Weigel: Reporting about politics and policy

Last Call: Wahls

HawaiiTours.com offers a Find Obama's Birth Certificate package tour for $399.

This is the perfect tour for those who are interested in helping put an end to the mystery of whether or not President Obama's birth certificate exists in Hawaii.

Travel arrangements will be made by our team of native Hawaiian tour guides, certified as some of the best on the Island. Activities include island hopping, volcano exploration, a visit to the Pearl Harbor Memorial, a 120-mile journey around the island of Oahu and a traditional luau at Paradise Cove. If the missing Presidential documents are to be found, these are the perfect tours to uncover them on.

Hold on, Orly: The only actual time given to a birth certificate search is during the luau. This might be a scam.

Solidarność. Give.

Weird of the Dems to drop this happy shiny news on a Friday afternoon.

Lobbyists and the Arab World

I've spent a bit of time today using ForeignLobbying.org to pull recent information about Egypt and its neighbors lobbying inside the United States. Comparing one country's contracts to another's, you get a sense of just how assiduously Egypt worked its connections. An October visit from the Speaker of the Egyptian Parliament led to meetings with the staffs of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Rep. Steve Cohen, Rep. Jim Costa, Rep. Gregory Meeks, Rep. Yvette Clarke, and more. Not so huge. But another visit from Egypt's Grand Mufti gets person-to-person meetings with Rep. Keith Ellison, Rep. Steve Scalise, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, Rep. Gene Green, Rep. Jim Himes, and the staffs of Rep. Barbara Lee and others.

A list I'll add to later, of who exactly works for the countries currently on a revolution watchlist:

Egypt - Public Policy Solutions, the Livingston Group, and the PLM Group.

Libya - Livingston Group as recently as 2009. Most of its contacts were directly with members.

Morocco - Gabriel Company. What it got: Mostly meetings with members.

United Arab Emirates -- Clark & Weinstock, mostly for discussions with the State Department.

Paul Ryan: Bachmann's State of the Union Response "Threw Jon Stewart Off My Trail"

"What I see," says Ryan, "is: Michele threw Saturday Night Live and Jon Stewart off my trail."

There is scattered laughter.

"That's a joke," says Ryan.

There's louder laughter. But Ryan is obviously right -- SNL mocked Bachmann's speech, not his, and Bill Maher opened his Friday evening show by noting that he'd "never heard of" Ryan, before mocking Bachmann.

Sarah Palin, (TM)-Alaska

UPDATE: The fun is over:

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's bid to trademark both her name and that of her daughter Bristol ran into trouble at the Patent and Trademark Office because the application forms were not signed, government records show.

An easy thing to forget on a trademark form, surely.

Do you want to see Sarah Palin's application for a trademark on her name? Of course you do. The basic form:

To the Commissioner for Trademarks:

MARK: Sarah Palin (Standard Characters, see mark)
The literal element of the mark consists of Sarah Palin.
The mark consists of standard characters, without claim to any particular font, style, size, or color.

The applicant, Sarah L. Palin, a citizen of United States, having an address of

      711 H Street, Suite 620
      Anchorage, Alaska 99501
      United States

requests registration of the trademark/service mark identified above in the United States Patent and Trademark Office on the Principal Register established by the Act of July 5, 1946 (15 U.S.C. Section 1051 et seq.), as amended, for the following:

For specific filing basis information for each item, you must view the display within the Input Table. International Class 035:  Information about political elections; Providing a website featuring information about political issues

In International Class 035, the mark was first used at least as early as 01/01/1996, and first used in commerce at least as early as 01/01/1996, and is now in use in such commerce. The applicant is submitting one specimen(s) showing the mark as used in commerce on or in connection with any item in the class of listed goods and/or services, consisting of a(n) Fox News Contributor; www.facebook.sarahpalin.

