Cesar Conda, Republican strategist, former Romney and Cheney advisor:
Another topic: Unemployment
Today, the Labor Department reported that the nation’s unemployment rate increased to 9.4 percent in May from 8.9 percent in April, which is the highest rate in 26 years. Although the pace of job loss has slowed, the economy has now lost 2.2 million jobs since the beginning of Janaury.
Last week, President Obama claimed that 150,000 jobs had been “created” or “saved” by the stimulus package. It’s yet another case of the President’s use of fuzzy math which miraculously turns a 2.2 milion job loss into a 150,000 job gain. Reduce…
And just a few minutes ago on CNBC, Arena Contributor and White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein said that the Administration predicts another 600,000 jobs would be “created” or “saved” in the next hundred days. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, unemployment will continue to rise and peak above 10 percent in the second half of next year.
How does this Administration continue to get away with producing these kinds of job creation estimates in the face of hard evidence from its own Department of Labor showing job losses, and economic forecasts from the CBO and other private sector sources predicting unemployment rising to 10 percent next year?
Rick Beyer, Documentary filmmaker, author, history guy:
The job loss for May was dramatically less than expected, and is widely viewed as good news. If you pass a big stimulus bill and the loss of jobs is suddenly much less than expected, it seems perfectly logical to me to conclude you’ve created jobs. It’s only fuzzy math when viewed through the distorted GOP prism that colors everything Obama does (even going out to dinner with his wife) as evil, deceptive, or un-American.
David Biespiel, Poet and writer, Attic Writers Workshop:
Rick, I’ve been involved in more left/right debates with Cesar than just about anyone on the Arena. I can assure you that Cesar Conda is anything but a distorter. He’s always informed, detailed, insightful, and yes, certainly partisan, but cogently and rationally so. I’m sure he’s pro-dinner-with-your-wife, too. His sweetly tweaking the Obama Administration today about the unemployment numbers is also mathematically accurate. Jobs have been lost and jobs have been gained.
But, Cesar, you know that the Obama Administration didn’t invent selective use of numbers as a method of self-congratulation. For instance, President Obama’s job approval hovers around 60 % (according to RCP), but you never hear the administration also say that the president’s job performance is disapproved by 40%. And you never will.
According to Recovery.org, as of May 22nd, only $36 billion of the $787 billion stimulus package had been spent. It is highly unlikely that $36 billion in increased government spending or tax relief could impact the $13 trillion U.S. economy enough to “suddenly” reduce job losses in one month. Yes, the lower-than-expected 345,000 job loss in May is good news. But the President’s stimulus package had little, if anything, to do with this improvement, and there is absolutely no evidence showing that it created 150,000 new jobs.
Cesar Conda, Republican strategist, former Romney and Cheney advisor:
The economy is more likely being “stimulated” by a breathtaking increase in the money supply by the Federal Reserve, and $12 trillion in federal loan guarantees over the past 6 months, which unfortunately will cause significantly higher inflation and interest rates in the near future. The President’s stimulus package and budget plan — which produces annual deficits averaging $600 billion and doubles the national debt — will make matters worse and cause interest rates to surge even further.
David Biespiel, Poet and writer, Attic Writers Workshop:
Cesar’s point about claiming job gains when it’s actually estimates of job gains is a valid one. Had the president simply said, “We began by passing a Recovery Act that has already saved or created over an estimated 150,000 jobs,” he’d have avoided this tiny dust up. At the same time, chastising the Obama Administration for using prediction economics as factual analysis followed by one’s own prediction about the future of interest rates and inflation isn’t convincing either. Since the Fed cut interest rates practically into the negatives, the percentages were destined to go up no matter what happened.
To have done nothing about the auto industry… was never an option
A paycheck is better than a handout, and had the government done nothing at all and let GM fold, the U.S. taxpayers would be spending as much or more than has been spent already as a safety net to the decimated economies in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and other border state and southern regions that depend on the auto industry. My standing position on the Arena on GM and the other struggling auto makers has been two-fold: They should have entered bankruptcy before receiving government bailout or loan guarantees and, second, it’s essential that the United States have a thriving private transportation industry and every effort must be made to ensure its existence. The government has already spent $80 billion on GM, though I point out to bean counters of the partisan variety that this is far less than the $700 billion bath American taxpayers have taken in Iraq.
