.

Some in this chamber are new to the House and the Senate -- and I congratulate the Democrat majority.

Of course the adjective associated with the Democratic Party is, well, Democratic. But people have positive associations with the term Democratic, so Conservatives are switching to the Democrat party. From there it will be a short step to DemocRAT party - which I think I saw on FOX News just the other day.

Anyway here's two different responses to the controversy. The first from Conservative Mary Katherine Harris.

How about the Party of the Suffixionally Fixated? The Lexical Paranoiacs?

And, how dare Bush be insincere in preaching bipartisanship?

The Democratics can dish it, but they can't take it. They're whining about an -ic. Leaving off an -ic is all that's required for the president to be accused of lowering the level of discourse. The double standard is just terrif.

And here's Joshua Micah Marshall, at Talking Points Memo.

You address people the way they choose to be addressed. You address them by what they consider to be their name. In the ordinary course of life, when people do otherwise, we rightly recognize that they're trying to pick a fight or demean the person in question.

It is, as Matt points out, another illustration of the 'bitch-slap theory of politics'. You assert dominance over someone by mangling their name and continuing to do so even after the correct pronunciation or style is pointed out. It's right off the schoolyard and it's no surprise that it's a stock and trade of this president.

You can guess which side of the fence I come down in this issue.

Go Vote Today

Stop me if you've heard this one before. But voting good. Not voting makes you a punk. I don't care how busy you are and I don't care how much stuff you have going on. You could be a student pursuing a tough degree in Engineering or Law, for example, and you should still take time off and go vote.

Remember - Not Voting is for Punks. And not cool punks. Punkass punks. Punkass punks don't vote. Cool Punks do vote.

I'm not really good at coming up with slogans.

In other news Republicans are dillholes. Have you heard the one about the robo calling monster? Talking Points Memo has information on this fiendish scheme by our Republican friends.

Most of the call's script is a fairly standard attack robocall, a series of Republican talking points aimed at the Democratic congressional in a particular district. Nothing particularly noteworthy. The key is the introduction. The lead into the call starts with the speaker saying 'I'm calling with information about' Dem candidate X. Then there's a short pause.

At this point, you know it's an annoying robocall, so a lot of people just hang up. If you hang up then, you think it's a call from the Democratic candidate.

Second, the repetition. And this part is the key. If you don't listen through the whole message, the machine keeps calling you back, often well in excess of half a dozen times with the same call. It only stops if you listen all the way through.

As you can imagine, that's driving a lot of people through the roof.

One can only imagine - and of coruse they believe that the Democratic candidate is the one doing all these repetitive phone calls. So it's a sort of heads I win, tails you lose set up for our friends on the right. But I don't think this particular scheme is doing to be popular once it explained to the American people.

Presumably the Republicans have their "overzealous staffer" already picked out to take the fall for this scheme.

What retaking the House Means

There's a really good post over at Talking Points Memo that ends with this paragraph.

If the Democrats do really well on November 7th, yes, they'll get the subpoena power that has the White House shaking in its boots. And the president's legislative agenda, as we've known it to date, will cease to exist. But I'm not certain those will be the most consequential changes. After the last six years, it will have a deep effect on the perceptions of both parties. And with a party that has based on so much on bluff, confidence and force, that could be a very big deal.

It sounds like it would be a very good very big deal.

Also check out this post on the most low-tech campaign website.

Which question do you want to answer?

Supposedly you can beat any lie detector by simply rewriting any question you can't answer in your head to one that you can answer. That's what the Republican party is trying to do going into the 2006 elections. The Democrats want people to ask "Had enough?" referencing the Iraq war, Katrina and other Bush debacles. The Republican question is "Do you want to get blowed up?" which apparently favors them, at least according to Michael Barone's latest article.

And it's a rule that he and Bush -- and events -- have put into operation over the last few weeks. For months, the central issue of the off-year election has been, Hasn't Bush kept us too long in Iraq? Now, the issue seems to have become, Who can keep us safe against the Islamofascist terrorists who want to kill us and destroy our society?

The first question tends to help the Democrats. The second tends to help Bush and the Republicans.

The answer to this is to tie our troubles in Iraq back too the Global War on Terror. Has invading Iraq made us safer from the terrorists? To paraphrase Joshua Micah Marshall, is there anybody who, upon hearing of the foiled London bomb plot, thought "Thank goodness we invaded Iraq"?

Putting Drumheller in Perspective

There's a very good post by Josh Marshall over at Talking Points memo about Mr. Drumheller's appearence on 60 Minutes.

What Drumheller has to say adds quite a lot to our knowledge of what happened in the lead up to war. But what it shows even more clearly is that none of this stuff has yet been investigated by anyone whose principal goal is not covering for the White House.

That's dead right - as Marshall notes elsewhere, the biggest problem with losing the house in the fall is that it would give Democrats the subeona power.