International Class 041:  Educational and entertainment services, namely, providing motivational speaking services in the field of politics, culture, business and values

In International Class 041, the mark was first used at least as early as 01/01/1996, and first used in commerce at least as early as 01/01/1996, and is now in use in such commerce. The applicant is submitting one specimen(s) showing the mark as used in commerce on or in connection with any item in the class of listed goods and/or services, consisting of a(n) Washington Speakers Bureau Website Featuring Sarah Palin.

I am not giving away her address; that is the office address of her lawyer at the time, Thomas Van Flein. The fee for submitting this was $550.

Judicial Power Couples

I talked with Northwestern Law Prof. Steven Lubet, who teaches judicial ethics, about Ginni Thomas's career move. He's spoken out before on whether Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases related to her activism (up to him) and whether he did something illegal by not declaring her affiliations in his tax filings (no). Can Ginni Thomas be a consultant (she's not a registered lobbyist) to members of Congress? Probably.

"No one I'm aware of has ever done it," said Lubet. He thought about it. "I suppose Justice Ginsburg's late husband might have had conversations with members." Ruth Bader Ginsburg's late husband, Martin, was a law professor and tax law expert.

It is unusual for a Supreme Court spouse to engage in activity like this. It's less unusual at lower levels, but it's something the spouses have to deal with. The Speaker of the House in Ohio, William Batchelder, is married to Alice Batchelder, a judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. She does not often have to recuse herself; she dealt with a little heat in 2008 when she didn't recuse herself in a political case involving Ohio's Democratic Secretary of State, but because she didn't ask for a recusal, it didn't amount to much.

"Since she's on the federal bench," said Tony Bledsoe, legislative inspector general in Ohio, "the state of Ohio doesn't even pay her salary. So there are no special ethics guidelines."

Socialist International Kicks Out Mubarak

Joshua Keating has the letter from the Socialist International to "the General Secretary of the National Democratic Party of Egypt" -- Hosni Mubarak -- expelling it from the organization. It was sent on January 31, before the crackdowns began in earnest. I've posted the letter below, in order to make Glenn Beck's chalkboard messier.

Dear General Secretary,

The National Democratic Party of Egypt became a member of the Socialist International in June 1989, at the XVIII Congress held in Stockholm.

This decision was based upon the desire of the Socialist International to build a partnership with your organisation in the search for peace and security in that region of the world, so crucial to global stability. The International, as a movement for peace, recognised in this decision the will of the NDP and its leadership to sincerely engage in this quest, as has indeed been evident over the last thirty years.

Along with this, the Socialist International wanted to encourage the development of multi-party democracy in Egypt by expanding relationships in that part of the world, as democracy is for our movement a fundamental pillar upon which to secure the rights and freedoms of our citizens and to achieve social and economic progress.

Our International certainly recognises that what we managed to do together in our common work to contribute to peace, particularly between Israelis and Palestinians, and to foster a new climate in the region conducive to the recognition of a two-state solution has had a positive and lasting impact.

On the other hand, the lack of developments in relation to democracy in Egypt has left us deeply troubled, notwithstanding the hopeful moments which had arisen during the 80s and led to membership of the NDP in the SI and then again in the mid- 2000s when a measure of important internal changes had taken place within the NDP.

The current massive calls being made today by the citizens of Egypt for freedoms and rights point to the dramatic failure of the Egyptian government to deliver to its people and to the failings of the NDP to live up to its promises. The use of violence, with scores dead and injured, is totally incompatible with the policies and principles of any social democratic party anywhere in the world.

Consequently, we consider that a party in government that does not listen, that does not move and that does not immediately initiate a process of meaningful change in these circumstances, cannot be a member of the Socialist International.

We are, as of today, ceasing the membership of the NDP, however we remain determined to cooperate with all the democrats in Egypt striving to achieve an open, democratic, inclusive and secular state.

Yours sincerely,
Luis Ayala
General Secretary

When CREW Took on Dell

In yesterday's post about Melanie Sloan's weird quasi-libel of the Center for American Progress, I mentioned in passing that Sloan's CREW had briefly crusaded against fraud in Dell's "next day service" policy. The reason stated at the time was that Dell had not given Sloan's computer next day service.

