Arizona's First Political Blog

E-mail Anonymous Mike at zonitics4-at-yahoo.com

By Anonymous Mike, pseudonymously.

 
A Kind Word For Janet Napolitano

Homeland Security Secretary (and former Arizona Governor) Janet Napolitano is getting heat from the right for these comments made during an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word "terrorism." Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

Some have remarked that this places terrorism on the same level as obesity or car crashes. In all fairness, I took it a different way. After 10 years of Napolitano holding high-level state office here in Arizona, I have noticed she combines the charm of pit bull with a tendency to indulge inpolicy wonkiness. You see the wonkiness in the part above, you see the pit bull in the part below:

SPIEGEL: This sounds quite different from what we heard from the Bush administration. How will the new anti-terror policy differ from the previous one?

Napolitano: Our policies will be guided by authoritative information. We also have assets at our disposal now that we did not have prior to 9/11. For example, we are much better able to keep track of travellers coming into the US than we were before. The third thing is to work with our international partners and allies to make sure that we are getting information and sharing information in an appropriate and real-time fashion.

Leave aside the fact that the information sharing and entrance screening she refers to were initiated by the previous administration she so derides, that's just the pit bull talking. The key is the elaboration of "nuance" with a healthy dose of supervisory systems and cooperation. Terrorism won't be forgotten by Napolitano's department, it will just be managed like any other program.

Now if there isn't a terrorist attack under Napolitano's watch, or at least for a decent interval afterwards, then she gets off scott free for the "man-caused" remark. If we get hit, then that remark will become her political epitaph. Actually Homeland Security is a pretty thankless job; much like a baseball umpire if you are doing well nobody notices you but if you screw up you end up with you picture next to Michael Brown's in the history book. However that's the price Napolitano was more than willing to pay to bail out on the fiscal crisis she helped create in Arizona.

So anyway I'll let the remark go and hope (and pray) that I'm given no reason to resurrect it in the future.
posted by Anonymous Mike at 6:39 PM

 
Newspaper Bailouts, AIG, and Art

The one great reminder of the whole AIG bonus controversy is what happens when government, whether bureaucrats or elected officials, start to get involved in the operations of private organizations. You take bailout money, whether through acceptance or by force, and all of the sudden your inner operations are thrown open to all sorts of meddling and grandstanding.

If you go back a few decades, remember the controversy over how grants were being used by the National Endowment for the Arts? With all the meddling and grandstanding about people wondering why taxpayer dollars were being used to fund projects that they considered obscene? People cried censorship, I wondered why such free thinkers and boundary pushers wanted federal dollars to begin with.

Keep that in mind when the next group starts pawing around, crying in distress for some federal funds to help them through a tough time... like newspapers. They don't even necessarily need money to become compromised, maybe just a little bending of the rules.

I especially enjoyed the plea for all sorts of federal subsidies from that former bastion of free thought, The Nation. Seriously, if we provide anti-trust exemptions and tax credits for newspaper subscriptions what happens the next time The New York Times blows the cover on a top-secret national security program? What about the chairman of a key congressional committee dealing with such newspaper subsidies?

Common folks, you accept taxpayer money you are going to be subject in some way to government influence and control.

(h/t Coyote Blog)
posted by Anonymous Mike at 7:53 PM

 
Ships Passing in The Night

This year I filled out my first NCAA bracket and my interest is the lowest it has been in the nearly 30 years I have been following the tournament.

Go figure
posted by Anonymous Mike at 7:51 PM

 
A Run on Whiskey and Revolvers

Well judging from my e-mail, yesterday's post caused a stir so here's a little bit more

The other week, Senator Grassley caused a stir by stating that he would feel better about the AIG bonus fiasco if the executives involved either committed suicide or resigned; while he was talking about the Japanese way of leaving I think he would have been satisfied if the people involved simply retired to a room with a bottle of whiskey and a loaded revolver.

The suicide part of Grassley's comment is what caused the public uproar but if you take it in the context of the overall statement with the words of "resign" and "or" you can see that he was talking about a lack of accountability in the business culture. AIG executives, who I seriously doubt are still employed, drove the company into the ground while making a pretty penny in salary and bonuses and whose only punishment, social or criminal, is to while away their copious free time spending their even more copious dollars. To take Grassley's comments and apply them retroactively, such people should have (after they cleaned out their offices) handed that revolver and whiskey and asked if they wanted to do the right thing.

Now let's turn the accountability one step further and apply it to the political arena.

