Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

Are you ready from some ultra-sheer audacity? This headline, and concomitant story, comes from the web site of the Dallas Morning News: Bush, GOP take credit for economic surge. Can you believe the effrontery of those tax cutters?

The article began:

WASHINGTON – The burst of unexpectedly good economic news Thursday set off a new round of political bickering that is destined to persist right up to Election Day, a year away.

The Administration has been forecasting this kind of expansion for a while, and this was hardly unexpected. On the 20th of this month, I wrote:

According to several reports, analysts are claiming a 7-percent growth rate for the 3rd quarter of this year. This is not a “Bush recession.” This is not a “sluggish economy.” (The growth rate for 1999 was 4.2-percent.)

Cut taxes, the economy will rise. Who ended the Carter malaise? President Ronald Reagan. Who is ending the Clinton-Bin Laden malaise? President George W. Bush.

The President and the Congressional Republicans, with some few likeminded Dems, deserve the credit. Their policies have enabled the American people to crawl from stagnation. But the Dems and their media stooges cannot let credit go where credit is due. Mission One: Create Doubt. Mission Two: Smile and say you did it despite the GOP.

From the Morning News article:

For President Bush and fellow Republicans, the fastest economic growth in nearly 20 years was hailed as proof that his tax-cut policy was finally boosting a stagnant economy.

For Democrats complaining about job losses and challenging the president’s bid for re-election, the upbeat report threatened one of their key election-year premises: The president has made a bad economy worse.

Actually, the Dems’ premise was that the President took a robust economy anemic.

And speaking of anemic, how’s this from candidate Joe Lieberman?

“While today’s news is encouraging, it does not change the fact that the president has turned Main Street into a one-way street going in the wrong direction,” said Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the nine Democrats seeking the party’s presidential nomination.

“We’ve lost more than 3 million jobs, 3 million people have fallen into poverty, the budget deficit and national debt are growing, health care and college tuition costs are escalating,” he said.
“And this president still has no real plan to sustain this growth, translate it into jobs and rebuild a strong middle class.”

They even let candidate Howie Dean rant for print:

Still another Democratic contender, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, made clear the nation’s economic vitality depended in large part on the restoration of jobs and the creation of new ones.

“President Bush has compiled the worst economic record since the Great Depression,” Dr. Dean said, “and it is going to take a lot more than one quarter of growth to clean it up.”

Yes, it’s “Dr. Dean”! Like in the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein, the lab assistant (”pronounced “Eye-gore”) hands him an abnormal brain and the good doctor creates a freak. And that’s his campaign. But I’m digressing.

Jobs, jobs, jobs. Bipartisan political analyst Charlie Cookagrees:

“His tax cuts may turn the broader economy around,” Mr. Cook suggested. “But if it doesn’t do anything to create jobs and put some of these people back to work, it doesn’t get the same political bang.”

Yes, it’s hard to vote for a President if you feel he cost you your job. It’s easier to vote for a President if he hasn’t. Chew on that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Miranda, the conservative teenaged Texas blogger, is back with her Right Winged blog after a month of computer purgatory. Check out her stuff.

According to the Planned Parenthood press release of this afternoon:

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the nation’s leading reproductive health organization, and Planned Parenthood Golden Gate (PPGG), the affiliate based in San Francisco, Calif., announced today at a press conference that they have filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco federal court to challenge the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, a federal abortion ban that was passed by Congress on Oct. 20 and has been sent to President Bush for his signature.

Since the ban on partial birth abortion is not now law, what are they suing? If there is no law against which to sue for an injunction, the case is not justiceable. The court technically can’t hear it, as there is no “it” to hear.

Are they seeking an injunction against the President taking several pens to paper, as Presidents are often wont to do in as a way of manufacturing souvenirs, and signing the bill into law?

The case should be thrown out of court, and they should also be given the hook and told not to return.

Good morning. A piece in Reuters this morning tells us that InterAction — an alliance of nongovernmental foreign assistance groups — does not approve of President Bush’s linkage of foreign aid to national security.

“The administration has increasingly turned its attention to development assistance as a tool of the war on terrorism,'’ InterAction said in a policy paper.

