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Mon, September 30 | Tues, October 1 | Wed, October 2 | Thurs, October 3 | Fri, October 4 | Sat, October 5 | Sun, October 6
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Thursday, October 3 The interesting part of the unanimous ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court justices (six out of seven of whom were GOP appointees) is described in this New York Times article:
New Jersey law only speaks of allowing a candidate to be replaced 51 days or more before the election, but it does not expressly address making such a change closer to an election. In arguments before the State Supreme Court today, the Republicans' lawyers pointed out that only 34 days remain until the election and argued that changing candidates would nullify the voting rights of some military servicemen who have already mailed in absentee ballots.After noting that the law does not specifically prohibit a change of candidates within 51 days of the election, the seven justices -- four Democrats, two Republicans and an independent -- ordered the state attorney general to oversee the printing of new ballots and their delivery to all eligible absentee voters.
As best Tapped can figure out, there's a difference between allowing a candidate to be replaced and forbidding a candidate from being replaced. Jersey law, which like most election law isn't very precise, specifices the former. Here's the decision.
Tapped confesses that we're confused regarding the GOP argument that military servicemen will be disenfranchised. The election is over a month away. How hard is it to expedite new absentee ballots to everyone in
time for the election? [posted 12:20 pm]
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Wednesday, October 2
We've recently posted five new articles. In a web-only piece, David Bacon reports on the latest developments in the West Coast longshoremen lockout -- and in a longer piece from the newest edition of the magazine, he looks at Bush's unconvincing use of national security as a pretext to justify his campaign against unions. Plus, we have an article by Harold Meyerson on post-partisanship among unions and a piece by Merrill Goozner on how pharmaceutical-industry front groups buy elections. And finally, there's our cover story from the latest issue: an investigation by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Laurie Garrett of the new kind of pollution unleashed into New York City's air by the collapse of the World Trade Center. [posted 5:10 pm]
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THE TIDE RISES. Many readers have probably seen this column by Michael Kinsley and this column by David Broder already. But in case you haven't, read them both. Each tries to make sense of the Bush administration's forever-shifting rationales for invading Iraq. Both display what Patrick Nielsen Hayden trenchantly describes as "the despair of the honest moderate at stampeding irrationality." This is important not just because Kinsley and Broder are right, but because Kinsley and Broder each represent, in their own way, a certain swath of influential establishment thinking. If Kinsley and Broder are beginning to wonder about the administration's rampant dishonesty, that means a lot of other people are, too. This Kinsley passage is a gem:
The Bush administration campaign for war against Iraq has been an extravaganza of disingenuousness. The arguments come and go. Allegations are taken up, held until discredited, and then replaced. All the entrances and exits are chronicled by leaks to the Washington Post. Two overarching concepts-"terrorism" and "weapons of mass destruction" (or "WMD" as the new national security document jauntily acronymizes)-are drained of whatever intellectual validity they may have had and put to work bridging huge gaps in evidence and logic.
Couldn't have said it better ourselves. [posted 2:20 pm]
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WHO DOES RICHARD PERLE THINK HE IS? Reader B.M emailed us this article, which was published in the German newspaper Handlesblatt and picked up by Der Spiegel. Luckily, we plugged it into Google's handy translator, which gave us this.
The translation is pretty rough, but it seems to confirm what B.M told us, which is that Pentagon apparatchik Richard Perle is getting a little too big for his britches. In the article, Perle apparently tells a reporter that newly-re-elected German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder should resign over his opposition to a U.S. invasion of Iraq. He also suggests, ominously, that German hopes for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council have been set back for at least "a generation."
Perle stressed that this was his own personal opinion. But that doesn't matter much when you express it so publicly. Let's put this in context: A senior defense advisor to George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld has now argued that the duly-elected foreign leader of an allied nation should resign simply because he opposes an administration plan to invade Iraq that itself has only tepid support in the U.S. We were worried before that the pro-war neocons were slowly being consumed by their own sense of manifest destiny. Now we're even more worried. [posted 12:40 pm]
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HOW TO PLAY HARDBALL. Now that Bob Torricelli has dropped out of the race, and Torricelli's least-favorite New Jerseyan, former senator Frank Lautenberg, is taking his place, the Democrats must decide how they will wage the fight ahead. Will they be wilting flowers, limiting their options by worrying excessively about what Sam Donaldson would say? Or will they be as ruthless, partisan and unyielding as the Republican Party was in Florida? Tapped hopes it will be the latter. If the Republicans were in the same position, they would be doing precisely the same thing. There is simply no doubt about that whatsoever. They would push every envelope, pursue every option and, if necessary, bend a few rules in the interest of getting a viable candidate in that race.
