I may have been called out of his speech by a temper tantrum (my son’s), but S-Class George Galloway keeps making the news.

Power Line is reporting that Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman has announced (press release here) that the Congressional investigation into Galloway’s claims that he never received payment from Saddam Hussein in the form of oil allocations are false.As reprinted in the U. K. Independent:

In a report issued here, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman and his colleagues on the Senate Subcommittee for Investigations claim to have evidence showing that Mr Galloway’s political organization and his wife received vouchers worth almost $600,000 (£338,000) from the then Iraqi government.

“We have what we call the smoking gun,” said Mr Coleman, who will send the report to the US Department of Justice and the British authorities. The MP could face charges of perjury, making false statements and obstructing a Congressional investigation. Each charge carries a possible jail term of five years and a fine of $250,000.

Mr. Galloway, unsurprisingly, is unmoved:

…Mr Galloway again denied the allegations – as vehemently as he did last May in a bravura performance before the Subcommittee, when he accused Mr Coleman of mounting “the mother of all smokescreens” to divert attention from America’s post-invasion difficulties, and launched a broadside against the Bush administration’s entire policy in Iraq.

“I have not made a penny out of oil deals with Iraq, or indeed any other kind of deal,” the MP said last night. “This ought to be dead, yet Norm Coleman parrots it once more from 3,000 miles away and protected by privilege.” His spokesman later described the report as “derogatory and defamatory”.

I’m making popcorn.

I’ve been watching the rise of partisan blog social events (“Drinking Liberally,” comes to mind) with some amusement. The amusement is based in part on the notion that the blogs have gotten big enough that we can parse who we want to associate with, and partly on my wry acknowledgement that American politics today consists of two camps, armed with sharp tongues and quick thumbs – the better to text disparaging messages about each other.

Now I like a disparaging message as much as the next guy, but I also have fond memories of the lesson taught me by an ultra-right-wing politician early in my career.

John Schmitz was (literally) a member of the John Birch Society. he was a California State Senator when I met him in my capacity as a junior lobbyist for Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, and he told me something I’ve remembered for a long time:

When Moscone ran the Senate, he and I used to fight hammer and tongs all day, then go out and have drinks over dinner and laugh about it. We differed on where we wanted the boat to go, but we recognized that we were in the same boat. These new guys would gladly sink the boat rather then compromise.

So in honor of the late Sen. Schmitz’s sentiment – if not his child-rearing ability or political views – I’m going to see if we can kick off a series of blogger meals – first here in Southern California, and then maybe elsewhere, if folks can be found to make them happen.

The John Schmitz – George Moscone Dining and Drinking Society. Motto: “It’s just one boat; we’re all on it; let’s make sure the food is good and there’s lots of booze.”

We’ll have our first dinner Saturday, November 12, someplace near the 405 and 110 in the Los Angeles area (I’ll pick a venue when I have some idea of how many people may come). We’ll meet for drinks at 6:00.

California is facing an interesting election this November, as a series of initiatives from Gov. Arnold are up for a vote.

One of the most significant is Prop 75, which would defund the public-employees union political warchests by requiring that they obtain annual permission from union members to use a portion of their dues for political campaigns.

I’m pro-union (and certainly pro-working families), and also strongly pro- this initiative. The capture of state government by it’s employees – at the expense of those who it is supposed to serve – is one of the reasons California government is in the straits it is in…

Apparently, I’m not alone.

As labor critics seek to limit the use of union dues in California politics, one group is mostly steering clear of the Proposition 75 campaign: the workers whose rights the initiative claims to be championing.

Despite their entreaties, advocates for the initiative have been able to recruit only a handful of the state’s public employee union members to make appearances, give money or participate in campaign ads.

Out of more than 1 million union members who would be affected by the measure, only 181 have publicly endorsed it.

The absence of union members within the Campaign for Paycheck Protection is striking because its advocates say that one-third to one-half of union households favor the measure.

Hmmm.

So it is important to defeat this proposition for the union members, or for the union leaders, and the political apparatus they are funding with the members’ money?

