Able Archer

Giuliani's trips to the Hamptons

At what points does Rudolph Giuliani’s candidacy for president become to ridiculous to be sustained? It seems Giuliani is doing all he can to find out. After Bernard Kerik was indicted and we found out Giuliani knew about Kerik’s underworld tires before he appointed him to run the NYPD, after Giuliani stuck by his old friend and accused pedophile priest Alan Placa, now Giuliani is found to have hidden the security expenses for trips to the Hamptons with his then-mistress and now wife.

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

The Hamptons. Not quite Myrtle Beach. The beach of repose for New York’s cultural elite – that’s where Rudy was with his mistress the weekends before 9/11. How can he continue to campaign with a straight face in Iowa and South Carolina, where Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush made a rule that the Republican candidate succeeds best with a strictly-enforced jus’-folksiness.

I am not indignant that Giuliani hid the costs of his luxury trips to the beach. It was a monumentally greedy thing to do, but Giuliani seems to think he is entitled to nearly anything. But I did not make American conservatism into a show of who could be the everyman John Wayne, splitting his time between staring down mortal enemies and tending to his ranch. Giuliani is a true New York eccentric – a law-and-order politician with an immigrant tenet temper but also slightly effete, seeming to revel in the decadence of his city, visiting high-class cigar bars and restaurants, romping on Long Island like old Gatsby, living with a gay couple after his wife threw him out, and appearing in a dress for laughs. I suppose this is fine; New York has produced many men of such power and vanity. But none of them seriously attempted to take over the post-Reagan Republican Party, which grew famous by damning just such caricatured East Coast behavior. When is this contradiction going to catch up with either Giuliani or the Republican Party?

-- Douglas Carlucci

Corzine resists Rutgers football delusions

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine did the right thing this week and said no to the ridiculous delusions of big-time college football at Rutgers University.

Corzine said the state would not provide a $30 million loan to help the state university expand Rutgers Stadium, in Piscataway. Rutgers estimates the total cost of the expansion would be $100 million – the loss of the state loan puts the entire project in jeopardy.

New Jersey, like most states, has treated its state universities badly as it descended into debt and special-interest government in the nineties. But Rutgers football – unlike, say, Rutgers rowing or Rutgers academics – became an unlikely zeitgeist last year. After decades as a Big East doormat, Rutgers won 11 games and became a name in the college football industry.

Suddenly, 41,500 seats were not enough for Rutgers home games. At least, this is so according the Rutgers Board of Governors and its athletic director, as well as the schools’ coach, who, according to Steve Politi in the Star-Ledger, only turned down a higher-paying job at the University of Miami because he was promised a bigger stadium.

Coach Schiano and the athletic department are cynical, and the Rutgers board is blinded by sentiment. Schiano and AD Robert Mulcahy must know for what they are asking: they want the state and Rutgers students – in the form of those inescapable “fees” – to build a new stadium, which will raise Rutgers profile. This is how Rutgers will become a major college football powerhouse – which will fatten the bottom-line of the athletic department. The athletic department probably will not share the loot with the academic departments it supposedly compliments.

The Board of Governors, like so many university trustees, seem to be too touched by all those young men and women in the stands in scarlet to notice the obvious shortcomings of the plan. Much of the proposed construction would be of businesses to be run by the athletic department. Nine-hundred new “club seats” would be sold by the athletic department for $2,000 for the season, generating $2 million in new revenue. The athletic department would also presumably run the proposed “dining club.”

Worse, the construction, the most powerful proponent of which is Coach Schiano, makes very generous assumptions about Rutgers long-term chances in college ball. Simply, what if Rutgers sucks again? What if the ticket sales go slack, and the stands are empty? Coach Schiano will probably move onto another program, and Rutgers will be stuck with a $100 million monument to his promises. College football is not a predictable endeavor – Rutgers will be competing with schools where the college football hustle has been going on for all the decades the program in New Brunswick was languishing with two or three wins each year. Rutgers didn’t exactly look convincing last night in its first game after it was denied the loan.

Athletic departments want it both ways. They want the perks of big time entertainment – Schiano is to make $1.5 million a year until 2016, plus whatever athletic boosters give him – provided by the cost-free labor of student athletes. They also want to be treated by government and taxpayers as legitimate parts of the university’s educational mission. Most big time programs are not – they are simply sports-entertainment ventures growing on the side of schools by trading on their name. Worse, they are usually unprofitable because of all the perks. Rutgers football lost $3 million last year.

Corzine seems to have gotten the message from voters: austerity on state-sponsored toys like stadiums, and experiments like stem cell research grants.

