Nation-Building

With Rudy Giuliani often saying he'd probably run for office again, there were three options: governor, senator, President. When an aide said last week the first two were out, only one choice remains standing.

Rudy's running for Prez.

It's unofficial, of course, but there's no other way to read Giuliani's decision to skip the governor and senate races next year. Win or lose, running for either would have made it impossible to run for President in 2008.

The development brought to mind a conversation with a Giuliani friend in 1988, when Giuliani was Manhattan U.S. attorney. Amid chatter even then that Giuliani had his eye on Washington, his friend argued he was already a national player. "If you had to name 100 people who have a chance to be President, Rudy's name would be on the list," the friend said then.

When I reached the friend last week and reminded him of our conversation, he quickly said, "The list is now down to five."

We ran into former Congressman Chris Bell at the Capitol this afternoon. He was in town touching base with legislators and Democratic poohbahs as part of exploratory effort.

Bell has two campaign operations in motion. One is in his hometown, Houston. For the time being, the other is shared office in Austin with his media/research operative, Jason Stamford. Bell presumes that his official campaign office will ultimately be in Austin.

While his effort is still deemed "exploratory", Bell has already assembled a campaign team. Heidi Kirkpatrick is doing fundraising. Joe Trippi is bringing his experience with the Howard Dean presidential campaign to bear building Bell's internet community.

Bob Doyle has been retained as general consultant. Doyle is a DC based and specializes in winning GOP leaning consgressional seats with Blue Dog Democratic candidates.

Neil Kammeron of Fenn Communications has been retained to do media. Duane Baughman will do mail. Baughman has done mail for both Howard Dean and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Bell will make his first Capitol appearance as a potential gubernatorial candidate before the Capitol Area Democratic Women at Nuevo Leon on April 14. The next day, he will be speaking to the Young Democrats at their state convention.

The broader lesson here is not that John Cornyn occasionally says unfortunate things. This much has been evident for some time; equally evident is that he's no threat to Constitutional governance, to say nothing of the idiot fantasies of him as a terror apologist. The true broader lesson lies in what we see here of the modern machinery of the Democratic grassroots: armed and proficient with the high-speed social feedback mechanisms of modern technology, it is fast; it is coalescing; it is on message; it is paranoid; and it is not very bright.

Mark R. Levin's Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America was ranked eighth on the New York Times list this week; it's been on that list for six weeks now, and seems to be leaping off the bookshelves... It's selling, it seems, almost entirely due to endorsements by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News.

But the maddening question here is why Levin, Limbaugh, and—as of yesterday, Tom DeLay—have stopped threatening just "liberal activist" judges and have started threatening the judiciary as a whole. Levin, recall, is excoriating a court composed of seven Republican appointees. He's trashing the body that's done more to restore the primacy of states' rights, re-inject religion into public life, and limit the rights of criminal defendants than any court in decades. He seems not to have noticed that the Rehnquist court is a pretty reliably conservative entity. Reading his hysterical attacks on Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, you'd forget they are largely on his side and substantially different creatures from the court's true liberals. But Levin seems as incapable of distinguishing between jurists as he is incapable of differentiating between cases or doctrine. He's happy to decimate the court as a whole.

Consider Tom DeLay's similarly broad comments from yesterday, following the death of Terri Schiavo: "This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change," DeLay warned. "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," he said. In addition to sharing Levin's unfortunate tendency to label all federal judges as "men," DeLay is now attacking all the judges involved in Schiavo—Republicans, devout Christians, and strict constructionists among them—for failing to interpret the law to suit him. This is not just an attack on some renegade liberal jurists. Levin, Limbaugh, and DeLay have subtly shifted their attack to encompass the entire judiciary.

Levin pays some lip service to the idea that the federal bench needs to be stacked with right-wing ideologues in his penultimate chapter. But he betrays early on his fear that even the staunchest conservative jurist is all-too-often "seduced by the liberal establishment once they move inside the Beltway." Thus, his real fixes for the problem of judicial overreaching go further than manipulating the appointments process. He wants to cut all judges off at the knees: He'd like to give force to the impeachment rules, put legislative limits on the kinds of constitutional questions courts may review, and institute judicial term limits. He'd also amend the Constitution to give congress a veto over the court's decisions. Each of which imperils the notion of an independent judiciary and of three separate, co-equal branches of government. But the Levins of the world are not interested in a co-equal judiciary. They seem to want to see it burn.

Let's state the obvious.

Cornyn is either dumb as a rock, or he decided to make political hay out of recent murders in Chicago and Florida by using them as an excuse to repeat the "activist judges" line. I will leave aside the question of whether any expression of sympathy for the murderers was intended. In any case, historical precedents of threats against the judiciary notwithstanding (or, rather, perhaps especially in the light of same), Cornyn's remarks were irresponsible, and perhaps also cynically and callously opportunistic.

Your post is a nice attempt to make this all about the reaction in the left-leaning commentary. Guess what? Nothing in any of the articles you link to approaches the idiocy, whether intellectual or moral, of Cornyn's comments.

Cornyn's comments weren't unfortunate. They were stupid, foolish, and irresponsible. Rather than wasting time playing he said/she said with the punditocracy, you'd do well to simply acknowledge that simple fact, disavow them, and move on.

Imagine how much stronger General Motors would be if it launched three additional new-model programs every year, each costing about $1 billion.

It could, if it didn't have to pay for its retirees' health care.

That is one of the most fundamental differences between GM and Toyota Motor Corp. GM pays for the health care of 339,000 retirees - and the number grows every year. In contrast, Toyota pays for fewer than 3,000 retirees' health care in Japan, a number that remains fairly stable.

That difference gives Toyota and other Japanese carmakers a massive advantage over their American rivals.

"The cost of health care in the U.S. is making American businesses extremely uncompetitive vs. our global counterparts," says GM CEO Rick Wagoner.

Toyota and other Japanese carmakers benefit from a national health care plan that reduces its obligations to retirees to almost nothing.

[...]

Toyota pays health care costs for its employees in Japan in the form of premiums for medical insurance. But it does not continue to pay those costs for retirees. Former employees of Nissan Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. also turn to the Japanese government for health care coverage.

The American Big 3 pay - and pay and pay - for their retirees' health care.

GM covers the health care costs of approximately 125,000 active employees and 339,000 retirees. Health care costs for those retirees amounted to approximately $3.6 billion last year.

That's more than two-thirds of the $5.2 billion GM spent on health care and medical-insurance premiums last year. GM also contributed about $9 billion in 2004 to a trust fund set up to pay for health care costs.

In 2004, Ford Motor Co. spent $2.0 billion on health care for U.S. retirees.

The Chrysler group last year spent $1.3 billion on retirees' health care.

$1,525 per vehicle

GM says that its payments for retirees' health care - more than what the company spent for steel - add about $1,525 to the cost of every vehicle the company sells.

In contrast, Toyota must contribute to health insurance payments for only about 64,500 active workers in Japan.

"Wisconsin's junior senator spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday driving around this politically forbidding 'red state,' meeting with liberal and conservative Democrats, Bush voters, local dignitaries and a curious Alabama media, enjoying the improbability of it all.

"'When was the last time some Democrat from another part of the country went into Greenville, Alabama, and just said, 'What's the deal here?' ' Feingold said before his trip.

"You could look at Feingold's Alabama adventure as an extended conversation between North and South over the current woes and future direction of the Democratic Party.