Brad Warthen's Blog

The UnParty's big (hypothetical) opening

Did you see that Ted Pitts might run for lieutenant governor? Do you realize the implications?

Ted Pitts is MY representative. So theoretically, it's time to make my move and run for office on the UnParty ticket. This is my big chance.

Except, of course, I can't. Newspaper editors aren't allowed to run for office, not if they want to keep on being newspaper editors. And I can't sing or dance, so I'll have to put the campaign plans on hold.

Dang.

Rendition we can believe in

Earlier this week I noticed yet another promising sign of continuity we can believe in in the War on Terror. The Obama administration has backed Bush policy in a key court case testing the policy of extraordinary rendition -- sending detainees to countries that have, shall we say, a more relaxed attitude toward certain methods of interrogation.

Here's a NYT story on the subject. And here's the AP version:

By PAUL ELIAS
Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A government lawyer urged an appeals court Monday to toss a lawsuit accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA fly suspected terrorists overseas to be tortured, maintaining a Bush administration position that the case would jeopardize national security.
    The American Civil Liberties Union and others had called on the White House to change direction and drop its move to dismiss the suit. The organization filed the lawsuit on behalf of five men swept up in the "extraordinary rendition" program and who are still being held in various prisons around the world.
    The lawsuit claims that San Jose-based Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. should be punished for allegedly providing the CIA airplanes and crew to carry out the program that included torture.
    The U.S. government intervened in the case and a trial court judge last year tossed it out after CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden invoked the government's so-called "state secrets privilege," which lets intelligence agencies bar the use of evidence in court cases that threaten national security.
    U.S. Department of Justice lawyer Douglas Letter on Monday urged a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to uphold the lower court decision. Letter said his position was "thoroughly vetted with the appropriate" administration officials.
    "These are the authorized positions of the administration," Letter said in a response to a question from Judge Mary Schroeder.
    Letter said that he was confident that Schroeder and her two colleagues on the appeals court would toss the suit after they read top secret legal documents the government filed with the court under seal.
    The case presented Obama's Justice Department with one of the first of many policy and legal decisions it faces in countless actions across the country left over from the Bush administration. Legal scholars contend that the prior administration stopped litigation involving the government by invoking state secret claims a record number of times, including in more than 40 legal challenges to the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program.
    A Department of Justice spokesman in Washington, D.C., said government lawyers were reviewing all such state secret assertions in lawsuits across the country.
    "It's vital that we protect information that if released could jeopardize national security," said Justice spokesman Matt Miller. "But the Justice Department will ensure the privilege is not invoked to hide from the American people information about their government's actions that they have a right to know."
    Outside of court, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero criticized the new president.
    "This is not change," Romero said in a prepared statement. "Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue."

I had meant to post something earlier in the week on this and another example of pragmatism-over-rhetoric on the part of the Obama administration. Right now I'm forgetting what the other example was -- I'll let you know if I remember.

But I was reminded of this one by an editorial in the WSJ today, which said in part:

    President Obama has done a masterful job disguising his Administration's growing antiterror maturity, but this week produced further evidence that he is erring on the side of keeping the country safe rather than appeasing the political left. The Justice Department filed to dismiss a federal appeals case involving rendition, embracing an argument developed by . . . the Bush Administration.
    In other words, the anti-antiterror lobby is being exposed as more radical than its putative banner carrier. As Mr. Obama is learning, the left's exertions to disarm the country's counterterrorism arsenal are as dangerous now as they were prior to his election.

When centrists are wrong

The Paul Krugman column I picked for tomorrow's op-ed page has some things seriously wrong with it, as do most Krugman columns: He trashes Obama for seeking bipartisan support of the stimulus (Krugman HATES bipartisanship), and he demagogues like crazy:

    What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

In its anti-UnParty sentiment, the column could be said to have precisely the opposite message of my Sunday column. But I chose it anyway, partly because one of the main missions of the op-ed page is to give you opinions other than mine, but also because he raises, in a backhanded way, a good point: Just because someone is a "centrist" doesn't mean he's right (or she's right, in the cases of Susan Collins and Olympia Snow).