-- Douglas Carlucci

Kerik publisher says News Corp. told her to lie

From the New York Times:

Judith Regan, the book publisher who was fired by the News Corporation last year, asserts in a lawsuit filed today that a senior executive at the media conglomerate encouraged her to mislead federal investigators about her relationship with Bernard B. Kerik during his bid to become homeland security secretary in late 2004.

The lawsuit asserts that the News Corporation executive wanted to protect the presidential aspirations of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Kerik’s mentor, who had appointed him New York City police commissioner and had recommended him for the federal post.

Ms. Regan makes the charge at the start of a 70-page filing that seeks $100 million in damages for what she says was a campaign to smear and discredit her by her bosses at HarperCollins and its parent company, the News Corporation, after her project to publish a book with O.J. Simpson was abandoned amid a storm of protest.

In the civil complaint filed in state court in Manhattan, Ms. Regan says the company has long sought to promote Mr. Giuliani’s ambitions. But the lawsuit does not elaborate on that charge, or identify the executive who she alleged pressured her to mislead investigators, nor does it offer details or evidence to back up her claim.

Ms. Regan had an affair with Mr. Kerik, who is married, beginning in the spring of 2001, when her imprint, Regan Books, began work on his memoir, “The Lost Son.” In December 2004, after the relationship had ended and shortly after Mr. Kerik’s homeland security nomination fell apart, newspapers reported that the two had carried on the affair at an apartment near Ground Zero that had been donated as a respite for rescue and recovery workers.

Mr. Kerik, who in 2004 said he withdrew his nomination because of problems with his hiring of a nanny, was indicted last week on federal tax fraud and other charges.

“Defendants were well aware that Regan had a personal relationship with Kerik,” the complaint says. “In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.”

Fox News in particular has a rather obvious pro-Giuliani slant. He has showed up on the network many more times than the other candidates and has played softball more than once on Hannity and Colmes. (This is the funniest interview; Hannity is such a slavish interviewer it's painful to watch.)

-- Douglas Carlucci

Coll on Pakistan

Steve Coll's article in the New Yorker this week is the best concise piece on Pakistan's internal conflicts. Coll notes the important distinction between the two domestic conflicts in the country:

Pakistan is gripped by two overlapping crises. The more visible one is the struggle between Musharraf, the judiciary, and the civilian politicians over elections and power sharing—an uncompromising contest among compromised leaders that two weeks ago culminated in a state of emergency, followed by an Army-led crackdown on human-rights activists, the independent media, and political organizers. It is sustained in part by the competition between two forces: the military, a broadly based, middle-class, undemocratic institution; and the People’s Party, a broadly based, somewhat poorer, undemocratic institution (it has never held internal elections). The People’s Party began as a rural socialist movement, led by Benazir Bhutto’s father, who was hanged by the Army, and it has led national governments three times; when Bhutto returned to Pakistan from exile last month, her followers poured into Karachi to show that they can still rule the streets. The struggle between the Party and the Army, however, is not likely to produce a major transformation—the house arrests, tear-gas clouds, and baton charges are only the latest episode in the national narrative of political dysfunction.

More alarming is the low-grade civil war on Pakistan’s western border, a conflict that is pitting the Army, dominated by ethnic Punjabis, against Islamists in the country’s tribally organized Pashtun minority, a deeply conservative people who helped repel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, and gave birth to the Taliban. The latest Pashtun uprising, which is also directed at secular Pakistani politicians and their Western allies, began several years ago. Taliban irredentism and proselytizing by a regrouping Al Qaeda leadership, presumably including Osama bin Laden himself, were among the causes. But antipathy toward the United States, the scheming of Pakistani intelligence officers and, perhaps, senior Army officers, who have long succored Pashtun Islamists, and, crucially, Musharraf’s persistent inability to build a political coalition of Pashtun allies who could help contain the Islamists also played a part.

Musharraf’s miscalculations were abetted by the United States, which until recently all but ignored the political aspects of counterinsurgency in Pashtun territory. The Bush Administration, distracted by the war in Iraq, and conditioned by its long dependence on Pakistan’s Army, outsourced its Pakistan policy to Musharraf and bankrolled his narrow, increasingly self-defeating strategies. Of the approximately ten billion dollars in overt funds delivered to Pakistan since September 11th, for example, less than a hundred million has gone toward education, an issue about which Musharraf has spoken often but done very little.

