“When Rick Perry Said And Did Nothing”: Two Other District Attorneys Faced The Same Charges Under Similar Circumstances
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) legal troubles started over a year ago, when Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg was arrested for drunk driving. After an ugly scene in April 2013, Lehmberg, a Democrat, pleaded guilty, apologized, and served 20 days behind bars.
Despite the fact that this was the district attorney’s first offense, Perry called for her resignation. Lehmberg refused. As we discussed over the weekend, this set a series of steps in motion: the governor announced that if she did not resign, he would use his veto power to strip her office of its state funding. When Lehmberg ignored the threat, the governor followed through and vetoed the funding, in the process scrapping resources for the Texas Public Integrity Unit.
Now, for those who are skeptical of the case against Perry, the governor’s actions hardly seem unreasonable. Indeed, it’s not exactly outrageous to think a governor would want to see a district attorney step down after she spent a few weeks in jail.
But the Dallas Morning News added an interesting wrinkle to this argument.
Rick Perry was outraged at the spectacle of Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg’s drunken-driving arrest last year. But he didn’t feel that strongly when two other district attorneys faced the same charges under similar circumstances.
In those cases, he said and did nothing.
This is no small detail. If Perry was convinced a DUI was a disqualifier for a district attorney, why did the governor apply this standard so selectively?
Democratic strategist Jason Stanford put it this way: “The key difference was that one of the DAs was investigating his administration for corruption and the other two DAs weren’t.”
In 2009, for example, a Kaufman County D.A. was convicted of drunk driving, his second offense. Perry’s office said nothing, dismissing it as a local issue.
In 2002, a Swisher County district attorney was found guilty of aggravated DWI, which came against the backdrop of a scandal involving the prosecutor and a sting operation gone wrong. Again, Perry said nothing.
So why would the governor rely on different standards? Jason Stanford, the Democratic strategist, added that Perry treated Lehmberg differently “in a way that makes you question what his motives were. And he had a real clear motive because she’s investigating him for corruption” in connection with a cancer-fund scandal.
I realize many on the left and right have been quick to dismiss this case on the merits. That said, I can’t help but wonder if they were a little too quick in their judgments.
Update: I heard from Gov. Perry’s press secretary this morning, who passed along an affidavit from Chris Walling, a former investigator with the Public Integrity Unit, who said the governor was not a target in the cancer-fund scandal.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, August 21, 2014
“Presumption”: Hillary Clinton’s Hawkishness May Be Her Undoing
Even without a formal declaration of her intent to run, Hillary Clinton is the presumed Democratic nominee for president in 2016. She has earned that status through two decades of hard work on the national stage — as First Lady, as a senator from New York, and, especially, as a loyal and energetic secretary of state in the administration of her former rival, Barack Obama.
But Clinton’s presumed bid for the presidency — a historic run she’s unlikely to turn down — is threatened by the same unfortunate tendency that cost her in 2008: presumption. She seems oblivious to national trends that make some of her stances unpopular.
Nothing better illustrates that presumption than her continued hawkishness, a trait on full display in her interview earlier this month with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly. While Washington pundits focused on her curt dismissal of a few words the president allegedly spoke to reporters — “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said — the substance of her argument is much more troubling than that.
She insisted that if Obama had intervened in Syria, if he had just agreed to arm Syrian moderates, jihadists such as the bloodthirsty cohort of the Islamic State might have been halted in their tracks.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad — there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle — the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.
That sentiment drew huge cheers from the left-of-center interventionists, as well as the neo-cons, who still occupy positions of influence on the national stage. But it contrasts sharply with average voters, the regular Joes who recognize the limits of American power. Polls show that they want nothing to do with more foreign entanglements that don’t directly reflect U.S. interests.
They remember that even deploying military advisors often leads to more boots on the ground, more American dead. And those dead are unlikely to come from the ranks of powerful politicians or diplomats or journalists, but rather from the working classes. More to the point, mainstream voters want their politicians to concentrate on fixing a broken economy here at home, not on fixing broken nations halfway around the world.
Last fall, 52 percent of the public said the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,” according to the Pew Research Center. It was the first time since 1964 that more than half the country held that view, Pew said.
Given the half-hearted economic recovery, it’s no wonder that voters want their politicians to focus on rebuilding the broad American middle class. While Washington politicians and the scribes who cover them are doing just fine, much of the country has yet to mount a full comeback from the Great Recession.
Moreover, it turns out that voters’ skepticism toward foreign interventions is supported by research, which shows that arming “moderates” was likely to backfire.
Recently, political scientist Marc Lynch, writing in The Washington Post, summarized the data this way:
In general, external support for rebels almost always makes wars longer, bloodier and harder to resolve. … Worse … Syria had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which external support for rebels is least effective.
To be fair, Clinton didn’t suggest sending U.S. troops into Syria. Still, her criticism of Obama’s approach shows a tone-deafness, a calculated disregard for the attitude most Americans now hold toward foreign interventions. Sometimes, that sort of brush-off of popular sentiment is a hallmark of genuine leadership. In this case, it’s just arrogance.