To have done nothing about the auto industry, however, was never an option, and that fact is not debatable. Both Republican and Democratic administrations acted under that very assumption–that the U.S. auto industry must come through the current crises in some form. A lot of good a prediction from will do for workers and investor who lose out in this restructuring, but I predict that the government will be all but entirely out of New General Motors’s hair before Labor Day in 2010 when the midterm campaign season shifts into full swing.
I won’t pretend any expertise on North Korea beyond a more than passing interest in the peninsula since my father served in the U.S. navy during the Korean War, and it’s probably no time for pessimism, but how do you avoid it? North Korea has confounded every American government as far back as the Eisenhower administration. As long as it acts like an animal with its paw caught in a trap–a trap of its own making even–it’s hard to imagine any new direction to lure North Korea, a country with one of the world’s largest militaries, out of the cold. Our 40,000-plus American troops in the Korean peninsula haven’t helped, nor have sanctions, threats about missile defense shields, the Agreed Framework, or Chinese half-hearted pressure. None of it has done much–and just saying build missile defenses, to point to one emerging meme, is just throwing good money after bad.
Seldom is the question asked, what does North Korea truly want by pursuing nuclear weapons? Political relevancy, surely, getting other nations, especially China, to cough up foreign aid, and maintain a saber-rattling stance toward South Korea and by extension the U.S. Without nuclear weapons–or even just nuclear testing–North Korea is just another crumbling dictatorship. To do? Direct talks, six party talks, U.N. talks, cultural exchange. What else is there to do? Until North Korea embraces whatever the Korean words for “glasnost” and “perestroika” are, we’re going to have our hands in that animal trap for the duration of this administration, too. As a coda: Meanwhile, Iran will watch whatever the U.N. does this week with particular interest.
Guantanamo might be the greatest, cleanest, best run prison facility since Robbin Island in the eyes of its defenders, but it remains a fresh black 21st century stain on America’s reputation as a country that values due process and human rights, and no amount of nativist panic in Congress will change that fact. As I wrote yesterday on this topic, of the 240 prisoners there, “a third of these have been cleared some time ago to be sent home without charges.
Another third are being kept because the military believes there is evidence to try them– whether in military or in federal courts, where, by the way, there is precedent for shielding the public from classified evidence–though only two dozen have actually been charged and of these only three have been brought to trial. Finally, of the other third, there lacks evidence to charge these individuals with anything–although intelligence officials insist these prisoners are too risky to set free.
They’re the ones who have to be dealt with, and they were going to have to be dealt with whether Guantanomo is kept open or not.” It’s a difficult decision. President Bush struggled with it too and passed it on to the next administration.
There will be no perfect solution. To answer the question then: Continue with plans to close Guantanamo. Reaffirm to the letter our trust in the Geneva Conventions. Afford detainees the right of habeas corpus and due process. Transfer some detainees to super-maximum security prisons in the U.S. and others–who are in fact prisoners of war–to the NATO detention system in Afghanistan. And, finally, develop a repatriation program with international partners to return non-convicted detainees to their home countries.
On the credit card bill: The next person who tells me that corporations have a good track record regulating their worst consumer practices and impulses, I’ll need to do no more than point to the necessity of this bill as my reply. My own experience is instructive: On the eve of this bill’s passage, in fact exactly two days ago, I received a poorly mimeographed notification from Bank of America, with whom I’ve been banking for decades, that the bank was making changes to my credit card accounts–and that these changes would apply even to accounts that might already be closed. This, after I recently paid off the very small balance on one card and now only carry a tinier balance on another card, and after the bank recently rescinded a card that I had not yet even used.
What are these changes? Increased fees for ATM advances, cash transfers, balance transfers, minimum payments, and other new changes that affect additional sections of the agreement in–and I quote–”Sections 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 30, and 33.” I’m not making this up; naturally, descriptions of these sections were not provided with the letter. That it took a stick-it-to-the-banks karma in Congress to achieve passage of credit card reform only illustrates how comatose bipartisanship is in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, looking ahead: Banks would win approval from the public if they treat the new disclosure requirements the way food companies label nutrition information as pull-quoted and uniform.
