As noted in this earlier post, John O’Neill is a prominent Houston attorney and Swift Boat Veteran who is a co-author of Unfit for Command that is highly critical of John Kerry’s Vietnam War service and subsequent anti-war activities. Mr. O’Neill had a hard time getting a word in edgewise in this hilarious television interview with MSNBC analyst and Kerry supporter, Lawrence O’Donnell.
I must say that it is impressive that Mr. O’Donnell’s performance made moderator Pat Buchanan appear to be absolutely moderate! ;^) Hat tip to the TigerHawk for the link to this interview.

Following up on the analysis noted in this previous post, Victor over at the Dead Parrot Society has posted the second part of his analysis on the Bush Administation’s record on domestic, non-defense, non-homeland security, discretionary spending. Inasmuch as the Bush Administration has come under criticism (including here) for its apparent profligacy in this area, I highly recommend reviewing Victor’s analysis, which concludes as follows:

Bush’s record on discretionary spending is not nearly as clear cut as the conventional wisdom would suggest. Bush has dramatically increased discretionary spending in certain specific areas like education. But if we are to try to glean information from his first-term record in order to predict his second term, the evidence is mixed. He isn’t as frugal as Reagan, but isn’t necessarily profligate, either. Upon examining his record in this much detail, I truly cannot say with much certainty whether a second Bush term would be fiscally conservative or whether his view of “compassionate conservatism” necessarily means more spending.
(All of this analysis, of course, ignores the elephant in the room which is the Medicare Prescription Drug bill. But again, there, I’m not sure he’ll do something like that again.)

Daniel Drezner, the assistant professor of poli sci at the University of Chicago who runs the smart Daniel W. Drezner blog, has decided to vote for John Kerry for president, albeit unenthusiastically. His post in which he publishes his decision links to a series of posts over the past several weeks in which Professor Dresner evaluates the pros and cons of each candidate. The series of posts is a highly informative resource for evaluating the positions of the candidates, particularly in the foreign policy arena.
I believe that Professor Drezner places too much emphasis in making his decision on criticism of the Bush Administration’s tactical decisions in Iraq. History instructs us that even successful battlefronts rarely are without significant tactical errors — unfortunately, such is the essential nature of the messy business of war. However, Professor Drezner’s point about the lack of reasoned policy analysis and lack of intellectual flexibility in the Bush Administration is a valid criticism and reflects my biggest reservation about the current administration.

Victor over at the Dead Parrot Society has performed this interesting analysis of this earlier American Enterprise Institute study (linked in this earlier post via Marginal Revolution) in which the author of the AEI study — Virginia de Rugy — concluded that the Bush Administration compares poorly with other administrations over the past 40 years in terms of reducing the amount of major governmental agency or department spending. Victor focuses on comparing the second Clinton Administration’s spending with the Bush Administration, and concludes as follows:

The numbers are ambiguous. By focusing only on discretionary expenditures, much — but not all — of the cyclical impact of the recession has been removed from the data. When you do this, Bush’s spending looks much better outside of the well documented cases where he has made a conscious push to increase spending (like education). However, he still has not achieved a real reduction in any federal agency.
But if you look at the actual Budget Authority levels, his administration actually has achieved a few reductions.
In both cases, of course, this has occurred in an environment where many agencies are adding homeland security requests to their budgets; I have only anecdotally adjusted for that. Regardless, the overall spending picture isn’t quite as dreary as implied by DeRugy’s original analysis.

Read the entire post. And as noted in this previous post, the prospect is remote that a Kerry Administration would be more restrained in terms of governmental spending than a second Bush Administration.
Quare: Is the difference between the increase in discretionary spending that would likely occur during the next four years under a second Bush Administration as compared to the increase that would likely take place under a Kerry Administration so marginal that it is not really a meaningful reason to favor one administration over the other?

