Obama has launched a new website on the transition and for the transition period. Sure there is only one President at a time and Bush is beyond a lame duck until January 20. He should become mute and emasculated until the Inauguration.
If I were to follow any developments in the US governance I'm thinking this Obama effort is the site to use.
Here is a link to the election night victory speech vidoe from the new site.
Showing posts with label Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bush. Show all posts
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Friday, August 24, 2007
China is Holding Bush by the Short and Curlies
The Globe and Mail reports today that Chinese state-owned banks “admit they’re on the hook for $11B” of the subprime debt paper. This crap debt is causing a credit crunch all over the world and I am sure the Chinese are not amused. The impact of the Chinese banking is not huge but if they pull out of the U.S. debt market, that will be a disaster for the American economy...and it will not stop there.
The impact of the American subprime mortgage market meltdown is getting wider and deeper and more global every day. This is not going away and the stock market volatility of the past week or so has been dampened by some pretty hefty cash interventions by national central banks everywhere trying to maintain liquidity. But this mess is far from over. In fact we have only just begun.
A scan of headlines in the financial pages tells us the worst is yet to come. One can all most see this as a fiscal tsunami rising on the horizon and heading towards us. Right now it is far enough in the distance we can’t really tell how big it is or how fast it is moving - but we can see it coming.
Here is a taste of what is gong on form the MSM newspapers:
“U.S. home foreclosures soar in July…fallout from subprime crisis seen as a major factor behind 93% jump in default.” Estimates are that the US will see over 2million residential foreclosures in 2007 and 43 States are all ready seeing a 2007 increase over 2006 figures.
“Finance jobs face the axe as housing woes deepen” U.S. financial services industry has 87,962 job cuts so far in 2007 while all of 2006 saw 50,327 financial sector job cuts. U.S. real estate and construction job cuts in the first 7 months of 2007 are 21,620, more than double the cuts in all of 2006.
On the investment side it is not any better and it has infected Canada too where estimates indicate we are holding over $33B of this non-liquid paper. The Financial Post reports that the Ontario government is in for $700 million, Air Canada is holding some $37million and, the Greater Toronto Airport Authority is exposed for about $250million. Even the venerable and huge Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is in for $60million.
Reports in the U.S. stock market that “confidence is shaky” and some American financial experts are indicating a recession is on the way because the recent buoyant economy has been lead by consumer spending financed by loans against increasing home equity. With housing prices dropping and the increasing foreclosures the consumer psychology changes and they quite spending causing a recession. The virtuous cycle turns vicious.
Put that in the context of where Dubya has taken the American economy from $236B surplus in 2000 when he became President to a $248B deficit in 2006. 2007 estimates say the 2007 Bush deficit is going to be at least $210B. He has overspent as much as $400B in a single year since becoming President. Total U.S. federal debt is now over $5-trillion with $2.2 trillion if held by foreigners. The Chinese hold about 50% of the foreign owned debt.
Now consider the enormous U.S. trade deficit of $758B in 2006 and we see more American vulnerability. The first half of 2007 saw the Bush Presidency creating a trade deficit with China alone of $118B. Ouch! And the war with Iraq must be costing the Americans a pretty penny too…largely being financed by borrowings from China.
So we can see that China is holding Bush by his short and curlies. They can, at their will, dictate a large portion of future of the U.S. economy just by not lending any more and not rolling over the existing American debt they hold when it mature. It is just a matter of time before we see some enormous changes in the direction of the U.S. economy. It is going to have a global impact…and it is not going to be pretty.
Here is a taste of what is gong on form the MSM newspapers:
“U.S. home foreclosures soar in July…fallout from subprime crisis seen as a major factor behind 93% jump in default.” Estimates are that the US will see over 2million residential foreclosures in 2007 and 43 States are all ready seeing a 2007 increase over 2006 figures.
“Finance jobs face the axe as housing woes deepen” U.S. financial services industry has 87,962 job cuts so far in 2007 while all of 2006 saw 50,327 financial sector job cuts. U.S. real estate and construction job cuts in the first 7 months of 2007 are 21,620, more than double the cuts in all of 2006.
On the investment side it is not any better and it has infected Canada too where estimates indicate we are holding over $33B of this non-liquid paper. The Financial Post reports that the Ontario government is in for $700 million, Air Canada is holding some $37million and, the Greater Toronto Airport Authority is exposed for about $250million. Even the venerable and huge Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is in for $60million.
Reports in the U.S. stock market that “confidence is shaky” and some American financial experts are indicating a recession is on the way because the recent buoyant economy has been lead by consumer spending financed by loans against increasing home equity. With housing prices dropping and the increasing foreclosures the consumer psychology changes and they quite spending causing a recession. The virtuous cycle turns vicious.
Put that in the context of where Dubya has taken the American economy from $236B surplus in 2000 when he became President to a $248B deficit in 2006. 2007 estimates say the 2007 Bush deficit is going to be at least $210B. He has overspent as much as $400B in a single year since becoming President. Total U.S. federal debt is now over $5-trillion with $2.2 trillion if held by foreigners. The Chinese hold about 50% of the foreign owned debt.
Now consider the enormous U.S. trade deficit of $758B in 2006 and we see more American vulnerability. The first half of 2007 saw the Bush Presidency creating a trade deficit with China alone of $118B. Ouch! And the war with Iraq must be costing the Americans a pretty penny too…largely being financed by borrowings from China.
So we can see that China is holding Bush by his short and curlies. They can, at their will, dictate a large portion of future of the U.S. economy just by not lending any more and not rolling over the existing American debt they hold when it mature. It is just a matter of time before we see some enormous changes in the direction of the U.S. economy. It is going to have a global impact…and it is not going to be pretty.
For more insight and commentary on suggestions for a made-in-Alberta foreign policy - check out the Aug 20th Editorial on Policy Channel
Thursday, August 23, 2007
The Jellybean Summit - NAFTA Morphs Into SPP
The Jellybean Summit (NAFTA meets and morphs into SPP in Montebello) is over and none too soon. Hurricane Dean put this fiasco out of its misery early and may well have saved us from the plotting, plodding and pandering of these purely political and photo-op spectacles. Plotting and plodding inevitably happens when Steve and George put their heads together for too long and not much good ususally comes of it .
There was so much going on behind closed doors with hidden agendas, and I’ll bet secret handshakes and shrouded rituals and sacrifices, yes sacrifices, at least we can rely on the truth being sacrificed at these events. It all too reminiscent and even makes one a bit nostalgic of the good old glory days of the Nixon Whitehouse and Watergate don't you think? There was obviously a lot going on at the Jellybean Summit and I’ll bet it was really serious stuff - and way too important for citizens, of all people, to know about.