The website for this campaign is down, but I found the launch video, compete with proto-Bachmann camerawork.

The Misadventures of Ginni Thomas

Ken Vogel, Marin Cogan and John Bresnahan report on Ginni Thomas's life since leaving Liberty Central. It was a departure, you'll remember, that Liberty Central denied at the time. And last week, I noticed that Thomas was on the list of speakers who'd address the first meeting of the Tea Party Caucus, as a representative of "Liberty Central," but Gary Aldrich subbed for her and told me she was probably snowed in.

What I'm trying to say is that Thomas's situation is a mess.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, has recast herself yet again, this time as the head of a firm, Liberty Consulting, which boasts on its website using her “experience and connections” to help clients “with “governmental affairs efforts” and political donation strategies.

Thomas already has met with nearly half of the 99 GOP freshmen in the House and Senate, according to an e-mail she sent last week to congressional chiefs of staff, in which she branded herself “a self-appointed, ambassador to the freshmen class and an ambassador to the tea party movement.”

...

Roughly half a dozen aides for new members told POLITICO that their offices received handwritten meeting requests from Thomas the day after they were sworn in, as well as follow-up e-mails requesting a meeting with her — but only one of them had met with her. The rest had no plans to do so.

Thomas doesn't really talk to the press; in this story, she gets a phone call, complains about the connection, then never responds to more interview requests. So her side of the story must come from the Liberty Consulting web site.

Liberty Consulting offers advice for short or long term projects and bringing resources to bear for impact — whether it includes a short term bill-reading project, assistance on congressional oversight efforts or an effective coalition for impact. Additionally, Liberty Consulting offers advice on optimizing political investments for charitable giving in the non-profit world or political causes. 

So you can hire Ginni Thomas to help determine whether a bill will pass constitutional muster if it comes before, you know, her husband. And she's having trouble getting work! It's quite possible that a combination of media blackout and embarrassing gaffes that echo for weeks (the call to Anita Hill) is not a good way to build a consulting shop.

Also, I notice that some of the testimonials for her work are recycled from her Liberty Central days -- the ones from Robert P. George, Larry Arnn, and Rick Berman.

Glenn Beck and Mitt Romney on the Caliphate

I have been told to watch Glenn Beck's Fox News show this week, as he has tried to tackle the crisis in Egypt. "It's incredibly insane," they informed me.

I was skeptical. Why was I skeptical? His February 1 show was an instant classic, with the highlight coming in a six-minute theoretical exploration of how radical Muslims, if they took over Egypt, could build a caliphate. The whole thing is too good to chop up: Here's the whole excerpt.

Here's how a caliphate could play out.

You have Somalia and Iran already in green. Now, let's add Tunisia. Former Tunisian government was considered one of the most secular and corrupt governments in the Arab world. The poor and the angry demanded changes. Most dangerous scenario is that radical Muslims seize power and put Sharia law into place.

Same thing now with Egypt. Here is Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood want this. They want a power-grab from Mubarak.

He's going to resign in September he said, just a few minutes ago. People are upset Mubarak doesn't take a hard line against Israel. Maintain the peace treaty with them. The Muslim Brotherhood, as you'll see in a minute, take a hard line against Israel.

This could very easily be 1979 Iran.

Then you have Jordan, the king is already considered a puppet because he sides with Western forces. Today, he said he's going to change out his government.

Then you have Syria. Here's Jordan. Here's Syria. Syria is already a puppet of the Iranians.

And then you have Yemen. This is Saudi Arabia. All of your oil comes from here.

Do you see what's happening? All of your oil -- you get your oil from here and here. How does that happen?

And we have Lebanon. Iranian-backed Hezbollah is in the driver's seat of their government.

If you go back to Africa, you have Nigeria. Parts of the country are already controlled by Sharia law.

Somalia, most of the country right now is living under Islamic law.

Sudan -- the country is split with Sudan. The north is imposing Sharia law already. The south is largely Christian. They're slaughtering each other.