The Pakistani Army’s intermittent attempts to suppress the Pashtun Islamists have failed, and these reversals have recently produced stresses within the military not witnessed since the country broke in half, in 1971: the humiliating surrender and capture of hundreds of Pakistani soldiers and local Pashtun paramilitaries, which have led to prisoner exchanges with the Taliban; reports of desertion and mutiny; and a succession of demoralizing battlefield defeats. About fifteen per cent of Pakistan’s Army officers are Pashtun, and the danger of revolt or division among them is deepening. Suicide bombings, emanating principally from the tribal areas—such as the one that claimed a hundred and forty lives at Bhutto’s rally in Karachi—now occur regularly in cities and towns that had little previous experience of them. They have also created havoc in Afghanistan, where Pashtuns make up about half the population.

I have wanted to write about the situation in Pakistan since last week, but a few things have stopped me. Although I have a pretty good general knowledge of the country, I have never been to Pakistan and I do not know any of the languages spoken there. I do not want to become another American writer trying to guess what the hell is going on in a country I have limited, second-hand knowledge of. That said, I do speak English and have lived in America all my life, and I know a great deal about how this country uses power in foreign countries. This is what I want to write about because too few writers do. So look for that over the next few weeks.

-- Douglas Carlucci

WCBS: Kerik indicted

New York media reports Bernard Kerik, former city police commissioner and Rudy Giuliani crony, was indicted by a federal grand jury today.

From the AP, via Newsday:

Bernard Kerik, the police commissioner under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani who nearly became head of the Homeland Security Department, will surrender to federal authorities Friday to be arraigned on criminal charges, an official said Thursday.

The federal law enforcement official said prosecutors plan to announce the filing of an indictment against Kerik at a news conference Friday.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of grand jury proceedings.

-- Douglas Carlucci

Kerik to be indicted this week

New York media reported this afternoon Bernard Kerik, former city police commissioner and Rudy Giuliani crony, would be indicted Thursday. He is to be charged with tax fraud, corruption, and conspiracy.

The New York Times reports on its City Room blog:

Federal prosecutors are scheduled to seek a grand jury indictment on Thursday of Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner, on a list of charges that include tax fraud, corruption and conspiracy, according to people who have been briefed on the case.

The grand jury, sitting in Westchester, has been hearing evidence about Mr. Kerik for more than a year as part of a broad federal investigation into a variety of allegations, including his acceptance of $165,000 in renovations from a contractor who was seeking a city license.

If an indictment is voted up, as prosecutors are expected to request, it would remain sealed until Friday, when Mr. Kerik would be arraigned in United States District Court in White Plains.

On the same day his liaison to New York’s underworld went down, Giuliani got an important endorsement from Sun Belt televangelist Pat Robertson:

Rudolph W. Giuliani scored a coup today by winning the support of Pat Robertson, who, as one of the nation’s best-known televangelists, could help Mr. Giuliani reassure Republicans who are wary of his support for abortion rights and gay rights.

Mr. Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, said in endorsing Mr. Giuliani in Washington, that he believed “the overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the blood lust of Islamic terrorists” and praised Mr. Giuliani as a “true fiscal conservative.”

While Mr. Robertson did not mention Mr. Giuliani’s support of abortion rights, he said approvingly that Mr. Giuliani “has assured the American people that his choices for judicial appointments will be men and women who share the judicial philosophy of John Roberts and Antonin Scalia,” who have argued against Roe v. Wade.

Giuliani is not a conservative true-believer. He never had much regard for Scalia and Roberts’s judicial politics before he sought the right-wing Christian vote. Giuliani believes he needs the support of men like Robertson to win the presidency; men like Robertson support Giuliani because they think he is going to win. They might be fooling each other, or they might both be right – either way, the alliance is based on political expediency.

-- Douglas Carlucci

Jersey voters reject stem-cell borrowing, support conservation fund

New Jersey voters agreed with my advice on the four public questions on yesterday's ballot. Maybe I should go into the wagering business.

Voters rejected using new sales tax revenue to offset property taxes, and a $400 million bond issue to subsidize stem-cell research. They approved a $200 million bond issue to buy open land and supported and changing the language in the state constitution regarding voting rights for the mentally disabled. All were wise decisions for the reasons I described the other day.

There will be a price for rejecting the stem-cell borrowing that I forgot to mention, however: right-wingers and religionists are already claiming it is proof the public does not support stem cell research. This is far from the truth. New Jersey elected a governor two years ago who campaigned strongly for stem cell research and voters have consistently supported state legislature candidates with similar opinions.

Bogota mayor and right-wing gadfly Steve Lonegan gets it half right today's Star-Ledger: "New Jersey is not the hopelessly liberal state people claim it is. People are saying enough is enough with the borrowing, and the we shouldn't be venturing into highly risky business ventures."

