Kausfiles: A mostly political weblog.

Sanitizing Mumbai?

Holder's Defense: 'I was played for a sucker by a lobbyist!' From the NYT today, the lawyer for Attorney General nominee Eric Holder defends him in the Marc Rich Pardon scandal:

 “There’s no question that [Marc Rich lobbyist Jack] Quinn played him and it was astute by Quinn because he did catch Eric unawares.”

Creative defense. Unfortunately, the NYT story makes it pretty clear that Holder knew too much about the case to have been unwillingly played. Seems more like the buddy system at work. ...[Thx to reader J.] 12:10 P.M.

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Undernews Alert: Rezko sentencing set for January 6. The Tribune story suggests this means he is not cooperating with prosecutors (if he was cooperating it would be delayed). ... [via NewsAlert] 11:47 A.M.

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On Warren Olney's To the Point, LAT veteran Doyle McManus says Robert Gates 

is in the unusual position of being a cabinet member who can't really be fired because if the President and the Secretary of Defense were to end up at loggerheads on an issue, that could be politically very damaging for the president. [E.A.]

This seems astonishingly wrong. Obama can fire Gates more easily because Gates is a Bush holdover, no? Obama won an election by opposing Bush's policies. ... Maybe Sam Zell had a point about McManus. ... 2:14 A.M.

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Monday, December 1, 2008

'You should never have made those loans groups like us pressured you to make!' The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a "community-based organization," is suing Wall Street ratings services for approving bonds backed by home loans to African American and Latino home purchasers with "insufficient borrower income levels."

The firms "knew or should have known" that subprime loans disproportionately were marketed to minority consumers -- a process known as "reverse redlining" -- and that those borrowers would ultimately default and go into foreclosure at high rates, according to the coalition's complaint.

Hmmm. Didn't community-based organizations push for exactly this sort of reverse-redlining? I think they did. It's one thing to argue that they maybe weren't the major cause of the subprime meltdown. It's another for them to pose as victims wronged by the very system they worked hard to set up (including the securitization that enabled banks to keep up "reverse redlining"). ... 2:21 A.M.

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Here's a Saturday Belfast Telegraph story about Sebastian D'Souza, the photographer who took a now-famous photograph of one of the Mumbai terrorists in the process of gunning people down in a train station:

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back." [E.A.]

Here's a Sunday New York Times front pager about the "troubling questions" the attacks raised about India's "ability to respond":

[T]he most troubling question to emerge for the Indian authorities was how, if official estimates are accurate, just 10 gunmen could have caused so much carnage and repelled Indian security forces for more than three days in three different buildings.

Part of the answer may lie in continuing signs that despite the country’s long vulnerability to terrorist attacks, Indian law enforcement remains ill-prepared. The siege exposed problems caused by inexperienced security forces and inadequate equipment, including a lack of high-power rifle scopes and other optics to help discriminate between the attackers and civilians. [E.A.]

Read the Times story and you'll see a numbing litany of "systemic" problems with Indian security, including "Ill-paid city police [who]  are often armed with little more than batons," and "little information-sharing among law enforcement agencies" and all that inadequate equipment, including  "old, bulky bulletproof jackets" and lack of  thosehigh-power scopes and "no technology at their disposal to determine where the firepower was coming from ..." [E.A.] It reads like the budget-increase proposal submitted by the Mumbai police bureaucracy--The Indian Omnibus Anti-Terror Funding Act of 2009.  Nowhere in the NYT story will you learn what American blog readers learned a day earlier when Instapundit (among others) linked to the Belfast story: Police had lots of guns, and no problem seeing who and where the terrorists were, but they wouldn't shoot at them.

I'm used to a sort of Liebling-like hierarchy of news sources, with twitterers and bloggers being fastest, but maybe less reliable, while the grand institutions of the MSM weigh in later with more comprehensive and accurate accounts. But that's not what is happening with this Mumbai story. The "fast" sources are telling you what happened. The "slow" MSM sources are using their extra time to sanitize what's happened, to build euphemistic assumptions into their very reporting of the events themselves--in this case, it just so happens, liberal assumptions:1) the idea that there is no problem that can't be solved by greater funding for government bureaucracies and more interagency taskforces** 2) the predisposition to think widely-distributed small arms and a willingness to use them can never be a good idea and 3) an antipathy to any suggestion that an aspect of foreign culture is inferior to nasty American culture. (Maybe we Americans are trigger happy. But do we think that a handful of terrorists could have gone on a similar rampage in New York City without quite quickly encountering a fair number of cops who would have shot back--let alone armed civilians who did the same)? ...

**--Substitute "lousy test scores" for "vulnerability to terrorist attacks" and you have the stereotypical liberal MSM template for reporting on inner-city education failure: insufficient spending leads to ill-paid teachers who lack the latest technology! ... 1:27 A.M.

