Oh my goodness! Are we really to believe that Sarah Palin wrote this piece in The Washington Post. I don't believe so.

Sarah Palin has an op-ed in The Washington Post today entitled "The 'Cap And Tax' Dead End."

She may be punishing The New York Times for the article in the previous post by not putting it there also. I thought the article seemed factual and neutral.

Palin’s Long March to a Short-Notice Resignation

From The New York Times:

Ms. Palin had returned to her home state from the presidential campaign as one of the hopeful prospects in her struggling party, even if she had much to prove to her detractors. Standing before the Legislature in January, she vowed to retake her office with “optimism and collaboration and hard work to get the job done.”

But interviews in Alaska and in Washington show that a seemingly relentless string of professional and personal troubles quickly put that goal out of reach.

Almost as soon as she returned home, the once-popular governor was isolated from an increasingly critical Legislature. Lawmakers who had supported her signature effort to develop a natural gas pipeline turned into uncooperative critics.

Ethics complaints mounted, and legal bills followed. At home Ms. Palin was dealing with a teenage daughter who had given birth to a son and broken up with the infant’s father, a baby of her own with special needs and a national news media that was eager to cover it all.

Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed emergency help from her hairdresser and close friend, Jessica Steele.

Yet to the dismay of some advisers, Ms. Palin dived into the fray, seeming to relish the tabloid-ready fights that consumed her as the work of the state at times went undone.

Her public feud with David Letterman over a tasteless sexual joke he made about one of her daughters spun into a broader fight at home with a fellow Republican over state efforts to combat sexual abuse.

She had a political aide issue a news release condemning Levi Johnston, the teenage father of her daughter Bristol’s newborn, for his assertion that Ms. Palin had known the unwed high-schoolers were having sex all along.

It was the sort of intermingling between her personal and public agendas that had drawn ethics complaints against her even before Senator John McCain tapped her as his running mate in August.

But now, Ms. Palin had fewer defenders to lend support. Her husband, Todd, her most trusted adviser, was spending less time at her side both because they needed money from his oil industry job, friends say, and because questions had been raised about whether he had been too involved at the Capitol.

Her growing list of detractors quickly signaled that they were not impressed with her celebrity status.

“We had business to do,” said State Representative Nancy Dahlstrom, a Republican who had worked on Ms. Palin’s 2006 race for governor. “It’s not all about adoration.”

Troubles Await Back Home

When Ms. Palin made it back to Alaska in November, the state that had once given her an 83 percent approval rating was no longer so enchanted.

She was met at the Capitol by a growing pile of ethics complaints filed by opponents that, under Alaska state law, had to be investigated.

During the campaign, an investigation by the Republican-dominated Legislature found that Ms. Palin had abused her office by leaning on subordinates to get her former brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper. She was forced to pay back taxes after it was disclosed that she had billed the state for thousands of dollars in per diem expenses meant to cover travel costs while staying in Wasilla. Still, of the 19 ethics complaints filed against her, most have been dismissed.

By all accounts, Ms. Palin became consumed with the complaints, no matter how small-bore — which many were — or where they came from.

When a local Democratic blogger accused her of becoming a “walking billboard” by wearing a jacket emblazoned with the logo of Arctic Cat, her husband’s team sponsor at the Iron Dog snowmobile race, she issued a news release titled “Governor Comments on Latest Bogus Ethics Complaint.”

“Yes, I wore Arctic Cat snow gear at an outdoor event, because it was cold outside,” her statement read. A follow-up release was triumphantly titled “Ethics Complaint on Governor’s Apparel Dismissed.”

Feuds begat feuds. Ms. Palin alleged in June that Mr. Letterman’s joke that one of her daughters had been “knocked up” by the Yankees star Alex Rodriguez during a recent trip to New York encouraged “sexual exploitation” of younger women.

Her comments then prompted a Republican lawmaker, State Representative Mike Hawker, to accuse Ms. Palin of underfinancing sexual abuse programs. Ms. Palin, in turn, directed public safety officials to give her fodder for a retort, requesting that they put out a statement saying her policies would reduce sexual assaults on minors.

Even Ms. Palin’s supporters came to believe that she was losing focus amid all the fighting.

“It was very relentless,” said State Representative John Coghill, a Republican. “My only criticism of her was she probably paid too much attention to it.”