In fact, one thing I ran out of room to say in my Sunday column, but had wanted to say, was that in the case of this bill, there are centrists and there are centrists. You'll recall that I ended the column thusly:

    But if the president has a bill that Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine all voted for, the nation would have a chance of moving forward together. And together is the only way we can recover.

When she was proofing it Friday, Cindi came into my office to object that John McCain was not a member of the gang of "centrists" negotiating over this legislation. I said yeah, that's right. Neither is Graham. I didn't intend to say they were involed in the Nelson-Collins group. I meant to say that it would have to have even broader support than what it would take to get the Nelsons and Collinses on board.

In fact, as I would have explained if I'd had a couple more inches to work with, that particular group was guided by a principle that I thought was wrong-headed: They simply wanted to cut $100 billion out of the bill, period (or that's the message I got, anyway). Since I was worried that Krugman was right when he said in a previous column that Obama's stimulus proposal wouldn't be enough, I doubted that making it LESS, on principle, was the right thing to do.

I mean, take your pick: Spend $800 billion that you don't have or $900 billion that you don't have. How is the former necessarily better than the latter? Once you've decided that massive deficit spending is what you've gotta do, in for a dime, in for a trillion...

And yet, this press release from Susan Collins seems to indicate that for her at least, reducing the amount was the point:

After days of leading bipartisan negotiations, U.S. Senators Susan Collins and Ben Nelson (D-NE) tonight announced an agreement on an amendment to the Economic Recovery Act currently before the Senate. The Nelson-Collins amendment would reduce the total cost of the package to $780 billion-$110 billion less than the bill that the Senate is currently considering.

"This deal represents a victory for the American people," said Senator Collins... "We've trimmed the fat, fried the bacon, and milked the sacred cows..."

The idea that when it comes to stimulating the economy, less is more, seems unpersuasive to me. So does the DeMint position that all you need is tax cuts. So does the position that all massive spending is good.

So is the idea that just because someone is labeled a "centrist" doesn't mean they're right. (But it sure doesn't mean they're automatically wrong just because they're centrists, as Krugman believes.)

Nobody's got the monopoly on wisdom in this discussion, from what I've seen. There are certain things I think the stimulus ought to do: It should spend money as quickly as possible and spend it on things we'll have something to show for down the line -- such as physical infrastructure that we needed to spend on anyway. I think the tax cuts are going to be pretty useless because they're spread too thin for anyone to feel them. But rather than cut them out, I'd direct that money to shovel-ready, needed infrastructure. I think any cost ceiling anybody tries to place on the plan is fairly arbitrary (such as Obama's own reluctance to go over the magic trillion mark).

But there's only one thing that I think is fairly non-negotiable: This thing needs to transcend the partisan spin cyle. To turn around our economy, we've got to be pulling together. This needs to be something that the overwhelming majority of Congress can go back home and sell, something that leaves the talking heads on 24/7 TV "news" little to natter about. And I believe that goal is worth spending a little more time to achieve.

Worrying about the stimulus

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

    “This is your bill; it needs to be America’s bill.”

            — Sen. Lindsey Graham,
         addressing Senate Democrats

What worries me, after all the rhetoric, exhortation, accusations, counter-accusations, fault-finding and blame-laying, is that the stimulus bill that spent the week staggering its way through the U.S. Senate might not work anyway.

     There was always that very good chance. Several weeks back, Paul Krugman — who as a Princeton economist is a Nobel Prize-winner, but as a political columnist is a partisan automaton — said as much. He said it wouldn’t be enough to give the economy the jolt it needs to overcome the lack of activity in the private sector. He made a persuasive case.

    Then, last week, Mr. Krugman wrote that this bill just had to pass, that those blasted Republicans opposing it were “putting the nation’s future at risk.” Obama’s mistake, he now said, was trying “to transcend partisanship” and work with the Republicans at all.

    I believe the exact opposite to be true. I believe the chances of the bill doing any good declined with each step into the thicket of partisanship.

