Let’s face it, for most conservative Republicans, a stimulus package is a couple of Viagra washed down with a double malt scotch.

Even now, there are those complaining that instead of a temporary injection of tax cuts or spending to jump start our moribund economy, the best move is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, an idea that fails stimulus 101 on each of the three t’s: timely, temporary, and targeted.

What’s fascinating is that no less an advocate of the Bush tax cuts than Bush himself appears to have eschewed this thinking. The stimulus plan coming out of the White House actually has some positive attributes.

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Thought the first. Chris Matthews’ apology for his latest swipe at Hillary is a little like the moment when Rod Stewart finally apologized for recording “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” Because yeah, sure, it’s nice to see a brief flash of contrition and self-awareness from people one had considered constitutionally incapable of such things. But it only addresses one item from a long list of crimes against humanity. When will Matthews get around to acknowledging that he also “hurt people” with his equivalents of “Tonight’s the Night” and “You’re in My Heart” and “(Let Me Give You My) Love Touch”? (You have to picture him singing these to Erin Burnett or Laura Ingraham to get the effect I’m going for here.)

Thought the second. I consider myself a responsible fellow with a reasonable level of respect for the social institutions that compose civil society, and I don't usually advocate creative destruction as a way of life. But I find it impossible, this fine morning, not to root for Fred Thompson in South Carolina and Rudy G. in Nevada. I call it “Project Mayhem.” Am I looking forward to a brokered Republican convention, you ask? Not at all. I think the GOP should take a page from the NHL’s playbook, and go for some real drama and excitement. I’m hoping for a shootout.

The White House's belated effort to join the stimulus debate reveals again that on every issue this Administration buries itself in the past, attends to its favorite special interests, and misses the chance to build a more productive economy.

And the media obscure the key political issues by treating the economy as some tricky machine that experts need to fix. What's tricky is how this Administration wants to direct much of the stimulus away from the most needy people and most necessary projects for the whole country.

We need an immediate jolt of spending in America, and we also need to use the downturn to galvanize a commitment to long-term and continual investment in non-carbon energy and the public goods of communication, transportation, and parkland.

The first necessity of an economic stimulus is of course to get money into the hands of those who will immediately spend it.

One way is to wire money to state and local authorities on the condition that they let contracts to build roads, bridges, and public facilities within 90 days. Just letting the contracts will help stimulate the economy, in particular in the construction trades that are suffering. The Administration doesn't believe in bolstering the crumbling infrastructure with federal funds, so they disfavor this approach.

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The latest news from Gaza is that Israel's Minister of Defense Ehud Barak has pledged that starting now even the transfer of medicines and humanitarian aid into Gaza would be allowed "only in exceptional circumstances."

He said that the IDF "will carry out continued, decisive actions with the goal of battering the Kassam crews until they can no longer target Israel. It won't be simple and it won't happen by the end of the week, but we will bring an end to the assault on Sderot."

Does Barak really believe that it is the Kassam crews that he is freezing and denying medicine to?

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As a component of the emerging economic stimulus package, Congressional Democrats are considering an increase in Medicaid matching funds to states. Congressional Republicans and the Bush Administration are reportedly cool to the idea, arguing that public spending on health care has little to do with rekindling the economy. The American public, I suspect, would beg to differ.

Medicaid is a countercyclical program: the need for Medicaid expands when the economy contracts and workers lose private health insurance coverage. Unfortunately for states, who jointly finance Medicaid and who also must balance their budgets, this greater need typically occurs as they experience declining tax revenues, hence the logic for the increased matching funds. But as public and media attention turns to the troubled economy, don't expect health care to be a mere sideshow. Americans intuitively and acutely get that health care and the economy are intimately intertwined, and that health insurance is not only about access to health care services, but also about economic security.

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The Brits, in their understated way, are on the fast track to revolutionizing the relationship between the debtor and the creditor. Legally speaking, we have had a two-choice world--make payments as they are due or file for the protection of a bankruptcy court. With no public fanfare, the British Ministry of Justice announced a plan for debtors to stop making payments on credit cards for up to a year if they had a change in circumstances, such as a job loss or divorce. In Britain, there may now be a place between financial life and death.