Unfortunately, or laughably depending on your perspective, the only real “news” we got from the Jellybean Summit was about hardships of incompatible red dye regulations between the US and Canada on jellybean sales and how it cuts down our productivity and competitiveness as a nation. And dammit that needs fixin’ right now. And fix it they did, for once and for all, unless, of course, they used the softwood lumber deal as the model. In that case, stay tuned for the inevitable sequel, "Son of Jellybean Dye Regulations - The Litigation Years."
Mr. Harper called the protests “sad” because he was apparently disappointed in the numbers that showed up. The protesters are claiming infiltration of their ranks by the police. This must be because Mr. Harper was feeling sorry for the small numbers of protesters on the ground. I'll bet he was just trying to be helpful by supplying infiltrators who would actually bolster the ranks. These guys could also help out and get some serious protester conflict action going for the TV cameras. Talk about synergy and symbioses...thanks Steve.
If that is all we get out of this "Summit" is the “Ganong Show” over regulating jellybean colours can we save some time and money next time and have George and Steve just phone it in?
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Bush Pardons Libby! Who Will Pardon Bush?
I don't like to republish MSM piece verbatim in this Blog however the latest Frank Rich column from NYT is a worthy exception (again!). His perspective is always interesting because he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning theatre critic whom NYT switched to political commentary. His commentary shows us just how much politics is like theatre - so much of the time.
I am OK if God wishes to Bless America.
I just hope America appreciates the Blessings of a Free Press and writers like Frank Rich!
July 8, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A Profile in Cowardice
By FRANK RICH
THERE was never any question that President Bush would grant amnesty to Scooter Libby, the man who knows too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq. The only questions were when, and how, Mr. Bush would buy Mr. Libby’s silence. Now we have the answers, and they’re at least as incriminating as the act itself. They reveal the continued ferocity of a White House cover-up and expose the true character of a commander in chief whose tough-guy shtick can no longer camouflage his fundamental cowardice.
The timing of the president’s Libby intervention was a surprise. Many assumed he would mimic the sleazy 11th-hour examples of most recent vintage: his father’s pardon of six Iran-contra defendants who might have dragged him into that scandal, and Bill Clinton’s pardon of the tax fugitive Marc Rich, the former husband of a major campaign contributor and the former client of none other than the ubiquitous Mr. Libby.
But the ever-impetuous current President Bush acted 18 months before his scheduled eviction from the White House. Even more surprising, he did so when the Titanic that is his presidency had just hit two fresh icebergs, the demise of the immigration bill and the growing revolt of Republican senators against his strategy in Iraq.
That Mr. Bush, already suffering historically low approval ratings, would invite another hit has been attributed in Washington to his desire to placate what remains of his base. By this logic, he had nothing left to lose. He didn’t care if he looked like an utter hypocrite, giving his crony a freer ride than Paris Hilton and violating the white-collar sentencing guidelines set by his own administration. He had to throw a bone to the last grumpy old white guys watching Bill O’Reilly in a bunker.
But if those die-hards haven’t deserted him by now, why would Mr. Libby’s incarceration be the final straw? They certainly weren’t whipped into a frenzy by coverage on Fox News, which tended to minimize the leak case as a non-event. Mr. Libby, faceless and voiceless to most Americans, is no Ollie North, and he provoked no right-wing firestorm akin to the uproars over Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers or “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.
The only people clamoring for Mr. Libby’s freedom were the pundits who still believe that Saddam secured uranium in Africa and who still hope that any exoneration of Mr. Libby might make them look less like dupes for aiding and abetting the hyped case for war. That select group is not the Republican base so much as a roster of the past, present and future holders of quasi-academic titles at neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.
What this crowd never understood is that Mr. Bush’s highest priority is always to protect himself. So he stiffed them too. Had the president wanted to placate the Weekly Standard crowd, he would have given Mr. Libby a full pardon. That he served up a commutation instead is revealing of just how worried the president is about the beans Mr. Libby could spill about his and Dick Cheney’s use of prewar intelligence.
Valerie Wilson still has a civil suit pending. The Democratic inquisitor in the House, Henry Waxman, still has the uranium hoax underlying this case at the top of his agenda as an active investigation. A commutation puts up more roadblocks by keeping Mr. Libby’s appeal of his conviction alive and his Fifth Amendment rights intact. He can’t testify without risking self-incrimination. Meanwhile, we are asked to believe that he has paid his remaining $250,000 debt to society independently of his private $5 million “legal defense fund.”
The president’s presentation of the commutation is more revealing still. Had Mr. Bush really believed he was doing the right and honorable thing, he would not have commuted Mr. Libby’s jail sentence by press release just before the July Fourth holiday without consulting Justice Department lawyers. That’s the behavior of an accountant cooking the books in the dead of night, not the proud act of a patriot standing on principle.
When the furor followed Mr. Bush from Kennebunkport to Washington despite his efforts to duck it, he further underlined his embarrassment by taking his only few questions on the subject during a photo op at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. You know this president is up to no good whenever he hides behind the troops. This instance was particularly shameful, since Mr. Bush also used the occasion to trivialize the scandalous maltreatment of Walter Reed patients on his watch as merely “some bureaucratic red-tape issues.”
Asked last week to explain the president’s poll numbers, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center told NBC News that “when we ask people to summon up one word that comes to mind” to describe Mr. Bush, it’s “incompetence.” But cowardice, the character trait so evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to understanding Mr. Bush’s cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and hubris.
Even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, a consistent Bush and Libby defender, had to take notice. Furious that the president had not given Mr. Libby a full pardon (at least not yet), The Journal called the Bush commutation statement a “profile in non-courage.”
What it did not recognize, or chose not to recognize, is that this non-courage, to use The Journal’s euphemism, has been this president’s stock in trade, far exceeding the “wimp factor” that Newsweek once attributed to his father. The younger Mr. Bush’s cowardice is arguably more responsible for the calamities of his leadership than anything else.
People don’t change. Mr. Bush’s failure to have the courage of his own convictions was apparent early in his history, when he professed support for the Vietnam War yet kept himself out of harm’s way when he had the chance to serve in it. In the White House, he has often repeated the feckless pattern that he set back then and reaffirmed last week in his hide-and-seek bestowing of the Libby commutation.
The first fight he conspicuously ran away from as president was in August 2001. Aspiring to halt federal underwriting of embryonic stem-cell research, he didn’t stand up and say so but instead unveiled a bogus “compromise” that promised continued federal research on 60 existing stem-cell lines. Only later would we learn that all but 11 of them did not exist. When Mr. Bush wanted to endorse a constitutional amendment to “protect” marriage, he again cowered. A planned 2006 Rose Garden announcement to a crowd of religious-right supporters was abruptly moved from the sunlight into a shadowy auditorium away from the White House.