On the gun amendment: I’ve camped in countless National Parks. Never once faced a threatening situation in which I’d wished I had a pistol. I didn’t realize there was such a crises in Yosemite or Shenandoah. We regulate gun ownership all the time, Americans have plenty of routes and access to purchase guns and get them permitted, that the National Parks provision hardly seems a constitutional infringement. I’m sure that the good folks on family vacations, Deadhead backpackers, Miller High Life partiers, and quiet poets can all pack heat and feel safer. Knowing that there will be more guns in National Parks, however, makes me feel less safe in fact.
Compared to the urgency of the credit card bill, this provision is like a parasite attached to a host. It hardly seems urgent. But, really, it does no harm. Come on, Yogi Bear, let’s lock and load.
…Unlike the Bush administration, the Obama administration is not tagged with seven years of legal disarray and perhaps illegal conduct
This detainee decision is flawed and troublesome.Our courts are well-equipped to try the 200-plus detainees we have in Cuba and others who are arrested in the future. Our super-max prisons are well-equipped to hold any prisoner, foreign or domestic.
By arguing that we can try some detainees in U.S. courts but not others, the decision is an admission that there are in fact a few dozen detainees, long considered extraordinarily dangerous, for whom we lack sufficient evidence to try or even convict. Thus, the government continues to trap itself into a quasi-legal vice. But creating a layered system of trying detainees in military tribunals and also in American courts, as well as expanding their legal rights, is significantly different from the Bush administration’s policy of holding combatants without charge or trial indefinitely. Or claiming a legal right to do so.
Some, especially on the right, are chastising President Obama for reversing his campaign pledge–he has–or that this new policy resembles the Bush administration’s policy–it does, though it differs significantly in affording combatants more legal rights of defense. But the complaint that Obama is now doing what Bush did is utterly hollow because context matters. The Bush and Obama decisions about detainees may resemble each other–and the do–but the two administrations are not developing tribunal and court policies from the same place of public faith and trust.
Republican strategist, former Romney and Cheney advisor
Bush’s polices made us safe
In her response to yesterday’s Arena question about the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies, Maria Cardona asserted that “these misguided and dreadful policies have not made us safer…” and they have only provided “fodder” to our enemies. On 9/11, our enemies killed almost 3,000 of our fellow Americans before “these misguided and dreadful policies” were ever put into place. Our enemies in Al-Qaeda don’t need additional “fodder” or motivation; their hatred for America and the freedoms America stands for is absolute.
Interestingly, when lawmakers were briefed about these tougher interrogation policies, there was bipartisan approval and encouragement for them. Apparently, the Democrats who were briefed on these interrogation policies did not view them as “misguided and dreadful.”
Cardona’s assertion that the intelligence infrastructure created after 9/11 has “not made us safer” doesn’t square with the fact that there has not been another terrorist attack on American soil. Weakening that infrastructure will make America more vulnerable.
Finally, there is another line from “conservative hero” Ronald Reagan that we should borrow and use to guide us in today’s War on Terror: “We must have the will to meet the challenges of an adversary who is constantly testing our resolve to defend our vital national interests.”
Cesar, you’re right to point out the culpability that Congressional Democrats share in approving the Bush administration’s dubious interrogation policies. These Democrats may not have viewed the interrogation policies, including torture, as “misguided and dreadful,” to use Marina Cordona’s words from the other day on the Arena, but that does not mean that the Democrats’ approval wasn’t itself misguided and dreadful.
Both the Bush administration and its supporters overt or tacit approval of torture as an interrogation method was misguided and dreadful.
Be that as it may, if supporters of President Bush’s post-9/11 polices can assert that his administration made us safer, then supporters must also affirm the corollary: President Bush’s pre-9/11 policies made us unsafe. If the Bush administration is responsible for the success that’s claimed after 9/11, then it’s responsible for the failure before on 9/10 and prior. While I believe that is the case–that culpability, I do not think it is absolutely so; except for a few spectacular occasions, it’s not like the American homeland has been under attack all that much from 1812 to 2001 anyway.
