Category Archives: Politics – General

A bully exposed

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Spitzer072407.jpgAs noted in this post from a couple of weeks ago, more than a few folks are not losing any sleep over the fact that former crusading state attorney general and current New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is having trouble getting along with with his new playmates in Albany.
But now things are getting even more interesting. According to a report issued yesterday by Andrew Cuomo, Spitzer’s successor as New York AG (and perhaps as governor sooner than we thought), Spitzer’s aides used the state police to gather information about whether Spitzerís chief political rival, Joseph Bruno, improperly used state-owned aircraft for political purposes. To make matters worse, when the improper use of state police was revealed, Spitzerís communications director, Darren Dopp, concocted a false story as to why the aides sought the information. Although the Cuomo report concluded that the aidesí conduct was ìnot unlawful,î Spitzer suspended Dopp and conceded at a press conference that his administration had ìgrossly mishandledî the situation. And all this occurred despite the fact that Cuomo’s report was not thoroughly prepared.
Spitzer has a lot of experience in the area of “grossly mishandling” situations. OpinionJounal notes the same thing.
The irony of Spitzer’s plight has generated quite a few entertaining blog post titles around the blogosphere, the best of which are Ellen Podgor’s (she of “Busted for Yoga” fame) “Spitzer Spitzered” and Nathan Koppel’s “Spitzer Schadenfreude.” Seems as if Spitzer is redefining the bully pulpit.

Dalrymple on Tony Blair

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Tony%20Blair.jpgThe recent resignation of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair provides an opportunity for British psychiatrist and author, Anthony Daniels (who writes under the pen name of Theodore Dalrymple), to provide this interesting early appraisal of the Blair years:

There undoubtedly were things to be grateful for during the Blair years. His support for American policy in Iraq won him much sympathy in the U.S., of course. He was often eloquent in defense of liberty. And under Mr. Blair’s leadership, Britain enjoyed 10 years of uninterrupted economic growth, leaving large parts of the country prosperous as never before. London became one of the world’s richest cities, vying with New York to be the global economy’s financial center. Mr. Blair did inherit a strapping economy from his predecessor, and he left its management more or less to the man who succeeds him, Gordon Brown. Still, unlike previous Labour prime ministers, he did not preside over an economic crisis: in itself, something to be proud of.
But how history will judge him overall, and whether it will absolve him (to adapt slightly a phrase coined by a famous, though now ailing, Antillean dictator), is another matter [. . .]
Tony Blair was the perfect politician for an age of short attention spans. What he said on one day had no necessary connection with what he said on the following day: and if someone pointed out the contradiction, he would use his favorite phrase, “It’s time to move on,” as if detecting contradictions in what he said were some kind of curious psychological symptom in the person detecting them.
Many have surmised that there was an essential flaw in Mr. Blair’s makeup that turned him gradually from the most popular to the most unpopular prime minister of recent history. The problem is to name that essential flaw. As a psychiatrist, I found this problem peculiarly irritating (bearing in mind that it is always highly speculative to make a diagnosis at a distance). But finally, a possible solution arrived in a flash of illumination. Mr. Blair suffered from a condition previously unknown to me: delusions of honesty.

Check out the entire op-ed. It’s worth the time.

Fair tax?

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income%20taxes%20graph.jpgGreg Mankiw provides this particularly lucid analysis of the current status of the progressive U.S. income tax system. Keep it handy when listening to the demagoguery over tax rates that will take place during the upcoming 2008 Presidential campaign.

The McCain meltdown

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mccain.jpgThe fellows over at Professors R-Squared are having a rather fun time chronicling the remarkably quick demise of the John McCain Presidential Campaign (see here and here). But the best line on the McCain campaign meltdown still came from Jay Leno earlier in the week:

“Sen. John Edwards began what he’s calling his poverty tour today. He’s visiting people who have no money and no hope. His first stop: John McCain’s campaign headquarters.”

Myths of the war

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dhs_threat_new-tbn_1.jpgMy nephew Richard and I had a good laugh about the new Homeland Security Threat Level on the left that resulted from Michael Chertoff’s ill-advised warning regarding the terror threat from earlier in the week. But kidding aside, following on this earlier post regarding James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly piece, this Steve Chapman RCP op-ed provides a level-headed analysis of the actual threat of an attack from Islamic fascists and the counterproductive nature of the Bush Administration’s characterization of the conflict as a global “war on terror.” Check it out.

Spitzer is suffering?

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Spitzer071107.jpgSo New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and his family just don’t know whether the rough and tumble nature of politics at the state level of New York is worth the severe emotional toll.
I wonder what Theodore Sihpol, Hank Greenberg, John Whitehead, Richard Grasso and Kenneth Langone, among others, think about that?