British historian Paul Johnson (author of “Modern Times,” “History of the Jews,” “History of Christianity,” “A History of the American People,” and his more recent “Art, A New History,” among others) is one of my favorites. In this WSJ ($) op-ed, Mr. Johnson notes that the nastiness of the 2004 Presidential Campaign really does not hold a candle to the campaign of 1928 between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams:

[The 1928 campaign] inaugurated the habit of long campaigns, since Tennessee nominated Jackson for president as early as Spring 1825, more than three years before the vote. . .
Adams’s supporters retaliated by the campaign poster known as the Coffin Handbill, listing 18 murders Jackson was supposed to have committed. Those who claim the current election is the dirtiest know little about 1828. An English visitor, shown a school in New England (where Adams was paramount), put questions to the class, including “Who killed Abel?” A child promptly replied “General Jackson, Ma’am.” An Adams pamphlet accused Jackson of “trafficking in human flesh,” another accused his wife of being a bigamist and adulterer. After seeing it, she took to her bed and died shortly after the election. To his dying day Jackson believed his political enemies had murdered her. On his side, pamphlets accused Adams of fornication, procuring American virgins for the Tsar while serving as ambassador in Russia, and being an alcoholic and sabbath-breaker. A White House inventory listing a billiard-table and a chess-set led to the accusation that Adams had introduced “gambling furniture.” (His most curious presidential habit, of taking a daily swim in the Potomac stark naked, went unnoticed.)
Jackson won the popular vote in this first razzmatazz election, 647,276 to 508,064, and the College by a clear majority. His inauguration was followed by a saturnalia in which thousands of his supporters invaded the White House and engaged in a drinking spree. The Spoils System (a new term) was inaugurated by the ejection of Adams’s men from public offices, a process called The Massacre of the Innocents.

And what does Mr. Johnson think about the qualitiy of the current campaign? Apparently, not much:

In recent decades the most significant election was 1980, when Reagan beat Jimmy Carter and so inaugurated the policies which demolished the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union, and ended the Cold War in a Western victory. Reagan won this election, which I covered closely, with wit and one-liners. The current election is likely to be significant, too, in deciding the strategy and tactics of the war against terrorism. But wit, alas, will play little part.

This post from last week addressed the hypocrisy of John Kerry’s political position that the federal government should raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans while his wife continues to use loopholes in the tax laws to pay a lower percentage of taxes than most other Americans.
In this editorial, the Wall Street Journal ($) takes deal aim at the issue and points out the advantages that super-rich folks such as Mrs. Heinz-Kerry have over working stiffs, starting with Ms. Heinz-Kerry’s avoidance of the payroll (i.e., Social Security) tax:

One point we failed to mention is that Mrs. Kerry paid only a token Social Security tax. That’s because the payroll tax is assessed on wages, and Mrs. Kerry declared very little wage income. She gets most of her income from dividends and interest, as many wealthy people do. This is fine by us, but it is one more advantage she has over the vast majority of Americans who draw a weekly paycheck and must (with their employer) cough up the 15.3% payroll levy.

And that advantage is just one of many that super-rich folks such as Ms. Heinz-Kerry enjoys under that income tax system that Mr. Kerry seeks to perpetuate:

Our main point is that this is one more advantage Mrs. Kerry would have over working stiffs on salary if her husband wins the White House and follows through on his plan to raise taxes.
It’s very hard to dodge a tax increase on salary income, especially for middle-class folk who need the money. Many couples who earn more than $200,000 a year are non-wealthy Americans who happen to be at the peak of their earning years and have big bills (such as college educations) to meet now or down the road. They haven’t had time — or been lucky enough to marry rich — to build up the assets to be able to live off tax-free investments the way Mrs. Kerry can. The super-rich, as opposed to the merely successful, are the ones who are really able to avoid taxes — which, come to think of it, may be why so many billionaires are supporting John Kerry.

The data on average tax rates actually reflects the highly progressive nature of the tax system, except for the super-rich who can hire lawyers and accountants to avoid paying taxes:

As it happens, the IRS has just released its data on individual income tax returns for 2002. And they reinforce our point about average tax rates. Recall that Mrs. Kerry paid an average tax rate of 12.4% on her declared income of $5.07 million. In 2002, even after the first round of Bush tax cuts, the average rate paid by all taxpayers was still higher than that at 13.03%.
As for the folks in her wealthy neighborhood, in 2002 the top 1% of taxpayers paid an average rate (also known as the effective tax rate) of 27.25%. By the way, the income threshold for getting into that 1% group was only $285,424, down substantially from 2000 and 2001. And that same top 1% of earners paid 33.7% of all income taxes in 2002. The way to think about these numbers is that, despite the Bush tax cuts that allegedly so favored the rich, the tax code remains highly progressive. And these people kept paying the lion’s share of all taxes even though their earnings declined amid the recession and stock-market slump.