Amid all the turmoil, Ms. Palin’s enthusiasm for the job itself seemed to be waning, her office appointment books from January 2007 through this May indicate. Since her return from the national campaign her days have typically started later and ended earlier, and the number of meetings with local legislators and mayors has declined.

Things on the home front were equally strained. Paparazzi regularly stalked the family . . . .

If Bristol Palin was avoiding the limelight, her estranged boyfriend was seeking it. Mr. Johnston appeared bare-chested in GQ magazine holding Tripp. He told the talk show host Tyra Banks that he was certain Ms. Palin knew his relationship with her teenage daughter had been sexual.

Ms. Palin’s top political aide cranked out another news release: “We’re disappointed that Levi and his family, in a quest for fame, attention and fortune, are engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration and even distortion of their relationship.”

Appeal Outside Alaska

Despite Ms. Palin’s travails in Alaska, she continued to have national cachet.

Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey’s producer called with interview requests. She fielded lucrative book deals, ultimately accepting one estimated to be in the millions of dollars. A veteran television producer proposed a “West Wing” meets “Northern Exposure” reality show about her. Out-of-state political trips were flashbacks to the presidential campaign. Crowds chanted, “Run, Sarah, Run!”

In January, Fred V. Malek, a longtime Republican kingmaker, held a dinner to introduce Ms. Palin to some of the party’s biggest names, prompted partly by what he saw as shabby treatment by the McCain campaign. Mr. Malek said she charmed former Vice President Dick Cheney at the dinner and bonded with Mr. Cheney’s daughter Liz over both raising five children.

The night was a high point. But already, Ms. Palin was having trouble reconciling the gravitational pull of her national support with the stresses of Alaska.

John Coale, a Washington trial lawyer and a Democrat who befriended the governor, said that during a political trip to Atlanta in December she expressed concern about her personal finances and complained that whenever she left Alaska “there was tremendous criticism up there.”

To Mr. Coale, the Palins seemed unprepared for the national stage. “I don’t think they got it, that they were in the arena,” he added. Mr. Coale helped Ms. Palin set up a legal defense fund and a political action committee to pay for her political activities. But both caused additional problems.

While the defense fund has raised more than $250,000, according to its trustee, the money cannot be spent pending resolution of an ethics complaint that contends that the contributions could amount to improper gifts.

The political action committee, named SarahPAC, was intended to help Ms. Palin steer clear of state ethics laws prohibiting the mixing of official duties and political activities. But according to people who dealt with it, a disconnect emerged between Ms. Palin’s political and official operations, resulting in embarrassing blunders.

After the Conservative Political Action Conference, a meeting of the Republican Party’s evangelical base, announced that the governor would have a coveted speaking role at its annual gathering in February, she canceled, citing scheduling conflicts. Then, organizers of one of the most important Republican Congressional fund-raisers of the year said they had been assured by a political aide to Ms. Palin that she would be their headliner, only to have her Anchorage office announce that she knew nothing about it.

Tugs, Pulls and Pressures

Hope for the intervention’s success soon faded. Despite advice to stick close to home and focus on an Alaska agenda, the governor accepted an invitation to attend an anti-abortion dinner in Indiana in April, even though the state budget was hanging in the balance in the Legislature.

When Tom Wright, chief of staff for the speaker of the Alaska House, suggested that the governor would catch heat for leaving, Ms. Palin stormed into his office and, according to a person familiar with the conversation, “proceeded to ream him out.”

In early June, when Ms. Palin visited Mr. Malek in Washington, “My sense was she was very unhappy with the multiple tugs, pulls and pressures in her life, that her family life was not even close to what she regarded as acceptable,” he said, adding, “she just had a dissatisfaction with the way the job had developed.”

When she announced on July 3 that she was leaving the job, the national political establishment speculated that it was part of a scheme to position herself for a White House run.

Ms. Palin scoffed at the notion. “There’s no ulterior motive,” she said in the interview. She said the lieutenant governor who will succeed her on July 26, Sean R. Parnell, will pursue “the same agenda as mine — minus the distractions.”

In her hometown area at least, people take her at her word, but they doubt she is out of the game for good.

“She’s very young and she has a long time to be a potential candidate and to mature and develop a thicker skin,” said Janet Kincaid, a supporter in Palmer. “In politics, you’ve got to just let it roll or it will eat you alive.”

At the governor’s Anchorage office, staff members are struggling to roll with Ms. Palin’s surprise announcement. Last week, a clock on the wall continued its countdown. Under a “Time to Make a Difference” placard, the clock ticks away the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the scheduled end to Ms. Palin’s term. As of Friday, it had 513 days left.