Conservatives and Republicans assert that, after 9/11, President Bush’s interrogation policies and actions generally have made us safer because, as you write, “there has not been another terrorist attack on American soil.” I’m disappointed that you make this argument because, for one thing, it’s just the mother of all debate stoppers, to borrow an expression. Why? Because no one can prove a negative.
Just because there’s been no attack on American soil, doesn’t confirm that we’re more safe. As you say, terrorists don’t need “fodder.” Meanwhile, Americans have not actually been safer. The 4,924 American service men and women who have been casualties in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom were not safer. (In the spirit of disclosure, I was a supporter of Operation Enduring Freedom and the creation of the Homeland Security Department; I opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom; and as I have written on the Arena and elsewhere I am willing to admit that President Bush was right to conquer Iraq when I see an Iraqi and Iranian embassy in Jerusalem and an Israeli embassy in Baghdad and Tehran.) As far as the issue of American safety is concerned, more Americans have died since 9/11 than died on 9/11.
Finally, to assert that Americans are safer because of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies is to assert that the rule of law is less important than American safety. That’s a debate that must be had again and again, now and in the future, about the relationship between the importance of American security and the importance of abiding by American laws. It is Machiavellian to assert that torture is justifiable because it prevents further attacks against Americans or because “there has not been another terrorist attack on American soil.”
I should like to add something to that fine quote by President Reagan you supplied this morning. Thank you, Cesar, for posting it; I hadn’t read it before. “We must have the will to meet the challenges of an adversary who is constantly testing our resolve to defend our national interests” and we must have the resolve to make sure that those challenges do not cause us to abandon our values about the relationship between freedom and the rule of law.
“he Republican Party has been using a grab-bag of strategies to counter Obama’s policies over the past month. They rail against the stimulus package for its (supposed) pork. They hammer home their points with gimmicky videos and props. They speak in warrior rhetoric and revel in heroic, fighting-man stunts. But if there is one strand running through all these strategies, it is that they evoke a discomfiting feeling of deja vu. We’ve seen this stuff before: The GOP is currently reliving John McCain’s presidential campaign. The return to the strategies of their fallen candidate may be the saddest illustration of the current state of the party.” Written by Eve Fairbanks.
“Throughout the fortnight-long Battle of the Stimulus Package—the Capitol Hill confrontation that culminates this week in a signing ceremony for a historically unprecedented piece of legislation that will inject more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars’ worth of adrenaline into America’s fluttering economic heart—one question preoccupied commentators and observers, especially those desperate for relief from the daunting substance of the matter: was President Obama being “bipartisan” enough?” By Hendrick Hertzberg.
DB notes: One message that Republican representatives sent to the electorate on the stimulus vote last week on the subject of relevancy is this: Not so much. Whether dead or just sleeping, 21st century American conservatism can certainly lay claim to being unified in the U.S. House of Representatives.
How farm and food programs will—and won’t—benefit from the President’s $825 billion plan.
“As members of Congress struggle to get their arms around the $825 billion economic stimulus plan passed through the House last week and currently being debated in the Senate, a report from the Congressional Research Service sheds light on how farmers and rural communities might be “stimulated” by the first round of spending.” Written by Sam Hurst.
DB notes: The manner in which American farms have been propped up by government spending, welfare, and subsidy is byzantine and capricious. That the first in the nation presidential caucus takes place in Iowa has been no help for the American farmer.
“Winding up his week-long tour of the region, President Barack Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, met Saudi officials here over the weekend for an exchange of ideas on ending the volatile Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Mitchell conferred with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud bin Faisal Saturday night and met with King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Sunday. Specifically, the talks were said to cover the Saudi-initiated Arab Peace Initiative – first offered to Israel in 2002 – as well as how to counter what many Arab states regard as an alarming development: The increased involvement of Iran in Palestinian affairs, through its partners, Syria and Hamas.” Written by Carole Murphy.
“When I was a kid you always had an art teacher and a music teacher. Even in the poorest school districts, everyone had access to music and other arts.” – Barack Obama
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