Politics: December 2004 Archives

No such thing as clear analysis of the season's holiday shopping sales results as companies spin, spin, spin. But one thing seems obvious to me. The rich are richer and the poor poorer:

Coach was a clear holiday winner, as the luxury goods maker said Monday that its holiday sales grew 25 percent, or 2 percent better than it projected.

Merrill Lynch analyst Daniel Barry told clients in a note Monday that the pre-Christmas sales surge benefited luxury the most, while UBS said Tuesday that it expects "strong relative peer performance" from luxury retailers Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue.

At the other end of the price spectrum, discount giant Wal-Mart Stores said December same-store sales, or sales in stores open at least a year, are tracking at the midpoint of its 1 percent to 3 percent increase.

Concern over the Bentonville, Ark.-based dismal November sales and the effect of higher gas prices on its customers' discretionary spending had cast doubt on its holiday sales prospects.

I was interested to read Jerome Armstrong's update on the race for DNC Chair (it's Dean's to lose; I still like Fowler). While looking back at some of what Armstrong has written I ran across this:

We already sucked it up and got Harry Reid for the Red State Minority Leader in the Senate, give us a break with the condescending remarks about wanting Southern and Midwestern values for the DNC. I'll stack up the West Coast-Northeastern coalition of freedom-for-all, morality-for-all, and liberty-for-all global values against those Red State regional resentments of moral superiority anytime, anyplace, and make the right choice. We want a Democratic Leader from a Democratic state.

From the red red center of a very Red State, I wholeheartedly agree.

Kevin Drum on how improbable it is that we'll be in Iraq for only one year more.

Today there's this in Georgia news: two Southern heritage groups, The Military Order of the Stars and Bars and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, are upset because Savannah Mayor Otis Johnson (who is black) authorized the removal of two portraits of Confederate army officers from City Hall to make way for television equipment needed to televise council meetings. A lawsuit is threatened.

Despite plans for the paintings of Gen. Robert E. Lee and John Wheaton, a former mayor, to be placed in the Savannah History Museum, leaders of these heritage groups see Johnson's action as another wave in the steady erosion of their history.

"We feel like the mayor is in violation of the law and we intend to pursue that," Newman said. "Because the portraits were (originally) placed in memorial of the individuals and the statute says that they are not to be disturbed."

The statute is a state law that cites memorials and monuments in honor of military service - including from the Civil War - cannot be removed. Heritage groups cling to this law and are using it to sue the Augusta Commission, who removed a Confederate flag from a display at Riverwalk Augusta.

A little over a year ago there was the flap over Howard Dean saying that he wanted to be the candidate of the "guys with confederate flags in their pickup trucks." At the time I agreed with Dean. My experiences since then have changed my mind. Let the Republicans keep them. (More in the extended entry.)

At last some common sense at Homeland Security. From the NYTimes today, "Responding to repeated calls from big-city mayors, the Department of Homeland Security is shifting a larger share of its annual $3.5 billion in antiterrorism grants to the nation's largest cities." Memphis isn't happy, "We are a prime location, a prime target, any way you look at it." No, they're not! Neither is Wyoming, which got more per capita in terrorism grants this year than New York.

Kos reports that the most aggressive candidate for DNC Chair is Donnie Fowler and pointed to his website, ChangeTheParty.com, and this C-SPAN interview (watch with Real Player). I watched and it sold me on Donnie. He started off with, "God does not belong to the Republican party, and values don't belong to the Right Wing and patriotism doesn't belong to George Bush." When he was questioned aggressively by a few conservative, religious, and anti-gay callers (one managed a mention of Hillary Clinton and Katie Couric, of course) he gave as good as he got. He told a couple of them they should stay with the Republican party.

He's the son of former DNC chairman Don Fowler, from South Carolina, living in San Francisco, was Wesley Clark's first campaign manager, and headed John Kerry's Michigan campaign. He sounds like a fighter; I like that he's young. I don't want a Democratic Party that tries to be Republican-lite in an ill-fated attempt to win the election. I agree with those who say that Republican-lite is a losing proposition because it inherently endorses the Republican agenda and alienates the natural Democratic base. I'll be watching Donnie.

UPDATE: My quick reaction to watching that single interview made me wonder if I was being rash. I went back to this overview of DNC Chair candidates from a significant Democratic meeting held the weekend before last. At the time I was watching Harold Ickes, who I've always liked. I still like him; they didn't. They did like Donnie. I'll comment on Howard Dean in another post.

I love The Washington Monthly, print and blog. My December issue just got here today (in Milledgeville, the mail is slow). A favorite feature, available online, is "Tilting at Windmills" by Founding Editor Charles Peters. One bit of it focused on flu shots:

...the CDC should have the power to order that shots be given first to the people who need them most and then according to a fair system of priority. It also should be able to allocate the vaccine so that supplies are available to meet those priorities. This year's shortage was clear by early October. But the CDC failed to act, and on Oct. 16, a Washington Post headline told us “Flu Vaccine Allocation in Area Haphazard, No System Exists for Haves to Share Supplies with Have-nots.”

The CDC should also be responsible for telling people what's going on. As late as Oct. 21, Gardiner Harris of The New York Times reported “local and state officials are complaining that their federal counterparts have given them almost no information to deal with the shortage.”