But the most interesting question in regard to Ms. Heinz-Kerry’s tax return is the following:

But back to Mrs. Kerry: Some readers wondered how she could be worth nearly $1 billion (as the Los Angeles Times has estimated) and earn only $5.07 million in 2003. Good question. It’s impossible to tell given that Mrs. Kerry has disclosed only two pages of her 1040 form and declines to explain how her assets are deployed. But we agree with those readers who suggest that much of her wealth must be tied up in trusts and estates that don’t require a declaration of income. Like many of the super-rich, Mrs. Kerry can afford to hire lawyers and accountants to create these shelters for her and her heirs.
The late, great Wall Street Journal editor Barney Kilgore used to say that the rich don’t mind high taxes because they already have their money. Mrs. Kerry and her husband are cases in point.

Inasmuch as the Bush Administration has done nothing during its first four years on making the income tax system in the U.S. simpler and more transparent, it is disappointing to me that the Democratic challenger’s platform in this area is a hypocritical and demogogic appeal for votes rather than a substantive proposal for reform of a broken system.

This NY Times article follows up on last week’s news that longtime Houstonian Oscar Wyatt is one of three individuals and four companies that federal investigators are focusing on for who allegedly receiving vouchers for oil from Saddam Hussein as he sought to flout United Nations sanctions. The Times article notes the close relationship between Mr. Wyatt and Saddam:

Mr. Wyatt . . . traveled to Baghdad as recently as early 2003, as the United States was preparing for war, to meet with officials in Mr. Hussein’s government. Mr. Wyatt – once called in Texas Monthly magazine “the most hated oilman in Texas” – met Mr. Hussein in 1972, just after Iraq’s oil industry had been nationalized, and eventually became one of the biggest United States importers of Iraqi oil.
The two met again in 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait and Mr. Wyatt flew to Baghdad on a company jet to help negotiate the release of nearly two dozen American oil workers whom Mr. Hussein had turned into “human shields.”
The relationship was so close that when the United Nations authorized Iraq in 1996 to begin selling oil again, under the Oil for Food program, Mr. Wyatt and Coastal secured the first tanker shipment to leave the country.

And that close relationship is at the heart of the criminal investigation into Mr. Wyatt’s activities:

The years of effort on Mr. Wyatt’s part to court Iraqi officials and build a venture to export Iraqi oil to the United States produced ample rewards: he and companies that he has been linked to earned an estimated $23 million in profit in the seven years of the Oil for Food program, according to sales and profit estimates included in the C.I.A. report by Charles Duelfer; Mr. Wyatt disputes that figure.

And, lest we forget, Mr. Wyatt’s used his relationship with Saddam to attain a humanitarian achievement:

By the late 1980’s, Coastal was importing as much as 250,000 barrels of oil a day from Iraq. As these oil imports became more and more important to Coastal’s operations, Mr. Wyatt became more outspoken in his opposition to any threatened or standing trade sanctions by the United States in the Middle East, . . . including a move by Congress to impose restrictions on trade with Iraq after Mr. Hussein used poison gas against the Kurds.
It was Mr. Wyatt’s surprise trip to Baghdad in December 1990, however, that finally brought his relationship with Iraq into the spotlight. He met then with Mr. Hussein to negotiate the release of American hostages. The effort was opposed by the administration of George H. W. Bush, but Mr. Wyatt came home a hero and he wept at a meeting of the released hostages and their families.
“It was not a stunt,” said Bobby Parker, a drilling rig electrician who had been held for 128 days before being rescued. “Oscar Wyatt is just not that type of person.”
The hostages were safe, but ultimately, Mr. Wyatt’s goal had not been fully achieved. He had hoped to prevent a military move by the United States on Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, a war that, he said, the United States had no reason to start.

Five years later in 1996, Mr. Wyatt’s relations with Iraq were again in the news:

Mr. Wyatt’s ties to Iraq again raised eyebrows, when the first tanker laden with crude oil sailed out of Mina al-Bakr, Iraq’s main export oil terminal, in December 1996, in Iraq’s legal return to global oil markets.
The ship had been chartered by one of Mr. Wyatt’s companies.
This was the start of the Oil for Food program, which ultimately would result in the export of 3.4 billion barrels, earning $65 billion for the Iraqi government over the next seven years, money that was used to buy food and medicine, maintain oil fields and pay reparations from the first gulf war, among other spending.

My Wyatt, through spokespersons, declines to comment on any of this other than to deny that he engaged in any wrongdoing with regard to his business relations with Iraq. However, the Times article notes that one competitor characterized Mr. Wyatt’s propensity to enter into difficult business deals in the following manner:
“He is not afraid of the devil.”
Read the entire article.