They also complained that the DoD had too great a role in distributing foreign aid in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is a no-brainer, but is seems we’re not dealing with people who have human brains in the metaphysical sense. At this level of cognition, abstracting beyond a simple “They need money, so give it to them” is impossibility.

The report also complains that the work of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), set up by Prez John F. “Ask Not” Kerry — er, Kennedy — forty years ago. The good folks at InterAction complain that the work formerly done by USAID is now being performed by other agencies.

There has been a long-standing effort to dismantle USAID and a lot of blame has been leveled at them. One way of doing this has been to disburse aid to other departments,'’ said one aid agency source.

“Social justice.” That’s the term InterAction likes to call it.

Social Justice. Consider first the ultimate source of the monies in question.

We know about French Prez Jacques Chirac and his whimsy about a superpower to counter the untrammeled will of a United States which threatens to consume the entire globe in the absence of the Soviet Union to counter her expansionist schemes.

So it goes. The French tried that game, enlisting the Russians and Germans, over the UNSC feud over whether or not Saddam should get the hook. Saddam’s gone, Iraq is working on independence, and Chirac’s axis has fallen apart.

Wait…

Said the PRC’s deputy Maoist dictator, Premier Wen Jiabao, at a meeting with the European leaders and Eurocrats Wednesday: “It is our hope that the European Union will become our biggest partner in economic cooperation and trade.” To the definite exclusion of the United States.

European Commission President Romano Prodi, the Italian for whom no European outside of government voted, proclaimed in response: “We need to intensify our relations, both in the trade and investment sectors. We must become the biggest partners. We must have the biggest relations - more than anywhere in the world.” He did not name the United States, but we were mentioned tacitly.

Okay, Chirac and the poet DeVillepin could be dancing an Axis/Vichy jig right about now. The dream is alive.

Or is it?

I don’t think so. What is the main thing — perhaps the only thing — standing between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China? Human rights. In the PRC, there are none. They torture, kill, twist, manipulate, destroy. And the second baby must be eliminated.

Commerce Secretary Don Evans brought up the PRC’s disrespect for intellectual property. The Europeans say, whatever. The PRC’s human rights record draws yawns from the Eurocrats.

There’s what this means. The Europeans are working out a deal with the PRC through which all refugees — political by definition of the Chinese state — would be returned to the PRC and their storied Lao gai.

The world’s largest trading partners — on the corpses of millions of dead Chinese.

When Treasury Secretary John Snow told the Times of London ten days go that he expected interest rates to rise with a growing economy, I posted — Secretary Snow and Interest Rates — I intimated:

According to several reports, analysts are claiming a 7-percent growth rate for the 3rd quarter of this year. This is not a “Bush recession.” This is not a “sluggish economy.” (The growth rate for 1999 was 4.2-percent.)

The analysts were low by two tenths, as the Gross Domestic Product grew by 7.2-percent last quarter. This is the highest GDP rise since the first quarter of 1984.

President Reagan’s growth in the first quarter of 1984 was in the first quarter of election year. President Bush’s growth in the third quarter of 2003, is in the penultimate quarter before the election year. And this year, the “election year” politically began early.

In November of 1984, President Reagan was reelected 58.8% of the vote. None of the current crop of Dems resembles Walter Mondale — or Jimmy Carter, for that matter, and any such talk is nifty as far as it goes, but it doesn’t buy you beer.

So what have the Dems got? Well, it’s been a jobless recovery, but it is no longer shedding jobs. With this kind of growth in consumer spending and business investment, re-employment is just a matter of time.

The Dems can harp on Iraq and the war on terror — two issues on which they once thought the President to be untouchable — but that issue is not a winner for them.

President Bush is doing very well right now, and things can only keep improving. The mutants are doing their worst in Baghdad as we speak. I daresay there is not much more that they can do in a country occupied by the United States military.

We are fortunate that President Bush is able to remain, for the most part, above the small talk, the cheap and snide pundits, the pugnacious partisans, and the wannabe presidents. I suspect he responds only when his staff begs him to do so: “Mr. President, you can’t let them talk about you like this!”

After employment has revived, we’ve won the peace, and President Bush is comfortably reelected, I hope he expends his political capital on abolishing the Department of Education. And cutting taxes.