    I never won so much as a Cracker Jack prize for economics, much less a Nobel, but there’s one thing I think I understand: Whatever Washington does in the way of stimulus — and it needs to do something (with the private sector in paralysis, this is a job for the Keynesians) — it won’t work unless America can believe in it.

    Just as Mr. Krugman is right about some things, so is Phil Gramm. Remember how indignant the Democrats got when the McCain adviser said, in mid-campaign, that we were experiencing a “mental recession”? Well, he had a point. While it doesn’t make the real-life pain any less, the mechanisms that get us into a predicament like this have an awful lot to do with what’s going on in our heads.

    When businesses think they have a chance to grow, they invest and create jobs. When they’re scared, they freeze up. When buyers and sellers believe home values will keep appreciating, the real estate market is hot. When they start to doubt values, buying and selling stop. When everyone believes a stock’s value will keep rising, it does keep rising; when they don’t, it crashes. When you think the lousy economy is threatening your job, you stop spending and stuff your earnings, literally or figuratively, into a mattress, and the workers who depended on you to buy what they produce lose their jobs, which of course increases everyone’s pessimism.

    No, it’s not all in our heads. At some point, certain things have real value. But we’re not going to start buying and selling and hiring and investing and taking risks at the levels needed to pull ourselves out of this tail-spin until we reach a consensus that things are getting better, or about to get better.

    You can argue about the specific provisions in the stimulus all you want, and Democrats and Republicans have been doing so enthusiastically. But I don’t think I’ve seen a specific idea yet that couldn’t be argued both ways. Even the worst idea pumps some juice into the economy; even the best one is no silver bullet.

    With private sector leadership — especially on Wall Street — having failed us so spectacularly, we need something intangible from our political leadership every bit as much as we need infrastructure spending and/or tax cuts: We need to look at what Washington is producing and believe that it actually is for the good of the country, and not for the good of the Democrats or the Republicans or this or that politician.

    As he entered office, I thought Barack Obama had what it took to lead us in that direction — to pull us together and help us believe that we can solve our problems. To persuade us, as FDR did, that we had nothing to fear, that we were going to get through this, together.

    I still think he can. But last week, I saw him stumble. I’m not talking about the Tom Daschle business. As the stimulus package faltered, he reverted to campaign mode, blaming Republicans who wanted to cling to those failed policies of the past eight years we heard so much about in 2008.

    Helping him in this counterproductive effort were such Republicans as our own Jim DeMint, who most certainly was clinging to the ideologies that have failed his party and the nation — such as the stubborn idea that tax cuts are the only kind of stimulus anyone needs.

    A far more sensible position was taken by our other senator late Thursday. Lindsey Graham grabbed headlines by saying “this bill stinks,” but he had smarter things to say than that:

    You know, my problem is that I think we need a stimulus bill. I think we need to do more than cut taxes. But the process has been terrible. The House passed this bill without one Republican vote, lost 11 Democrats. Nancy Pelosi said, We won, we write the bill.... (W)e’re not being smart and we’re not working together, and people want us to be smart and work together, and this has been a miserable failure on both fronts.

    As I wrote this column, much remained unsettled. By the time you read it, something may have passed. But as I wrote, I was sure of this: If the Congress gave the president a bill that was pleasing only to the Harry Reids and Nancy Pelosis, it wouldn’t help the president inspire the kind of confidence that the whole nation needs to recover. (The same would be true if Jim DeMint got all he wanted, but there was no danger of that.)

    But if the president has a bill that Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine all voted for, the nation would have a chance of moving forward together. And together is the only way we can recover.

For more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Now, about that 'zero Republican votes' thing...

The last time they did this, I had no doubts that the Republicans were wrong. When not one of them voted for Clinton's Deficit Reduction Act in 1993, it was about as pure an example as I can recall of partisan mule-headedness and populist demagoguery. Not to mention the fact that they were wrong on the issue. Argue cause and effect all you like, the passage of that legislation WAS followed by dramatic deficit reduction. And the way the GOP went to their home districts and told everybody about how those awful Democrats had raised their taxes was unconscionable. Especially when South Carolina Republicans said it -- most people in S.C. did not see their taxes increase, unless you count the 4-cent rise in gasoline tax. And what importance can you honestly attach to 4 cents a gallon when monthly fluctuations in price are usually far more than that? (Of course, you know what I think about gas taxes.)

