Able Archer

McCain, FEC update

Senator John McCain's fight with the Federal Election Commission continues. Today, the McCain campaign sent a letter (written by campaign lawyer Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman) to the commission claiming the candidate has a "constitutional right" to withdraw from the public financing system.

The campaign, in a letter to Federal Election Commission Chairman David Mason, also said McCain did not encumber his potential share of public matching funds as collateral for a crucial $4 million loan he obtained late last year.

McCain lawyer Trevor Potter said the Supreme Court concluded that public financing for campaigns is constitutional because it is voluntary. "As a result, candidates have a constitutional right to withdraw from the program," Potter, a former FEC chairman, wrote Mason.

McCain's loan, from Fidelity & Trust Bank, has become a central issue in the Arizona senator's attempt to bypass the public financing system and the strict spending caps that come with it. Mason told McCain last week that the commission's approval was required and that he needed to explain the terms of his loan.

"The campaign did not use its federal matching fund certifications as security for the campaign's bank loan," Potter wrote.

Lawyers for the bank said in their own letter Monday that the loan agreement was carefully drafted to give McCain the opportunity to withdraw from public financing during the primary elections. They said the loan terms specifically excluded from the collateral any potential share of public matching funds McCain was entitled to receive.

I readily admit I'm not an expert on campaign finance, and McCain may technically be right. I doubt it, but it might be so. At the very least, though, McCain is violating the spirit of the law, and, as a politician whose credibility is based on his work on campaign finance legislation, this is a real problem for his campaign.

I'll write about this as I learn more; I think it's a big issue.

—Douglas Carlucci

Holden Caulfield appears

I was rereading some of J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories last night and was looking around the internet for some of his unpublished work. I found this story, first published in the New Yorker in 1946, in which Holden Caulfield makes his first appearance. It’s not obscure, but I had never read it, and it isn’t in any of Salinger’s published collections. The story is first-rate and the essential conflict that came to be The Catcher and the Rye is developed beautifully.

Slight Rebellion Off Madison

By J. D. Salinger

On vacation from Pencey Preparatory School for Boys (“An Instructor for Every Ten Students”), Holden Morrisey Caulfield usually wore his chesterfield and a hat with a cutting edge at the "V" in the crown. While riding in Fifth Avenue buses, girls who knew Holden often thought they saw him walking past Saks' or Altman's or Lord & Taylor's, but it was usually somebody else.

This year, Holden's Christmas vacation from Pencey Prep broke at the same time as Sally Hayes' from Mary A. Woodruff School for Girls ("Special Attention to Those Interested in Dramatics"). On vacation from Mary A. Woodruff, Sally usually went hatless and wore her new silverblue muskrat coat. While riding in Fifth Avenue, boys who knew Sally often thought they saw her walking past Saks' or Altman's or Lord & Taylor's. It was usually somebody else.

Fight for you right to subsidize professional sports

State Senator Paul Sarlo is complaining about the deal Newark officials made when building the Prudential Center; Sarlo’s gripe comes after Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo called for the Meadowlands arena, in Sarlo’s district, to be closed in order to generate more business for the Newark arena.

Maybe they should have worked this out before they built two arenas within ten miles of one another.

From the Star-Ledger:

A prominent Bergen County official went on the offensive yesterday, accusing Newark of making a "sweetheart deal" with the Prudential Center developers and asking to review the venue's lease and financial records.

The jab came soon after Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo called for the Meadowlands arena to close so Newark's venue will have a better shot at succeeding. DiVincenzo has called together a coalition of Essex County politicians to fight for "The Rock." The group is set to meet tomorrow to form a game plan, he said.

Located within 10 miles of each other, the recently opened Prudential Center in Newark and the 27-year-old Izod Center in the Meadowlands are in hot competition to attract ticket buyers and entertainment acts.

Yesterday, state Sen. Paul Sarlo wrote to the city of Newark and its housing authority, demanding copies of the Prudential Center's records.

"I'm not going to stand by and destroy a successful state asset to benefit a wealthy private investor," Sarlo said, in a reference to Devils team owner Jeff Vanderbeek. "He already has a sweetheart deal in place."

Sarlo was also among nearly 20 officials with ties to Bergen County and the New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority to issue a statement yesterday calling the Izod Center "a boon to the entire region." The sports authority said it expects a profit of $2.2 million this year.