NZ Bear is asking bloggers to take a stand on the Harriet Miers nomination.

I oppose the Miers nomination.

Conservative, moderate, or liberal, we deserve a Supreme Court justice that first of all represents the highest level of jurisprudential (as in theory of laws) thinking.

I’ll have more to say, but right now I need to go do chores.

In the course of surfing around and looking at the state of things in the Arab world – part of my effort to try and assess what the impacts of Iraq and the recent changes in the Middle East might be – I found this recent poll, taken in June by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.
5) From among the following factors, which one is the most important in determing your vote for one list against another?

Note that reaching a peace agreement was the most important for 17.2%, improving economic conditions was most important for 15.6 percent, fighting corruption was most important for 24.3 percent, and ensuring the continuation of the intifada was most important for 3.0 percent.

I’ve argued for a while that the bulk of the Palestinian people – like the bulk of people anywhere want the same thing – a future for their children, a safe home, and the chance to build a better life for themselves.

I’ll suggest that this poll supports that…

Yglesias attempts to set my misguided soul straight.

NOT SURRENDER, DEFEAT. To certain misguided souls the question of whether or not the Iraq War has failed hinges on whether or not we can win the war, in the sense of defeating our adversaries there. Unlike some, I don’t have any real doubt that, if we’re willing to spend the blood and money that it takes, that we can beat this insurgency sooner or later. And of course, insofar as the point of the war was to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program, we’ve already done that. But insofar as the goal is democracy, we’ve already lost.

Of course, I discussed why there was a strategic justification for the war apart from WMD (although I think I let them skate a bit on that issue…go reread this old post…) and democracy.

Vide democracy, Yglesias’ post points to today’s murder of the attorney for one of Saddam’s co-defendants as concrete evidence that democracy is not at risk of failure, but has failed.

Rosemary Nelson and Jonathan Luna and Joan Lefkow might stand as examples of the thinness of Matt’s argument here.

I doubt that Iraq will be a democracy in the sense of 21st-century California any time soon. But I’d settle for something a lot like 19th-century Illinois.

And if you asked the Iraqi people, I bet they would, too.

Matt Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld have a big new article up in The American Prospect, which intends to eviscerate ‘liberal hawks’ on the basis that their only refuge is that – as they put it – “…the invasion and occupation could have been successful had they been planned and administered by different people.”

It’s a thin argument, well-padded, and it pretty much rests on one simple presumption – slipped in a rhetorical flourish in the beginning:

Victory, as John F. Kennedy observed, has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan. Abandoning the orphan that is the Iraq War has clearly been a protracted, painful process for the liberal hawks, those intellectuals and pundits so celebrated back in 2003 for their courage in coming forward to smash liberal expectations and support the war. Long criticized by fellow liberals for failing, amid much hand-wringing and navel-gazing, to express clear regret over their original support for the war, these hawks have started to become a bit more vocal about their second thoughts.

Let’s be clear. I don’t have any second thoughts about the invasion.

I have all kinds of criticisms of things that I wish had not been done or had been done better. I don’t blog about those because – first – I feel like it’s somehow expected of me, and I don’t like rising to that bait, and – second – because I have a finite amount of time to blog, and that’s not how I choose to spend it. Those issues are not, to me, the critical ones today.

But, as an opener in responding to Yglesias and Rosenfeld, did I somehow miss the line of Americans hanging from the skids of the helicopters as they flew away from the Embassy roofs? Was there a surrender as our troops streamed, bedraggled, weaponless, defeated, and under the watchful eyes of their Sadrist captors out to the safety of Kuwait?

When the hell did it become the accepted public wisdom that we have lost this war?

Because, guess what – we haven’t.It’s hard – damn hard. I am in awe continually of the men and women who are prosecuting it – from the sharpest tip of the spear all the way back to the butt of the shaft.

Taking on the arguments in the article isn’t, so I’ll handle that part.

Let me summarize the arguments they make:

* We must accept that we cannot change the world, and therefore limit our military interventions where our efforts “can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life.”