Nowhere is this president’s non-courage more evident than in the “signing statements” The Boston Globe exposed last year. As Charlie Savage reported, Mr. Bush “quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office.” Rather than veto them in public view, he signed them, waited until after the press and lawmakers left the White House, and then filed statements in the Federal Register asserting that he would ignore laws he (not the courts) judged unconstitutional. This was the extralegal trick Mr. Bush used to bypass the ban on torture. It allowed him to make a coward’s escape from the moral (and legal) responsibility of arguing for so radical a break with American practice.
In the end, it was also this president’s profile in non-courage that greased the skids for the Iraq fiasco. If Mr. Bush had had the guts to put America on a true wartime footing by appealing to his fellow citizens for sacrifice, possibly even a draft if required, then he might have had at least a chance of amassing the resources needed to secure Iraq after we invaded it.
But he never backed up the rhetoric of war with the stand-up action needed to prosecute the war. Instead he relied on fomenting fear, as typified by the false uranium claims whose genesis has been covered up by Mr. Libby’s obstructions of justice. Mr. Bush’s cowardly abdication of the tough responsibilities of wartime leadership ratified Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to go into Iraq with the army he had, ensuring our defeat.
Never underestimate the power of the unconscious. Not the least of the revelatory aspects of Mr. Bush’s commutation is that he picked the fourth anniversary of “Bring ’em on” to hand it down. It was on July 2, 2003, that the president responded to the continued violence in Iraq, two months after “Mission Accomplished,” by taunting those who want “to harm American troops.” Mr. Bush assured the world that “we’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” The “surge” notwithstanding, we still don’t have the force necessary four years later, because the president never did summon the courage, even as disaster loomed, to back up his own convictions by going to the mat to secure that force.
No one can stop Mr. Bush from freeing a pathetic little fall guy like Scooter Libby. But only those who paid the ultimate price for the avoidable bungling of Iraq have the moral authority to pardon Mr. Bush.
I am OK if God wishes to Bless America.
I just hope America appreciates the Blessings of a Free Press and writers like Frank Rich!
July 8, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A Profile in Cowardice
By FRANK RICH
THERE was never any question that President Bush would grant amnesty to Scooter Libby, the man who knows too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq. The only questions were when, and how, Mr. Bush would buy Mr. Libby’s silence. Now we have the answers, and they’re at least as incriminating as the act itself. They reveal the continued ferocity of a White House cover-up and expose the true character of a commander in chief whose tough-guy shtick can no longer camouflage his fundamental cowardice.
The timing of the president’s Libby intervention was a surprise. Many assumed he would mimic the sleazy 11th-hour examples of most recent vintage: his father’s pardon of six Iran-contra defendants who might have dragged him into that scandal, and Bill Clinton’s pardon of the tax fugitive Marc Rich, the former husband of a major campaign contributor and the former client of none other than the ubiquitous Mr. Libby.
But the ever-impetuous current President Bush acted 18 months before his scheduled eviction from the White House. Even more surprising, he did so when the Titanic that is his presidency had just hit two fresh icebergs, the demise of the immigration bill and the growing revolt of Republican senators against his strategy in Iraq.
That Mr. Bush, already suffering historically low approval ratings, would invite another hit has been attributed in Washington to his desire to placate what remains of his base. By this logic, he had nothing left to lose. He didn’t care if he looked like an utter hypocrite, giving his crony a freer ride than Paris Hilton and violating the white-collar sentencing guidelines set by his own administration. He had to throw a bone to the last grumpy old white guys watching Bill O’Reilly in a bunker.
But if those die-hards haven’t deserted him by now, why would Mr. Libby’s incarceration be the final straw? They certainly weren’t whipped into a frenzy by coverage on Fox News, which tended to minimize the leak case as a non-event. Mr. Libby, faceless and voiceless to most Americans, is no Ollie North, and he provoked no right-wing firestorm akin to the uproars over Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers or “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.
The only people clamoring for Mr. Libby’s freedom were the pundits who still believe that Saddam secured uranium in Africa and who still hope that any exoneration of Mr. Libby might make them look less like dupes for aiding and abetting the hyped case for war. That select group is not the Republican base so much as a roster of the past, present and future holders of quasi-academic titles at neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.
What this crowd never understood is that Mr. Bush’s highest priority is always to protect himself. So he stiffed them too. Had the president wanted to placate the Weekly Standard crowd, he would have given Mr. Libby a full pardon. That he served up a commutation instead is revealing of just how worried the president is about the beans Mr. Libby could spill about his and Dick Cheney’s use of prewar intelligence.
Valerie Wilson still has a civil suit pending. The Democratic inquisitor in the House, Henry Waxman, still has the uranium hoax underlying this case at the top of his agenda as an active investigation. A commutation puts up more roadblocks by keeping Mr. Libby’s appeal of his conviction alive and his Fifth Amendment rights intact. He can’t testify without risking self-incrimination. Meanwhile, we are asked to believe that he has paid his remaining $250,000 debt to society independently of his private $5 million “legal defense fund.”
The president’s presentation of the commutation is more revealing still. Had Mr. Bush really believed he was doing the right and honorable thing, he would not have commuted Mr. Libby’s jail sentence by press release just before the July Fourth holiday without consulting Justice Department lawyers. That’s the behavior of an accountant cooking the books in the dead of night, not the proud act of a patriot standing on principle.
When the furor followed Mr. Bush from Kennebunkport to Washington despite his efforts to duck it, he further underlined his embarrassment by taking his only few questions on the subject during a photo op at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. You know this president is up to no good whenever he hides behind the troops. This instance was particularly shameful, since Mr. Bush also used the occasion to trivialize the scandalous maltreatment of Walter Reed patients on his watch as merely “some bureaucratic red-tape issues.”
Asked last week to explain the president’s poll numbers, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center told NBC News that “when we ask people to summon up one word that comes to mind” to describe Mr. Bush, it’s “incompetence.” But cowardice, the character trait so evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to understanding Mr. Bush’s cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and hubris.
Even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, a consistent Bush and Libby defender, had to take notice. Furious that the president had not given Mr. Libby a full pardon (at least not yet), The Journal called the Bush commutation statement a “profile in non-courage.”
What it did not recognize, or chose not to recognize, is that this non-courage, to use The Journal’s euphemism, has been this president’s stock in trade, far exceeding the “wimp factor” that Newsweek once attributed to his father. The younger Mr. Bush’s cowardice is arguably more responsible for the calamities of his leadership than anything else.
People don’t change. Mr. Bush’s failure to have the courage of his own convictions was apparent early in his history, when he professed support for the Vietnam War yet kept himself out of harm’s way when he had the chance to serve in it. In the White House, he has often repeated the feckless pattern that he set back then and reaffirmed last week in his hide-and-seek bestowing of the Libby commutation.