I remember actually watching TV news -- something you know I don't often do -- during that vote. Somebody had Al Gore on live, and Al was as stiff and awkward and priggish as only he can be as he talked about how wrong the Republicans were not to support it, with the roll call going on in the background (I'm thinking it was the Senate; in any case not one Republican in Congress voted for it). But he was right.

This time, I'm not as sure. I'd LIKE for our elected representatives to get together on anything as big as spending $819 billion, rather than splitting along partisan lines. I mean, if we're going to do it, let's do it together -- doing it divided increases the chances that it the stimulus will fail. I say that because Phil Gramm had a point -- so much of the economy is psychological. If the country sees this as THE plan that everyone agrees on, the country is more likely to have its confidence boosted. If it sees every member of one of the two major parties (for now) decry it as a waste doomed to fail, we could be looking at some self-fulfilled prophecy.

That said, I don't know but what a Republican -- or UnPartisan, or anyone else -- who says this plan isn't going to do the job doesn't have a point. After all, Paul Krugman says it won't, and he's no Republican.

On the other hand, their reason why this package isn't quite the thing is all bass-ackwards. They complain that only about a third of it is tax cuts. Well, I'm worried that a third of it IS tax cuts, and that those tax cuts will have zero effect on stimulating the economy. I haven't seen figures yet on exactly what the tax cuts will mean to the average American, but as I pointed out before, in an earlier version, the amount we're talking about would have given each worker only about $9 a week -- which is just barely enough to go to a movie. By yourself. If you don't buy popcorn.

If you're going to have a stimulus package, either SPEND enough to really kick-start the economy (and this doesn't appear to be enough), or target tax cuts to where they are likely to stimulate some real activity. Unfortunately, in trying to provide something for everybody -- and then going to woo the GOP in person -- Obama may have produced a solution that doesn't do enough of anything. And then, after all that trouble, you fail to get the bipartisan support that you were trying to buy with that $300 billion in tax cuts.

As for what you will probably hear them yammer about most on TV news (and in the rest of the blogosphere) -- what partisan political effect this vote will have -- I don't have a dog in that fight. Whether the Republicans have cooked their own goose by voting against a plan that will work, or set themselves up to be blamed for it NOT working, or are poised to recapture the House because they were the only ones to see it wouldn't work, or whatever... I don't care. I'd like to see both parties suffer in the next election, just on general UnPartisan principles. Unfortunately, I might get my wish: The stimulus could fail, and both parties be blamed -- but that be the least of the nation's worries. You know what I'd be worried about right now if I were a Republican? I'd worry that my caucus just invested its hopes in economic failure -- just as Harry Reid et al. bet all their chips on our failing in Iraq. That's not a position you want to be in -- your nation having to fail for you to be right. But that's their lookout, not mine.

For my part, I hope the stimulus works. Or that something we do soon works. And as long as it does, I don't care who gets the credit -- even a political party.

Yesterday was a good day, 'cause I got to write about Joe

What with my department being down from four editorial writers (we call 'em "associate editors") to two, I'm having to write more editorials myself these days.

That means more editorials on national and international subjects. It's best for metro subjects to be handled by Warren Bolton, and state topics by Cindi Scoppe. Those are their areas of expertise. That just leaves the rest of the world to me.

It also means you'll read more editorials with UnParty themes, because that's what I'm interested in. Hey, you want editorials from me, I'm going to write them whenever possible on stuff that interests me, Al Franken. Or whoever I am.

Hence today's piece about Joe Lieberman. John McCain robbed me of the chance to write lots about my man Joe during the election when he picked You Know Who from the frozen tundra. Think what a fine time I would have had.

But this week's events gave me the chance to write about Joe anyway. And that's a good thing.