The measure failed because the state asked for way too much money and its supporters -- Gov. Corzine and Senate President Richard Codey (D-Essex) -- did not address the implications of still more state debt. Politicians on both sides wanted to make the measure a moral issue; voters wisely reminded them budgeting is about choices and the state can't have everything. Decisions were made long ago to put the government deeply in hock and now we have to deal with the consequences.

New Jersey, however, remains a "hopelessly liberal state." Voters supported the bond issue to buy and conserve open land before it can be sold off to the stripmall and McMansion developers who bankroll the "free enterprise" and "development" extremists in both parties. They also continue to hope stem cell research succeeds and New Jersey universities and companies are the vanguard of the science. They just don't want to be stuck paying the bill for it in ten years.

-- Douglas Carlucci

Advice to New Jersey voters

One more thing before I leave Able Archer alone and start studying. Tomorrow is election day in New Jersey. Here’s my advice to voters:

Don’t vote for the incumbent legislator

Our legislature has turned into a social club for political hacks. It has failed at every opportunity to solve the problems of governing New Jersey. Does one suppose it is going to be this session when they finally decide to burn the midnight oil and take on the state’s debt crisis? Don’t make a bet. They will get themselves re-elected, dole out favors from the public trough, go back to fundraising and in two years, when everyone realizes the problems have gotten worse, they will make token gestures of “governing” and repeat the cycle. It is time for retirement.

Take my senator, Paul Sarlo. His main contributions to my district are lining up government support for Xanadu, the obscene mall “development” in the Meadowlands. He should be proud: as any resident of Bergen County knows, it is in desperate need of malls. Sarlo also set up cut-rate government loans for EnCap, the company that proposed to clean up several Meadowlands landfills but instead accomplished the rare feat of actually making them dirtier.

Xanadu will open soon; I would love for Sarlo to have a lot of time to visit it with his family. I am going to do my part by not voting for him.

Use your judgment. There are some honorable and intelligent members of the New Jersey legislature. But they are the true minority party.

Vote NO on public question number one

Do you approve the amendment of Article VIII, Section I of the Constitution of the State of New Jersey, to provide for the annual dedication and annual appropriation of an amount equal to the annual revenue derived from a tax rate of 1% imposed under the New Jersey Sales and Use Tax, exclusively for the purpose of property tax reform, through a special Property Tax Reform Account established in the constitutionally dedicated Property Tax Relief Fund?

This sounds like a good idea, but think about it: The government is asking us to dedicate part of the state’s consumption tax revenue to alleviate the property tax burden. This is called an accounting trick. Property tax relief is going to come from … last year’s tax increase! Why don’t they just let us keep that extra cent on each dollar so we can save it to pay our property taxes? Because everyone pays the consumption tax, but only property owners pay the property tax. Property taxes won’t decrease – they’ll just be subsidized by everyone who makes a purchase in New Jersey. Vote no. Let them know you’re not quite as dumb as they’d like you to be.

Vote NO on public question number two

Shall the "New Jersey Stem Cell Research Bond Act," which authorizes the State to issue bonds in the amount of $450 million for grants to fund "stem cell research projects," as defined in the act, at institutions of higher education and other entities in the State conducting scientific and medical research, and providing the ways and means to pay the interest on the debt and also to pay and discharge the principal thereof, provided that recurring revenues of the State are certified by the State Treasurer to be available in an amount equal to the sum necessary to satisfy the annual debt service obligations related to such bonds, be approved?

You can’t have it all. It would be great if the state had money to subsidize stem cell research; sadly, it does not. I fully support stem cell research and I think the government should encourage it. However, the state needs to have some sense of fiscal discipline. Perhaps if the government had some plan to pay off its present debt and future pension obligations, this would be manageable. Right now it is not.

Vote YES on public question number three

Shall the "Green Acres, Farmland, Blue Acres, and Historic Preservation Bond Act of 2007," which authorizes the State to issue bonds in the amount of $200 million to provide moneys for (1) the acquisition and development of lands for recreation and conservation purposes, (2) the preservation of farmland for agricultural or horticultural use and production, (3) the acquisition, for recreation and conservation purposes, of properties in the floodways of the Delaware River, Passaic River, and Raritan River, and their tributaries, that are prone to or have incurred flood or storm damage, and (4) funding historic preservation projects; and providing the ways and means to pay the interest on the debt and also to pay and discharge the principal thereof, be approved?

I know this contradicts my position on public question number two, but there is a difference. If New Jersey does not subsidize it, businesses and universities will still pursue stem cell technology. If New Jersey does not purchase and conserve its remaining open land, no one will. “Development” has almost totally ruined our environment. It has caused our relationship with the state’s bears and deer to sour, and it has encouraged a dependence on automobiles that could hobble our economy if cheap petroleum suddenly became history. This is an essential measure to preserve what is left of New Jersey’s natural environment.