The first fight he conspicuously ran away from as president was in August 2001. Aspiring to halt federal underwriting of embryonic stem-cell research, he didn’t stand up and say so but instead unveiled a bogus “compromise” that promised continued federal research on 60 existing stem-cell lines. Only later would we learn that all but 11 of them did not exist. When Mr. Bush wanted to endorse a constitutional amendment to “protect” marriage, he again cowered. A planned 2006 Rose Garden announcement to a crowd of religious-right supporters was abruptly moved from the sunlight into a shadowy auditorium away from the White House.
Nowhere is this president’s non-courage more evident than in the “signing statements” The Boston Globe exposed last year. As Charlie Savage reported, Mr. Bush “quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office.” Rather than veto them in public view, he signed them, waited until after the press and lawmakers left the White House, and then filed statements in the Federal Register asserting that he would ignore laws he (not the courts) judged unconstitutional. This was the extralegal trick Mr. Bush used to bypass the ban on torture. It allowed him to make a coward’s escape from the moral (and legal) responsibility of arguing for so radical a break with American practice.
In the end, it was also this president’s profile in non-courage that greased the skids for the Iraq fiasco. If Mr. Bush had had the guts to put America on a true wartime footing by appealing to his fellow citizens for sacrifice, possibly even a draft if required, then he might have had at least a chance of amassing the resources needed to secure Iraq after we invaded it.
But he never backed up the rhetoric of war with the stand-up action needed to prosecute the war. Instead he relied on fomenting fear, as typified by the false uranium claims whose genesis has been covered up by Mr. Libby’s obstructions of justice. Mr. Bush’s cowardly abdication of the tough responsibilities of wartime leadership ratified Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to go into Iraq with the army he had, ensuring our defeat.
Never underestimate the power of the unconscious. Not the least of the revelatory aspects of Mr. Bush’s commutation is that he picked the fourth anniversary of “Bring ’em on” to hand it down. It was on July 2, 2003, that the president responded to the continued violence in Iraq, two months after “Mission Accomplished,” by taunting those who want “to harm American troops.” Mr. Bush assured the world that “we’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” The “surge” notwithstanding, we still don’t have the force necessary four years later, because the president never did summon the courage, even as disaster loomed, to back up his own convictions by going to the mat to secure that force.
No one can stop Mr. Bush from freeing a pathetic little fall guy like Scooter Libby. But only those who paid the ultimate price for the avoidable bungling of Iraq have the moral authority to pardon Mr. Bush.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Is Dick Cheney a Law Unto Himself?
The New York Times recently published a piece on the aproach to governance by Vice President Cheney. It is rich in detail, facts, context and interpretation. It is also worth a read if you value democracy.
July 1, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
When the Vice President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal
By FRANK RICH
WHO knew that mocking the Constitution could be nearly as funny as shooting a hunting buddy in the face? Among other comic dividends, Dick Cheney's legal theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch yielded a priceless weeklong series on "The Daily Show" and an online "Doonesbury Poll," conducted at Slate, to name Mr. Cheney's indeterminate branch of government.
The ridicule was so widespread that finally even this White House had to blink. By midweek, it had abandoned that particularly ludicrous argument, if not its spurious larger claim that Mr. Cheney gets a free pass to ignore rules regulating federal officials' handling of government secrets.
That retreat might allow us to mark the end of this installment of the Bush-Cheney Follies but for one nagging problem: Not for the first time in the history of this administration — or the hundredth — has the real story been lost amid the Washington kerfuffle. Once the laughter subsides and you look deeper into the narrative leading up to the punch line, you can unearth a buried White House plot that is more damning than the official scandal. This plot once again snakes back to the sinister origins of the Iraq war, to the Valerie Wilson leak case and to the press failures that enabled the administration to abuse truth and the law for too long.
One journalist who hasn't failed is Mark Silva of The Chicago Tribune. He first reported more than a year ago, in May 2006, the essentials of the "news" at the heart of the recent Cheney ruckus. Mr. Silva found that the vice president was not filing required reports on his office's use of classified documents because he asserted that his role in the legislative branch, as president of the Senate, gave him an exemption.
This scoop went unnoticed by nearly everybody. It would still be forgotten today had not Henry Waxman, the dogged House inquisitor, called out Mr. Cheney 10 days ago, detailing still more egregious examples of the vice president's flouting of the law, including his effort to shut down an oversight agency in charge of policing him. The congressman's brief set off the firestorm that launched a thousand late-night gags.
That's all to the public good, but hiding in plain sight was the little-noted content of the Bush executive order that Mr. Cheney is accused of violating. On close examination, this obscure 2003 document, thrust into the light only because the vice president so blatantly defied it, turns out to be yet another piece of self-incriminating evidence illuminating the White House's guilt in ginning up its false case for war.
The tale of the document begins in August 2001, when the Bush administration initiated a review of the previous executive order on classified materials signed by Bill Clinton in 1995. The Clinton order had been acclaimed in its day as a victory for transparency because it mandated the automatic declassification of most government files after 25 years.
It was predictable that the obsessively secretive Bush team would undermine the Clinton order. What was once a measure to make government more open would be redrawn to do the opposite. And sure enough, when the White House finally released its revised version, the scant news coverage focused on how the new rules postponed the Clinton deadline for automatic declassification and tightened secrecy so much that previously declassified documents could be reclassified.
But few noticed another change inserted five times in the revised text: every provision that gave powers to the president over classified documents was amended to give the identical powers to the vice president. This unprecedented increase in vice-presidential clout, though spelled out in black and white, went virtually unremarked in contemporary news accounts.
Given all the other unprecedented prerogatives that President Bush has handed his vice president, this one might seem to be just more of the same. But both the timing of the executive order and the subsequent use Mr. Cheney would make of it reveal its special importance in the games that the White House played with prewar intelligence.
The obvious juncture for Mr. Bush to bestow these new powers on his vice president, you might expect, would have been soon after 9/11, especially since the review process on the Clinton order started a month earlier and could be expedited, as so much other governmental machinery was, to meet the urgent national-security crisis. Yet the new executive order languished for another 18 months, only to be published and signed with no fanfare on March 25, 2003, a week after the invasion of Iraq began.
Why then? It was throughout March, both on the eve of the war and right after "Shock and Awe," that the White House's most urgent case for Iraq's imminent threat began to unravel. That case had been built around the scariest of Saddam's supposed W.M.D., the nuclear weapons that could engulf America in mushroom clouds, and the White House had pushed it relentlessly, despite a lack of evidence. On "Meet the Press" on March 16, Mr. Cheney pressed that doomsday button one more time: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." But even as the vice president spoke, such claims were at last being strenuously challenged in public.