The Meadowlands arena had such an unfavorable lease with the hockey team that it operated at a loss until the Devils left last year, Sarlo said.

A spokeswoman for the city, Janet Dickerson, declined to comment.

The housing authority's executive director, Keith Kinard, did not return calls yesterday.

Newark's deal with the arena benefits the city by granting it a portion of all revenues, and by attracting more redevelopment around it, Vanderbeek said.

"It's just really a catalyst to spur the redevelopment of the downtown core," he said.

According to the Devils' 30-year lease with Newark, the team pays the city 7 percent of its income from suites, concessions, advertising and naming rights, plus 4 percent of other income, with a minimum annual payment of $2 million.

The city contributed $220 million to build the $375 million arena with the Devils paying for the rest. The total public investment is about $311 million, including work around the arena site.

My case against the Prudential Center can be read here and here. In short, Newark very clearly got screwed on the deal: by the time the city makes back its tremendous investment of public money, the Devils will probably want to move onto a new and better arena (look at how they came to regard the 30-year-old Meadowlands arena), which will be build by another unfortunate burg with public money, and the city of Newark will be left with a huge, underused hulk in the center of its downtown.

It should be said that Sarlo’s complaint is terribly disingenuous. He can hardly complain about dedicating public money to a redundant private enterprise: Sarlo lined up a lot of public cash for both the ridiculous Xanadu mall (next to the Meadowlands arena) and the disastrous EnCap development in Lyndhurst.

New Jersey Bonus

How much money does it take to fix a deathtrap? It will cost $40 million to repair the Pulaski Skyway this year.

The cost of fixing the aged, crumbling and heavily traveled Pulaski Skyway will be tens of millions of dollars higher than the Department of Transportation originally believed.

The department started work last summer on the $10 million first phase of a rehab project intended to keep the bridge sound for the decade or longer it would take to replace it.

But once work started, DOT officials said yesterday, they realized the Skyway was in need of a more urgent and expensive overhaul, one that will cost close to $40 million this year alone. They plan to shift $30 million from other bridge and road projects to cover the difference, and they expect to have to spend more money in future years.

"There's only so much money to go around," said Tom Wospil, DOT's director of capital investment. "We're back to the same old math problem: If something goes up, something else must go down."

The Pulaski Skyway has played a central role in the public discourse over New Jersey's aging infrastructure since the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed in August, killing 13 people.

The Skyway, which crosses the Hackensack and Passaic rivers from Jersey City to Newark, is of the same outdated design as the Minneapolis span and is more than 30 years older. On the 0-to-100 scale that bridge engineers use to measure a span's ability to carry traffic, the section of the Skyway in Hudson County scores a 2. The section in Essex County scores a 0. [Emphasis mine]

It's a curious phenomenon: New Jersey started fixing all the bridges in this area after the Minneapolis bridge collapsed. They've been working every night on the Route 3 bridge over the Passaic River for months. Makes you wonder: in what part of their decline and fall are these bridges?

—Douglas Carlucci

'You still have to investigate crimes, not people.'

If you missed it, here’s 60 Minutes’ devasting piece on the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. This is the best piece of broadcast journalism I’ve seen in a very long time:

Scott Horton has been reporting on this case for months on his weblog at Harpers.org—his work is absolutely essential reading. There is no better example of what eight years of the Bush administration has done to American politics than this phony prosecution. Siegelman sits in prison today for no other reason than that he was a successful Democrat in a Republican state. I am sure that if the whole of this conspiracy becomes known before January 2009, several former high-level Bush administration officials will be prosecuted.

For what it’s worth, Karl Rove denies Jill Simpsons’s allegations. I don’t believe him and you shouldn’t either—his career is deception, and he’s a veteran of dirty-trick politics in Alabama.

And as though the whole sad affair were not maddening enough, at least one CBS affiliate in Alabama went dark while it was broadcasting the Siegelman piece. The station manager claims he lost the network feed from New York for 12 minutes—almost the exact length of the segment.

Update

The Times looks into the CBS blackout here. Horton called CBS:

I contacted CBS News in New York and was told that “There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters.”