Here's Algeria. Notice its location.

Algeria -- Al-Qaeda already has a significance perhaps there.

Then you have the Ivory Coast down here the election turmoil is going on right now between Christians and the new Islamic president.

And then you have all the other ones that are on a tipping point, already a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity. Libya -- Libya has already been anti-Israel, pro-terrorism for a long time.

And then you have morocco. Morocco -- important, significant al-Qaeda activity. The king has been battling. But if you go back here, you have - - remember, this is Iraq. Look at what you're surrounded by.

Iraq is really important, especially to the Shiites, especially to the Twelvers who are in charge of this country right now. Because what is in Iraq? There's one place that we told our bombers not to bomb. Does anybody know what it was?

Two wars in Iraq. We said no bombing there. Ancient Babylon. Ancient Babylon. Why? Because the Bible tells us that that is the seat -- right here -- of power of a global, evil empire.

Well, that's also where the 12th imam from Iran is supposedly going to show up. Everybody on this side wants ancient Babylon for their caliphate.

Turkey was originally the seat of the Ottoman Empire, the last caliphate. It's now modern day Turkey. It has Islamist government that is moving aggressively pro-Iran, anti-Israel.

Saudi Arabia, God help them, I don't know what happens to those guys. And the Gulf States are all nearly defenseless and tiny, all of them, throw them in. Do you have it?

Now, what happens? You move over to Asia and grab the ones -- once this dominoes starts to fall and the Muslims start to see oh, my gosh, we might have a caliphate. We might be able to have Islam impose Sharia law all over the globe. You start to lose all of Asia.

Now, let's go up this way, shall we? Turkey's prime minister came out and supported today the Egypt protesters. Morocco. Morocco -- if Morocco flips, it puts pressure on Portugal and Spain. It could close off the Strait of Gibraltar, which is right here.

We all know how weak this entire area. The Iberian Peninsula is very weak.

Let's talk about 22 percent unemployment in Spain. It's also once a Muslim land. They have high Muslim populations. It's already in trouble. Bad economic situations, food prices go up.

Well, let me ask you this. Here's Spain. Here's France. What happens to France?

You already have a lot of Algerians living there. If you go to Italy, you have the Libyans living there. You have Great Britain where many of them are from Pakistan.

So, what happens? What happens?

In the three days after this aired, Beck has been knocked back and forth like a birdie. The punchline: He is not the first conservatives to talk about this.

No, Unemployment Isn't 9 Percent

Sorry, BLS. It would be nice if it was! But 36,000 people got jobs while 600,000 people fell out of the ranks of the unemployed. We know what this means: Hundreds of thousands of people gave up and stopped looking for work. No wonder, because construction and transportation employment fell after a year of increases.

I like the way Gallup calculates this stuff. Yes, it's a private company, not a government agency, which as we all know means it can't possibly be as good. Bear with me, though. Gallup interviews around 20,000 people every month, doesn't adjust seasonally, and comes up with 9.8 percent unemployment and 18,9 percent underemployment.

Busy Doing Nothing

My new piece is about how the GOP Congress is succeeding by not doing very much. Compare it to the insurgent Congresses of 1995 and 2007 and it's barely trying to pass bills -- ie, pass things that will get to the president's desk and become law. There are no "70 percent issues" like Newt Gingrich fought on. A month in, the only Republican agenda item that might pass is 1099 reform.

This year, Republicans have kicked things off with repeal bills. There are no bold new ideas. There is just dismantling of Democratic ideas. And the result of this, so far, has been resilient Republican popularity. At the end of January, a Gallup poll gave Republicans their first favorable approval ratings since 2005, when their Bush-era slide began. Since the election, Rasmussen Reports polls have put the number of Americans identifying as Republicans close to the number of Americans who identify as Democrats. I asked Scott Rasmussen why this was.