“I don’t know how to reset the darn thing,” David Murrow, a spokesman for the governor, said earlier in the week.

Sotomayor will soon have her first chance to explain her comment that a "wise Latina" can often reach a better conclusion than a white man.

From The Wall Street Journal:

When Judge Sonia Sotomayor faces the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, she will finally get to explain before the cameras her comment that a "wise Latina" can often reach a better conclusion than a white man. That response could help determine whether her confirmation is smooth or rocky.

Despite the furor surrounding the remark -- which she made at a law school in 2001, among other occasions -- Judge Sotomayor hasn't been able to address it publicly since her nomination, because nominees typically don't speak out before their hearings.

However, she did discuss it privately when she made the rounds of senators following her nomination. Based on those discussions, she is likely to say that her judicial record shows no hint of the bias or activism that critics see in the remark. She also is expected to defend the importance of diversity on the bench, while perhaps offering a nod to critics by calling her choice of words imperfect.

"I asked her that question...and she was very direct," said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.). "She just said, '[Latina identity] is something that informs my experience, but I'm always going to look to judicial precedent, I'm always going to follow the rule of law.'"

Manuel Miranda, a former aide to Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee who is working against Judge Sotomayor's confirmation, said that "the whole race-bias issue" suggested by the remark will probably be the liveliest part of the hearing. "I think that's explosive, I think that's worthwhile, I think that's entertaining," Mr. Miranda said. "Then it becomes pretty boring."

Judge Sotomayor made the now-famous comment in a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, in which she noted that even great judges like Oliver Wendell Holmes had voted to uphold racial and sex discrimination.

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," she said.

The White House initially argued that, as spokesman Robert Gibbs put it, "She'd say her word choice in 2001 was poor." But it soon emerged that Judge Sotomayor had used similar language on several other occasions.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.), a strong supporter of Judge Sotomayor, said she pointed out to him that several sentences later in the same speech, she observed that many white men had issued great opinions, including Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case outlawing segregation in public schools.

Mr. Schumer made the argument that is likely to be Judge Sotomayor's chief response -- that her 17-year judicial record, including hundreds of rulings, shows no evidence of unfairness or tilting the scales in favor of minority groups, whatever she may have said in speeches.

"Paraphrasing Joe Friday, 'Just look at the record, folks,'" Mr. Schumer said.

But many Republicans consider the comment biased on its face. Judge Sotomayor has told Republican senators her wording was "inadvertent" and "inartful," but they will press her hard at the hearing for a persuasive disavowal.

"I do think that based on her speeches and writings, that it will be essential that she convincingly assert that she will be impartial," said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), the Judiciary Committee's top Republican.

Democrats are certain to argue, if Judge Sotomayor doesn't, that conservative Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito cited their Italian-American backgrounds during their own confirmation hearings, to suggest their sensitivity to discrimination and sympathy for immigrants.

"Just based on her record, she is clearly not, as her opponents are saying, an activist," Ms. Gillibrand said. "She is someone who follows precedent, follows the rule of law and is very judicial in temperament."

Minimum-Wage Increase Comes at a Bad Time for Weakened Job Market (Before 2007, the federal minimum wage stayed for 10 years at $5.15 an hour.)

From The Wall Street Journal:

The federal minimum wage goes up this month just as job losses are sending new alarms about the economy, giving traction to perennial fears that higher wages will hurt job creation.

In the past, minimum-wage increases have done little to dent job creation. And pouring more money into people's pockets -- especially low-wage workers who are likely to spend the increase to meet living costs -- would normally boost the economy.
But these aren't normal times.

"It's tough timing," said John Silva, chief economist at Wells Fargo, who expects low-skilled workers and teenagers will be hit hardest. "You're going to have a very negative response. In a recession like this, companies don't have the pricing power to pass on those costs."

History, in this case, isn't a reliable predictor, he says, because the current economic slump is much deeper than during previous times.

The job market remains weak; figures released last week show the June unemployment rate hit 9.5%. Consumer confidence, consistently low, retreated in June, translating into weak traffic at restaurants, car washes and hotels, all places that rely heavily on minimum-wage workers.

The impact of the higher minimum wage will resonate even beyond that group of earners and industries. Economists say there are 2.8 million workers earning between the current federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour and the new minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which takes effect on July 24 and has had no signs of delay from legislators. But some estimates figure an additional seven million workers are affected because their wages are tied to the minimum and will go up accordingly.