Boy, there is just so much wrong with this that I don’t know where to begin.

Let me start with my own take on where we stand – we’re slowly winning, and will win in time. There will be ebb and flow, setbacks and breakthroughs, but the fundamental characteristic is to make it clear to the parties involved that we have the sitzfleisch to see this through.

I’ve got a simple indicator, and let’s use Vietnam as a good example.

The troops in Vietnam turned against the war before the mass American population did. As a ‘chickenhawk’ (and as a snarky sidenote, given the recent column about the wealthy and tax-avoiding Norm Chomsky – I’ll go back to my Black and suggest that when he advocates that Chomsky or George Soros pay what would be ‘fair’ for his taxes, as opposed to what he owes under law – I’ll gladly make a ‘chickenhawk’ pin and put it on the site), I guess I just ought to keep listening to the troops.

So no, I don’t think we’re losing. We’re certainly not winning as quickly as some had hoped, but here I’ll go to my own record and pass on (again) my own quote from before the war:

We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to ‘declare victory and go home’ when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And while we’re damn good with stuff and money, this is going to take much more, and we’re going to have to roll up our sleeves, work, and be willing to sweat with this for some time.

Next, Yglesias suggests that the strategic justification for the war collapsed with the discovery that there was no nuclear bomb waiting to be primed in Baghdad or Tikrit.

He’s wrong there as well.

First, from before the war again:

So unless we shock the states supporting terrorism into stopping, the problem will get worse. Note that it will probably get somewhat worse if we do…but that’s weather, and I’m worried about climate.

What’s wrong with that? The reality is that even in a worst-case scenario such as I painted in Armed Liberal, our losses would be limited and readily survivable.

But I don’t think our reaction would be. I believe that a sufficiently aggressive terrorist action against the United States could well result in the simple end of the Islamic world as we know it. I believe that if nukes were detonated in San Pedro and Alameda and Red Hook that there’s a non-trivial chance that we would simply start vaporizing Arab cities until our rage was sated.

I’d rather that didn’t happen. I’d rather that San Pedro, Alameda, and Red Hook stayed whole and safe as well, and I believe the answer is to end the state support of terrorism and the state campaigns of hatred aimed at the U.S. I think that Iraq simply has drawn the lucky straw. They are weak, not liked, bluntly in violation of international law, and as our friends the French say, about to get hung pour l’ecourager les autres…to encourage the others.

Now this may seem like a week reed on which to base a war.

But it is stronger than it appears.

First, there is a legitimate case for regime change in Iraq, regardless. I’ll refer the reader back to Salon in 1998…

The reality is that positive news has outweighed the negative in the Muslim world recently.

* The fact that vile, murderous dictators are now seen as vulnerable old men who may well wind up pulled from spider-holes to stand frustrated, arrogant, and powerless in the dock as they await sentencing from those they once terrorized.

So, what am I missing about the failure of the strategic justification?

* The war has left the U.S. isolated, alone in the West and without allies.

Yeah. tell that to Merkel, to Howard, Blair, and to Sarkozy.

So no, Matt and Sam, I appreciate the advice on how to rehabilitate myself, but I’ll just take a pass.

I’ll ignore the simple fact that the only alternative anti-Islamist policy to this one would involve bailing our CIA agents out of Italian jails.

So let’s check in a few years from now, and we’ll see whose reputation needs rehab.

From the L.A. Times:

Workers at auto parts maker Delphi Corp. will be asked this week to take a two-thirds pay cut. It’s one of the most drastic wage concessions ever sought from unionized employees.

Workers at General Motors Corp., meanwhile, tentatively agreed on Monday to absorb billions of dollars in healthcare costs. Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler employees are certain to face similar demands.

The forces affecting Delphi and GM workers are extreme versions of what’s occurring across the American labor market, where such economic risks as unemployment and health costs once broadly shared by business and government are being shifted directly onto the backs of American working families.

This risk-shifting is only a small part of what is really a slow collapse of wages in the entire manufacturing sector.