—Douglas Carlucci

Smart move by Dean and the DNC

From the Wall Street Journal:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told reporters today that the DNC will file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission Monday over Sen. John McCain’s recent letter to the FEC informing them that he is withdrawing from the public financing system for his presidential campaign.

“We are in this complaint to the FEC asserting that the senator and his campaign are still bound to the conditions by matching funds including the spending limits of approximately $56 million dollars,” Dean said.

McCain and his campaign have vigorously disputed that assertion in light of a recent letter from FEC Chairman David Mason to the McCain campaign stating that he cannot formally withdrawal from the system until the FEC obtains more information regarding the terms of a $4 million loan his then cash-strapped campaign obtained last year as well as a formal vote from the commission, which would require an approval from four of the six members on the panel.

The backstory on McCain's FEC troubles is here.

—Douglas Carlucci

GOP testing the limits of hate

Accroding to this report in The Politico, the Republican National Committee is working with focus groups to see just how much anti-black and anti-woman vitriol they can spew between now and November without making too many people uncomfortable:

Top Republican strategists are working on plans to protect the GOP from charges of racism or sexism in the general election, as they prepare for a presidential campaign against the first ever African-American or female Democratic nominee.

The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved. The secretive effort underscores the enormous risk senior GOP operatives see for a party often criticized for its insensitivity to minorities in campaigns dating back to the 1960s.

The RNC project is viewed as so sensitive that those involved in the work were reluctant to discuss the findings in detail. But one Republican strategist, who asked that his name be withheld to speak candidly, said the research shows the daunting and delicate task ahead.

Republicans will be told to “be sensitive to tone and stick to the substance of the discussion” and that “the key is that you have to be sensitive to the fact that you are running against historic firsts,” the strategist explained. ...

“Republicans will need to exercise less deafness and more deftness in dealing with a different looking candidate, whether it is a woman or a black man,” Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway said. “But at the same time, really charge back at any insinuation or accusation of sexism or racism.

“You can’t allow the party to be Macaca-ed,” she continued, referring to a much-publicized remark made by former GOP Sen. George Allen that played a significant role in his 2006 defeat. “I think the standards are higher and the bar is lower for the Republican Party.”

Republicans interviewed for this story uniformly believe they will have to be especially careful. Many expect to be held to a higher rhetorical standard than is customary in campaigns, in part because of perceptions of intolerance that still dog the party.

“Fair or unfair, but that’s going to be a reality,” said GOP strategist John Weaver, a longtime confidant of John McCain. “The P.C. [politically correct] police will be out and the standards will be very narrow.”

In what other business will someone pay you for something such as this?

—Douglas Carlucci

More Obama innuendo

Is Hillary Clinton’s campaign responsible for circulating this photo of Barack Obama?

Campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson says no (well, kind of, maybe, no):

Asked if the campaign had any role, Wolfson said, "No, not to my knowledge...I've never seen that picture before. I'm not aware that anyone else here has. I'm not aware that anyone here has circulated this e-mail."

It’s almost impossible to say at this point what happened. Even if you take Wolfson at his word, the Clinton campaign is thousands-strong, including full-time staffers, volunteers in every state, and surrogates in all sorts of elected and unelected political positions—and any one of them could be behind this without the executive-level staff and advisers knowing.

Whoever is responsible for circulating the photograph, though, had a very clear statement: this Obama is not like us.

It needs to be said this is pure nonsense. First of all, Congressional and executive branch delegations (the photo is apparently from a 2006 trip Obama made to Africa as a Senator) regularly engage in this sort of ceremony. Trading tokens of local culture is a diplomatic tradition which probably goes back to the first Homo sapiens taking a walk and finding another settlement of Homo sapiens.

Take a look at some of these photos:

That’s President Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chinese President Hu Jintao dressed in Vietnamese robes during an official visit to that country. Does this prove Bush is a secret Buddhist? Or Viet Cong? No, I don’t think you can draw either of those conclusions.

Here’s Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wearing a scarf over her head during a trip to Syria. Surely, if her sympathies are suspect…

Than so are President Bush’s, who is seen here laughing with an Arab and holding a sword.