How the Presidents stack up

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Presidential%20approval%20ratings0605-all.gifThis Wall Street Journal Online provides this nifty graphic overview of the approval ratings of all U.S. presidents since Truman. Take a few minutes to check it out and enjoy the surprises of a quick history refresher. For example, I had forgotten about the length of the bounce in President Carter’s approval ratings after the Iranian hostage crisis began in late 1979. Of course, that bounce didn’t last as the hostage crisis dragged on for over a year, contributing substantially to Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.

Snow Fall

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cocaine.jpgRobin Moroney over at The Wall Street Journal’s Informed Reader blog picks up on this interesting Ken Dermota/Atlantic ($) article that reports on the weird economics relating to the demand, the supply and the price of cocaine:

Demand for cocaine stays steady, Colombiaís coca fields are destroyed, yet the drugís street price in the U.S. continues to fall . . . [as] drug smugglers and dealers have eked out efficiencies in their operations to keep their prices low. The U.S. Coast Guard has been able to catch only a small percentage of the drugs entering the country since President Nixon declared a ìwar on drugsî in 1971. In 2000, the U.S. decided to switch tactics and take the fight to Colombia, which produces 90% of the cocaine sold in the U.S. Since then, it has spent $4.7 billion fighting rebels who grow and sell the crop, as well as spraying coca fields from the air.
The price of cocaineóthe pure version, not crackóhas kept falling. In the early 1980s, the price of a gram of cocaine was about $600. By the late 1990s the price had fallen to about $200. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the street price of a gram of cocaine in 2005 was $20-$25 in New York, $30-$100 in Los Angeles and $100-$125 in Denver.
Some of the price decrease has come from more efficient distribution networks. Some New York smugglers have chosen to eliminate the middleman and pick up their drugs directly from Colombia, offering ìfactory-to-youî prices. The surging trade with Mexico has increased the nooks and crannies for drugs to be hidden as they cross the border, making smuggling both safer and cheaper.
Labor costs also have decreased. Street vendors take a smaller cut of the drugís proceeds. A lot of the drug dealers who fell prey to an aggressive imprisonment campaign in the 1990s are now leaving prison. Their felony conviction and minimal job experience means they have few other ways to make money and are willing to take a pay cut.
The falling street price also reflects the lower risk of handling the drug. The violence of the 1980s crack boom has faded and, since 2001, federal drug prosecutions have fallen 25% as agents get diverted to the hunt for terrorists.

While the Atlantic article focuses on why the price of cocaine continues to drop even though the supply sources are declining, what’s particularly interesting is that the demand for cocaine is not rising dramatically as the price declines. Given its addictive nature, it makes sense that the demand for cocaine would be somewhat price inelastic, but it seems logical that demand would increase at least to some extent as the price falls. This does not appear to be happening. Sounds like a good exam question for an economics course.

It’s not been a good week for federal agencies

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fcc.GIFFirst, it was the dubious decision of the Federal Trade Commission to sue to enjoin the proposed merger between natural foods grocers Whole Foods Markets and Wild Oats Markets.
Then, as this Daniel Drezner post notes, Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin chose a rather interesting way to criticize the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision this week striking down the FCC’s policy governing “fleeting expletives” on television.
So it goes in the wacky world of governmental regulation.

Giuliani’s hypocrisy

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giuliani.jpgDoug Berman notes that Rudy Giuliani thinks that Scooter Libby got a raw deal. That is unquestionably correct, but what Giuliani failed to mention is that he is one of the politicians primarily responsible for the culture of criminalization that gobbles up productive citizens such as Libby.
As noted earlier here and here, Giuliani’s politically-motivated prosecution of Michael Milken and related destruction of Drexel Burnham during the late 1980’s ignited the criminalization of business interests that reached its peak with the destruction of Arthur Andersen, the prosecution of former Enron executives Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay last year and the ongoing trial of former Hollinger CEO Conrad Black this year. Indeed, the Bush Administration’s willingness to toss business interests into the cauldron of internecine criminal prosecutions for transient political purposes has largely undermined the Republican Party’s credibility in challenging the motives of dubious white collar prosecutions of businesspersons or politicians.
And lest you think that rich and powerful people are the only ones affected by what Giuliani has helped wrought, remember the name of Lisa Jones. As Daniel Fischel brilliantly explains in his book Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and his Financial Revolution (Harper-Collins 1995), Jones is a remarkable American success story — a teenage runaway and high school dropout who worked her way up through the ranks of Drexel to become the top assistant to one of Drexel’s most successful traders. Giuliani threatened to indict Jones in an effort to get her to turn on Milken (sound familiar?), but Jones refused to give in and remained loyal to Milken and Drexel to the end. Giuliani eventually prosecuted and convicted Jones for crimes that were never proven (sound familiar?) and she was sentenced to a year and a half in prison, later reduced to ten months. Other than Milken, Jones was the only longtime employee of Drexel Burnham who ever spent time in prison.
I don’t know about you, but that’s not the political legacy I’m looking for in a presidential candidate.