The WSJ’s ($) Alan Murray is spot on with regard to his analysis in his weekly Political Capital column that the Bush Administration’s second Treasury Secretary — John Snow — has been just as ineffective as the Bush Administration’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill:

Even some of the administration’s closest allies wonder: Why has Mr. Bush failed in his first four years to find an effective Treasury secretary? And can he be expected to do any better in a second term?
Messrs. O’Neill and Snow have proved the least effective in recent memory. And it is worth asking: Why? Part of the answer comes from the fact that national-security concerns have pushed economic matters to the back burner. The secretaries of state and defense have been in the spotlight in this administration, and economic policy has been secondary.
But much of the answer comes from the fact that, for this administration, economic policy has been a direct extension of political strategy. The tax cuts that characterized President Bush’s first term were forged during the campaign, and were as much a plan for election and re-election as for economic reinvigoration. The Treasury secretary’s job was taken over, in effect, by political adviser Karl Rove.
If Mr. Bush is re-elected, that could change. He won’t be running for a third term and he won’t be pushing tax cuts. Yawning budget deficits make that certain. And unless Brother Jeb Bush signs him on, Karl Rove will have lost his client.
That could be the chance for a new approach to economic policy. President Bush has suggested an ambitious agenda for his second term. He wants to rewrite the tax code, to encourage savings and eliminate loopholes. He wants to give Americans more control over their health-care plans. And he wants to remake the Social Security system, restoring its finances while creating private accounts for younger workers. If he is serious about all this, he will need a very strong Treasury secretary at his side.

Quare: Each of the policy initiatives mentioned in the foregoing paragraph make sense and would be supported by the vast majority of Americans. Given the Bush Administration’s track record, is it more likely that such initiatives would be seriously pursued in a second Bush Administration or in a Kerry Administration?

Several months ago, Professor Ribstein commented on the phenomena in this election of Bush-bashing, which the Professor observed is premised on “an assumption that Bush and his supporters are not credible — that they are all idiots or worse.”
Along those lines, this Weekly Standard article by Andrew Ferguson examines how the political culture of Austin, Texas facilitated the Bush-bashing phenomenom. As Mr. Ferguson notes, Austin is . . . well, different from most other places in Texas:

With its university-town origins, its large population of musicians and artists, its long tradition of political liberalism, Austin is, as Jeff says, the “anti-Texas,” where “Texans who don’t really like Texas” choose to live. More important, it has also, in a larger sense, exported its own peculiar brand of Bush hatred to Democrats from one coast to the other.

And Mr. Ferguson points out that Austin’s brand of political opposition to President Bush may backfire big-time:

Austin has a lot to answer for, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Ponder for a moment the strange course the presidential campaign has followed these last 18 months. Judged by the simplest, crudest criterion–comparing the state of the world as it was the day he took office with the world as it will be on the day he stands for reelection–George W. Bush should be the most easily beatable presidential incumbent since Jimmy Carter. A frontal assault on Bush’s record, repeated endlessly and packaged cleverly, might well have resulted in a walkaway win for whoever the Democrats had chosen to oppose him.
It hasn’t worked out that way, as we know. Bush’s opponents instead find themselves in a tight race they well might lose. There are lots of reasons why, but one surely is that instead of mounting a substantial critique of what the president has done and hasn’t done, his Democratic adversaries have obsessed over piecing together odd, paranoid caricatures of the man who’s driving them nuts–Bush as the agent of Halliburton, Bush as the idiot son of Robber Baron privilege, Bush the religious crank, the right-wing ideologue, the draft-dodger, the front man for Enron or Rove or the Saudi royals or J.R. Ewing.

Interestingly, Mr. Ferguson notes that the trouble with the Austin-style of opposition to Mr. Bush is the underlying insecurity of those who promote it:

[An essential characteristic of the Bush-haters is] hatred for themselves as Texans. “Keep Austin weird” is the cute, self-congratulatory, semi-official motto the city’s residents repeat insistently, and there is, sure enough, something weird here. But the city isn’t weird in the way Austinites think it is. No matter where in Austin you find yourself–the waiting room of an auto body shop, the men’s room of a beer joint–you’ll be confronted with a community bulletin board coated thickly with fliers announcing a poetry contest or some new development in Hatha Yoga technique. In that way Austin is no weirder than any other college town. It’s weirdness lies in the fact that, unlike every other college town–Madison, Wisconsin; Lawrence, Kansas; Eugene, Oregon–it has never made peace with its home state. Texas progressivism sets itself in opposition to its surroundings, defines itself by what it isn’t. It depends on a blend of boosterism (for Austin and for a few progressive neighborhoods in Houston) and contempt (for everything else north of the Rio Grande Valley and south of the Mason Dixon line). “The feeling you get in Austin sometimes,” Nathan Husted told me, “is like we’re all living in West Berlin during the Cold War.”

