Some key stories and blog posts from over the weekend...
+ Allegations about the potential misuse of funds by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani's continued to mount over the weekend. On Saturday, TPM provided a great overview (two actually) for those who missed the story's early development. At this point, whether or not his administration's creative accounting methods were illegal is really beside the point. Illegal or no, it looks real bad, and the NY tabloids are having a field day getting past and current NYC officials on the record saying so. Perhaps even worse for Rudy, many of his supporters are beginning to publicly question what all this might mean for his candidacy.
What might this mean for the race for the GOP nomination? Over the past couple of months, it has become increasingly clear that social conservatives have lined up behind Romney in an effort to block the rise of Giuliani. But if Giuliani self-destructs, that will no longer be necessary, freeing them up to support someone who is more authentically conservative. If things continue to head south for Rudy, Huckabee's surge may very well just be beginning.
+ If you want to understand why most American's have been pessimists about their own economic fortunes over the past 5-6 years, this statistic from Ezra Klein should help: the median American's income is below its 2000 peak by abut $1,000. Trickle down economics is a wonderful thing, no?
+ This next story is so shocking that I'm going to have to quote it directly lest you think I'm making it up. From the Times Online:
AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.
A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.
Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.
The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.
Legal experts confirmed this weekend that America viewed extradition as just one way of getting foreign suspects back to face trial. Rendition, or kidnapping, dates back to 19th-century bounty hunting and Washington believes it is still legitimate.
In essence, the Bush administration is now arguing that international lawlessness is lawful because our own domestic court system has said so. We can apparently kidnap anyone we want, and we need only cite our on judicial process to do so. So I cannot help but wonder...when other nations follow our precedent and begin kidnapping Americans on US soil, will we agree to live by our own rules, or will we label them terrorist states and organizations?
+ And while I'm examining shocking developments, Paul Wolfowitz is back in the Bush adminsitration, and you'll never guess his new area of responsibility: WMD. That would be funny if it were a joke, but it isn't.
+ And why not add this too. Karl Rove is now blaming Democrats for forcing the administration to rush to war, publicly declaring that it was them, and not the administration, that wanted a vote prior to the election. But that's not the worst part. The headline of the story in the Washington Post about the claim?
Rove's Version of 2002 War Vote Is Disputed
The man is lying. The Post knows it. Everyone knows it. This isn't a dispute. It's a fabrication. Language matters. The Catholic Church "disputed" Galelieo's theories about the solar system, but that didn't change the fact that he was right and they were wrong. Ahmadinejad has "disputed" the history of the holocaust, but that doesn't change the fact that is happened. This isn't complicated. Rove is lying. That is news. The Post should report it as such.
+ Numerous polls over the weekend showed the races in Iowa and New Hampshire tightening, with some even showing Obama with a statistically significant lead in Iowa. Clinton's response? To go very, very negative. Expect this to backfire badly, giving Obama the chance to take the high road and appear presidential.
+ The understatement of the weekend comes from this NYT headline: Estimates May Have Overstated Job Growth.
The American economy appears to have created far fewer jobs this spring than has been reported so far, a new government report indicated yesterday. That could provide further impetus for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates when it meets Dec. 11.The report included a sharp downward revision of the government’s estimate of personal income growth for the second quarter. Because the changes were made as soon as better employment figures were available, the revisions made it seem likely that figures on job creation are also likely to be revised downward in coming months.
The new report concluded that personal income from wages and salaries grew at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in the second quarter, far below the 4.5 percent that had previously been estimated.
The government did not explain why the revision was made, and it is possible that some of it came from reducing estimates of wages or of the profits that employees received from exercising stock options. But it was most likely, said Robert J. Barbera, the chief economist of ITG, that the largest part of the revision came from a change in employment estimates.
If so, he said, he expected the government would revise its estimate of the number of jobs created in the quarter, to as little as 50,000 a month from 126,000 a month. That would indicate that the economy was much weaker than had been thought.
+ And last but not least, an excerpt from today's column by Paul Krugman:
The financial crisis that began late last summer, then took a brief vacation in September and October, is back with a vengeance.How bad is it? Well, I’ve never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even during the Asian crisis of 1997-98, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.
This time, market players seem truly horrified — because they’ve suddenly realized that they don’t understand the complex financial system they created....
“What we are witnessing,” says Bill Gross of the bond manager Pimco, “is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system, a complex of leveraged lending so hard to understand that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers in mid-August.”
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