Grocery workers at the 71-store Farmer Jack chain in Michigan agreed to take a 10% wage cut to make their operation more palatable to a new owner. Hundreds of workers at a hose plant in Auburn, Ind., approved a $2 cut in their $18-an-hour pay to keep the plant open. Police officers in Wyandotte, Mich., agreed to a three-year wage freeze and to pay more for healthcare.

Jerry Jasinowski, president of the Manufacturing Institute at the National Assn. of Manufacturers, said such givebacks would simply become a fact of life.

“From airline pilots to auto assembly workers, employees need to help reduce their costs,” he said. “We can’t afford to live with the very generous benefits we provided 10, 15 years ago.”

Workers’ reduced leverage has many origins, including a slack labor market and the offshoring of jobs to low-cost countries such as China and India.

Some companies, challenged by low-cost rivals, say they can’t afford more than minimal raises. And even at firms doing well, high premiums for healthcare insurance take away from the pool of funds that could be used to provide raises.

The problem of course, is that part of those givebacks do pay for our modern Gilded Age:

This [2004] was a year of record-breaking real estate sales, with high-end properties pushing through price ceilings around the country. In fact, the average price of the homes on our list jumped from last year’s $25.9 million to $34.9 million, a dramatic increase of nearly 35%.

Significantly, in 2004 the record for the most expensive house ever sold in the U.S. was broken when billionaire Ronald O. Perelman unloaded his Palm Beach estate for $70 million. Perelman, 61, whose holding company MacAndrew & Forbes owns cosmetics producer Revlon (nyse: REV – news – people ) and flavoring maker M&F Worldwide (nyse: MFW – news – people ), sold to Dwight C. Schar, 62, who has been chief executive of Virginia-based construction service company NVR for 18 years, and is a part owner of the Washington Redskins football team. The sale price shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for Schar, who had a paycheck last year of $58 million, making him the fifth best-paid CEO on our annual roundup of executive pay.

I’ve oft-quoted Neil Stephenson when he said (in Snow Crash):

When it gets down to it–talking trade balances here–once we’ve brain-drained all our technology to other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here, once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel, once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would call prosperity–y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anybody else: music/movies/microcode (software)/high-speed pizza delivery.

“once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would call prosperity” – has a kind of accurate ring to it, doesn’t it?

The rub, of course, is that a bunch of people in America are going to buy record-breaking numbers of record-breakingly expensive mansions while Jane and Joe America worry about paying the heating bill on their two-flat apartment.

That’s not inherently evil, and I’m not someone who believes that those who get don’t deserve.

But I do believe that if those who get don’t understand the social compact that allows them to keep getting and to enjoy what they’ve got, the consequences for our polity will be massively destructive.

It’s simple; we’re in this together or we’re not.

As my health plan, Pacificare, looks to consummate a sale to a larger health care organization, the CEO stands to make over $180 million in the transaction. Good for him, bad for us.

Cramming cutbacks down the throats of employees, while budget crises in local government limit their access to education for retraining, cutbacks in public health and local hospital networks limit their access to health care, and restrictive zoning and planning requirements limit their access to housing is a pretty clear signal that the answer to that question today is “not.”

When the largest group of voters wake up and see this, and their answer becomes “not,” too, the kind of demagoguery masquerading as populism won’t be anything we want to hear.

I’d like to forestall that, and I think we can.

Directors of California’s giant public pension fund voted Monday to oppose $345 million in payments that top executives of PacifiCare Health Systems Inc. would reap from the sale of the health insurer to UnitedHealth Group Inc.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or CalPERS, holds a small fraction of PacifiCare shares, but it is the first institutional investor to take a position on the proposed $8.1-billion acquisition. Shareholders are scheduled to vote Nov. 17.

The deal, proposed in July, would grant payments to 39 top PacifiCare executives, including about $180 million to Chief Executive Howard Phanstiel. The payments include accelerated vesting of options granted by Cypress-based PacifiCare and signing bonuses and other incentives to executives who stay with UnitedHealth, the nation’s second-largest health insurer, for several years.

Good for CALPERS.
–

Adam Bellow (to whom I still owe a review) answers my question below and explains what the **** Bush was thinking.