Clinton should know better. She was defeated for the Democratic nomination by a lesser-known senator largely because his opposition to the war in Iraq, by then a clear disaster, contrasted with her support for it. While she won’t face Obama in 2016, she might find herself up against Republican Sen. Rand Paul in the general election. And his skepticism toward military interventions could prove more popular than her stubborn, ill-advised hawkishness.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor, The University of Georgia; The National Memo, August 23, 2014
“Always Ready For Closeups”: Dick Cheney Is Still A Petty Hypocrite
Former vice president Dick Cheney resurfaced again this week, to sharply criticize President Barack Obama for being on vacation when ISIS murdered American journalist James Foley.
During a Wednesday night appearance on Fox News’ Hannity, Cheney reiterated his belief that President Obama doesn’t understand foreign policy, and slammed him for playing golf after making a statement condemning Foley’s killing and denouncing ISIS as a “cancer.”
“Every day we find new evidence that he’d rather be on the golf course than he would be dealing with a crisis that’s developing rapidly in the Middle East,” Cheney insisted.
Cheney is not the only person to criticize President Obama for taking a working vacation, nor is his criticism the most ridiculous (for example, The Hill recently criticized the president for taking a walk while “the White House grapples with crises at home and abroad”). But the complaints are especially galling coming from the 46th vice president.
For starters, Cheney’s former boss blew Obama out of the water in terms of time spent away from Washington. To date, President Obama has spent about 150 days on vacation. During his two terms, according to accepted presidential vacation expert Mark Knoller of CBS, George W. Bush spent 1,020 days: 487 at Camp David, 490 at his Crawford, Texas ranch, and 43 at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.
But guess who Cheney thinks was better at dealing with crises in the Middle East (never mind the question of who’s responsible for them)?
Cheney himself has some experience with executive branch vacations. Back in 2005, Cheney hesitated to cut his own vacation short after Hurricane Katrina struck, and then pointedly turned down President Bush’s request that he lead a task force designed to speed the recovery effort (White House advisor Dan Bartlett reportedly backed the decision, noting that the vice president “doesn’t do touchy-feely“).
For its part, the White House insists that, like his predecessors, President Obama is perfectly capable of doing his job from outside of Washington. But that won’t stop the media from obsessing over his vacation. After all, punditry is hard during the dog days of summer — and overeager critics like Cheney are always ready for their closeups.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, August 22, 2014
“Hawks Crying Wolf”: The Usual Republican Inflation Suspects Are Saying The Usual Things
According to a recent report in The Times, there is dissent at the Fed: “An increasingly vocal minority of Federal Reserve officials want the central bank to retreat more quickly” from its easy-money policies, which they warn run the risk of causing inflation. And this debate, we are told, is likely to dominate the big economic symposium currently underway in Jackson Hole, Wyo.
That may well be the case. But there’s something you should know: That “vocal minority” has been warning about soaring inflation more or less nonstop for six years. And the persistence of that obsession seems, to me, to be a more interesting and important story than the fact that the usual suspects are saying the usual things.
Before I try to explain the inflation obsession, let’s talk about how striking that obsession really is.
The Times article singles out for special mention Charles Plosser of the Philadelphia Fed, who is, indeed, warning about inflation risks. But you should know that he warned about the danger of rising inflation in 2008. He warned about it in 2009. He did the same in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. He was wrong each time, but, undaunted, he’s now doing it again.
And this record isn’t unusual. With very few exceptions, officials and economists who issued dire warnings about inflation years ago are still issuing more or less identical warnings today. Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Minneapolis Fed, is the only prominent counterexample I can think of.
Now, everyone who has been in the economics business any length of time, myself very much included, has made some incorrect predictions. If you haven’t, you’re playing it too safe. The inflation hawks, however, show no sign of learning from their mistakes. Where is the soul-searching, the attempt to understand how they could have been so wrong?
The point is that when you see people clinging to a view of the world in the teeth of the evidence, failing to reconsider their beliefs despite repeated prediction failures, you have to suspect that there are ulterior motives involved. So the interesting question is: What is it about crying “Inflation!” that makes it so appealing that people keep doing it despite having been wrong again and again?
Well, when economic myths persist, the explanation usually lies in politics — and, in particular, in class interests. There is not a shred of evidence that cutting tax rates on the wealthy boosts the economy, but there’s no mystery about why leading Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan keep claiming that lower taxes on the rich are the secret to growth. Claims that we face an imminent fiscal crisis, that America will turn into Greece any day now, similarly serve a useful purpose for those seeking to dismantle social programs.
At first sight, claims that easy money will cause disaster even in a depressed economy seem different, because the class interests are far less clear. Yes, low interest rates mean low long-term returns for bondholders (who are generally wealthy), but they also mean short-term capital gains for those same bondholders.