Does that make it right for the Democrats to do the same? Well, maybe not. So here's the principled reason for Democrats to fight hard, as outlined by The New York Times in an editorial yesterday:
The courts must then expeditiously approve the ballot substitution, which in turn will clear the way for an energetic one-month campaign that, with Senator Torricelli out of the picture, can focus tightly on loftier issues than his seamy behavior. In his emotional announcement, Mr. Torricelli said he would file a court petition to remove his name from the ballot and clear the way for another candidate, to be named in coming days from a short list being considered by Governor McGreevey. The Republicans are likely to argue that under New Jersey election law, it is too late to put another name on the ballot. But legal wrangling over ballot access cannot be allowed to obscure the central issue, which is one of democracy. The guiding principle should be the voters' basic right to a genuine election.
This is not the Times being partisan. Traditionally, in election-law
jurisprudence, courts are generally willing to override certain kinds of
election statutes -- deadlines and such -- in the interest of giving voters
a choice. And that's usually a good thing, on general principle. [posted 12:20 pm]
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Tuesday, October 1 There's been a lot of good reporting recently on how much of the Bush administration's new strategic doctrine -- which was presented as a response to terrorism and Saddam Hussein -- has actually been percolating in the minds of neoconservative hawks for at least fifteen years. This excellent article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, by deputy editorial page editor Jay Bookman, does as good a job as anything Tapped has seen when it comes to summarizing the roots of "pre-emption" and its place in a constellation of policies that long predate September 11th. It includes sidebars on the key players -- from Paul Wolfowitz to Eliot Cohen -- and the key institutions, such as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). And it explains just how suspiciously old some features of our "new" national security policy really are.
For instance, a key PNAC report from 2000 names Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as primary short-term targets -- around two years before Bush's "axis of evil" speech. That report was itself a direct descendant of an earlier document produced in 1992 by some of the very same authors but under the aegis of the first Bush administration. The basic theory is one of empire -- of an America unchallenged, and unchallengable, capable of throwing its weight around and demanding what it cannot get by asking. One of the theorists, Donald Kagan, who teaches classics at Yale, openly adopts the obvious cowboy motif. "You saw the movie 'High Noon'?" he asks Bookman. "We're Gary Cooper."
If you've followed the Iraq debate closely, you already know most of this. But Bookman makes a couple of points that bear repeating. One is that this was not the foreign policy Bush campaigned on. Yes, missile defense and a pullback from some treaties were part of Bush's platform, just as they are part of the new Bush doctrine. But the broader position was one of "humility," as Bush put it in one of his debates with Al Gore. "Pre-emption" is not a doctrine of humility. More broadly, the Bush administration's handling of foreign policy reveals a certain kind of contempt for democracy and democratic decision-making. Time and time again, they have declined
to have an open, honest debate over the policies they favor, from tax cuts to Social Security privatization. Rather, they have chosen subterfuge and
obfuscation, usually to defend themselves against public sentiment. Instead of admitting that an invasion of Iraq has little to do with stopping al-Qaeda and everything to do with establishing the U.S. as a global
hegemon, Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and others have tried to defend the former explanation with ominous warnings and vague explanations. This is no way to have a debate about a war. [posted 6:30 pm]
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MORE ON THE PROTESTS. Check out this fascinating account by two reporters for The Diamondback -- the University of Maryland's student newspaper -- of their experience in police custody this past weekend. Jason Flanagan and Debra Kahn were arrested along with IMF and World Bank protesters in Pershing Park on Friday, and despite explaining that they were journalists, were held in handcuffs for 23 hours by DC police. Before being arrested, Flanagan and Kahn had the presence of mind to hand their notebooks off to a Washington Post reporter -- who in turn wrote about them in Saturday's paper.
You can say what you want about the dubious ideological content of the protests themselves -- and TAP Online said yesterday that the intellectual content of the protests was unimpressive indeed -- but there can be little doubt that the DC police were overzealous in whom, exactly, they chose to arrest. Detaining rock-throwers is commendable; detaining drum circle participants -- no matter how loony -- is quite another matter. And detaining journalists, whether students or professionals, who are doing their jobs and covering the news is absolutely unacceptable. So kudos to Flanagan and Kahn for their willingness to go to jail to get a good story -- and kudos to their editors at The Diamondback for giving them the space to tell it. [posted 5:30 pm]
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WHO, EXACTLY, IS RESPONSIBLE FOR DELAYING HOMELAND SECURITY? You have probably guessed that this is a question to which Tapped already has an answer. Today's L.A. Times carries a story on the Senate Democrats' efforts to break a Republican-led filibuster. That's right, filibuster. For about a month, you see, Republicans have been blocking a vote on the Democrats' version of the homeland security legislation -- which, we must point out, was the earliest version, since Democrat Joe Lieberman was promoting such a reorganization long before the White House came up with the idea. Without the GOP filibuster, the Democrats -- minus Zell Miller, who supports the GOP bill, and plus Republican Lincoln Chafee, who's sided with the Democrats -- could have passed a homeland security bill. Bush's allies in the Senate, not the Democrats, are holding it up.