The problem for W is that the ethic of friendship and loyalty that the Bushes cultivate and that brought him to power is threatening now to bring him down. He has made the common dynastic mistake of confusing loyalty and merit; in his eyes, the merit of people like Michael Brown and Harriet Miers consists in their being his friends. They are loyal to him, and their loyalty must be rewarded. Thus in Bush, the very loyalty that was a private virtue has become a public vice. His greatest failing is his inability to hold people accountable for their errors. Because they are his creatures, he seems unable to disown them or even to see their faults. This is an inexcusable failing in a democratic leader. As the Machiavellian FDR would be the first to acknowledge, aristocratic virtues have no place in the modern executive. For while Americans do love a prince, they want nothing to do with a king.

OK, that’s a gotcha, for sure.

Yes, I know that the equipment is in use in fighting terrorists, and that the troops are stretched thin…

…but it ought to be really, really bothersome that:

…the footsoldiers of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, one of Pakistan’s most prominent Islamic extremist groups, have been at the vanguard of the relief operation for the October 8 disaster.

One of the reasons the perception of the United States has risen in the Muslim world was out generous and rapid response to the tsunami.

Were we only as visibly rapid and generous now.Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis are homeless, starving, and freezing right now.

The U.S. contribution hasn’t been insubstantial:

Following are details on the material assistance that has been provided as of 4:30 PM EDT, October 12.

Emergency Relief Supplies:

* 10 Emergency Health Kits are scheduled to arrive in Pakistan on Friday, October 15. Each kit serves 10,000 people for three months.
* Two C-17 aircraft, four C-130 aircraft, one Mi-8 aircraft and one UC-35 aircraft arrived on October 12, carrying medical supplies, relief supplies, water, cots, doctors, and humanitarian assistance personnel.
* Two C-17s carrying relief supplies arrived on October 11.
* A IL-76 carrying initial USAID/OFDA relief supplies arrived on October 10, including 250 rolls of plastic sheeting – sufficient for approximately 2,500 families – 5,000 blankets, and 5,000 water containers.
* USAID/OFDA has allocated $9.3 million to the UN Consolidated Appeal Process s part of the initial $50 million contribute toward Pakistan relief.
* USAID/OFDA in Washington, DC has committed $1 million to be provided through the American Red Cross in response to a Preliminary Emergency Appeal issued by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. This was in addition to the $100,000 announced on October 10 by the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

Transportation Assets:

* Eight U.S. military helicopters now in country (five CH-47 Chinooks and three UH-60 Blackhawks) continue to deliver regular supplies of tents, medical supplies, water, meals ready-to-eat and other desperately needed relief supplies. The aviation task force has flown about 150 missions since arriving October 10, moving 250 people and 45,000 pounds of supplies and equipment. Some of the most severe damage from the earthquake has been sustained in remote areas not easily accessible by road.
* Heavy equipment such as bulldozers, dump trucks, and forklifts, and support systems, such as water purification systems, portable generators, and medical support are being dispatched from within the Central Command region.

Emergency Management Assistance:

* Eight members of the nine-person Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) arrived in Islamabad on October 12. The team’s mission is to assess humanitarian needs, assist with targeting and coordination of U.S. assistance, and provide technical assistance as needed.
* A 23-member Contingency Support Group from McGuire Air Force Base arrived in Islamabad on October 12 and will be involved in planning and logistics support.
* Department of Defense announced on October 11 that Navy Rear Admiral Michael Lefever has been designated to coordinate the Disaster Assistance Center in Islamabad.

But it’s behind-the-scenes help with materiel and logistics; the kind of help that is vital, but often invisible.

I can well understand the security challenge of placing lots of boots on the ground in an environment like this.

But I can also see the massive and long-term win that we could generate – throughout the Muslim world – with the simple image of U.S. medics helping the wounded, U.S. uniforms distributing shelter.

The social-service arm of Hamas is the engine that drives it’s legitimacy. It ought to be our engine, not theirs. We should be better at this than they are.