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Saturday, November 29, 2008

A friend of mine who occasionally visits the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai tells me that earlier in November the hotel bristled with security, including aggressively manned checkpoints--security that had been absent a few months earlier. Apparently the security was withdrawn before terrorists attacked the hotel this week. ...I don't know what to make of this, but it at least suggests that the attacks might not have been "a complete surprise," as the headline on Slate's home page (but not the article to which it links) claims. ... Maybe they were anticipated but on an earlier date?  ... Maybe the extra security caused the terrorists to postpone them. ... If so, were they originally planned for before the U.S. election? ...

Update: Hotel's owner says "we did have such a warning, and we did have some measures," which were relaxed before the attacks. But he argues they wouldn't have made a difference because ... the gunman didn't go in the front door.

However, [Tata Group chairman Ratan] Tata said the attackers did not enter through the entrance that has a metal detector. Instead, they came in a back entrance, he said.

"They knew what they were doing, and they did not go through the front. All of our arrangements are in the front," he said.

Reminds me of the time I visited Hyannis Port when JFK was staying at the family compound there. The Secret Service was protecting it closely, except for a one-way street leaving the area, which was left unguarded--apparently on the theory that an assassin wouldn't go wrong way down a one-way street.  ...  More: kf's friend says that during the early-November high-security period the rear doors to the hotel were locked. Not that that would necessarily have stopped the terrorists. Still, they seem to have preferred low-security to high-security. ...1:21 A.M.

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Fear of 60

What does a tasered possum sound like? Harry Shearer has the answer. ... P.S.: Yes, he does Mr. Burns too. ... 2:43 A.M.

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Wednesday, October 8, 2008

George McGovern makes an ad on "card check":

I've always been a champion of labor unions, but I fear that today's union leaders are turning their backs on democratic workplace elections. I've listened to all their arguments and reviewed the facts on both sides. Quite simply, this proposed law cannot be justified.

Can I vote for him? ... Done it before! [via Insta] 12:58 A.M.

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Mark Halperin almost nails Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs on the Ayers issue--"It is the case that Barack Obama at least implicitly seems to be saying 'It's Ok to have professional associations with someone who was a terrorist and by some measures is an unrepentant terrorist'"--but Halperin doesn't know to stop talking. As a result, it sounds like an argument as opposed to a question followed by fumfawing or evasion. ... P.S.: Note Gibbs' pissed-off close. .. 12:31 A.M.

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Tuesday, October 7, 2008

McCain/Obama Debate #2: Before I get spun: A dull debate in a dead room. Each stole the other's theme: Obama called for service to country, McCain for a "cool hand on the tiller" even as he seemed like a hyperactive hand himself. A tie helps Obama, and this probably wasn't even a tie. ... 1) Obama's great weakness is that he's an unknown with an unusual (i.e. strange) background. By painting him as a big-spending liberal, McCain oddly made Obama seem less strange, and more acceptable. Voters are used to dealing with big spending liberals--and they also may think that the there's not enough money for that much big spending anymore anyway. 2) Speaking of spending, McCain rails against Obama's "$860 billion" in proposed "new" spending, yet McCain wants the government to buy up all the bad mortgages in the country, give all homeowners new purchase prices and protect them from their ill-advised decisions? Sounds very expensive. Update: I was just on Tavis Smiley's TV show with Rep. Maxine Waters, who said the money to do what McCain wants to do is already in the bailout bill. But it sure sounded to me like McCain was proposing a big new initiative. More: He thought he was. "Aides to McCain told reporters" it will cost $300 billion. Waters' point may be that the existing bailout bill already authorizes such purchases; ... 3) "That one." Heh. Not racist--seemed to me like an attempt by McCain to avoid being too confrontational (by saying Obama's name) that wound up seeming more hostile than saying Obama's name would have been. ... 4) Obama still refers to economically pressured Americans as "you" rather than "we." He says, "Maybe you don't go out to dinner as much. Maybe you put off buying a new car." That's all? Is Obama trying to make the economic hardship he's talking about sound minimal? ... 5) McCain was badly hurt by the camera angle--shooting him from above only made him look short and scuttling. ... 6) Worst format ever? Could be! Can't believe McCain wanted more of these things. ... 7) Was it awful because it was a fake town hall debate, as Maxine Waters and Slate's Jack Shafer contend? It certainly managed to keep the worst aspects of the town hall format--the phony empathy competition between the candidates as they either ignore questions or treat them as prompts for stock answers--while leaving out the worthwhile aspects--spontaneity and risk. In the process it reduced its Real Average Americans to props in the earnest empathon! 8) Brokaw didn't help by adding his own little bien pensant suggestions on top of the cherry-picked high-minded audience queries. At least when Brokaw moderated debates in 1988 he would harangue the candidates about "means-testing" Social Security, a substantive proposal. Now he wants only "a date certain to reform Social Security and Medicare within two years"--a bipartisanist gimmick ... 8) McCain has his own gimmick:

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Monaco, gritty center of automotive innovation. ... 11:35 A.M.