Democrat Senator Zell Miller of Georgia has announced that he will vote for President George W. Bush next November. Democrat Senator Zell Miller of Georgia has announced that he will campaign for George W. Bush’s reelection if asked to do so.

Zell Miller is a Democrat, and he has been offered, no doubt, some high prizes if he were to make the switch. He has refused, but at the press conference held when then-Georgia Governor Roy Barnes appointed him to fill the vacancy left by the untimely death of Senator Paul Coverdell, Miller told those assembled: “I will serve no single party but rather 7.5 million Georgians.”

That is what he thinks he’s doing with his latest announcement, and that is what he is doing. Bypassing CNN, headquartered in Atlanta, the Georgia Senator told Fox News yesterday:

“The way I see it is, that these next five years are going to be crucial in determining what kind of world my grandchildren and great grandchildren live in, and I don’t want to entrust that to any of these folks that are running out there on the Democratic side. I’m going to vote for George Bush,” Miller said in a taped interview for Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes show.

Of the Democrats’ anti-Bush — disguised as anti-war — rhetoric, Miller said:

“It makes me ashamed. It’s a disgrace for anyone to talk about — talk like that in a time of war. … You know, if some of these folks have been living back to that April night in 1775 when Paul Revere came riding through, saying, ‘The British are coming, British are coming’ - if Howard Dean was living back then he would have yelled out the window, ‘Shut up I’m trying to get some sleep in here.’ It’s a disgrace.”

He told further told Sean Hannity:

“I’ve given this a lot of thought. I think that George Bush is the right man in the right place at the right time. The way I see it is, that these next five years are going to be crucial in determining kind of world my grandchildren and great- grandchildren live in.

And I don’t entrust that to any of these folks that are running out there on the Democratic side.

I included so much of what Miller said because he sounds like so much of what I’ve been reading in the blogosphere and hearing from friends. It’s what I meant when I wrote Tuesday night that: “We have to win this one. If we don’t, civilization dies. The 2004 Presidential election is the most important political event in this history of the United States. We are playing for keeps.”

“This does not mean I am going to become a Republican,” Miller said yesterday. “It simply means that in the year 2004, this Democrat will vote for George Bush.”

Good morning. There are two new Quinnipiac polls out today, of 1262 registered voters taken from October 23-27, with a margin of error of plus or minus three points.

The first Quinnipiac poll shows President Bush with 47-perecent to candidate Wes Clark’s 43-perecent. He was 48-43 if candidate Lieberman, 49-43 over candidate Kerry and over candidate Gephardt, and 48-42 over candidate Dean, considered by many to be the likely Dem nominee. (I still consider Dean to be doubtful.)

What if Hillary were to jump in the race? She’d be the probable Dem nominee if she did, and President Bush would beat her, 50-42, the most support the President receives against anyone. Hillary knows that she has half of America strongly opposed to her, so she is not about to enter the race. Her negatives are far too high.

The second poll is identical to the first.

The first poll is reported by the New York Post online as: Bush Tops Prez Field.

The second poll is reported by the Associated Press as: Bush approval rating slips, Dems gain. (The President’s approval rating fell two percentage points, from 53% to 51%, from a September 17 poll of different people. This is within the margin, of course.)

They are the same poll, reported with two different biases.

The AP piece quotes poll director Maurice Carroll as intoning: “President Bush is ahead, but he’s hearing footsteps.” The results are not significantly different from previous polls, so the statement is a poll directors braggadocio and nothing more.

The Post piece also points out that the poll puts Clark atop the Dem field with 17-percent, tied with “Don’t Know.”

There’s no Democrat-fever currently sweeping the nation. Unless or until the media manages to harp of something which catches the public’s notice — and they are trying — the President’s lead looks to be safe.

Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta is the president of the new lefty DC think tank: the Center for American Progress.

From their web site:

The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all Americans. We believe that Americans are bound together by a common commitment to these values and we aspire to ensure that our national policies reflect these values.

Okay, they claim to represent America’s values. According to Podesta on Fox News, however, they want to change America’s values:

We think the debate has been unbalanced in the country,” center president John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton, told Fox News.