Ryan Arfmann, who owns a Jamba Juice franchise in Idaho Falls, Idaho, is a case in point. He said he will have to boost pay to all of his 18 workers. The ones making less than $7.25 an hour will be raised to the new rate. But he said he will have to give raises to those currently earning more than $7.25 an hour because they have more experience.

As a result, he plans to cut hours for his part-time workers. "I'll definitely have to run a tighter shift each day and watch numbers like never before," said Mr. Arfmann, who estimates his business is down between 3% and 4% this year.

Still, many economists also see long-term positive effects for the economy from boosting the income of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. They note that many small businesses may benefit through higher productivity in the form of improved worker retention and less churn.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the minimum-wage increase will add $5.5 billion to the economy, and that this money is likely to be readily spent by low-wage workers, giving a boost to local economies. Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal think tank in Washington, argues that "it is actually a good time" for an increase in the minimum wage.

The change is welcome to workers such as Walter Jasper, 48 years old, who earns $6.55 an hour at Shur Brite Hi Speed Car Wash in Nashville, Tenn. He has worked there for 14 years off and on. His wife earns $7 an hour working at a discount store and will also get an increase in her paycheck. Mr. Jasper said he and his wife will be late with their rent payment of $359 this month and that the extra income will be used to pay bills.

The minimum-wage increase is the third step of a three-step increase passed by Congress in 2007, meaning businesses had time to prepare. Many states, including California, at $8 an hour, already have minimum wages that surpass the federal level. Last year, as a presidential candidate, President Barack Obama proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011.

Before 2007, the federal minimum wage stayed for 10 years at $5.15 an hour, undermining the actual earning power of low-wage workers.

"There is a long-term rationale: to make sure minimum wage at least keeps pace with inflation," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist with IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Mass. "If you're going to impose a minimum wage, you want to make sure it keeps up, which it hadn't been for a while." The legislation, he said, was an attempt to make sure people weren't getting hurt by inflation and that their wages were keeping pace.

But, he adds, this is probably the worst time to be raising wages. "This is an unfunded mandate that the government is imposing at a time when the economy is struggling," he said.

Frank Rich: She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It

Frank Rich writes in The New York Times:

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.

Those Republicans who have not drunk the Palin Kool-Aid are apocalyptic for good reason. She could well be their last presidential candidate standing. Such would-be competitors as Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Newt Gingrich are too carnally compromised for the un-Clinton party. Mike Huckabee is Palin-lite. Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal — really? That leaves the charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, precisely the kind of card-carrying Ivy League elitist Palinists loathe, no matter how hard he tries to cosmetically alter his history as a socially liberal fat-cat banker. Palin would crush him like a bug. She has the Teflon-coated stature among Republicans that Romney can only fantasize about.

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

For a week now, critics in both parties have had a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start her lucrative afterlife.

Peggy Noonan: A Farewell to Harms -- Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan.

Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him.
_______________

A month or so ago the Journal quit allowing access to links without a subscription. If you can't get this entire column and want it, send me an email.

Path to Supreme Court: Speak Capably, Say Little (that is, sound as if you know what you are talking about but avoid saying anything)

From The New York Times:

On his first day at the Justice Department in 1981, a 26-year-old lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was handed a high-profile assignment: to help prepare Sandra Day O’Connor, then an Arizona judge, for her Supreme Court confirmation hearings

“The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court,” Mr. Roberts wrote later that year in a report to a Justice Department supervisor, “but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments.”

That advice — sound as if you know what you are talking about but avoid saying anything — has been followed pretty faithfully by every nominee since, including the report’s author, who is now chief justice of the United States. And it may well be followed by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings are scheduled to begin Monday.

Judge Sotomayor will have little reason to deviate from the convention, with perhaps one exception, to explain how her background would influence her work as a justice.

Here is the basic script: the nominee is expected to praise Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision barring segregation in public schools; endorse a constitutional right to privacy without saying whether it extends to abortion; and deplore cases like Dred Scott, the 1857 decision that said black people could be property but not citizens, and Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 decision endorsing internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

I listened as some lenders on CNBC a month or so said their banks were lending. Hogwash. The below is reality.

From The New York Times Quotation of the Day:

"The credit pendulum is stuck at ‘stupid.’ I am turning down loans every day that my grandfather in his Ponca City, Okla., savings and loan in 1935 would have been happy to make. And he was tough."