Nine days earlier Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency had announced that documents supposedly attesting to Saddam's attempt to secure uranium in Niger were "not authentic." A then-obscure retired diplomat, Joseph Wilson, piped in on CNN, calling the case "outrageous."
Soon both Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Congressman Waxman wrote letters (to the F.B.I. and the president, respectively) questioning whether we were going to war because of what Mr. Waxman labeled "a hoax." And this wasn't the only administration use of intelligence that was under increasing scrutiny. The newly formed 9/11 commission set its first open hearings for March 31 and requested some half-million documents, including those pertaining to what the White House knew about Al Qaeda's threat during the summer of 2001.
The new executive order that Mr. Bush signed on March 25 was ingenious. By giving Mr. Cheney the same classification powers he had, Mr. Bush gave his vice president a free hand to wield a clandestine weapon: he could use leaks to punish administration critics.
That weapon would be employed less than four months later. Under Mr. Bush's direction, Mr. Cheney deputized Scooter Libby to leak highly selective and misleading portions of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to pet reporters as he tried to discredit Mr. Wilson. By then, Mr. Wilson had emerged as the most vocal former government official accusing the White House of not telling the truth before the war.
Because of the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation, we would learn three years later about the offensive conducted by Mr. Libby on behalf of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush. That revelation prompted the vice president to acknowledge his enhanced powers in an unguarded moment in a February 2006 interview with Brit Hume of Fox News. Asked by Mr. Hume with some incredulity if "a vice president has the authority to declassify information," Mr. Cheney replied, "There is an executive order to that effect." He was referring to the order of March 2003.
Even now, few have made the connection between this month's Cheney flap and the larger scandal. That larger scandal is to be found in what the vice president did legally under the executive order early on rather than in his more recent rejection of its oversight rules.
Timing really is everything. By March 2003, this White House knew its hype of Saddam's nonexistent nuclear arsenal was in grave danger of being exposed. The order allowed Mr. Bush to keep his own fingerprints off the nitty-gritty of any jihad against whistle-blowers by giving
Mr. Cheney the authority to pick his own shots and handle the specifics. The president could have plausible deniability and was free to deliver non-denial denials like "If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is." Mr. Cheney in turn could delegate the actual dirty work to Mr. Libby, who obstructed justice to help throw a smoke screen over the vice president's own role in the effort to destroy Mr. Wilson.
Last week The Washington Post ran a first-rate investigative series on the entire Cheney vice presidency. Readers posting comments were largely enthusiastic, but a few griped. "Six and a half years too late," said one. "Four years late and billions of dollars short," said another. Such complaints reflect the bitter legacy of much of the Washington press's failure to penetrate the hyping of prewar intelligence and, later, the import of the Fitzgerald investigation.
We're still playing catch-up. In a week in which the C.I.A. belatedly released severely censored secrets about agency scandals dating back a half-century, you have to wonder what else was done behind the shield of an executive order signed just after the Ides of March four years ago.
Another half-century could pass before Americans learn the full story of the secrets buried by Mr. Cheney and his boss to cover up their deceitful path to war.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
July 1, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
When the Vice President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal
By FRANK RICH
WHO knew that mocking the Constitution could be nearly as funny as shooting a hunting buddy in the face? Among other comic dividends, Dick Cheney's legal theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch yielded a priceless weeklong series on "The Daily Show" and an online "Doonesbury Poll," conducted at Slate, to name Mr. Cheney's indeterminate branch of government.
The ridicule was so widespread that finally even this White House had to blink. By midweek, it had abandoned that particularly ludicrous argument, if not its spurious larger claim that Mr. Cheney gets a free pass to ignore rules regulating federal officials' handling of government secrets.
That retreat might allow us to mark the end of this installment of the Bush-Cheney Follies but for one nagging problem: Not for the first time in the history of this administration — or the hundredth — has the real story been lost amid the Washington kerfuffle. Once the laughter subsides and you look deeper into the narrative leading up to the punch line, you can unearth a buried White House plot that is more damning than the official scandal. This plot once again snakes back to the sinister origins of the Iraq war, to the Valerie Wilson leak case and to the press failures that enabled the administration to abuse truth and the law for too long.
One journalist who hasn't failed is Mark Silva of The Chicago Tribune. He first reported more than a year ago, in May 2006, the essentials of the "news" at the heart of the recent Cheney ruckus. Mr. Silva found that the vice president was not filing required reports on his office's use of classified documents because he asserted that his role in the legislative branch, as president of the Senate, gave him an exemption.
This scoop went unnoticed by nearly everybody. It would still be forgotten today had not Henry Waxman, the dogged House inquisitor, called out Mr. Cheney 10 days ago, detailing still more egregious examples of the vice president's flouting of the law, including his effort to shut down an oversight agency in charge of policing him. The congressman's brief set off the firestorm that launched a thousand late-night gags.
That's all to the public good, but hiding in plain sight was the little-noted content of the Bush executive order that Mr. Cheney is accused of violating. On close examination, this obscure 2003 document, thrust into the light only because the vice president so blatantly defied it, turns out to be yet another piece of self-incriminating evidence illuminating the White House's guilt in ginning up its false case for war.
The tale of the document begins in August 2001, when the Bush administration initiated a review of the previous executive order on classified materials signed by Bill Clinton in 1995. The Clinton order had been acclaimed in its day as a victory for transparency because it mandated the automatic declassification of most government files after 25 years.
It was predictable that the obsessively secretive Bush team would undermine the Clinton order. What was once a measure to make government more open would be redrawn to do the opposite. And sure enough, when the White House finally released its revised version, the scant news coverage focused on how the new rules postponed the Clinton deadline for automatic declassification and tightened secrecy so much that previously declassified documents could be reclassified.
But few noticed another change inserted five times in the revised text: every provision that gave powers to the president over classified documents was amended to give the identical powers to the vice president. This unprecedented increase in vice-presidential clout, though spelled out in black and white, went virtually unremarked in contemporary news accounts.
Given all the other unprecedented prerogatives that President Bush has handed his vice president, this one might seem to be just more of the same. But both the timing of the executive order and the subsequent use Mr. Cheney would make of it reveal its special importance in the games that the White House played with prewar intelligence.
The obvious juncture for Mr. Bush to bestow these new powers on his vice president, you might expect, would have been soon after 9/11, especially since the review process on the Clinton order started a month earlier and could be expedited, as so much other governmental machinery was, to meet the urgent national-security crisis. Yet the new executive order languished for another 18 months, only to be published and signed with no fanfare on March 25, 2003, a week after the invasion of Iraq began.