“The conservative movement has really built up an infrastructure of not just ideas, but the ability to kind of get out there and do the kind of hard communications work to sell to the American public,” he added.

Liberals have this weird thing. They believe that the world will agree with them if they just yell loud enough. They believe that when America tells them to go to hell, it means only that they have to work harder to enlighten Americans to see the “truth.”

They are launching a talk show to compete with conservative talk radio, now this think tank. Their news network is still losing its share. The kids still love Clinton, and they had candidate Wesley Clark at their opening conference. Wes Clark cannot make up his mind even about which lie he’s telling when.

It’s falling to bits, my friends. I’ll have to post that Robert Reich column from 2001. It’s even more relevant now.

Back in September of 1999, Al Gore marched to the podium at the DNC’s Plenary Session to the sounds of Love Train, by the Ojays:

People all over the world (everybody)
Join hands (join)
Start a love train, love train
People all over the world (all the world, now)
Join hands (love ride)
Start a love train (love ride), love train
The next stop that we make will be soon
Tell all the folks in Russia, and China, too
Don’t you know that it’s time to get on board
And let this train keep on riding, riding on through
Well, well

He later adopted the tune as a campaign them song, dressed as he was in Naomi Wolf’s earth tones.

My mind raced. Here was a new Democrat Party, suitably retro with an A-1 ’70s sound. Priceless. The Democrat Party had finally lost it.

The song disappeared with Gore, only to reappear at — of all places — the funeral of Paul Wellstone, this time covered by a new group. We were looking at a neo-new Dem Party, getting funky at a funeral. (PoliPundit includes a photo of Clinton and Mondale sharing a laugh at the funeral with his Wictory Wednesday post of this morning.

People, ain’t no war
People all over the world (on this train)
Join in (ride the train)
Start a love train, love train (ride the train, y’all)
People all over the world (come on)
Join hands (you can ride or stand, yeah)
Start a love train, love train (makin’ love)
People all over the world (’round the world, y’all)
Join hands (come on)
Start a love train, love train

But it is going to get better. I found this story on today’s Washpost:

The Democrats have a dream, that politics can be hipped up. And that the disaffected young citizens of America will set aside their sense of abandonment and apathy and flash-mob the polls, pulling the Big D lever in ‘04.

The dream undulates into shape Monday night at Dream, the sleek, four-story dance club on New York Avenue NE, with a Democratic National Committee fundraiser that raises the roof and a quarter-million dollars, one $50 ticket at a time.
DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe looks out over the club’s second floor, so packed it represents the sardines-in-a-can wing of the Democratic Party, and beams. “How great is this!” he yells over the blasting hip-hop, thrilled that 90 percent of those who bought tickets are first-time party donors.

The bass lines are so thumping that it defibrillates the hearts of all 4,500 people, lured to party with former president Bill Clinton. The aim is to make politics sexy for the 18-to-34 crowd, not in a “Sir, the girl is here with the pizza” way, but in a smart, leggy, sassy way. One person onstage will say that only one in five of this group voted in the last presidential election, and one will say only three out of 10, but why quibble about numbers? It’s not enough.

The story goes on with who was there — a mostly young(ish) set of varied backgrounds — including the soul master of deranged funk himself, Bill “Da Man” Clinton:

…In Da Club” lyrics inside — “I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love / So come give me a hug if you into getting rubbed.” This is what’s playing when the former president takes the stage.

Of course, all wasn’t well after this funky fundraiser. The Washpost piece concludes:

Outside on the sidewalk, Richard Strauss, 34, a former Clinton staffer, reflects wistfully on Da Man. “I’m longing for him,” he says. He sees President Bush as vulnerable, but doesn’t see who right now in the Democratic field can generate the same excitement as the 42nd president.

“I don’t think there’s anyone else, period,” says Justin Pascal, 29, the DNC staffer who directs McAuliffe’s office and created the event. For young people, “he is their president. Most people came of age under Bill Clinton. They graduated when he was in office, got their first job when he was in office. He is their president.”

So people all over the world, join hands. Start a love train.

This from the New York Times. While he was in Durham, North Carolina, to sell his health care scheme, he had a few interesting accusations for the Bush administration.