LOU S. BARNES, an owner of a Colorado mortgage bank.

(1) Ensign's Parents Made Payments to Mistress, Her Family; (2) Another senator is noted & the plot thickens.

From The Washington Post:

The wealthy parents of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) gave $96,000 last year to the staffer who was then his mistress and to her family, his attorney said yesterday.

The disclosure comes a day after Douglas Hampton alleged that Ensign gave his wife a $25,000 severance payment.

Since Ensign admitted the extramarital affair several weeks ago, he and his defenders have accused the Hamptons of making exorbitant financial demands but denied that Ensign provided any severance payments or other financial assistance for the couple.

In an interview this week, Douglas Hampton also alleged that Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a close friend of Ensign's, urged Ensign to end the affair early last year and suggested financial compensation for the Hampton family.

Coburn's office acknowledged that he counseled Ensign to end the affair but denied suggesting any financial deal.

Yesterday, Coburn told the Roll Call newspaper that he would refuse any attempts to compel him to testify in court or at the Senate ethics committee about his role. Coburn, an obstetrician, claimed a legal privilege against such testimony as his physician and religious adviser.

"I was counseling him as a physician and as an ordained deacon," Coburn said. "That is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody. Not to the ethics committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody."

But Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who is now executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that neither privilege would apply to Coburn's case because Ensign cannot plausibly be his patient and because being a deacon does not qualify a person as clergy.

Obama: Don't have the rest of us bail out New York & California (along with Chrysler, GM, etc.) just because they can't govern & help themselves.

New York Senate Democrats announcing an arrangement on Thursday in which Pedro Espada Jr., second from right, returned to the caucus.

The bitter standoff that has paralyzed the New York Senate for five weeks ended on Thursday, when a senator who had defected to the Republicans returned to the Democratic fold, giving the party the majority it needed to re-establish control.

Mr. Espada’s defection on June 8 threw the Senate into turmoil and hobbled the state government, making the body a national laughingstock as the feuding factions shouted and gaveled over each other in simultaneous legislative sessions.

Oxendine returns $120,000 in contributions

Cameron McWhiter and James Salzer write in the ajc:

Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine has returned $120,000 in questionable contributions that were funneled to his gubernatorial campaign by two Georgia insurance companies.

In campaign reports filed Tuesday night, Oxendine reported the money amounted to more than 8 percent of all the money his campaign has raised.

Just yesterday Jay Bookman wrote in the ajc's about the Ox's reputation, noting:

The nominal Republican front-runner is Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, but I’d be surprised if that’s the case a year from now. He carries too much personal and political baggage, and his GOP opponents are eager to make the most of it. The most recent revelation —- that an insurance company used front committees in Alabama to funnel $120,000 to Oxendine’s campaign —- is damaging mainly because it confirms the reputation he has built over the years.

Keep it up, I love it: Infighting Distracts Unions at Crucial Time

From The New York Times:

With their allies controlling the White House and Congress, the nation’s labor unions should be making hay. Instead many unions are making war — largely with one another — in the biggest, nastiest surge of labor fratricide in decades.

With some union leaders condemning other leaders as dictators and Darth Vaders, business leaders are smiling. Every million spent by unions to bash one another depletes their coffers for battling corporate America and Republican political candidates.

“The other side doesn’t have to take any shots at us,” said Amy B. Dean, a longtime union leader and an author of a new book on reinvigorating organized labor. “We’re killing ourselves.”

Many union officials acknowledge that the infighting is undercutting two of labor’s biggest objectives: having Congress enact pro-union legislation and organizing millions more workers to reverse labor’s long decline.

Finally, a big step in the right direction: Government to Require Verification of Workers

And recall, as noted below, that the Bush administration tried to do this, but is was block by a federal court in San Francisco in an action brought by the ACLU, et al., as I recall.

From The New York Times:

The Obama administration will require businesses that win federal contracts to use a government electronic database system to verify that their employees have legal immigration status to work in the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Wednesday.

After a six-month review, Homeland Security officials decided to go ahead with a worker-verification plan based on the electronic system, called E-Verify. The system, which the Bush administration sought to put into effect in its final months, is meant to prevent federal contractors from hiring illegal immigrants.