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Monday, October 6, 2008

Rezko Alert! Federal prosecutors have moved to delay sentencing of former Obama fundraiser Tony Rezko, the Chicago Tribune reports. ... The obvious suspicion is that he's talking. Or at least talking about talking ... Update: Full Tribune story. ... Of course this will also have the effect of pushing Rezko's sentencing past the election--eliminating one potentially bad bit of publicity for Obama. .. And according to the Trib's sources, Rezko "has not yet made a firm deal." ... See also the timeline on the local NBC affiliate's blog, where Steve Rhodes writes: "[S]ubstantively, Obama's long and intimate relationship with Rezko is of far more import than the spectacle of Jeremiah Wright and the (mostly) nonsense of Bill Ayers. ... Obama's house deal with Rezko was indeed shady." ...

P.S.: Everybody seems to agree that the main target of the federal probe is sitting Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. But that doesn't rule out the possibility that prosecutors might also extract something from Rezko about Obama. ...

P.P.S.: Barring some dramatic development, like an indictment, voters may find the accusation that Obama is really a Chicago political hack more comforting than troubling. Better than a strange Third World Madrassa Man!** We're used to dealing with Chicago political hacks.

** Previous anti-Obama meme, discredited but not necessarily forgotten. ... 5:08 P.M. link

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He's Lost Alter! New York's John Heilemann, as evidence of a media shift against McCain, offers this:

Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.

I know Jon Alter. Jon Alter is a friend of mine. He's very good at what he does--I couldn't do it. He wrote an excellent book, has a lot to say. But he's not exactly someone you look to as a political weather vane. Alter is totally for Obama and has been since the beginning of the campaign. If Jon has "turned" brutally against McCain in the final weeks of the campaign that is as predictable as the Giants going into a prevent defense with a two touchdown lead and a minute to go.** ... But of course he hasn't "turned"--missing from Heilemann's piece is any evidence of Alter favoring McCain at any earlier point in the campaign, let alone evidence of Alter favoring McCain once he was the nominee running against Obama. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for his fellow Chicago Dem (and head of the Slate Group) Jacob Weisberg. Nor is it exactly surprising that Klein, Cohen and Ignatius would be on Obama's side in the end. ...

It's one thing to have pro-Democratic, pro-Obama media favoritism: That's just the way it is. Political reporters have opinions. Better blatant than latent.

It's another to have that very favoritism used as evidence that McCain is blowing it, losing his reputation for "integrity" and his "gold plated brand." ...

P.S.: It might seem as if the MSM reaction against McCain's shift to negativism has "driven the final nail into his coffin," as Heilemann suggests. The Feiler Faster Thesis says no--given the speed with which the country now processes information, there's plenty of time for several dramatic twists and turns, including lead changes. Obamaphiles (in the press and elsewhere) are deluding themselves, I think, if they think they can ride the economic crisis and the reaction against negativity to victory in a month. Plus Obama's not that far ahead.

**--I worked with Alter at Newsweek in the 1988 campaign. We were for Dukakis. ... 1:57 P.M. link

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Fear of 60: If there's a good chance that the Dems will achieve a theoretically filibuster-proof majority of 60 in the Senate, shouldn't that change the dynamic of the race? It certainly changes the nature of the prospective Obama presidency. It means he might come under intense pressure to do something big about health care. And it is a blazing arrow pointing in the direction of the Employee Free Choice Act, more commonly known as "card check," which would constitute a fairly fundamental revision of our basic economic laws in a direction designed to unionize a large chunk of the economy (at the cost of doing away with the secret ballot in union certification elections). ... Currently about 12.6% of all U.S. jobs are unionized, though that includes the union-heavy public sector. How much of the economy would be organized after the secret ballot is eliminated? At the Dem convention I heard figures ranging from about 15% to 25% (the latter estimate derided by some as extreme). ... .

Since I think a dramatic increase in unionization is not the way to help those on the bottom of the job market--it's more likely to introduce inefficiency and inflation, compared with the proven Clintonite remedy of achieving a low unemployment rate--the looming 60-Dem threshold evokes mixed feelings, if not actual dread. I think I'd rather have Obama win a big victory while the Dems struggle to a narrow win in Congress than what we're likely to get--namely the reverse. (It's a measure of Obama's troubling weaknesses that he's lagging so far behind the underlying Dem legislative wave.) ...

This morning some idealistic, well-scrubbed 10 year olds down the street were raising funds by selling "Obama Lemonade." Do they know it's really Card Check Lemonade?!...

Mickey's Assignment Desk: It would be good to have a seat by seat analysis of: a) Whether all 60 prospective Dems will actually side with labor to break a card-check filibuster--or whether some independent-minded Dems might defy union-enforced orthodoxy and join the McGovern wing of the party. b) Whether the unions even need 60 Dems to pass the card check bill. Maybe they could rely on liberal GOPs like Susan Collins, Arlen Specter, or Olympia Snowe to break a filibuster even if the Dems win only, say, 58 seats. [Update: Collins, at least, is anti-card check, I'm told.] ... 1:38 A.M. link

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