First, he declared that September 11 was indirectly the doing of President Bush:

“You can’t blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers, however badly they communicated in memos with each other,” said the retired general, the latest entrant in the Democratic presidential field. “It goes back to what our great president Harry Truman said with the sign on his desk: `The buck stops here.’ And it sure is clear to me that when it comes to our nation’s national security, the buck rests with the commander in chief, right on George W. Bush’s desk.”

“And,” he added, “we’ve got to say again and again and again, until the American people understand: strong rhetoric in the aftermath is no substitute for wise leadership.”

This begs the question: who blamed September 11 on “lower-level intelligence officers” with bad memoranda? The blame is on the terrorists, as the President has repeatedly insisted, and some of us would add that they were buttressed by the belief that our reaction would be weak and ineffective. The terrorists themselves used the term: “paper tiger.”

Clark’s second lunatic assertion, made also by former NSC bureaucrat Dick Clarke on NBC’s Meet the Press, was that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld leaked his own memo, “because no one would have believed him that we’ve been two years in the war on terror and we don’t have a strategy and we don’t know how to measure success.” When confronted about this later, he admitted: “Well, that’s what the rumor is, and it’s been talked about on the Sunday talk shows.”

Clark of all people ought to know better than to believe Sunday Talk Show rumors. He started his own whopper, what with his claim that he received phone calls from the White House on September 12 directing him to blame 9-11 on Saddam Hussein. It never happened, he later backtracked, and no one knows what he’s going to say next.

Today is PoliPundit’s “Wictory Wednesday.” It is the day when we issue a wake-up call: The President cannot be reelected in a vacuum. By visiting the Bush/Cheney webpage, we can donate money via this secure server, and/or we can volunteer to be a “Bush Team Leader” using this secure server. Everything helps.

The war against terrorism is a war against mutans who are not compatible with civilization or humanity. The 2004 Presidential election is the most important in federal history, and a lot depends on reelecting President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Here are those who’ve volunteered to carry this message, in whatever form, on this “Wictory Wednesday”:

Backcountry Conservative
Boots and Sabers
Bowling for Howard
Dean
BushBlog.us (unofficial blog)
Bush-Cheney 2004 (unofficial
blog)
ExPostFacto
Freedom of Thought
The Hedgehog Report
The Irish Lass
Jarhead
Jeremy Kissel
Left Coast
Conservative
Matt Margolis
The Ole Miss Conservative
PoliPundit
Political Annotation
A Rice Grad
Ryne McClaren
Slublog
Southern Conservatives
Stephen Blythe
Viking Pundit
The Wise Man Says

Back in August, when fulltime fundraising was starting to grow thin on him, candidate John Edwards had his bus: the Real Solutions Express. At the time and in this space, I said that if it worked for McCain in 2000, with his Straight Talk Express, then Edwards might as well give it a go. One thing Edwards should remember, though: it did not work for John McCain in 2000. McCain, whom the press perceived as a certain loser to Al Gore, had a media-supported run for a while, then he quit.

Here’s this from an Edwards e-mail of this evening:

That’s right the Real Solutions Express was a hit in August, so we are bringing it back in November. We need your help to get the word out on November 1st & 2nd.

Don’t miss the true NH experience of going door-to-door, talking about why John Edwards should be our next President and inviting voters to more than a dozen Town Hall Meetings with Senator Edwards.

New Hampshire’s first-in-the nation primary is less than 100 days away!! Come learn how presidential campaigns are really won.

Which leaves me to remark in mock admiration: so that’s how McCain did it!

On ABC’s This Week last Sunday, John-boy predicted to Steph and George Will that he would finish third, behind Howie Dean and John-John Kerry. He’d better look out, though, as Wes Clark, Superstar is skipping Iowa to concentrate on the Granite State.

Too many journalists and pundits attributing rational thought processes to the mutants in Iraq:

“They’re killing the Red Cross to frighten international organizations out of Iraq.”

“They’re trying to reduce American public support for the war effort.”

“They’re not helping their cause by killing their fellow Iraqis.”

Folks, human reason does not apply here. This is jihad. Their actions are not compatible with civilization. Their thought processes and their selves are not compatible with humanity. When I call them “mutants,” it’s not just throwaway name-calling: they are mutants.