Even the flap over the now infamous 60 Minutes segment that relied on a untested forged document regarding Mr. Bush’s National Guard service has its genesis in the Austin culture of hatred toward Mr. Bush:

For our purposes, however, what was most interesting about the 60 Minutes imbroglio was the light it shed on the tiny, hermetic world of Texas Bush-hating. Rather himself–perhaps the world’s most prominent Texas Bush-hater–has a daughter, Robin, who is an activist in, and future contender for the chairmanship of, Austin’s Travis County Democratic party, which Rather once helped raise money for and whose chairman at that time, David Van Os, now serves as the attorney for Bill Burkett, who gave 60 Minutes the bogus documents and who has worked as a source for James C. Moore, who discovered the Austin4Kerry tape and whose book, Bush’s Brain, was co-written by Wayne Slater, Austin bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News, whose News colleague, Mark Wrolstad, is married to Mapes, who produced the 60 Minutes segment and who knew Moore when both were TV reporters in Houston, where Mapes still lives. It’s dizzying to think what Bush-haters would do with this web of intimacies if they were on the other side.

Read the entire piece. Quare: Is the Bush-bashing phenomena the natural result and counterbalance to the proliferation of demogogic right wing pundits that have arisen over the past decade (i.e., Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc.)? Or did the latter naturally evolve in response to the former?

Lou Dubose — co-author of The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress (Public Affairs 2004) and Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Vintage 2000) — pens this LA Weekly article summarizing the development of the multiple criminal and Congressional investigations into U.S. Representative Tom DeLay‘s allegedly illegal campaign fund-raising scheme that had as its goal the Republican takeover of the Texas Legislature. Mr. Dubose notes the background of DeLay’s fundraising effort:

For 10 years the Republican Party had been trying to capture the Texas House. Party operatives aimed for 2000 so the House, the Senate and the state?s Republican governor could have absolute control of redrawing the state?s congressional district lines when the Legislature met after the 2000 census. Despite years of spending record sums on campaigns, in 2000 they fell short. And the Democratic House speaker refused to go along with the governor and Senate?s effort to reconfigure the state?s district lines so that a half-dozen more congressional seats could be won by Republicans.
That?s when Tom DeLay came home to Texas. Working with one of his Washington operatives, he created a political-action committee in Texas, modeled on his own national PAC. Texans for a Republican Majority was spectacularly successful. It raised $1.5 million and elected 17 new Republican members of the state House, seizing control of the body for the first time in 130 years. With his handpicked Texas House speaker in place, DeLay personally presided over the redrawing of the state?s congressional districts. The map he put in place will provide the Republicans five to seven new seats in Congress.

As Mr. Dubose notes, there is a small problem with Mr. DeLay’s fundraising efforts:

Since 1905, it?s been against state law to raise or spend corporate money in Texas [political campaigns]. And DeLay?s Texas PAC raised three-quarters of a million corporate dollars. They reported their corporate contributions only with the IRS in Washington, avoiding disclosure to the state agency that regulates elections in Texas. Ronnie Earle, a D.A. with statewide prosecutorial authority, caught them. He also found they were doing some odd things with their money, like sending $190,000 corporate ?soft? dollars to the Republican National State Election Committee in Washington in exchange for $190,000 non-corporate ?hard? dollars that can be legally spent in Texas.

Mr. Dubose also does not find Mr. DeLay’s protestations about his relative non-involvement with Texans for a Republican Majority to be particularly credible:

DeLay insists he had little to do with Texans for a Republican Majority, which seems odd since he founded it. And the PAC?s Texas director said under oath that DeLay was consulted on PAC activities. DeLay has said he raised no corporate money himself, but a June 24, 2002, letter I found in the exhibits of a civil suit filed in Austin suggests otherwise:

Dear Congressman DeLay:
On behalf of the Williams Companies Inc., I am pleased to forward our contribution of $25,000 for the [Texans for a Republican Majority] that we pledged at the June 2 fund-raisers.
With best wishes . . .

Read the entire piece. Regardless of whether DeLay fades an indictment over his campaign fundraising, his designs on the Speaker of the House’s chair in Washington are (thankfully) no longer viable.