But while easy money may in principle have mixed effects on the fortunes (literally) of the wealthy, in practice demands for tighter money despite high unemployment always come from the right. Eight decades ago, Friedrich Hayek warned against any attempt to mitigate the Great Depression via “the creation of artificial demand”; three years ago, Mr. Ryan all but accused Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman at the time, of seeking to “debase” the dollar. Inflation obsession is as closely associated with conservative politics as demands for lower taxes on capital gains.
It’s less clear why. But faith in the inability of government to do anything positive is a central tenet of the conservative creed. Carving out an exception for monetary policy — “Government is always the problem, not the solution, unless we’re talking about the Fed cutting interest rates to fight unemployment” — may just be too subtle a distinction to draw in an era when Republican politicians draw their economic ideas from Ayn Rand novels.
Which brings me back to the Fed, and the question of when to end easy-money policies.
Even monetary doves like Janet Yellen, the Fed chairwoman, generally acknowledge that there will come a time to take the pedal off the metal. And maybe that time isn’t far off — official unemployment has fallen sharply, although wages are still going nowhere and inflation is still subdued.
But the last people you want to ask about appropriate policy are people who have been warning about inflation year after year. Not only have they been consistently wrong, they’ve staked out a position that, whether they know it or not, is essentially political rather than based on analysis. They should be listened to politely — good manners are always a virtue — then ignored.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 21, 2014
“Not A Single GOP Ripple”: So Much For Politics Stopping At The Water’s Edge
We talked earlier about Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who brought three television cameras, three photographers, six reporters, a political aide, two press secretaries, and far-right activist David Bossie to Guatemala for a “stage-managed political voyage.” But it appears that wasn’t the only reason for the trip.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told the Guatemalan president the surge of child immigrants flooding the U.S. border this year is a result of President Obama’s policies, not problems in Central America.
“I told him, frankly, that I didn’t think the problem was in Guatemala City, but that the problem was in the White House in our country, and that the mess we’ve got at the border is frankly because of the White House’s policies,” Paul told Brietbart News in an article published Thursday.
According to the report in The Hill, the Kentucky Republican sat down with Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina for 45 minutes, and the senator discussed politics with the foreign head of state.
“I think what’s happened at the border is all squarely at the president’s lap,” Paul said. “The problem and the solution aren’t in Guatemala. The problem and solution reside inside the White House.”
As a substantive matter, the senator’s position is tough to defend or even understand. President Obama didn’t sign the 2008 human-trafficking measure into law; he didn’t create awful conditions in Central American countries; and he didn’t encourage anyone to lie to desperate families about what would happen to their children. If there’s a coherent explanation for why the White House is to blame, it’s hiding well.
But even putting that aside, since when is it kosher for U.S. officials to travel abroad to condemn U.S. leaders like this?
In fairness, it’s hard to say with certainty exactly what Rand Paul told President Molina during their discussion. I haven’t seen a video of the meeting and all we have to go on is the senator’s own claims.
But if Paul is telling the truth, he traveled abroad, visited with a foreign leader, and spent time trashing the president of the United States.
I seem to remember a time when there were norms that deemed actions like this unacceptable.
Under traditional American standards, some considered it inappropriate to criticize the president when he was overseas. More importantly, when U.S. officials were outside the country, norms called on those officials to refrain from criticizing America’s elected leaders.
I guess that doesn’t apply anymore? These standards were certainly in place during the Bush/Cheney era.
Here’s what happened in 2006 when Al Gore gave a speech at a conference in Saudi Arabia in which he criticized Bush policies towards the Muslim world – as summarized by The New York Times’ Chris Sullentrop:
“As House Democrats David Bonior and Jim McDermott may recall from their trip to Baghdad on the eve of the Iraq war, nothing sets conservative opinionmongers on edge like a speech made by a Democrat on foreign soil. Al Gore traveled to Saudi Arabia last week, and in a speech there on Sunday he criticized ‘abuses’ committed by the U.S. government against Arabs after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A burst of flabbergasted conservative blogging followed the Associated Press dispatch about the speech… The editorial page of Investor’s Business Daily accused Gore of ‘supreme disloyalty to his country’….”
The Wall St. Journal’s James Taranto accused Gore of “denouncing his own government on foreign soil” and quoted the above accusation of “disloyalty.” Commentary was abundant all but accusing Gore of treason for criticizing the U.S. in a foreign land.
I’ll concede that such niceties may be antiquated, and maybe no one cares about this anymore. But if presidential criticism abroad was outrageous in the Bush/Cheney era, why does it barely cause a ripple now?
Update: Just to flesh this out further, in 2010, then-House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) traveled to Israel in the hopes of undermining U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. At the time, this caused quite a stir in foreign-policy circles – it seemed extraordinary for an elected American official to travel abroad in order to work against his own country’s position.Perhaps now, with the Rand Paul example in mind, the practice is becoming more common.
For even more context, note that in 2007, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) met with Syrian officials in Syria. Republicans, including Cantor, suggested Pelosi may have violated the Logan Act, “which makes it a felony for any American ‘without authority of the United States’ to communicate with a foreign government to influence that government’s behavior on any disputes with the United States.”
One wonders who, if anyone, will raise similar allegations against Rand Paul.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 22, 2014
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