"The Republicans are helped by low expectations," said Rasmussen. "Hardly anybody expects them to actually cut spending. The GOP is also helped by the fact that Democrats still control the White House and the Senate. You cite the lack of legislative accomplishment. Remember, by a 3-to-1 margin, voters believe that no matter how bad something is, Congress can always make it worse. That's true regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge. Lack of action may be a plus in some eyes."

Rick Santorum Was A Senator

George Will devotes a column to Rick Santorum's possibly-not-hopeless presidential bid and the Union Leader runs it -- a nice little coup. Even better for Santorum is the way Will nut-grafs his career.

Santorum had one of the Senate's most conservative voting records and was floor manager of the most important legislation of the 1990s, the 1996 welfare reform, which Clinton vetoed twice before signing.

Santorum had a very conservative voting record -- an 88 percent American Conservative Union rating. That's a good lifetime rating, but it's nine points below the rating of Pat Toomey when he was in the House. And the rating fell during George W. Bush's presidency, to 70 percent in 2004, because as the third-ranking Republican, Santorum cast some un-conservative votes. He voted for Medicare Part D. He introduced billions of dollars in earmarks, something he now apologizes for. He famously endorsed Arlen Specter for re-election over Toomey in 2004, but this almost works for him now -- at events, he apologizes for that, and conservatives applaud him for recognizing his heresy.

Santorum's lucky in another way. He wasn't in the Senate after 2007, so he didn't have to cast tough votes on TARP or the tax cut deal (which he opposed). But his argument to Tea Partiers depends on 1) apologizing and 2) taking ideal positions on bills he didn't have to vote on. Sure, his success is going to be driven by social conservatives, not libertarians, but he needs a lot of benign neglect to make this work.

The Don't Tread-On-Meter Rises As Much As It Can

Last Call: Thugs

Terrific AP breakdown of Egypt's lobbying power in Washington. Count the no-comments!

Northern Florida District Court now governs Alaska.

Wow, Ruben Hinojosa. Just... wow.

Darrell Issa wants you to tell him how to save jobs.

Read this immediately.

Rand Paul Supports Your Right to Keep and Bear Laser Pointers

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., attached an amendment to the FAA funding bill criminalizing the act of pointing lasers at airplanes.

The amendment has passed, with one vote against: The vote of Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY.

Melanie Sloan Is Not Making Sense

Libel law gives a lot of leeway to the claims made in op-eds. CREW's Melanie Sloan probably didn't libel the lefty college activism group Campus Progress, an arm of the Center for American Progress, with this Politico op-ed. But Sloan should be embarrassed by the innuendo in here. She notes that short-seller Steve Eisman, who should be familiar to anyone who read The Big Short, appeared before Congress to testify about the problems with for-profit colleges. OK, fine. Then:

Campus Progress also appears to be funding an ad campaign on MSNBC and Fox to promote these regulations. The group has, in the past, suggested scurrilous profit motive on the part of those who deviate from its own position. But it’s worth noting that major ad campaigns require major donors.

Sloan's full of it. Cable campaigns in the D.C. area are dirt cheap, which is why there are so many of them. Campus Progress's communications director Katie Andriulli says the think tank spent $4000 in order to get the ad running on MSNBC and Fox News at times between 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. -- ie, before prime time.

I'd say Sloan damages CREW's credibility with stuff like this, but she left it pretty well dented in 2009 when CREW launched a campaign against Dell because her computer did not get next-day service the next day after she had a problem with it.

BREAKING: Jerks React to Leading Questions on Video

The conservative blogosphere is blowing up over this video, recorded and posted by Christian Hartsock. He attended the protests outside of last weekend's Koch conference as an "independent investigative journalist," and asked protestors a variation of a leading question: What should be done to Clarence Thomas, to get revenge for Anita Hill? Among the answers: "put him back in the fields," "torture him," and "string him up."

I got interested in this when James O'Keefe, the ACORN sting artist, tweeted a link to it directed at Politico's Ken Vogel, one of the few reporters who filed stories from the Koch meeting and the protest. "Why didn't you mention the 'lynching' stuff these protesters said in your Politico articles?" asked O'Keefe. Vogel responded: "because I didn't instigate them to say those things, just like I don't instigate at Tea Party protests. Not your style, I know."