So far, there are no reports of mass heart attacks by lenders, no threats to halt all consumer lending, and no repeal of the law of gravity.

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Do you remember back in the good old days when all the great minds in Washington were issuing measured pronouncements about the risk of recession and the possible need for a stimulus package? For example, just last week the Washington Post editorial page urged caution. They told readers that any stimulus package should be timely, targeted and temporary. They even proposed a trigger mechanism under which the data would have to show three consecutive months of job loss before any stimulus went into effect.

Well that was yesterday's news. The word for today is "panic." Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is calling for stimulus as is the Bush White House and the Republicans in Congress. And the number is now between $100 and $150 billion, not that piddling $70 billion that the level-headed types were talking about last week. Bernanke's phrase for the day was "quickly implemented." Whatever happened to the wait and see approach and the trigger mechanism?

Addendum (1-19): The Washington Post editorial board's new line on stimulus is "Everyone agrees the economy needs a boost." and their number for stimulus is $150 billion, more than twice last week's conventional wisdom of $70 billion.

You couldn't make this stuff up. One can admire their flexibility, although an occasional admission of error might be nice. 

If it needed clarifying at this late date, this week's Democratic presidential debate underscored the fact that none of the party's frontrunners supports a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq any time soon. And with Bill Richardson out of the race and Dennis Kucinich excluded from recent debates, voters aren't even likely to hear an advocate for genuine withdrawal from the Democratic camp.

The key phrase here is "combat troops." Clinton, Obama and Edwards are all in favor of withdrawing combat troops, but they support other military missions, from training Iraqi forces to serving as a "quick strike force" to go after Al Qaeda operatives to protecting the borders from infiltration by insurgents and jihadists. It is hard to see how these missions could be carried out without an ongoing commitment of tens of thousands of troops -- a reduction and redeployment, not a "withdrawal."

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Back in 1992, in one of Bill Clinton’s many exhibitions of his masterful grasp of spin, he called out Sister Souljah by criticizing her extremist comments during the Democratic primary season in 1992. In doing so, then-Governor Clinton signaled to moderate, undecided voters that he was a centrist, like them, and he’d be an acceptable alternative to the incumbent, President George Bush (No. 41).

In an inverted echo of the Sister Souljah moment from her husband’s first Presidential campaign, Senator Hillary Clinton recently opened the door to the issue of race – but without such positive results. In making the case that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would never have happened but for President Lyndon Johnson, she essentially disparaged the crucial role of every civil rights leader of that era. But for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Hon. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and many others, the pressure required to make voting and civil rights legislation a reality wouldn’t have existed. By the time she stammered her way through this explanation, though, it was too little, too late; Barack Obama’s campaign had fashioned the issue just enough to get the attention of a critical segment of South Carolina’s Democratic primary voters.

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DISSENT / Winter 2008
“WE, THE JURY...”

Years later, I would tell my friends never
to shirk their jury summonses. This is
the most democratic experience you’ll
ever have, I’d insist.

But when I first arrived at the Alameda
County Superior Courthouse, located in what
was the gritty area of downtown Oakland in
the late 1980s, I had little desire to serve on a
criminal trial. I simply assumed that no sane
assistant D.A. would accept me as a member
of a jury because I was a professor, a Berkeley
resident, and a lifelong liberal activist.

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This just came over the "wire."

Imagine if it was a Democrat!

WASHINGTON (AP) - A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.

The former Republican congressman from Michigan, Mark Deli Siljander, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.

Yesterday night's Democratic presidential debate featuring the economy helped me fashion a response to Paul Krugman's column from Monday, which struck as way off-base when I read it, even though I wasn't sure why.

Krugman described John Edwards as "driving his party's policy agenda," which has been stated here on the Warren Reports before, and which I am happy to accept as a completely reasonable assertion. But then Krugman went on to write that Obama's recent stimulus plan was "to the right" of Clinton's, concluding, "For example, the Obama plan appears to contain none of the alternative energy initiatives that are in both the Edwards and Clinton proposals, and emphasizes across-the-board tax cuts over both aid to the hardest-hit families and help for state and local governments. I know that Mr. Obama’s supporters hate to hear this, but he really is less progressive than his rivals on matters of domestic policy."