Why then? It was throughout March, both on the eve of the war and right after "Shock and Awe," that the White House's most urgent case for Iraq's imminent threat began to unravel. That case had been built around the scariest of Saddam's supposed W.M.D., the nuclear weapons that could engulf America in mushroom clouds, and the White House had pushed it relentlessly, despite a lack of evidence. On "Meet the Press" on March 16, Mr. Cheney pressed that doomsday button one more time: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." But even as the vice president spoke, such claims were at last being strenuously challenged in public.
Nine days earlier Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency had announced that documents supposedly attesting to Saddam's attempt to secure uranium in Niger were "not authentic." A then-obscure retired diplomat, Joseph Wilson, piped in on CNN, calling the case "outrageous."
Soon both Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Congressman Waxman wrote letters (to the F.B.I. and the president, respectively) questioning whether we were going to war because of what Mr. Waxman labeled "a hoax." And this wasn't the only administration use of intelligence that was under increasing scrutiny. The newly formed 9/11 commission set its first open hearings for March 31 and requested some half-million documents, including those pertaining to what the White House knew about Al Qaeda's threat during the summer of 2001.
The new executive order that Mr. Bush signed on March 25 was ingenious. By giving Mr. Cheney the same classification powers he had, Mr. Bush gave his vice president a free hand to wield a clandestine weapon: he could use leaks to punish administration critics.
That weapon would be employed less than four months later. Under Mr. Bush's direction, Mr. Cheney deputized Scooter Libby to leak highly selective and misleading portions of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to pet reporters as he tried to discredit Mr. Wilson. By then, Mr. Wilson had emerged as the most vocal former government official accusing the White House of not telling the truth before the war.
Because of the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation, we would learn three years later about the offensive conducted by Mr. Libby on behalf of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush. That revelation prompted the vice president to acknowledge his enhanced powers in an unguarded moment in a February 2006 interview with Brit Hume of Fox News. Asked by Mr. Hume with some incredulity if "a vice president has the authority to declassify information," Mr. Cheney replied, "There is an executive order to that effect." He was referring to the order of March 2003.
Even now, few have made the connection between this month's Cheney flap and the larger scandal. That larger scandal is to be found in what the vice president did legally under the executive order early on rather than in his more recent rejection of its oversight rules.
Timing really is everything. By March 2003, this White House knew its hype of Saddam's nonexistent nuclear arsenal was in grave danger of being exposed. The order allowed Mr. Bush to keep his own fingerprints off the nitty-gritty of any jihad against whistle-blowers by giving
Mr. Cheney the authority to pick his own shots and handle the specifics. The president could have plausible deniability and was free to deliver non-denial denials like "If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is." Mr. Cheney in turn could delegate the actual dirty work to Mr. Libby, who obstructed justice to help throw a smoke screen over the vice president's own role in the effort to destroy Mr. Wilson.
Last week The Washington Post ran a first-rate investigative series on the entire Cheney vice presidency. Readers posting comments were largely enthusiastic, but a few griped. "Six and a half years too late," said one. "Four years late and billions of dollars short," said another. Such complaints reflect the bitter legacy of much of the Washington press's failure to penetrate the hyping of prewar intelligence and, later, the import of the Fitzgerald investigation.
We're still playing catch-up. In a week in which the C.I.A. belatedly released severely censored secrets about agency scandals dating back a half-century, you have to wonder what else was done behind the shield of an executive order signed just after the Ides of March four years ago.
Another half-century could pass before Americans learn the full story of the secrets buried by Mr. Cheney and his boss to cover up their deceitful path to war.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Bush Grants Lying Libby a Free Pass - Shame!
OK Scooter Libby’s Presidential Pardon for obstruction of justice and perjury before a Grand Jury is perceived by President Bush’s equivalent of judicial jaywalking. Is that really our concern in Canada? It is American politics after all. However given Mr. Stephen Harper's proclivity to mimic all things Bush-league, I worry.
What if Harper actually manipulated the judicial appointment process, as he has professed to want to do? Would a Prime Ministerial pardon ever be even necessary (if it were possible in the first place in Canada) given that the Harper hand picked court of the future may be far from free and independent.
True Mr. Libby’s transgressions are not as tacky as a blowjob in the Oval Office anteroom with a willing Intern. They are however, to put the kindest possible light on it, power politics trumping a duty for good governance by the U.S. Executive Branch - and at so many levels.
In fact the Libby outing of a CIA operative (spy) while serving as Chief of Staff for the Vice-President, done for pure domestic partisan political reasons, undoubtedly put the lives and families of many more CIA operatives around the world at risk. Then to lie about it and to obstruct justice to boot – especialy given the fact that he is a lawyer and clearly knows better…that is unfathomable and unforgivable...unless of course you are George Bush and a Presidential pardon is within your power.
To “died in the wool” American Republican Conservatives Dubya must seem like a rock today. He is, after all, showing the "courage" to grant a Presiential Pardon to a reckless, wanton felon who may yet be seen by history to be a de facto traitor. To socially progressive citizens everywhere, given his actions yesterday, President Bush is also going to be perceived to be like a rock – only dumber.
I think Dubya just gave up the White House and the Congress to the Democrats in the 2008 elections with this action. I wonder if he hasn't also invited the laggardly impeachment proceedings against him to now pick up steam. That may be an appropriate reaction for American citizens to pursue, save for the fact that if impeachment were successful then Dick Cheney would be his pro tem replacement. Another rock - but this time it is one who like to be in or be creating "a hard place."
I want to look up to America but this latest abuse of the Rule of Law by the American head of state is making that nearly impossible, at least for now. Come on America...make us proud of you and your principles once again. We Canadians all know the world needs more Canada. But it also needs a renewed America.
What if Harper actually manipulated the judicial appointment process, as he has professed to want to do? Would a Prime Ministerial pardon ever be even necessary (if it were possible in the first place in Canada) given that the Harper hand picked court of the future may be far from free and independent.
True Mr. Libby’s transgressions are not as tacky as a blowjob in the Oval Office anteroom with a willing Intern. They are however, to put the kindest possible light on it, power politics trumping a duty for good governance by the U.S. Executive Branch - and at so many levels.
In fact the Libby outing of a CIA operative (spy) while serving as Chief of Staff for the Vice-President, done for pure domestic partisan political reasons, undoubtedly put the lives and families of many more CIA operatives around the world at risk. Then to lie about it and to obstruct justice to boot – especialy given the fact that he is a lawyer and clearly knows better…that is unfathomable and unforgivable...unless of course you are George Bush and a Presidential pardon is within your power.
To “died in the wool” American Republican Conservatives Dubya must seem like a rock today. He is, after all, showing the "courage" to grant a Presiential Pardon to a reckless, wanton felon who may yet be seen by history to be a de facto traitor. To socially progressive citizens everywhere, given his actions yesterday, President Bush is also going to be perceived to be like a rock – only dumber.