The problem is that the CDC did not want these responsibilities. Its director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, said “imposing federal controls over this process would probably make a big mess.” It was already a big mess, Dr. Gerberding. If government did not fill the need, who would? Some things simply have to be done by the government. The real question is not whether government should do them, but how to make sure government does them right. (Emphasis mine.)

Finally, on Nov. 10, Dr. Gerberding overcame her market principles and announced a plan for rationing the vaccine according to need. By this time, the CDC controlled only 10 million of the 50 million shots that were available in early October. Furthermore, the CDC is allowing freelancers like New York mayor Bloomberg to import the vaccine from abroad. Your ability to get a shot may depend less on your need than on the enterprise of your mayor. So far a lot of people have been getting the vaccine who are not exactly priority cases, including many twenty-something congressional aides, not to mention many of their healthier bosses.

The allocation mess never got sorted out. Today USA Today is reporting that some states have extra vaccine and are being advised by the CDC to expand their eligibility pool while other states are not able to immunize their high risk population. The upshot is several million high-risk Americans will not be getting the vaccine.

I've enjoyed reading Josh Marshall's commentary about Bernard Kerik's woes (click here and type in "Kerik" for the comprehensive collection), but even in the face of all that I've been hanging on to my original opinion that the guy would have been good at Homeland Security. He's got a colorful background that won't fly in Washington and would have been trouble in New York had it been found out, but still I haven't see anything on how well he did his job. I've heard the nanny stuff, the affairs, some financial stuff, the apartment in Battery Park City and the Baghdad questions (the issue that concerned me most). It's all smarmy and I'm not seriously suggesting that the guy had a chance. How smart is he if he thought he could keep all that from getting out? But who are we going to wind up with? It's a tough important job and he's more the kind of person I want than some Washington bureaucrat or career politician.

Plenty of questions about Kerik; Josh Marshall was my jumping off point.

My first reaction to Bernard Kerik's withdrawal from consideration for Homeland Security Secretary is disappointment. He wasn't my favorite New York City Police Commissioner, but he was good. I pretty much liked everyone who held that job through the 80s and 90s. That's hard to say given some of the horrible things that went down, most memorably Abner Louima among way too many others. But in a police force the size of New York's there are bound to be bad apples. New York has always worked hard to remove them.

I lived in the city from 1975 through 2003. When I arrived crime was rampant and the city bankrupt. By the time I left the city had become one of the safest in the world. Before moving down here I compared New York and Milledgeville crime rates and New York did remarkably well. Compare New York to Atlanta and you really see the difference (click here to pick your city). What's most significant is that the New York City Police didn't just bring down crime; they did it while at the same time protecting the rights of its citizens, even if living there you don't always have that perspective.

It's illustrative to look at the difference during the political conventions last summer between Boston locking up demonstrators in a pen under an interstate, and New York closing down Eighth Avenue for a huge march. I've been in some of those marches, and I'm impressed with how they're handled. Consider the Seattle Police Department and the WTO in 1999; they were in way over their head. I see the difference in almost every city I visit or read about. Any city would be well served to have the kind of police force New York has. Homeland Security would have been in good hands with Bernard Kerik.

Peter Beinart's article An Argument for a New Liberalism, A Fighting Faith in The New Republic has been all over the blogosphere. I read lots of commentary before finally sitting down with the article in an Athens, GA coffee shop this past Sunday. Beinart argues that until the Democratic Party reigns in its liberal base and takes the Jihadist threat seriously, they're going to lose. He sees the militant Islamic threat as clear and equivalent to the totalitarian threat in World War II and the communist threat in the Cold War. Basically, I do too. But I've always had a paranoid world view (duck and cover!) and I can see why others don't. Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly blogger (I'm a long time subscriber to the print magazine and a big fan of the blog) is a case in point. He wrote a must read response to the Beinart article that, after an eye openening review of historical comparisons, concludes:

I think the majority of liberals could probably be persuaded to take a harder line on the war on terror — although it's worth emphasizing that the liberal response is always going to be different from the conservative one, just as containment was a different response to the Cold War than outright war. But first someone has to make a compelling case that the danger is truly overwhelming. So far, no one on the left has really done that.

Today Jonah Goldberg jumped in to back Beinart. (I watch Fox News sometimes too, it's good to hear what the other side has to say.) His "compelling case" for an overwhelming danger is that everybody says it's so and isn't it obvious? As I said, I'm inclined to agree that the threat is as they say. What I don't get is why they don't respect the need to persuade us. Especially after Iraq, where so many of the arguments were wrong (on WMD, on welcoming throngs, on quick victory, on how many troops, the list goes on). For all the talk of spreading democracy around the world, they have very little patience with the inherent messiness of democracy; the need to convince people and convince them again. After all, it's World War IV they're talking about.

The Washington Monthly pointed me to this. It turns out that 99.8% of the indecency claims made to the FCC in 2003 came from one group, the Parents Television Council. They're "non-partisan" but the fact that Bill Bennett is on their board should tell us something. From the Media Week story:

The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, [FCC chairman Michael] Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”

What Powell did not reveal—apparently because he was unaware—was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group.

UPDATE: I'm told that in the blogosphere this is way old news. And living in Milledgeville is no excuse. I've been too busy working on making the site work! As I get better, I'll be more timely.

What do you think about Outing? I think I'm for it. Michael Rogers definitely is. Click here for his latest action -- really complete, thorough work. And click here for his blog. I visit regularly.