Vote YES on public question number four

Shall the amendment of Article II, Section I, paragraph 6 of the Constitution, agreed to by the Legislature, revising the current constitutional language concerning denial of the right to vote by deleting the phrase "idiot or insane person" and providing instead that a "person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting" shall not enjoy the right of suffrage, be adopted?

The current language is inhumane and prone to abuse, and a revision is long overdue. Vote yes.

-- Douglas Carlucci

I learned it at Yale

Something comes along and it all makes sense. Scott Horton posted this gem on his top-shelf blog at Harper's:

New York Times, “Branding Rite Laid to Yale University,” Nov. 8, 1967

NEW HAVEN, Nov. 7–A Yale fraternity accused by the student newspaper of burning its initiates with a brand will have its fate decided Friday by student fraternity leaders.

The fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, could face the temporary closure of its house and a $1,000 fine resulting from alleged violations of rules previously passed by the Inter-Fraternity Council, which consists of Yale’s five fraternity presidents.

The charges against Delta Kappa Epsilon were made last Friday in a Yale Daily News article that accused campus fraternities of carrying on “sadistic and obscene” initiation procedures.

The charge that has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus is that Delta Kappa Epsilon applied a “hot branding iron” to the small of the back of its 40 new members in ceremonies two weeks ago. A photograph showing a scab in the shape of the Greek letter Delta, approximately a half inch wide, appeared with the article.

A former president of Delta said that the branding is done with a hot coathanger. But the former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound is “only a cigarette burn.”

Things Fall Apart: Bush and Pakistan, Part One

I don't have time today, but I will be writing more this week on Pakistan. Along with the low-level conflict between Turkey and Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq, Musharraf's decision to shed his business suit once and for all and come out as a military dictator is a good indicator that President Bush's foreign policy is beginning to come apart. Certainly America's corrupt relationship with Musharraf did not begin with President Bush, but since The War President has never been shy about insisting on the authority of his office these last few years, I think he ought to own the recent colossal, epochal failures of U.S. foreign policy, too.

A good description and analysis of the current crisis was published today by Ahmed Rashid in the Washington Post. He makes an important distinction:

The other prime targets were not the extremists terrorizing major swaths of northern Pakistan but the country's democratic, secular elite. Dozens of judges, lawyers and human rights workers have been arrested. Others have gone into hiding. Asma Jahangir, Pakistan's leading human rights activist, is under house arrest. She appealed yesterday for the Bush administration "to stop all support of the unstable dictator as his lust for power is bringing the country close to a worse form of civil strife."

Rashid also aptly describes the limitations of Musharraf's strategy:

Despite U.S. expectations it is unlikely that Musharraf will use his new powers to step up a military offensive in the north. His first concern is political survival. More likely are a flurry of truces and shaky peace deals with the Pakistani Taliban that will leave them in place. As a timely sop to the Pentagon, the arrests of a few high-level leaders of the Afghan Taliban and perhaps an al-Qaeda leader are possible. But the extremists know that the Pakistani state has been irretrievably weakened and that this is the moment to push their offensive.

The key question Musharraf faces is how long the army will continue to back him. Rank-and-file soldiers are keenly aware of the widening gulf between them and the public they are supposed to protect. The army, already demoralized, is unwilling to fight a never-ending war against its own people.

For now, the judges are gone, the media has been censored, the opposition and lawyers jailed and curtailed. But Musharraf's emergency is not sustainable. Ruling by force without any political support will prove impossible.

UPDATE

Professor Juan Cole analyses the situation here.

He notes the leader of the fundamentalist Jamaat-i Islami is the only leader calling for mass resistance against Musharraf's declaration of marshal law:

Qadi Hussain Ahmad, the leader of the fundamentalist Jamaat-i Islami called Sunday for massive protests against the coup of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. He was speaking to a crowd of 20,000 near the major Punjabi city of Lahore. I just saw Qazi Hussain on Aljazeera condemning Musharraf as a traitor, saying in English, "This is clear treason." The Jamaat-i Islami is still largely a cadre organization rather than a mass movement, though it did win a lot of votes in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan. It has in the past organized demonstrations as big as 80,000 in the southern port of Karachi, though for a city of Karachi's size (9 million), that isn't actually all that impressive. That the Jama'at got 20,000 to rally near Lahore strikes me as a bad sign for Musharraf. What is really significant, however, is that Qazi Hussain is the only major party leader openly calling for mass resistance against Musharraf, a stance which will help the popularity of his party even if (as seems likely) he winds up in jail over it.

-- Douglas Carlucci