I think Dubya just gave up the White House and the Congress to the Democrats in the 2008 elections with this action. I wonder if he hasn't also invited the laggardly impeachment proceedings against him to now pick up steam. That may be an appropriate reaction for American citizens to pursue, save for the fact that if impeachment were successful then Dick Cheney would be his pro tem replacement. Another rock - but this time it is one who like to be in or be creating "a hard place."
I want to look up to America but this latest abuse of the Rule of Law by the American head of state is making that nearly impossible, at least for now. Come on America...make us proud of you and your principles once again. We Canadians all know the world needs more Canada. But it also needs a renewed America.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Lying Libby Says "Oops, My Bad" and Asks for Leniency
So Scooter Libby can’t get away with lying to the FBI, perjury before a Grand Jury and obstructing Justice. A jury found him guilty and an independent Judge passed sentence a 30 month and a $250K fine. This sends a strong message that abuse of power and betrayal of trust by governments and their operatives cannot be tolerated.
Undoubtedly there will be an appeal but that does not mean Mr. Libby will escape jail time pending an appeal. That is the next question before the Judge. Stay tuned – this is not over. My money says he does time pending an appeal.
This trial and the result is one more example and reason to be thankful for an independent judiciary. Former Prime Minister Mulroney, as mentor to current Prime Minister Harper reaffirmed this important cornerstone of democracy recently. Hopefully “our man” Steve is still listening to Brian and will cease and desist from further manipulation of the judicial review and appointment process. His recent interferences threaten this all important independence of the judiciary, one of most important protections a citizen has against the power of the state.
The Libby trial testimony according to media sources exposed the White House allegedly deeply involved in managing the news, manipulating reporters and exaggerating intelligence on Iraq’s WMD program. This is all laced with sufficient irony to make one cry, both in and for a free country and a once proud democracy.
Will Dubya do the Presidential Pardon thing? Given this, his tanked approval ratings and hubris he will likely see now down side. There will be a down side to a Presidential Pardon for Libby? Not for Dubya, he is already toast! But the Office of the President of the United States will no doubt suffer…as if Bush cares – or ever did about such matters.
One wonders if this will embolden the pursuers of presidential impeachment aimed at Bush 43?
Undoubtedly there will be an appeal but that does not mean Mr. Libby will escape jail time pending an appeal. That is the next question before the Judge. Stay tuned – this is not over. My money says he does time pending an appeal.
This trial and the result is one more example and reason to be thankful for an independent judiciary. Former Prime Minister Mulroney, as mentor to current Prime Minister Harper reaffirmed this important cornerstone of democracy recently. Hopefully “our man” Steve is still listening to Brian and will cease and desist from further manipulation of the judicial review and appointment process. His recent interferences threaten this all important independence of the judiciary, one of most important protections a citizen has against the power of the state.
The Libby trial testimony according to media sources exposed the White House allegedly deeply involved in managing the news, manipulating reporters and exaggerating intelligence on Iraq’s WMD program. This is all laced with sufficient irony to make one cry, both in and for a free country and a once proud democracy.
Will Dubya do the Presidential Pardon thing? Given this, his tanked approval ratings and hubris he will likely see now down side. There will be a down side to a Presidential Pardon for Libby? Not for Dubya, he is already toast! But the Office of the President of the United States will no doubt suffer…as if Bush cares – or ever did about such matters.
One wonders if this will embolden the pursuers of presidential impeachment aimed at Bush 43?
Monday, June 04, 2007
Harper at the G8 is Not Being Honest Nor is He Being a Broker.
Prime Minister Harper is off to the G8 and positioning Canada as the “honest broker” to bridge the gap between the climate change approaches between Europe and the Americans. Our Prime Minister has yet to clarify his own position on these issues so it is hard to see him as having any significant moral, legal or even intellectual authority to mediate between some pretty significant superpowers.
Our national economy and security is so tied to the USA that it is stretching credibility to believe the Europeans will see Harper as anything more than a shill for President Bush’s position on climate change.
It is not as if our record in Canada on GHG emissions cutting has been exemplary either. So there is no lever for persuasion or brokerage by Harper on that front. In fact we are doing a worse job than the Americans who never said they were to be bound by Kyoto in the first place. Harper’s own anaemic and hesitant policies on climate change offer nothing to add to his stature as an honest broker between Europe and American interests either.
He even misrepresents the India and China position on climate change. They have signed on to Kyoto but starting in the post-2012 period. According to the World Wildlife Fund, India currently contributes 2% of world GHG emissions with a billion people and China spews 5% with 1.3 billion people. Canada sources 2% of the worlds GHG emissions with only 35 million citizens.
The trends in all cases are not encouraging. In the time frame 1999-2004 Canada increased emissions 27%, India was up 57.5% and China increased by 73%. That only proves we are all in serious trouble. Canada obviously needs to do more at home and not just preach to China and India, as temping as that seems to be to Bush and Harper. As for an honest broker we are not in the best position be making the case to others now are we?
We have hardly anything to teach them, except perhaps not to waste the lead up time they have and to start early to create the changes necessary to comply with Kyoto. In Canada we have definitely squandered that lead time from when we signed on.
Yes Steve, it is not easy being green. It is even harder to be credible by pretending that you are. Harper’s Cons are spending big bucks in the pre-writ pre-election period that they don't have to account for when an inevitable election is called. Their message is focused on trying to convince us Dion is not a leader. Ironically Harper is spending lots of his personal political capital right now too. He is posing and posturing as a greenie and proving too all of us in the process that he is definitely not a leader.
Our national economy and security is so tied to the USA that it is stretching credibility to believe the Europeans will see Harper as anything more than a shill for President Bush’s position on climate change.
It is not as if our record in Canada on GHG emissions cutting has been exemplary either. So there is no lever for persuasion or brokerage by Harper on that front. In fact we are doing a worse job than the Americans who never said they were to be bound by Kyoto in the first place. Harper’s own anaemic and hesitant policies on climate change offer nothing to add to his stature as an honest broker between Europe and American interests either.
He even misrepresents the India and China position on climate change. They have signed on to Kyoto but starting in the post-2012 period. According to the World Wildlife Fund, India currently contributes 2% of world GHG emissions with a billion people and China spews 5% with 1.3 billion people. Canada sources 2% of the worlds GHG emissions with only 35 million citizens.
The trends in all cases are not encouraging. In the time frame 1999-2004 Canada increased emissions 27%, India was up 57.5% and China increased by 73%. That only proves we are all in serious trouble. Canada obviously needs to do more at home and not just preach to China and India, as temping as that seems to be to Bush and Harper. As for an honest broker we are not in the best position be making the case to others now are we?
