Kausfiles: A mostly political weblog.

Will This Bloat Float?

39,000 New Pentagon Civil Servants are to be hired in the next five years, according to Defense Sec. Gates' plan. Many would replace private contractors overseeing military acquisitions--allegedly on the theory that this will help prevent over-budget, under-performing weapons systems. But not all the new full-time civil servants will be in acquisitions. Reports WaPo: 

Of the 13,000 private contractors to be replaced in the coming year, 2,500 of them would be in the acquisition workforce.

What about the other 10,500? ... Contractors can be fired, remember. Full-time civil servants are forever. Yet replacing the former with the latter seems to be a consistent theme of the new administration. Is this really Gates talking? Or is it Obama talking through Gates? Or is it AFSCME** talking through Obama through Gates? ... P.S.: The Post's ed board says "Democrats who say they support the president's expensive health-care and education programs" should support cuts in weapons systems that would free up money to pay for those programs. But, on the same grounds, shouldn't they also oppose permanent Pentagon bloat? ...

**--Or, when it comes to Pentagon workers, AFGE. ...12:42 A.M.

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The rehabilitation of Andrew Cuomo has been a heavy price to pay for the return of a few AIG bonuses. HuffPo's Thomas Edsall and Robert Dowling do their best to cut him back down, suggesting Cuomo may have tacitly approved, or at least enabled, the bonuses he later dramatically got returned. ... 12:24 A.M.

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'Employee Free Choice' Still on the Move! Yet another Democratic Senator, Michael Bennet of Colorado, declares "card check" unpassable. He also calls it an impediment to enacting health care reform--a potentially convenient "frame" for other wobbly Dems, Greg Sargent notes. ... P.S.: At some point doesn't the near-stampede of moderate Democrats to renounce the unions' top agenda item cut into labor's leverage when it comes to negotiating a compromise? Just asking! These Dems are defying labor. Are they paying a big price for it, or do they know labor needs them as much as they need labor? Lesson learned? ... P.P.S.: Didn't Robert Reich try to warn Andy Stern that this would happen? ... P.P.P.S.: Or is labor angling for a pity vote--they're about to be so humiliated, Dems will have to do something to help them? ... Update: Udall and Warner (!) seem to say they will vote for cloture. Of course, that's a bit of a 'free' vote now since cloture on the full-strength bill seems unlikely to get the necessary 60 votes (or even come up). Still, it makes it less of a stampede. ... Campaign Diaries' headcount seems a bit Ambinderesque--that is, optimistic, from labor's point of view. If they can get Feinstein and Bennet on cloture, then they only need two out of five other senators who "oppose the current version but haven't closed the door to compromise." Why would a senator 'close the door to compromise'? The question's still "which compromise?"  ...  12:03 A.M.

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Tuesday, April 7, 2009

60 in two? Really? Jennifer Rubin (citing Jay Newton-Small): Are we sure 2010 is a year for Dem Senate pickups? ... 11:40 P.M.

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Variety Was His Blog: Amy Wallace, whose 2001 profile of Peter Bart in Los Angeles Magazine became the sort of "industry" sensation the L.A. Times seems to never achieve, jumps in on Bart's upstairs-kicking with a juicy lunch anecdote (see end of page 1) that demonstrates why Bart had no business running Variety.. ... P.S.: It's another question whether a man who's a bag of conflicts and biases--and who gives them free range in his writing--should be covering anything anywhere. The answer is of course he should. But those ethics aren't the ethics of a man running a large conventional reporting staff. They're the ethics of a blogger. In the coming days it will probably become a cliche to suggest that Bart's Variety was been done in by lone Web operators like Nikki Finke. But Bart actually had more in common with Finke (who also doesn't seem to keep her ad hominem impulses from shaping her reporting) than you might think. ... [Via L.A. Observed] 11:38 P.M.

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Obama Buffetted

First Time The MSM Has Ever Ignored Warren Buffett: The press accounts I've read have wildly underplayed Obama supporter Warren Buffet's criticism of the President on CNBC today. It's fairly pointed, and Buffett comes back to it, suggesting he has a message he's trying to deliver. [E.A.]:

BUFFETT: ...And, Joe, it--if you're in a war, and we really are on an economic war, there's a obligation to the majority to behave in ways that don't go around inflaming the minority. If on December 8th when--maybe it's December 7th, when Roosevelt convened Congress to have a vote on the war, he didn't say, `I'm throwing in about 10 of my pet projects ... [snip] ...

JOE: Yeah, but you might--might not have fixed...

BUFFETT: But I say...

JOE: You might not--you might not have fixed global warming the day after--the day after D-Day, Warren.

BUFFETT: Absolutely. And I think that the--I think that the Republicans have an obligation to regard this as an economic war and to realize you need one leader and, in general, support of that. But I think that the--I think that the Democrats--and I voted for Obama and I strongly support him, and I think he's the right guy--but I think they should not use this--when they're calling for unity on a question this important, they should not use it to roll the Republicans all.

JOE: Hm.

BUFFETT: I think--I think a lot of things should be--job one is to win the war, job--the economic war, job two is to win the economic war, and job three. And you can't expect people to unite behind you if you're trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat. So I would--I would absolutely say for the--for the interim, till we get this one solved, I would not be pushing a lot of things that are--you know are contentious, and I also--I also would do no finger-pointing whatsoever. I would--you know, I would not say, you know, `George'--`the previous administration got us into this.' Forget it. I mean, you know, the Navy made a mistake at Pearl Harbor and had too many ships there. But the idea that we'd spend our time after that, you know, pointing fingers at the Navy, we needed the Navy. So I would--I would--I would--no finger-pointing, no vengeance, none of that stuff. Just look forward. ..[snip] ...

BUFFETT: Well, I was going to mention to Joe that you've heard this comment recently from some Democrats recently that a `crisis is a terrible thing to waste.'

BECKY: Yeah.

BUFFETT: Now, just rephrase that and since it's, in my view, it's an economic war, and--I don't think anybody on December 7th would have said a `war is a terrible thing to waste, and therefore we're going to try and ram through a whole bunch of things and--but we expect to--expect the other party to unite behind us on the--on the big problem.' It's just a mistake, I think, when you've got one overriding objective, to try and muddle it up with a bunch of other things.

P.S.: He's against "card check." ("I think the secret ballot's pretty important in the country.") ... 7:19 P.M.

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Least convincing editorial ever?** WaPo's ed board admits 1) earmarks aren't the problem 2)  the "omnibus" spending bill now before Congress would mean a "significant jump in domestic spending" of either 6 or 8 percent 3) this increase will be "built into the annual baseline" and as a practical matter, set the floor for future spending; 4) if you add in the already-passed stimulus, the "overall increase in domestic spending is a staggering 80 percent;" 5) Obama's 2010 budget "appears to envision another increase in excess of 6 percent in this category."

Yet the Post endorses the omnibus bill. It argues the only alterntive is the GOP's spending freeze. Huh? Why not block the bill, cut the increase in across-the-board spending on existing agencies in half, and substitute equivalent spending on stimulus programs that actually are reversible once the economy recovers? A Third Way! It's the sort of thing a presidential veto might accomplish, if there were a president around. ... [via Corner]

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** Harmless bloggy hyperbole. But it's a pretty strange editorial. ... 6:19 P.M.

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