A rational human being, if he had signed onto a suicide mission, would reach the target then detonate; if he did not make it to the target, he’d return to base and try again another day. A mutant kept from his objective would blow himself up wherever he stood, taking anything (whatever) with him.

Jihad. To the death, and the winners will meet in paradise. Tortured by the oppression of corrupted leaders who treat them as disposable pawns, they need to hate something. The mullahs tell them whom to hate: the monkeys, the dogs, and their allies in Washington.

The Nazis in Germany had a sophisticated system, a “well-oiled machine,” for exterminating Jews qua Jews. This is what they did. The scale of this systematic slaughter defies sane credulity, but it happened. The Nazis were mutants. But in public, they put on the façade of civilization. We know what they did behind closed doors, because they kept records.

The mullahs teach this same breed of insanity. It is not human. And this mutant madness would devour the world if there was no one to stop it. Osama bin Laden saw one obstacle standing in his path: the United States of America. On September 11, 2001, he gave it his best shot to neutralize this impediment. He didn’t.

We have to win this one. If we don’t, civilization dies. The 2004 Presidential election is the most important political event in this history of the United States. We are playing for keeps.

In the Rose Garden this afternoon, President Bush held a news conference. [transcript]. The questions had been asked before, and the answers, we’ve heard. But a few caught my ear.

Norah O’Donnell of MSNBC asked:

Mr. President, if I may take you back to May 1st when you stood on the USS Lincoln under a huge banner that said, “Mission Accomplished.” At that time you declared major combat operations were over, but since that time there have been over 1,000 wounded, many of them amputees who are recovering at Walter Reed, 217 killed in action since that date. Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks?

The President challenged O’Donnell to look at his May 1st remarks aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln: “I said, Iraq is a dangerous place and we’ve still got hard work to do, there’s still more to be done. And we had just come off a very successful military operation. I was there to thank the troops.”

Major combat operations are over. There are no more divisions racing north to Baghdad. There are no more cities and towns to liberate. There is no more Shock and Awe.

Aboard the Lincoln, the President said:

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We’re pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We’re helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

O’Donnell did not ask the President if he thought the remarks had been premature; she challenged him to admit that his remarks were premature.

His remarks were candid and accurate. O’Donnell is living in the media-generated “universe by reporters’ consensus.” Everything is what the press invents and repeats. Reality has no meaning.

Fox’s James Rosen, in questioning the President, brought up the Bush Doctrine, which he phrased: “If you feed a terrorist, if you clothe a terrorist, if you harbor a terrorist, you are a terrorist.” He then laid out the White House case for P.L.O. chief Yasser Arafat and his relations with terrorists. He asked, then, isn’t Arafat a terrorist who “should be dealt with in the same way that you’ve dealt with Saddam Hussein and Charles Taylor?”

The Mid Eastern situation involving Israel operates with different factors than Saddam in Iraq and Taylor in Liberia. The most basic difference is that Arafat governs no nation from which he can be ousted.

Many of Saddam’s neighbors assisted us in removing him. Many of Taylor’s neighbors did most of the work in ousting him. Arafat’s neighbors support him, monetarily in the case of the Saudis.

Some Senate Republican staffers call it “negotiating with terrorists,” but Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is striking a deal with the dour Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) which would give Michigan two new federal judges in exchange for Levin dropping a few of his obstructionist moves. One GOP committee member called the plan a “split-the-baby solution.”

Senator Levin has been disgruntled because the wife of one of his cousins was nominated by Clinton in 1997 to a federal judgeship, and the Republican Judiciary Committee never gave her a hearing. Because he was just plain mad at the world, Levin decided to spend the last two years, in part, blocking the Presidents judicial nominees from Michigan. He’s been in the Senate since 1978, and he doesn’t have to take any of this here nonsense. Or some such. Committee Democrats aided in the obstruction as a favor to Levin.

Word of Senator Hatch’s deal with Levin comes in this morning’s Washington Times. The deal is not yet done, but preliminary reports have another seat (the 23rd) being added to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals; the seat will be filled by someone from Michigan. Also on the table, the Times was told, is adding another seat (the 31st) to one of Michigan’s two federal district courts.