There's a gross lack of accountability when it comes to politics and the AIG bonuses. Not just in terms of who slipped in the bonus language into the "stimulus" bill or who suggested it in the first place or the fact that the very same legislators who are screaming the loudest about are the ones who voted for it last month. Nope, I'm talking about bigger fish. I'm talking about societal accountability.

For various reasons, right and wrong both, we decided to bail out certain companies rather than allowing them to proceed to bankruptcy. Both the wrong and right reasons centered around the notion that such companies were too important to allow to fail. Once we started pouring money into them, politicians and the media began to see them as government property and started to look askew at how those bailed-out companies were spending money on large salaries, meetings, and other perks. Right or wrong, that sort of attention was inevitable.

The problem with that attention was that it distracted public debate from the critical question, which was what we were going to do with those companies. The prevailing notion was that these bailouts were a temporary step; they would be cleaned up of their toxic assets and put back onto the street as going concerns. If that was to be the case, then the companies would need smart management and smart management in those industries tend to get paid outside of the GSA wage scale.

So here's the lack of accountability part. Apparently some people in Treasury knew that the AIG people would need to get paid, if not to keep them from heading for the door then for contractual reasons. That's why it looks the language was inserted. Perhaps the politicians that be, going back to the previous administration last fall, should have arranged a different structure for the bailed-out companies but they didn't... this was the game they had chosen to play, turning them into quasi-public entities. However in their attempt to run Wall Street from Washington, it never occurred to the people in the Bush and Obama Administrations or in Congress that things work differently in New York than in Washington.

In other words they didn't have the guts to explain to the public, to take the political heat, that the people on Wall Street that they had grouped as a single class and dehumanized as villains would have to still be employed and paid a very handsome (though reduced) compensation if these bailed-out companies were going to be righted and sent back out onto the Street.

If you in Washington cannot do what it takes to bail-out companies, then maybe you shouldn't have taken that route. Maybe you should have thought through the implications of your actions and the fact that you tack to the political winds before you started pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the private sector. Nope you didn't, you spent first and then started looking for the political pinata later which just makes everything worse.

So where's the accounatbility for Washington?
posted by Anonymous Mike at 2:43 PM

 
Congress, AIG and Confusion

I am trying to understand this whole political firestorm about the AIG bonuses.

The so-called stimulus package, Obama's signature legislation and passed by the Democrats, contained a provision that would ensure that the AIG bonuses would be paid.

So when those AIG bonuses were paid, as authorized by law, the same Democrats who passed that law suddenly go ape poop and scream how outrageous it was that something that they had authorized actually occurred. Their solution is to go pass what amounts to a bill of attainder to punish people who benefited from what the Democrats so specifically authorized.

Huh.

So what am I supposed to conclude about this? I guess I have a number of options...

1) I can conclude that no one actually read the massive "stimulus" bill and that it contains more ticking political time bombs and fiscal cluster f***ks that are just waiting to go off. I mean how funny it is that Congress and the White House is getting so uptight about something that is so clearly spelled out?

2) I can conclude that given that Dodd inserted that AIG bonus language, that the good Senator from Connecticut seems to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the financial industry, and the way he slipped the language in that the $800 billion "stimulus" package is just an invitation to more political graft and corruption.

3) I can conclude that given the way the Obama Administration and the whole Congressional leadership is running around trying to find anyone, just anyone, to be a scapegoat that there seems to be more concern over an amount of money equal to Mark Teixeira's new contract with the Yankees than getting $800 billion in spending right.

So let's see in choosing among political incompetence, fiscal incompetence, and political corruption I can conclude that the AIG bonus issue is all three!
posted by Anonymous Mike at 9:52 AM

 
Dropping the Hammer

Around the time of the election, I posited that in any future battles between an Obama White House and a Democratic Congress it would be the latter that would win. After all the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress before Obama even launched his campaign and they could claim they made him rather than the other way around.

At first I wondered a bit if I made the right call. Right after the election, Obama selected Congressman Rahm Emmanuel to be his chief-of-staff. Emmanuel not noly was a congressional critter, but he was the brains behind the Democrats taking the House in 2006. Combine that with his past experience in the Clinto White House and I thought that he might be the man to help Obama control Congress.

I guess not.

First indication of what was going to happen was when Obama allowed Congress to write his administration-defining legislation, the stimulus bill. Between his inaguration and the bill's passage, the man who got elected to the world's most powerful office on the platform of hope and change basically acted as the chief majority whip on a bill essentially written by David Obey.

Now you have Obama's presser on earmarks and the omnibus bill.