The reason? One is that Bush still hopes to bludegon the Senate into passing Republican legislation. Another is that if the Democrats pass their bill, they have a good chance of getting their version through a conference committee more or less intact and landing on Bush's desk a bill that he doesn't want to sign. (That is, one that doesn't cynically exploit the need for a homeland security agency by larding up the legislation with a GOP attack on unions.) Bush has threatened to veto a bill that doesn't give him what he calls "management flexibility," but the truth is, this is probably a bluff. Bush hasn't veto anything yet, and he won't want to start with this legislation. The question is, why is it the Democrats who are getting blamed for not giving Bush a homeland security bill, when it is the Republicans who are directly responsible? [posted 1:20 pm]
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SPINSANITY GETS RESULTS. Brendan Nyhan reports that The Washington Times' Tony Blankley told him yesterday the paper would issue a clarification of this Sunday editorial, which criticized Tom Daschle's reaction to President Bush's attack on the Senate Democrats. The Times, like so many other outlets, cited the wrong Bush attack -- one that was milder than the one Daschle had specifically cited in his speech. This, conveniently, had the effect of making Daschle look like a hothead. The actual correction by the Times, which ran today, didn't bother to cite the correct Bush statement. Nevertheless, the fact that there was a clarification at all is pretty good for a paper like the Times. [posted 1:15 pm]
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ARE WE EVEN READY TO INVADE IRAQ? This article in Newsweek -- which is really coming up with some great scoops lately over rival Time -- raises the question of whether the
White House is putting the politics of the war ahead of planning for the war. It looks like Don Rumsfeld is too consumed with getting Congress to sign on to a military campaign to notice that the military is not quite ready to wage one. [posted 9:25 am]
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TAPEGATE REDUX. In our post yesterday, we named Jeff Link, the campaign manager for Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, as the guy who asked former Harkin worker and alleged recent Greg Ganske donor Brian Conley to tape-record a Ganske fundraiser. Actually, we misread. It was another Harkin worker, Rafael Ruthchild, who asked Conley to record the fundraiser. (Ruthchild is the guy whose job it is to record all of Ganske's campaign events and is apparently pretty junior.) So it seems that Link took responsibility and fell
on his sword. But the whole thing still looks much less significant than the Ganske campaign is making it out to be. Also, Tim Francis-Wright of Bear-Left points out that while the Greater Des Moines Partnership is a non-profit, it is of a
type that is allowed to involve itself in election campaigns. So no skullduggery there. [posted 9:20 am]
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Monday, September 30 The Des Moines Register has more information on the emerging "scandal" in Iowa. Senator Tom Harkin's campaign manager, Jeff Link, resigned this weekend after admitting that he had asked Brian Conley, a Harkin aide from the 1970s, to record a fundraiser/briefing featuring Republican challenger Greg Ganske and White House political director Ken Mehlman. Tapped reported last week that the formerly-anonymous Conley was a Ganske donor who had been invited to the event, which seems still to be true. But we hadn't known that Conley had a connection to Harkin. From the Register story, it seems that either Link asked Conley to tape record a meeting to which he had been invited, or Conley taped it of his own accord and, angry at some of Ganske's comments, decided to hand the tape over to the Harkin campaign. We would stress that in either case nothing illegal transpired -- the story points out that in Iowa, as in many states, any participant in a meeting is allowed to record it. But the Iowa GOP is trying to spin what happened, with some success, as unethical.
Let's back up a bit here. It may strike some readers as sleazy that the Harkin campaign got ahold of a tape of someone else's fundraiser. But in fact, campaigns routinely do this sort of thing. Especially on big campaigns, there is often a staffer whose sole job is to run around videotaping the opponent's campaign events just in case that individual commits a gaffe, falls off a stage, or does something else embarassing. So this not a very big deal.
Also, reader J.S. writes in with a tidbit that some Iowa political reporter really should look into. The invitation to Conley was apparently mailed under a label from the Greater Des Moines Partnership, a business-development organization that, if it is a non-profit (and it likely is), is banned from engaging in electoral politics.