We have hardly anything to teach them, except perhaps not to waste the lead up time they have and to start early to create the changes necessary to comply with Kyoto. In Canada we have definitely squandered that lead time from when we signed on.
Yes Steve, it is not easy being green. It is even harder to be credible by pretending that you are. Harper’s Cons are spending big bucks in the pre-writ pre-election period that they don't have to account for when an inevitable election is called. Their message is focused on trying to convince us Dion is not a leader. Ironically Harper is spending lots of his personal political capital right now too. He is posing and posturing as a greenie and proving too all of us in the process that he is definitely not a leader.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Harper Gets to Surge in a Poll...Bush is Still Waiting to Surge in Iraq
A BANNER HEADLINE IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL PROCLAIMS A TORY “SURGE.” Is anyone still surprised that Harper’s political hero and mentor is George W. Bush? Now Harper is intent on outdoing the “Dubya” by having his “surge” first… while the “Decider” is still waiting for his “permission slip” from Congress so he can have his Iraq troop “surge.”
This new Globe and Mail / CTV poll is just daring Steve to call an election. Let’s look at the ploy. The poll of 1000 Canadians done between Dec 15-18, with 3.1% margin of error, shows Harper has 36% versus Dion’s 18% indicating he “would do the best job of Prime Minister.” Layton is a respectable 16% but the real story is 23% undecided. Let’s put some context on this support.
Harper has been a federal party leader for almost 5 years, since March 20, 2002 when he took over the Alliance Party in a decisive first ballot victory from Stockwell Day. He has been Prime Minister for over a year in some of Canada’s most uncertain times. When this poll was taken Dion has been the leader of the Liberal Party, winning on the fourth ballot for a grand total of 75 DAYS, including political hothouse times of Christmas and New Year.
Smilin’ Jack Layton has been the NDP leader more than four years again winning with a first ballot victory on January 25, 2003. He is Mr. Charismatic winning that most meaningless of political questions at 36% nosing out Harper by a point. Harper has to be asking himself, “What is a poor economist to do to after five years to make people warm to him?”
The recent performances of the Liberal party under Chrétien and Martin have not been confidence builders by any stretch. The 36% support for Harper is amazing…amazingly low under the circumstance. The 18% for Dion is also amazing…amazing he has that much support at all when he is virtually unknown, leading a disgraced party who is still in the political penalty box in the mind of Canadians.
On name recognition alone one would expect Harper to be a big winner…”the devil you know.” The most important number on this question…again the 23% undecided. That should scare the “beejeezez” out of Harper and give Dion a glimmer of hope. Remember campaigns matter.
The headline reporting on this poll is a pure ploy to bait Harper into an ego driven early election. I say this because the headline is a misdirection of the poll results as a whole. The real story was on A7 of the Globe and Mail. Taking the 3.1% margin of error in context the critical political questions show a statistical tie.
The key question of “…how would you vote today” has the Cons (34) and Libs (29) still in a statistical tie. “Who do you identify with the most,” Cons (27) Libs (28) another statistical tie. The statistical tie story is the same on questions of who would govern best, manage the economy best and deal with the environment and global warming. About 25% of Canadians are undecided on each of these questions…that is the real story here.
Harper’s five years in leadership politics and focus on only five political promises in the past year has given him the clear edge to where 50% see him as having “…the clearest vision of where HE (emphasis added) want to take the country. He is also seen as the most decisive by 53% of respondents.
The real question these numbers beg is do we share HIS vision of the country…it is not decided yet – just look at the size of the undecided voters. Being decisive is not helpful if we don’t trust you or your decisions or your agenda. What if the voter’s true sense of Harper is one of a man often wrong but never in doubt! That will not win an election.
As for the personal characteristics in this poll, it is old news. We have already seen them from Nik Nanos at SES in his February 12 poll. Read my post of Feb 12 for my take on it then too.
This new Globe and Mail / CTV poll is just daring Steve to call an election. Let’s look at the ploy. The poll of 1000 Canadians done between Dec 15-18, with 3.1% margin of error, shows Harper has 36% versus Dion’s 18% indicating he “would do the best job of Prime Minister.” Layton is a respectable 16% but the real story is 23% undecided. Let’s put some context on this support.
Harper has been a federal party leader for almost 5 years, since March 20, 2002 when he took over the Alliance Party in a decisive first ballot victory from Stockwell Day. He has been Prime Minister for over a year in some of Canada’s most uncertain times. When this poll was taken Dion has been the leader of the Liberal Party, winning on the fourth ballot for a grand total of 75 DAYS, including political hothouse times of Christmas and New Year.
Smilin’ Jack Layton has been the NDP leader more than four years again winning with a first ballot victory on January 25, 2003. He is Mr. Charismatic winning that most meaningless of political questions at 36% nosing out Harper by a point. Harper has to be asking himself, “What is a poor economist to do to after five years to make people warm to him?”
The recent performances of the Liberal party under Chrétien and Martin have not been confidence builders by any stretch. The 36% support for Harper is amazing…amazingly low under the circumstance. The 18% for Dion is also amazing…amazing he has that much support at all when he is virtually unknown, leading a disgraced party who is still in the political penalty box in the mind of Canadians.
On name recognition alone one would expect Harper to be a big winner…”the devil you know.” The most important number on this question…again the 23% undecided. That should scare the “beejeezez” out of Harper and give Dion a glimmer of hope. Remember campaigns matter.
The headline reporting on this poll is a pure ploy to bait Harper into an ego driven early election. I say this because the headline is a misdirection of the poll results as a whole. The real story was on A7 of the Globe and Mail. Taking the 3.1% margin of error in context the critical political questions show a statistical tie.
The key question of “…how would you vote today” has the Cons (34) and Libs (29) still in a statistical tie. “Who do you identify with the most,” Cons (27) Libs (28) another statistical tie. The statistical tie story is the same on questions of who would govern best, manage the economy best and deal with the environment and global warming. About 25% of Canadians are undecided on each of these questions…that is the real story here.
Harper’s five years in leadership politics and focus on only five political promises in the past year has given him the clear edge to where 50% see him as having “…the clearest vision of where HE (emphasis added) want to take the country. He is also seen as the most decisive by 53% of respondents.
The real question these numbers beg is do we share HIS vision of the country…it is not decided yet – just look at the size of the undecided voters. Being decisive is not helpful if we don’t trust you or your decisions or your agenda. What if the voter’s true sense of Harper is one of a man often wrong but never in doubt! That will not win an election.
As for the personal characteristics in this poll, it is old news. We have already seen them from Nik Nanos at SES in his February 12 poll. Read my post of Feb 12 for my take on it then too.
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