Big Government Republicans

David Broder: So, Now Bigger Is Better? "Two years after taking office, Bush is presiding over the biggest, most expensive federal government in history. He has created a mammoth Cabinet department, increased federal spending, imposed new federal rules on local and state governments, and injected federal requirements into every public school in America."

How does Bush get away with this? Two proximate reasons:

1. The GOP doesn't have the rep of supporting "big government", so there appears to be no pattern to point to. The logic, then is, if there is an exeption, then it must be a "principled" one.
2. The GOP white-noise machine, which ratchets up each time the Democrats take some particular action, doesn't worry about the hypocrisy of staying silent when the Republicans do the same thing, since for some, hypocrisy in politics is no sin.

This strategy works because of a fundamental failure on the part of the mainstream media to understand that the second reason is why the first reason exists. In other words, the press rarely sees beyond the rep because it takes the conservative spin at face value.

But as usual, the reality in this case is somewhat different from the rhetoric. Like the GOP's oppositon to term limits, opposing "big government" makes political sense when you don't control the government; it becomes a symbolic issue that directs attention to the party that is in power. Far from being a position based on principle, it is a position based on political calculation. Why does the media gives this kind of posturing a pass? That is left as an exercise for the reader.

The Case Against Pickering

In the days since Bush renominated Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, we've been given a chance to review the evidence against confirmation. The best summary of this evidence I've seen to date comes from the People for the American way, which includes a good background piece and a detailed analysis of Pickering's legal record.

Signs of Improvement

A few days ago, I posted a rather critical review of the John Edwards for President website. One of the most serious problems I noted was the lack of an online contribution form, even though a contribute link existed in the main site navigation. Thankfully, this problem has been fixed.

Contact info and the donation amount are entered in a two-page form on the Edwards site, and the user is sent to an authorize.net secure server for the credit card information. The HTML on the secure server is very 1995 — just text, not wrapped in the Edwards site template — but it works. I made a small donation to the campaign, and while I didn't do much to try to break the form (except try to give $5000, which generated an error), the process was successful.

One thing still bugs me, however. When clicking on the contribute button at the top of the page, the user isn't taken to the contribute page. Instead, the logo banner next to the button morphs into a quick pitch with a "Donate Here" link. I missed this the first time I clicked on the contribute button, and just thought the button was broken. In the end, the user has to click five times to make a contribution: on the button, the banner, the contact info form, the donation amount form, and the credit card info form. That's a lot of clicking.

There is still a lot of work to be done to fix this site, but the fact that the site is being worked on post-launch is a good sign.

Working for a Living

At the end of this article on CNN is a short list of who's working on the various Democratic presidential campaigns.

Moon over DC

When I moved to DC several years ago, one of the first fun facts I learned was that the ultra-conservative Washington Times was run by the Moonies. Odd, yes, but I never gave it much thought.

But now I find out that Bush's new head of VISTA, David Caprara, is one of Reverend Moon's top political operatives. And that Moon been cultivating deep ties with political conservatives and fundamentalist Christians for years. And that Moon has some rather scary things to say about theocracy, sex, the Holocaust, and race.

But all these facts leave two central questions unanswered: Why do conservatives continue to actively partner with the Unification Church? And why isn't this connection brought to light more often?

Chipping Away at Another Pillar

New York Times: U.S. Plan Could Ease Limits on Wetlands Development. "The Bush administration opened the way today for a redefinition of federal rules that could remove obstacles to development on millions of acres of isolated wetlands historically protected under the Clean Water Act."

In the wake of the midterm elections, Bush first moved to weaken the Clean Air Act. Now he's targeting the other pillar of modern environmental legislation, the Clean Water Act. But with the crises in Iraq and North Korea, what would stir up a louder outcry (remember arsenic?) will no doubt slip by under the radar.