Either way, this is clearly hurting Harkin. [posted 1:30 pm]
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IS TORRICELLI TOAST? That's the big news of the day. Needless to say, this is a big deal. And to be honest, Tapped is still not certain how Torricelli's ethics problems, which have been stewing for some years now, all of a sudden became the deciding issue in his re-election. For the definitive take on Torricelli, check out Art Levine's profile of the senator from The Prospect.
Torricelli's fortunes, plus movement in other races
around the country, have The Washington Post's Helen Dewar and Juliette Eilperin arguing that the GOP has increased its odds of keeping the House and retaking the Senate. Meanwhile, The Washington Monthly's Nick Confessore suggests a way out for the Democrats here. [posted 12:50 pm]
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THE GATEKEEPERS SPEAK. Howard Kurtz's "Reliable Sources" was particularly interesting this weekend. Tapped encourages you to take a look at the transcript. First, Dana Milbank pointed out what is by now increasingly obvious: That the White House has maneuvered the Democrats and the media into focusing almost entirely on Iraq. All kinds of negative economic indicators -- the stock market's continued slide, the rise in the number of uninsured Americans, the rise in unemployment -- are being underplayed or ignored. Obviously, the GOP benefits from this and the Democrats suffer, yet these are real problems, and just as deserving, we submit, of attention. (Milbank points out that the last time the market was this low, it was front page news.)
Also on "Reliable Sources," the exchange over George Bush's attack on the Senate Democrats (which sparked a furious response from Tom Daschle last week) sheds some light on another story most of our readers probably aren't familiar with. Bush had actually used phrases similar to the one in question -- saying the Democrat-controlled Senate was "not interested in the security of the American people" -- several times before. But White House reporters are so used to hearing Bush's stump speeches that they often don't "hear" changes or asides. Tapped went on the campaign trail with Bush in New Hampshire once, and we can tell you that when you hear the same boring speech three times in 14 hours, it's tough to pay attention. (Over here, Spinsanity examines the Milbank piece that started it all and finds that Milbank overstates his case.)
Finally, it was also noted that Al Gore's speech last week was first maginalized and then viciously attacked. Few papers gave his speech good play (the Post fronted it below the fold and jumped inside after two paragraphs), but all of them carried a number of hysterical attacks upon it on their op-ed pages. Milbank candidly notes that:
Here's a time when Al Gore actually took a risk and conceivably did something principled, and he didn't get any credit for it at all. That's partially our fault, perhaps, but it's also partially his fault. During the speech, at one point, he leveled all these criticism and then said, well, wait, I'm not actually saying this. There are other people who have said this.So that sort of gave the opening for this sort of -- this industry of sort of Al Gore haters to jump on it and say just another bit of the typical Al Gore.
And this quote from E.J. Dionne is priceless:
I also think Al Gore is the only politician in America of whom it would be said simultaneously he's done this for political reasons, and it hurts him politically. I mean, you know, poor Al Gore.
Wise words. Wise words. There was also some discussion on "Reliable Sources" about the substance of Gore's speech -- not much! -- in which the rest of the reporters let Byron York get away with the conservative line on Gore's speech, which is that it was a flip-flop. (Convincing people that Gore's speech was a change from his previous position on Iraq is an essential building block for the charge that his speech was crass and opportunistic.) [posted 12:40 pm]
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NEW CONTENT. TAP Online hit the streets of Washington, D.C. this past weekend to cover and analyze the IMF and World Bank protests. This morning, we have four web-only articles on the weekend's events: Richard Just focuses on the generational politics behind the protests; Drake Bennett reports on the growing staleness of the anti-globalization script; Alex Gourevitch write about the perils of embracing victimhood; and Natasha Hunter provides details about the weekend's props and personalities.
Also worth checking out are Nick Penniman's recent Prospect cover story on anti-globalism forces and Tapped's take on the protests from last Friday. Here, in part, is what Tapped had to say:
What's important is that no one seems to be paying attention. That may strike some readers as unnecessarily Scrooge-like of Tapped. But we think it will be good for the movement to be ignored. Street protest is not in itself a way to effect change. What you have to say matters, whether you can get people to listen matters and whether you can make something come of it matters. For too long now, the movement has been inward-looking, immature and disconnected from politics as it must eventually be practiced -- not inthe street, but in the voting booth. Here's to growing up.
And one additional piece of web-only content today: an article by Nicholas Confessore aruging that the Democrats ought to judge D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Miguel Estrada on his ideology -- not his qualifications. Check it out here.[posted 10:20 am]
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Note: This section is currently a work in progress.....
Altercation: Eric Alterman has the best-named blog we know -- and the content's great too.
Instapundit: Glenn Reynolds is blogging's 800 pound gorilla.
The Nation: Bizarre link-less blogs. Weirder than naked mole rats!
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