Barack Obama is not a Muslim, no matter how many times Michelle Malkin insists it is so. I love how writers such as Malkin get to trade attitudes according to the latest petty scandal they are writing about. When a Republican is accused of something, all of a sudden Malkin finds her gumshoes and becomes determined to get to the bottom of the rumors and innuendoes and find the hard rock of truth. Then something like this comes up, and she’s eleven years old again: no matter how obvious it is she’s wrong, no matter how much contrary proof is offered to her to show she’s wrong, she thinks she’s right, because, you know, his name is Barack Obama… what the hell kind of a name is that? What a horrible life for a mind.

The intentional ignorance is astounding. Right now, my favorite thing is the way all the right-wing blogs are saying Obama is wearing “Muslim garb.” How stupid can you be? I thought these people were all experts on Islamofascism. Well, have they ever seen Ayman al-Zawahiri in an outfit like that? What about Ayatollah Khameini. No, they haven’t, because in the photo Obama is wearing clothing very specific to a certain part of Africa, and the reason he is wearing it is because that is where he is. You see, Bush and Obama have something in common: they both follow diplomatic protocol and gracefully accept the ceremonies they are made part of as representatives of the United States of America. To do less would be a real scandal.

If Obama was a white politician we wouldn’t have to deal with this nonsense. But because he’s black, and has a foreign-sounding name, the media repeats any libel about Obama and Islam and acts as though it is all part of due-diligence. It is not; it is abetting nativist slander. Obama is the most purely American political leader in a very long time. He used his mind and his natural energy and charisma not simply to build his own advantage, but to help his community and now his country. He rose from obscurity to be a leader, and in my lifetime he is the first such person who I feel is working not for his own glorification but rather to leave the country better off than he found it as a young man. His story is a microcosm of the American ideal.

The is nothing wrong with the photograph of Obama in Somalia. To me it shows he will be a dignified representative of his country to any part of the world. But the message implicit in the way the photograph was circulated today by a political rival—sotto voce and with a wink about this Obama fellow—is poison. If the Clinton campaign is responsible for this, whomever in the organization had knowledge of the plan to circulate the photo in such a way should no longer be hired by Democratic politicians. I think anyone with regard for that party would agree. If Clinton herself was aware of this, and approved it, I do not think I would be able to vote for her should she become the Democratic nominee. I see the difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party as clear as black and white, but there is no difference between a Republican leading by fear and hate and a Democrat doing the same.

Update

This photo is the strongest proof to date Obama is a secret cattle rustler:

Second Update

One more point on this topic. Implicit in all the whispering about Obama's supposed foreignness is that the man has something to hide, even if it isn't quite something so big as the right-wing margins of American politics seem to hope. But pause for a second and take a look at Obama's background. He has been a public person for his entire professional life. He was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. He was a professor at the University of Chicago law school, one of the best in the country. He was a community organizer in Chicago and was elected to the Illinois Senate.

Soon after, he was recruited by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (at the time, headed by then-Senator and present New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine) to run for an open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, which was vacated by Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald. Although his Republican opponent's campaign infamously burned out and Obama ended up routing replacement-candidate Alan Keyes—who was actually a resident of Maryland until days before he announced his candidacy—when the DCCC recruited Obama to run, it had every reason to think he would be in for a tough campaign. If this is true, then presumably the DCCC did its homework and found nothing in Obama's past that would prevent him from running a statewide campaign in moderate-to-conservative Illinois. (Remember, his first book, Dreams from My Father, in which Obama unabashedly describes his origins and youth, was published in 1995)

As hard as it is for some people to imagine, it is more than likely Barack Hussein Obama is just another regular American Joe. It could be that the only way he's different than the great American rabble is that most of its members aren't smart and hard-working enough to do all the things he has in his young life.

—Douglas Carlucci

Long live WFMU

Peter Applebome published in the Times today a loving profile of WFMU, by far the region's best radio station. (Apologies to Funkmaster Flex.)

Since its beginning as the radio station at a now-defunct Lutheran college in New Jersey, WFMU-FM has managed to carve out a niche for itself as perhaps the longest-lived and most admired practitioner of free-form radio programming. That now careers from Mr. Abramson’s “Music to Spazz By” to “Put the Needle on the Record” by Billy Jam (mostly rap and hip-hop), to Phuj Phactory with Ergo Phizmiz, described as “bricolage, ballet, sound tracks, antiquarian humor and vintage curios.”