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When the Bush Administration came to power roughly seven years ago, they vigorously advocated for a housing policy that moved away from rental subsidy and towards homeownership. While in my view this plan has some substantial problems, single women in Baltimore heeded the call and represented roughly 40% of home sales in 2006.


This is good news, no?

Well it turns out that financial discrimination is a double whammy for women of color living in Baltimore. Note only does race impact financial services but the New York Times reports that women with comparable credit scores to men are 32% more likely to receive subprime loans instead of prime loans.

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For too many years, American politics has been divided between two types of people: those who want more people to vote, and those who want fewer people to vote. Just last week, the Bush-packed Supreme Court heard oral arguments about the kind of law we’ve become all too familiar with these last years: an Indiana law putting more roadblocks in the way of people who simply want to vote. (Talk about a not so subtle reminder of why some of us filibustered Sam Alito’s nomination two years ago this month.)

Well, it’s troubling to me that now we see another kind of effort to keep people from voting in Nevada. But this time, it’s not the Republicans trying to limit the vote, it’s a fight within our own Party.

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...to ask all the Republican candidates (as you asked the Democrats) if they will pledge to cut off Federal aid to universities that bar ROTC? Will you ask them why they did not clamor for that cut-off during the years when the leader of their party was in command?

...to ask all the Republican candidates if they will pledge to cut off Federal aid to schools that teach the pseudo-science of "intelligent design"?

...to ask all the Republican candidates why they went to the mat to support a president who smiled benignly on the housing bubble?

...to ask all the Republican candidates why they went to the mat to support a president who stood by while New Orleans was drowning?

...to ask any Republican candidate besides John McCain why they have sat on their hands while the glaciers were melting?

In one of the most important securities cases in years, the Supreme Court ruled today that investors cannot bring fraud claims against parties that know about securities fraud but did not directly mislead investors themselves.

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(This post was written jointly with Larry Mishel, president of EPI)

Allow us to quickly offer one more wrinkle—a really important one—to the ongoing debate about economic stimulus: we all want a quick, timely package to offset what, with each new data release, looks like a recession. But even if the process takes awhile, a stimulus package will still be very much worth pursuing.

There have been many statements in the press contradicting this point, i.e., asserting that unless we can get a stimulus package into the economy quickly, there’s little point in pursuing it. One economist told Bloomberg News, “Timing is extremely important…[r]ecessions typically last less than a year, so unless you can be pretty quick, it's not worth doing.”

The reason this statement is wrong is because it is based exclusively on gross domestic product, as if mitigating the fall in overall growth is the sole focus of an anti-recession package. In fact, our efforts should also target insufficient job growth, rising unemployment, and the resulting wage and income losses for many families, including those who don’t lose their jobs.

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“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” was a vivid analogy made by Justice Louis Brandeis about the benefits of candor and transparency. And that’s the spirit in which I wrote How to Rig An Election. The book is a completely candid account of my personal experience in Republican politics from the inception of the Republican Revolution to its demise in 2006. My objective in the book was to walk the reader through the process by which political campaigns are waged so that the next time they receive a piece of direct mail, see a television commercial, or hear a radio spot they will know why they got it and what the people who sent it to them are trying to make them believe. After reading this book the reader will no longer just react to the message as they are expected to, but rather pause and consider what reaction is anticipated and then perhaps instead act according to what they think – not feel.

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The effect of foreclosure on neighboring property values has been well-documented, but Fortune Magazine brings us reports of another troubling possibility: a jump in arson among homes in foreclosure. The FBI has reported an increase in suburban arson for 2006. Something to watch for as the year-end statistics on 2007 become available.

Just when it was looking safe to come out and talk about grown-up, more-than-identity politics, Richard Cohen pours oil on the embers in this morning's WP column, smacking Barack Obama for having failed to denounce his church's magazine for having made an award to the loathsome Louis Farrakhan for having "truly epitomized greatness."