According to The Washington Post:

The administration's announcement appeared aimed at satisfying law-and-order conservatives on Capitol Hill, where Senate Republicans successfully amended Homeland Security's $43 billion 2010 budget yesterday to extend E-Verify to federal contractors and to expand construction of fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Task Force to Recommend Overhaul of U.S. Immigration System

From The Washington Post:

A bipartisan task force will recommend today that the United States overhaul its immigration system in response to national security concerns, saying that the country should end strict quotas on work-based immigrant visas to maintain its scientific, technological and military edge.

As Iran Calms, a Struggle for Political Power Intensifies

From The New York Times:

The streets of Iran have been largely silenced, but a power struggle grinds on behind the scenes, this time over the very nature of the state itself. It is a battle that transcends the immediate conflict over the presidential election, one that began 30 years ago as the Islamic Revolution established a new form of government that sought to blend theocracy and a measure of democracy.

From the beginning, both have vied for an upper hand, and today both are tarnished. In postelection Iran, there is growing unease among many of the nation’s political and clerical elite that the very system of governance they rely on for power and privilege has been stripped of its religious and electoral legitimacy, creating a virtual dictatorship enforced by an emboldened security apparatus, analysts said.

Among the Iranian president’s allies are those who question whether the nation needs elected institutions at all.

Most telling, and arguably most damning, is that many influential religious leaders have not spoken out in support of the beleaguered president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Indeed, even among those who traditionally have supported the government, many have remained quiet or even offered faint but unmistakable criticisms.

According to Iranian news reports, only two of the most senior clerics have congratulated Mr. Ahmadinejad on his re-election, which amounts to a public rebuke in a state based on religion. A conservative prayer leader in the holy city of Qum, Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini, referred to demonstrators as “people” instead of rioters, and a hard-line cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, called for national reconciliation.

Some of Iran’s most influential grand ayatollahs, clerics at the very top of the Shiite faith’s hierarchy who have become identified with the reformists, have condemned the results as a fraud and the government’s handling of the protests as brutal. On Saturday, an influential Qum-based clerical association called the new government illegitimate.

Yet Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Ahmadinejad and their allies still have a monopoly over the most powerful levers of state. They control the police, the courts and the prosecutor’s office. They control the military and the militia forces. And they retain the loyalty of a core group of powerful clerics and their conservative followers: for example, a hard-line cleric who heads the Qum Seminary, Ayatollah Morteza Moghtadai, said on Tuesday that “the case is closed.” No one, not even restive clerics, is in a position to strip this group of its power in the short term.

You younger readers especially, just so you will know, read this. It is part of our "recent" history. -- A Onetime 'Whiz Kid' Brought Low by Vietnam

From The Wall Street Journal (complete article):

For Robert S. McNamara, the former secretary of defense who died Monday at the age of 93, life broke into two parts: before Vietnam and after.

Prior to landing at the Pentagon at age 44, Mr. McNamara was seen as the embodiment of mid-century managerial competence for helping bring about a U-turn at Ford Motor Co. When he was made president of the company, a headline extolled "Ford's Fastest Whiz Kid." Weeks later, he was summoned to Washington by incoming President John F. Kennedy, a Merlin at the new Camelot.

But after Vietnam split the nation in the late 1960s, Mr. McNamara spent the rest of his life caught between the two eras, approaching problems with technocratic zeal while harried by demands that he apologize or be made to pay for helping escalate what demonstrators called "McNamara's War." The man President Lyndon Johnson once called "the smartest man I ever saw" was harried by epithets like "baby burner" and "murderer."

His silence for decades after the war was taken as yet more evidence of a habitual arrogance. When he brought his talents to bear as head of another giant organization, the World Bank, many complained that his approach to eliminating poverty made things worse by shackling developing nations to insurmountable debt.

During the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was publicly upbeat and maintained for decades a sphinx-like silence about his tenure at the Pentagon. When he finally did open up, in his 1995 memoir "In Retrospect," it was not so much to apologize as to explain.

"[W]e were wrong, terribly wrong," he wrote. "We owe it to future generations to explain why."

Mr. McNamara had honed his management skills by directing bombers in World War II and later at Ford, where he rose to become the first president who wasn't a member of the Ford family. He was widely credited with establishing central controls over a sprawling military bureaucracy, and his recall of facts and statistics was legendary. Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater once called him "an IBM machine with legs."

But his genius lay in pursuing efficiencies rather than in questioning policy goals. Throughout his career, he harbored misgivings about military campaigns but failed to negotiate changes that would address them. It was perhaps a businessman's habit of seeking immediate fixes to problems.