Keep in mind the omnibus bill everyone is so worked up on is this year's budget bill, not next year's. Pelosi and the gang has kept government going on continuing resolutions for the past 5 1/2 months so they could get bypass the Bush Administration and land this sucker on Obama's desk. So for the past 4 1/2 months, since his election, Obama has known the day would come when he would be tested on this bill regarding his earmark pledge.

So what did he do?

He called the bill old business left over from the previous administration, despite knowing that the bill was designed for his signature, and promised to work on earmark reform after he signed it. If you remember after he signed the travesty of a "stimulus" bill he promised the country a future of fiscal restraint.

Less than 2 months into office and he's already getting pushed around by the likes of Pelosi and Obey. How embarassing. I cannot wait until years from now when the stories come out of how the critters up on Capitol Hill dropped the hammer on the Obama team and told them how things were going to work.
posted by Anonymous Mike at 1:31 PM

 
Perhaps Not The Wisest Choice

From the East Valley Trib:

Indicted Maricopa County Supervisor Don Stapley has been appointed by the White House to a task force to help implement the economic stimulus package signed last month by President Barack Obama, and wants a judge's permission to travel to its first meeting next week.

I know Stapley is the current President of the National Association of Counties and I have doubts about those indictments, but with all the problems the Obama Administration has had with its nomination process (with the tax cheating, corruption probes, conflicts of interest) you would think they would pick someone uhhh you know... less inidcted.
posted by Anonymous Mike at 8:18 PM

 
The Bear and NATO

Alot of things after the past week but perhaps one of the most troubling and least publicized was what exactly is the Obama Administration doing in Europe?

There were alot of chuckles after Secretary of State Clinton's gaffe with the Russian Foreign Minister, with the gift of a button that said "overcharged" instead of "reset, but the idea of "resetting" relations with Russia needs to be put into the larger context of Administration and Russian actions.

First Russia is a declining power. Its demographics are in the tank with a population that is both shrinking and growing less ethically Russian. Its recent economic turmoil should remind us that any Russian economic strategy is tied to commodities and not any information-based or manufacturing sectors; its recenet stability has been resting on theonce pricey fumes of crude oil and little else.

Second, Russia may be declining but it has chosen to reclaim its role in its former sphere of influence in both the "near abroad" and Eatsern Europe. Witness its invasion of Georgia, its computer warfare against Estonia, and threats against both the Cezechs and Poles over missile defense. In many ways the situation is analogous to the one we faced in the late 1980s as we tried to manage the decline of the Soviet Union except this time the Russians will probably not go into the good night like the Soviets did. To also being back the 80's, Europe is now even more tied to Russian energy.

So you would think with the last stand of the agressive Russian bear that the Obama Administration would want to keep its NATO powder dry. Perhaps countries in the Russian near abroad like Georgia and Kygyrstan are beyond help, but certainly not Europe.

Okay Europe is a region in decline and NATO has shown itself to be pretty toothless as an expeditionary force, but the key parts of NATO are pretty formidable and those parts are Britain and "New Europe"- the Czechs and the Poles. The Poles and Brits have sent troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan and they, unlike those from other NATO countries, fight. The Czechs and Poles have both, despite withering pressure from the Russians, agreed to host the key elements of the US missile defense system.

These countries are our staunchest allies in what soon may be a troublesome region. So what does the Obama Administration do? First after the Poles and Czechs stick their necks out for us, both understand that Russia is much closer than the US, we then turn around and offer missile defense as a bargaining chip. If that didn't get them worried in Warsaw and Prague, we then make a stunt of some corporate knick knack offering to "reset" relations with Moscow. Both Waraw and Prague understand what it is like to be a bargaining chip when great powers meet and wish to reset things.

The was the curious story of what happened when the head of government of the other pillar of NATO came to visit President Obama. British Prime Minster came bearing gifts for Obama that showed the rich history of cooperation between the two countries; a history that spanned the bequest of American civilization, multiple wars, and a joint stand against the greatest tyrannies in history.

In return, Obama gave DVDs of American movies and in general gave the perception that he couldn't be bothered.

Now in fairness to the President, his people claimed he was "tired" due to his laser-like focus on the economy but it's not like Washington has a pucity of staff drones. You would think if the White House really sort of cared, it would have delegated the planning of the British PM's visit to some assistant deputy associate secretary of something; somebody who would have actually cared to do a good job. So I'm not buying the tired thing... a president needs to multitask; instead I'm buying the theme of malign neglect.

So at a time when Russia is acting like a general pain in our back side our approach is to kiss up to them while at the same time pissing off the key members of our anti-Russian alliance?
posted by Anonymous Mike at 6:34 PM