Lieberman lets Democrats keep his vote

That's all I had to say. I just thought I'd offer the alternative interpretation to the standard headline, such as this one on the NYT site, which was "Democrats Let Lieberman Keep Senate Chairmanship."

I wonder if this development had anything to do with the president-elect's meeting yesterday with the other two of the Three Amigos? I don't know, but it's another positive development. I always like to see Joe get what he wants; he deserves it.

The Obama-McCain meeting

Not a lot to emerge from the president-elect's meeting with John McCain (and Lindsey Graham and Rahm Emanuel) today, which is to be expected. Here's the closest thing to substance I've seen, from their joint communique:

We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation’s security.

Of those items, seems to me the greatest potential for collaboration would be on energy. (But I would think that, wouldn't I?)

Here's a scene-setter from the NYT politics blog:

Senator John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama are sitting down together now and metaphorically smoking a peace pipe in their first face-to-face session since the bruising campaign.

The two are meeting at Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters at a federal building in Chicago, where they just posed for the cameras.

The meeting space has a stagey look, in front of the kind of thick royal blue curtain you see in an auditorium, not the usual campaign-rigged blue backdrop. Flags are strewn throughout, with one planted between the two principals, who are sitting in yellow, Oval-Office-like chairs.

To their sides are their wingmen, Rahm Emanuel on Mr. Obama’s left and Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina on Mr. McCain’s right.

They’re all looking jolly (Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanual the jolliest), and we’ll soon get a read-out on the discussion.

The Obama team is hoping they can smooth any ruffled feathers and build an alliance with the old John McCain — not the one whom the Obama camp called “erratic” during the presidential campaign but the self-styled “maverick” who worked across party lines for various causes that Mr. Obama wants to advance — global warming, immigration, earmark spending among them.

In the brief moment before the cameras, Mr. Obama said: “We’re going to have a good conversation about how we can do some work together to fix up the country, and also to offer thanks to Senator McCain for the outstanding service he’s already rendered.”

Mr. McCain was asked whether he would help Mr. Obama with his administration.

“Obviously,” he said.

Those pesky reporters tried to shout out other queries, like about a possible bail-out for the auto industry, but the pool report says they were “shouted down by the pool sherpas,” and that “Mr. Obama finally said with a smile, ‘You’re incorrigible.’”

The last in-person meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain took place more than a month ago, at the third and final presidential debate at Hofstra, remembered chiefly as the coming-out party for Joe the Plumber.

Updated | 2:12 p.m.: A joint statement was released from President-elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain:

“At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform where we take on government waste and bitter partisanship in Washington in order to restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and opportunity for every hardworking American family. We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation’s security.”

Beyond that, here are versions of the story from:

• The Associated Press (on thestate.com)
• The Chicago Tribune
• The Wall Street Journal (really just an update of their story from this morning's paper)
• The New York Times

Hoping, audaciously

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
BACK IN JANUARY, I said — on video; you can view it on my blog — that this year’s presidential election presented the American people with a no-lose proposition.
    It was the first time in my career when the two candidates we (and I) enthusiastically endorsed for their respective nominations actually made it onto the November ballot. So how could we lose?
    Well, there’s one way — the guy we preferred between the two guys we liked didn’t win on Nov. 4. But now that the other guy has won (and did you ever really think he wouldn’t?), I’m putting that setback behind me and looking forward to what happens next, with Barack Obama as my president.
    You could say I have no choice, but you’d be wrong. Unfortunately, we have before us a plethora of examples of how to have a perfectly rotten, stinking attitude when your preferred candidate loses, from the “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bush” bumper stickers that appeared on Republican cars before Bill Clinton was even inaugurated to all that nonsense we’ve heard for eight years from Democrats about how the election was “stolen” in 2000.
    We always have the option of being mean, petty, poor losers. But not me. Call me audacious, but every day I see fresh cause to be hopeful:

• First, there’s Barack Obama himself. Just as John McCain was the best conceivable Republican to unify the country, Sen. Obama offered himself as the one Democrat most likely to put the bitterness of the Clinton/Bush years behind us. As we wrote when we endorsed him in the S.C. primary, “for him, American unity — transcending party — is a core value in itself.” In a column at the time, I cited “his ambition to be a president for all of us — black and white, male and female, Democrat and Republican.” When a guy like that wins an election, nobody loses.
• Sen. McCain’s gracious (and typical, for him) concession speech left his supporters no room for bitterness, as he wished “Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president.”
• Sen. Obama’s promise that same night, in his first flush of victory, “to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn.” He said, “I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too.”
• The appointment of Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff. He’s been called a partisan attack dog, but he was defended against those who called him that by our own Sen. Lindsey Graham, John McCain’s close friend and ally. Yes, he ran the Democrats’ successful effort to take over Congress in 2006, but he did it by recruiting candidates who appealed to the political center — something his party’s more extreme elements haven’t forgiven him for. In an interview just before he was offered the job, Rep. Emanuel said, “The American people are unbelievably pragmatic. Have confidence in their pragmatism. It’s the operating philosophy of our country.” (The Associated Press says exit polls back that up: “This year 22 percent called themselves liberal, compared with 21 percent in 2004; 44 percent moderate, compared with 45 percent; and 34 percent conservative, same as four years ago.”)
• The image of the Obamas visiting the Bushes at the White House a week after the election. No big deal, you say? It is after the way the current president has been demonized by many Democrats. The presidential election of 1800 proved the miracle of the American system — that power can change hands in a peaceful, civilized manner. That never gets old for me.
• After days in which the more partisan types in the Senate debated just what to do to Joe Lieberman in light of his unpardonable “sin” of supporting Sen. McCain, the president-elect said that of course the senator from Connecticut should still be allowed to caucus with the Democrats.
• The fact that on Monday, Sens. Obama and McCain will sit down at transition headquarters to chart ways to move forward together. “It’s well known that they share an important belief that Americans want and deserve a more effective and efficient government,” said an Obama spokeswoman Friday, adding that the two men “will discuss ways to work together to make that a reality.” They will be joined by Sen. Graham and Rep. Emanuel.

    You’ll notice a certain theme in my points, and just in case I haven’t hit you over the head with it hard enough, I’ll say it again: I draw my hope from signs that this country is ready to move beyond the stupid, pointless, destructive  polarization that has been thrust upon us by the two dominant political parties, their attendant Beltway interest groups, the blogosphere and the mindless yammering of 24/7 shouting-head cable TV “news.”
    You might say that mere nonpartisanship — or bipartisanship, or post-partisanship (or my favorite, UnPartisanship) — is not enough by itself. That’s true. But without it, there’s no hope. Fortunately, I see plenty of cause to believe we’re about to see something new, and better.

Join me in hoping at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Graham likes Obama's 1st pick

Thought y'all might find this interesting:

Graham Statement on Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today made this statement on the news Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel has accepted the job as White House Chief of Staff.  Graham spoke by phone with Emanuel earlier today.

Graham said:

“This is a wise choice by President-elect Obama. 

“Rahm knows Capitol Hill and has great political skills.  He can be a tough partisan but also understands the need to work together.  He is well-suited for the position of White House Chief of Staff. 

“I worked closely with him during the presidential debate negotiations which were completed in record time.  When we hit a rough spot, he always looked for a path forward.  I consider Rahm to be a friend and colleague.  He’s tough but fair.  Honest, direct, and candid.  These qualities will serve President-elect Obama well. 

“Rahm understands the challenges facing our nation and will, consistent with the agenda set by President-elect Obama, work to find common ground where it exists.  I look forward to working with him in his new position and will continue to do everything I can to help find a pathway forward on the difficult problems facing our nation.”

            #####

After reading of Mr. Emanuel being a hard-ball operative from Clinton days, and how he was expected to play "bad cop" to Obama's "good cop," I was prepared not to like him. I mean, didn't we choose Obama over Hillary Clinton to get away from that stuff? But if Lindsey likes him, I need to reconsider.

By the way, I'd have included a picture of Graham from our recent interview with him, but MY LAPTOP GOT STOLEN, so all those pictures are gone!

Just in case you didn't know.