Defenders of Cohen say that this stuff is already "out there" in right-wing blogs, and that Obama had better show he can fend it off during the primaries before the Republicans have at him. But Cohen's tone is smarmier, more bristling than that.

It would be one thing to pin Norman Podhoretz's blood-lusty foreign policy on his advisee Rudy Giuliani. But the failure-to-denounce game easily metastasizes and can't be called back. Was Richard Cohen up in arms because John Ashcroft, in his incarnation as presidential candidate, sucked up to the unreconstructed Confederates?

Hell has frozen over. I know this because the great conservative icon William F. Buckley has called for a mortgage moratorium. After prattling on for several paragraphs about the beauty of the market, he does a quick double axel and declares that we should have regulated the mortgage lenders and mortgage brokers much earlier. Now, he says, the federal government has no choice but to halt all foreclosures "until the disparity between true value and hypothetical value is pounded away by time and inflation."

I smell fear.

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On Friday, when I wrote about the Jewish community being inundated with anti-Obama fear-mongering, some people at TPM expressed doubt. I was even excused of making it up.

Five days later, few Jews active in the community have not received calls or e-mails telling them that Obama is a threat to the Jews.

The latest charge is that the minister of Obama's church publishes a magazine that honored Louis Farrakhan.

Farrakhan! Honestly, I thought he had died. It turns out he is alive but seriously ill and inactive. He is not exactly a threat to anybody right now.

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The relentlessly maligned Jonah Goldberg has been complaining that the cascade of hostility directed toward his book Liberal F-ism largely emanates from critics who haven’t read it, or even ponied up to buy it. Fortunately, he has a free piece in the Washington Post that I’ve read in full and would like to trash. Of particular note is this line: “Today the American public seems deeply schizophrenic: It hates the government – Washington, Congress and public institutions are more unpopular than at any time since Watergate – but it wants more of it.”

Actually, the public’s hostility toward government today is just as sane as it was during the Watergate era. When government fails abysmally, especially in ways that are patently antithetical to the Constitution, Americans become unhappy toward those responsible. It’s pretty obvious to much of the public that government under the control of conservative Republicans has failed in myriad manifestations. Republican candidates are having such a hard time crafting a message that is both conservative and politically appealing because those are the two concepts that have come to seem paradoxical. It’s because the right-wing’s philosophy and ideas have over and over again proven not to work in practice that Republicans are having a hard time attracting voters. Americans don’t want more government, they want better government.

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If the current lineup holds, the Democrats will be represented in the forthcoming national elections by a communitarian. Hillary’s communitarian leanings have been long known. They are especially well spelled out in her book It Takes A Village. She also delivered the keynote address at the 1996 meeting of the Communitarian Network, met frequently with communitarian thinkers, especially William Galston, and read Michael Sandel (and even yours truly).

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In a piece that ran over the week-end, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt comes to the defense of the paper's decision to hire neo-con extraordinaire Bill Kristol as its new op-ed columnist. While hardly a ringing endorsement, the piece does mischaracterize the nature of the opposition to the Kristol appointment. The large type pull quote/summary of the piece is "a mob gathers around William Kristol and his pen."

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My favorite blog comment about How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative was “Well, that’s refreshing candor from a guy who’s probably going to hell.” It is a favorite because it assumes so much so wrongly.

Setting aside any debate over such a thing as hell, I was never hired by a campaign to be the moral compass. In fact, morality is a slippery slope and not a political dialogue I would willingly enter or incite. I was hired to engineer victory. With so much at stake, morality was not a luxury to be afforded candidates or their staff.

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As the main character in HBO's The Wire, Baltimore has come to symbolize the seemingly impossible problems facing many inner cities across the nation. Yesterday, in collaboration with John's Hopkins, real life city leaders announced a new program called "More in the Middle" to increase the city's middle class. The program targets improved opportunities for home ownership, education, and employment, using what it deems to be a public-private partnership. These are all familiar themes when we talk about attracting, retaining and growing the middle class, but this program focuses and relies more exclusively on the racial attainment gap in Baltimore. A recent study found that white households had an average of 10 times the net worth of African American families.

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This is a pretty significant article. My only comment is that it depresses the hell out of me.