Just POlitics

Hillary’s right turn

Hillary Clinton made another right turn yesterday. Senators Hillary Clinton, Joseph Lieberman and Rick Santorum introduced a bill yesterday on media and child development.

"It is a little frustrating when we have this data that demonstrates there is a clear public health connection between exposure to violence and increased aggression that we have been as a society unable to come up with any adequate public health response," Clinton said.

Budget

Senate Republicans called for $70.2 billion in tax cuts over the next five years, as opposed to the estimated $100 billion the White House proposed.

"I think we can get most of the expiring provisions, which I happen to consider to be fairly benign provisions with a lot of support, under the $70 billion umbrella," Senator Judd Gregg, who is chairman of the Budget Committee, said.

The NY Times reports on the budget today:

The House budget calls for $106 billion in tax cuts over the next five years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates Mr. Bush's proposed tax cuts would total $100 billion. The budget also instructs other House committees to pare $68.6 billion from entitlement programs, in which spending is determined by eligibility, over the next five years. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Bush's budget proposed only $51 billion, or about $18 billion less, in cuts to those programs. The Senate budget, by contrast, instructs committees to cut $32 billion in mandatory spending, including $14 billion from Medicaid.

"I think he would be pretty happy with where we are in the House," Mr. Nussle said, referring to the president. Compared with the Senate, he said, "We have quite a lot more savings and reform that we are requesting."

DeLay knew

Rep. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, said Wednesday that he was aware of how accounts for corporate donations had been set up at a political action committee that is under criminal investigation by a Texas grand jury. DeLay also admitted that he was one of the creators of the PAC.

Delay is reported as saying in the NY Times:

"Everything that Trmpac did they did under the advice of lawyers," he said, using the committee's acronym (pronounced TRIM-pack). "So this notion that they created a criminal offense, you first have to have intent, which they didn't show in the indictment. Secondly, when you have lawyers advising you every step of the way in writing, it is very hard to make a case stick."

Suing CBS

On Dan Rather’s last day as news anchor CBS was sued by producer Esther Kartiganer, who has worked at the network for four decades.

Kartiganer filed the lawsuit against the network in State Supreme Court in Manhattan asserting that she should not have been removed from her position on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes."

At the heart of Kartiganer's suit is that her main responsibility on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," was to check whether interviews were portrayed in context. CBS chairman Leslie Moonves wrote in a release available on-line, "It is difficult to understand how a person of Kartiganer's toughness and experience abnegated her assigned function, but the fact is that she did, and CBS News is the worse for it."

U.S.’s beef with Japan

Not only is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice raising the issue of when America will begin exporting beef to Japan, now President Bush is also raising the issue.

Japanese and U.S. officials announced a "framework" agreement, and U.S. officials predicted that some American beef shipments to Japan would resume quickly. That was just prior to the Presidential election.

A major sticking point between the United States and Japan is how to determine that beef is coming from slaughtered U.S. cattle less than 20 months old. That age limit was set because it is the earliest age at which Japanese testing on domestic herds has detected mad cow disease.

Bennet’s Social Security plan

Robert Novak writes about Sen. Robert Bennett’s, the chief deputy majority whip, Social Security plan:

Bennett tackles the coming Social Security shortfall by making an overdue change -- long advocated by the late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- of pegging Social Security to prices instead of wages. That requires a cut in future benefits. But Bennett would ''blend'' that cut -- deeper for the rich than the poor. This constitutes a nonpartisan compromise. Significantly, Bennett does not raise taxes.

The Bennett plan tries to sidestep the furor over personal accounts by establishing an individual savings account outside of the Social Security system. Many Democrats are proposing similar plans, and nobody really thinks they would impel workers to save appreciably more than they do today. However, Bennett would write into law, effective five years from now, the option for wage earners to commit a portion of their payroll taxes to future accounts.

Democrats: it wasn’t turnout

Al From and Bruce Reed offer some advice to Democrats:

For example, it's a delusion to think that if we just turned out our voters, we could win national elections. The 2004 election should have dispelled that myth, once and for all. With an unprecedented effort to get out our vote, Democrats far exceeded all expectations -- and we still lost. Next time, we need to mount an unprecedented effort in persuasion, not just turnout. A party that has averaged 44.5 percent of the vote in the last 10 presidential elections and has only won a majority of the popular vote for president twice in six decades needs to start winning over some of the voters it's losing.

The argument about base versus swing voters is the longest running false choice in Washington. We simply need both to win. If we only win our base vote, we'll lose every time. If our base doesn't come out to vote in large numbers, we won't win, even if we do well with swing voters. But if we offer a clear, progressive approach for tackling the big challenges facing America, we'll do well every time, and so will the country.

Democrats like to believe that we have the right message and our problem is one of communication -- of getting our message out more effectively. The Republicans, we like to argue, win with an inferior message, because they're better at getting it out. But after losing two presidential and three congressional elections in a row -- all of which Democrats thought they would win -- maybe it's time to think hard about what we say, not just how loudly we say it.

Gov. Vilsack for President?

Seen at the People for the American Way Foundation dinner in New York Tuesday night: Gov. Tom Vilsack and wife Christie, (IA-Democrat) collecting business cards and working the room.

U.N.: withdraw Syria

U.N. Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen will fly to the region today, stopping for talks in Egypt, Lebanon and possibly Jordan before his scheduled arrival Saturday in the Syrian capital. U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan said that he hopes the envoy can nail down a timetable of Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon.

"What is essential is that full and complete withdrawal takes place," Annan said.