Now, word is that the new seat on the federal circuit court would go to that wife of Levin’s cousin, Michigan Judge Helene White, though the President would have to sign off on that.

From the Times piece:

Asked if he was willing to placate Mr. Levin by adding the Michigan judicial posts, Mr. Hatch said: “I’m always very open, but let me not …” and trailed off.

“It’s sensitive,” he resumed. “These are very sensitive negotiations.”

Generally speaking, Mr. Hatch said, he wants to “resolve this without poking anybody in the eye.”

Another problem for Hatch if he’s making the deal, the article reports, is getting his Republican colleagues on Judiciary to go along with it. He might not have trouble with weasels like Arlen Specter, but Texas’ freshman Senator John Cornyn said: “It’s not very palatable to me. I’d be very curious whether [White House Counsel] Al Gonzales and the rest of the West Wing would be amenable to that.”

The Dems are embittered and tenacious, and it will require a substantial Republican Senate majority to move the Senate in the right (Right) direction. Note that I did not say it would require a conservative Republican majority, as we lack one now but even moderate and liberal Republicans tend to vote with their President on judicial nominations. For this and for other, similar reasons, I stress that it’s important to keep liberal Republicans like Linc Chafee, Olympia Snowe, Specter, and the erstwhile Republican Jim Jeffords in the party. They not only increase the majority, but they can usually be counted on to vote correctly on certain issues and nominations.

That being said, Representative Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) will make a better Senator than Snarlin’ Arlen.

Not in the Simi-Valley fire, but another of California’s current wildfires is believed to have been caused by humans. Witnesses saw two long-haired white men in a truck throw a blazing object into brush on Saturday morning.

It seems likely to me that the truck bore the bumper sticker: “NO on Recall/ YES on Bustamante.” It fits the profile: a disregard for private property and an awareness that the federal government will send them money.

Never fear: Geraldo’s there.

Good morning. Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, whose nomination had been obstructed by a few Dems, is set to become the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Senator Hillary Clinton and Jim Jeffords, candidates John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, as well as former candidate now Senator-again Bob Graham. They had forced a procedural block on the nomination which would have required a 3/5ths majority (60 votes) to break, but they surrendered to the inevitable when it became clear that they did not have the 40 votes they needed.

The Senators and candidates had opposed Leavitt’s confirmation, they had said, because they opposed President Bush. The President, they asserted, would not give them information regarding the reportage of the air quality at Ground Zero following September 11. Pulling a trick from their Texas brethren’s book, they had even skipped a hearing so as not to have the quorum necessary for a vote on Leavitt’s nomination.

Utah Senator Robert Bennett, the chief deputy GOP Whip, said that he expected Leavitt’s nomination to pass this morning “with maybe 70-plus votes.”

If they feared shame, this would have been a humiliating setback for Hillary and the Dems, who, by their own accounts, were opposing Governor Leavitt’s nomination to make a case against President Bush as the election season approaches.

Natalie Gochnaur, a spokeswoman for Governor Leavitt, said Monday: “The governor remains patient and gracious; he feels optimistic he can make a meaningful contribution at the Environmental Protection Agency and looks forward to the final vote in the morning.”

The Dems tried, but no one showed up at their little protest.

There’s an open governor’s seat in Kentucky, and Republican Representative Ernie Fletcher is leading Democrat State Attorney General Ben Chandler comfortably. Fletcher will replace Democrat Governor Paul E. Patten is going the way of the term limit.

In Mississippi, we all remember Haley Barbour. He signed my first RNC Life Member certificates. (I received two of them in the space of a few months, by a fluke. I think it was a result of the transition between Barbour and Jim Nicholson.) Haley’s leading Mississippi’s Dem Governor Ronnie Musgrave by 5 points in the latest polls, but that’s the margin.

Barbour’s getting it from all sides in the press. I read one article a week or so ago — “straight news piece” — likening Haley’s success with that of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California: a star with a national name firing up the voters with an anti-incumbent fervor a lots and lots of big bucks. There are so many flaws in that analogy that I had to spend time trying to think of ways in which it could be considered valid.