"I see my position as being that of a leader, not a judge," he said when he came to Washington in 1961. "I'm here to originate, to stimulate new ideas and programs, and not just to adjudicate arguments."

Sometimes the business philosophy made for nifty policy-making. His insight that nuclear wars were unwinnable led to a new U.S. doctrine of limited "flexible response," superseding all-out "massive retaliation." And it is Mr. McNamara who signed off on a secret swap in which the U.S. removed its nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for the USSR removing missiles from Cuba.

But business acumen didn't always translate smoothly into questions of war and peace. Soon after taking office, it became clear the "missile gap" with the Soviet Union that the new president had campaigned on was a fiction. Yet he undertook the modernization and expansion of U.S. nuclear weapons that President Kennedy's campaign had promised. Similarly, having inherited plans for the invasion of Cuba from the Eisenhower administration, he signed off on the military's role in the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961.

On both the nuclear issue and the Bay of Pigs, Mr. McNamara expressed serious reservations about whether victory was possible. Yet in all cases he continued to toe in public the administration line and to find practical solutions.

In "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam wrote "[H]e did not serve himself nor the country well; he was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool."

Behind the slicked-back hair and steel-rimmed glasses lurked an agile mind, one well-aware of subtleties and doubts accompanying U.S. actions in Southeast Asia. As early as 1965, he later said, he saw little chance of an armed victory and urged President Johnson to approve a bombing pause to encourage the North Vietnamese to make peace. Many suspect his dovishness -- less apparent to those outside the administration -- was the reason he lost the president's faith. In his memoir he wrote, "I do not know to this day whether I quit or was fired."

Whether he jumped or was pushed, Mr. McNamara moved at President Johnson's behest to the presidency of the World Bank. In 12 years at the helm, he initiated numerous new programs and switched the focus from building industries in economies shattered by World War II to fighting poverty through rural development, such as large-scale water projects. Loans grew from $1 billion to $11.5 billion, adjusted for inflation.

Some have suggested that such charitable intentions were meant as a kind of atonement for Vietnam. Whatever the motive, Mr. McNamara believed passionately in the work, former associates say.

"He'd show up at annual meetings at the World Bank and bring himself nearly to tears by giving speeches on absolute poverty and failure of world to resolve it," says Sebastian Mallaby, now a researcher with the Council on Foreign Relations. "He got the expansion [of World Bank lending] and the ambitious reach he wanted, but he didn't deliver a great leap forward against poverty."
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And from The New York Times.

Taking stock of the GOP field after Sarah Palin's exit.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Palin's resignation comes as the once-populous Republican field has been narrowed in recent weeks by a series of events, including separate admissions by a Republican senator and a governor of having engaged in extramarital affairs. Both South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Sen. John Ensign of Nevada were seen as possible contenders in 2012.

Another potential candidate, former Utah Gov. John Huntsman, has accepted a post as President Barack Obama's ambassador to China. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, often mentioned as a possible candidate, saw his star fall after a widely criticized national television appearance to deliver the GOP response to Mr. Obama's first congressional address earlier this year.

For now, that leaves former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who ran unsuccessfully in 2008, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty as top candidates. Another senator, John Thune of South Dakota, has been mentioned as a potential candidate. And former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who also ran in 2008 and attracts support from social conservatives, may make another go.

Andrea Mitchell's Take on Sarah Palin Getting Out of Politics (her take is the same as mine formed without the benefit of her interviews, etc.)

Click on this link to see a video with Andrea Mitchell addressing her take on Sarah Palin stepping down and getting out of politics for good.

And I must add that, regardless of party affiliation, I think it so sad that politics gets so mean.

And these is a caveat to Andrea Mitchell's take. Once in politics, it is hard to get it out of your system. Thus Sarah Palin may have a change of heart in the future if Andrea Mitchell's take is the correct one.

Don't come back when we're thru: Young Afghans are abandoning their country, frustrated by endless war, a lack of prospects & the slow pace of change.

The New York Times has a story about how young Afghans are abandoning their country, frustrated by endless war, a lack of prospects and the slow pace of change.

I note that if they all leave, then we might want want to consider doing the same thing. We might need to consult with Russia about this.

Leading Clerics Defy Ayatollah on Disputed Iran Election -- The revolution is getting traction more quickly than I thought it would. Wow!

From The New York Times:

The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.

A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.

“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”