Maybe the film director Jim Jarmusch is being hyperbolic when he proclaims, in the introduction to a book of WFMU art, writing and ephemera, “Hands down, WFMU is the greatest radio station on the planet.”

But there’s something of a history of modern communications in the survival of a place that managed to mix yin and yang — controlled chaos and business acumen — to thrive long after its original home, Upsala College, had gone bankrupt.

“It’s the little engine that could,” said Vin Scelsa, the longtime New York radio figure now at WFUV-FM, who was there for the creation of WFMU’s current form as a student at Upsala in 1968. “They’ve always remained true to their vision of letting the person on the air be the creator, weaving whatever elements he or she wants to put together.”

For its first decade, WFMU operated much like the French club — as a student activity broadcasting lectures, Lutheran services and classical music or jazz. Then, amid the ferment of the 1960s, Mr. Scelsa and his pals cooked up a seamless mix of music, noise, talk and satire that lives to this day, after an interregnum in 1969 when the staff walked out and Upsala shut the place down for 10 months.

The station is starting its 50th anniversary fundraising drive tomorrow; you can donate here. In an era when radio and so much other free entertainment has been gutted and ruined by corporations, WFMU is a rare gem—and best of all, it's based in Jersey City, not New York.

Oh, and by the way: you can find the station at 91.1 FM in North Jersey and New York City and 90.1 FM in the Hudson Valley.

—Douglas Carlucci

Coburn on Iraq War: "probably a mistake"

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, one of the Senate's most conservative members, told a crowd in Muskogee that invading Iraq was "probably a mistake."

From the Tulsa World:

Coburn's comment came at the beginning of remarks at a weekend town hall meeting in Muskogee.

"I will tell you personally that I think it was probably a mistake going to Iraq," said the freshman senator, who made it clear he did not believe the U.S. could withdraw but had to stay.

What was unclear was when exactly Coburn changed his position on the controversial war, what led to that change and why he chose to reveal it at a town hall meeting back in the state as opposed to in front of a wider audience.

Coburn's comment came less than a week after he returned from his second trip to Iraq since entering the Senate.

He declined to comment Wednesday.

Oklahoma's other Senator, James Inhofe, who is as conservative as Coburn (but significantly dumber), was incredulous:

Coburn's latest comments on the war clearly surprised his fellow Oklahoma Republican senator, Jim Inhofe.

"No, no, he couldn't have said that," Inhofe said Wednesday when asked to comment.

A veteran member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who has made a number of trips to Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion, Inhofe is a staunch defender of the war.

"I cannot believe he said that," Inhofe said, adding a few minutes later that he disagreed with Coburn.

Even though he brought up the issue of war at his recent town hall, Coburn added: "It doesn't do any good to dwell on it because we're there."

He said the risk of withdrawal is greater than the risk of remaining, and he praised the military personnel.

"I personally think we have to finish this," Coburn said. "People who are running for president saying 'Bring our people out' are wrong."

In 2005, Coburn reportedly predicted Iraq was about two years away from becoming a working democracy and went on to say Syria would follow.

Last weekend, Coburn said "we are on a glide path in the Muslim world" to creating a sustainable democracy and warned that withdrawing would "expose 570,000 people to genocide."

"How we got there is (the) past," he said.

—Douglas Carlucci

Corporate lobbyists run McCain campaign

The Washington Post explains the McCain campaign's connection to several prominent lobbyists.

The best part:

But even as [McCain chief political adviser Charles R.] Black provides a private voice and a public face for McCain, he also leads his lobbying firm, which offers corporate interests and foreign governments the promise of access to the most powerful lawmakers. Some of those companies have interests before the Senate and, in particular, the Commerce Committee, of which McCain is a member.

Black said he does a lot of his work by telephone from McCain's Straight Talk Express bus.[Emphasis mine.]

So, while Mr. Black conducts his lobbying business from the campaign bus of the Republican candidate for President, he expects people to believe his lobbying career and his campaign work do not overlap? I guess he would say, Well, they don't know I'm on the bus. Rather a feeble excuse, considering he told the Washington Post about it. I suppose this wouldn't be quite such a big deal if the bus wasn't called the "Straight Talk Express."

—Douglas Carlucci