Anyway, that’s two GOP gains this November, an off-year election. And it’s tricky for a President to have coattails when he isn’t running, and especially in an off-year, but this year might be different. The Democrats have made the President an issue, which shows questionable judgment when his job approval rating is in the mid-50s.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Democrat Party needs a political savior with a strong set of beliefs, someone to move that lazy leviathan beyond the current crop of nobodies doing nothing, beyond the retrograde Clinton nostalgia. That person does not exist, at least not in a big-ticket way. (Harold Ford is too young, and to little like Jesse, though he verges of leftism-lite. Nancy Pelosi brushed him aside like the dandruff settling on her shoulders.)

It’s an interesting thought from Talon News, in which Kennebec County, Maine GOP Chairman Charles Mahaleris writes that he thinks Joe Lieberman’s campaign is coughing up blood.

He writes of Lieberman’s tactics in Sunday night’s debate, which seemed no different than standard Joe to me. He talked of Joe stubbornly clinging to support of the war and opposition to Palestinian terrorists. That’s Lieberman being Lieberman, nothing new.

These efforts, however, could be just the last gasp for a dying effort. Lieberman’s campaign, which at one time was leading the way, may be weeks from closing up.

Weeks? Lieberman still has money, and he he’ll have a few weeks off later this year where he won’t have to play Senator. Maybe he’ll drop a little before Chanukah and enjoy the Festival of Lights with his family.

With the two Lieberman positions the article mentions, he seems perfectly sane, and those positions would appeal to rational voters. But remember, Lieberman is trying to win the Democrat nomination.

I think he’s waiting for the delusions and hyperbole to wear thing on voters, and he could well see himself as the emergency escape valve for Dem voters who wake up to see just what (who?) is trying to operate their party. That times not going to come. Hatred is a powerful emotion, and there is an unsettling core to that party who literally loathe our President. If they let it consume them to the center, we’re going to have a Democrat Howie Dean running against President Bush. Sure, it will be a walk, but I shudder to think of it. (John Edwards would be much more of a challenge against whom to run, and possibly even more frightening. He says what he says, but his manner makes it seem palatable.)

Thinking aloud.

Good Morning. Former Bush cybersecurity chief Dick Clarke was one of Steph’s guests on ABC’s This Week yesterday, and I’m not sure why. He didn’t seem to be hawking a book or complaining about anything recently in the news, and the man hadn’t be the President’s cybersecurity honcho since early this year.

He seemed deeply bitter, displaying an astringency which might require medication to bring the brain chemicals back into balance. He had, after all, spend three decades dealing with the nation’s security and had been President Bush’s counterterrorism chief on September 11, 2001 — a day on which terrorism was not countered.

To Steph on Sunday, he said: “No, we’re not winning the war on terrorism.”

By invading and occupying Iraq, he said on ABC, “we’ve made it easier for them [al Qaeda] to attack us.” His dull eyes seemed to blaze black when he faulted the President’s “bring ‘em on” line of earlier this year. He does not like the idea of having the terrorists focus on Iraq rather than New York and Washington, as it is more immediate on the ground near Baghdad.

On This Week, Clarke accused the administration, in the act of invading Iraq, of confusing Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, but Clarke in the camp of those who cannot quite understand that the ouster of Saddam and liberation of Iraq was not payback for September 11. It was helping to prevent other such attacks, but Clarke is stubborn.

According to former Clinton aide Sandy Berger, Clarke was not liked by subordinates because he pushed them hard. Berger says that he liked that in Clarke, and that Clarke “had President Clinton’s ear.” (This was not on the ABC show; rather, it was from quips made when Clarke decided to quit government rather than be transferred to the new department of Homeland Security.) So we have a Dick Clarke betrothed of Clinton and afraid of “this new-fangled Homeland Security stuff we didn’t have in my day.”

On This Week, Clarke complained of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the attempts of the Defense Department to try to do things which are the purview of others, such as the State Department, the CIA, or the National Security Council. He feels the DoD “should let the experts do it.” He resents Rumsfeld.

Steph seemed to cut the interview short when Clarke announced that he had heard that Rumsfeld had leaked his own memo.

At least the man’s out to pasture. We can thank him for his service to our country and regret that he stayed on past his mental fitness. It’s sometimes sad, in a wistful way, to see a dedicated public servant/bureaucrat go out in this manner.