This is a revealing little incident. There is a subgenre of political video in which the videographer infiltrates an event and asks leading questions to see how the subject responds. The best stuff shows up in a rundown of clips that, inevitability, makes the event look completely insane. And this is as old as TV, but I trace the web-driven version of it to 2003 videos filmed at anti-Iraq War rallies by documentary director Evan Coyne Maloney. For example:

In the Tea Party era, some liberals have tried to get Tea Partiers on camera saying stupid and violent things. The success has been limited; conservatives are naturally pretty damn skeptical of media in general and people with video cameras in particular. Theoretically, anyone -- any journalists -- can show up an event and "expose" the attendees by seeing how violent they'll get. It seems less like journalism than psy-ops.

Lieberman on Fort Hood: DOD Needs to Identify and Name "Violent Islamic Extremism"

A bit lost in the shuffle today, Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security has released an oft-delayed report on the 2009 Fort Hood shootings which concludes that the Department of Defense needs to abandon political correctness and start naming violent Islam when it sees it.

"We need to take strong new steps, urgently, and with the same sense of purpose we felt after the 9/11 attacks, to identify the ideology of violent Islamic extremism," said Lieberman.

Here's the report. It is not altogether different in its conclusions than the Republicans of 2009-2010, who made a suggestion similar to Lieberman's: for DOD to "finally, explicitly, describe and confront violent Islamic extremism."

FortHoodReport

Next GOP Cut: End Aid to China, Brazil, Luxembourg, Etc

The Majority Leader's office announces its next "YouCut" vote: Ending economic assistance to nations that hold more than $50 billion of U.S. treasuries.

Ironically, we actually provide economic assistance in the form of foreign aid to some of our largest creditors. For example, in 2010 U.S. taxpayers provided approximately $4.7 million in economic assistance for countries, including China, that hold in excess of $50 billion in U.S. government debt (this excludes funds for environmental programs). In short, Congress is borrowing money from foreign countries and turning around using some of that money to provide them with economic grants. This proposal would prohibit any economic foreign aid to a country that holds $50 billion or more in U.S. debt.

Who fits the bill? China, obviously, followed by Japan, the UK, Brazil, Canada, Taiwan, Russia, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Thailand, Germany, and Singapore. The $50 billion cutoff would leave us free to aid Ireland, South Korea, Egypt and Mexico, who are more often in the position to be bailed out; beg for help to avoid coups.

Up Next: Defense Cuts! UPDATED

And the Overton Window shifts a little further.

House Republicans are proposing to slash $74 billion in discretionary spending this year, and have included an surprise cut of $16 billion for defense and other security programs... It wasn't clear where Republicans hope to cut security spending, because the Budget Committee only sets overall limits. The cuts would not affect combat operations in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is possible that the cuts would simply reflect budget cuts along the lines that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has proposed, though some GOP lawmakers have complained about his proposals as well.

Once again, the GOP freshman tail wags the dog. New members of Congress had been unhappy about GOP cuts failing to hit the $100 billion promised during the campaign, and they had been telling constituents that they were open to defense cuts. Rand Paul kicked this off, but even Alabama's Mo Brooks had spoken out this week about R&D cuts that would suck money out of his district.

UPDATE: I left out something very important in the first run. Here's the item from the Budget fact sheet.

Security spending is assumed to be $635 billion, an increase of $8 billion relative to the 2010 level. Security agencies have been operating under a continuing resolution that is maintaining spending at last year’s level for the first five months of this year. The assumption is $16 billion below the President’s request for security spending.

Two things.

1) The $16 billion is a cut from what the president has asked for, not a cut back to 2008 levels -- which is the ambitious standard for other spending.

2) "Security spending" is not exactly "defense spending." We need to see the actual numbers, but as it has been defined in the past, security spending can include foreign aid and other non-defense programs. Until the numbers come out this is mostly rhetorical.