Yesterday, I complained that President Obama is using the White House website for partisan political purposes. Politico’s Andy Barr digs deeper and says it’s worse than it appears at first blush:

The new White House website unveiled by President Barack Obama’s team Tuesday includes a shot at former President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Under the “agenda” portion of the site regarding Katrina, it reads: “President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.”

“President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina,” the statement on the site continues. “Citing the Bush Administration’s ‘unconscionable ineptitude’ in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims.”

Again,  this is a function of Team Obama having literally moved their 2008 campaign website to whitehouse.gov.  This is unseemly.  He’s president now, not a political candidate or even president-elect.  This sort of nonsense does not belong on the people’s website.

via memeorandum

While I’m socially conservative on most issues, I’m by no stretch a Social Conservative. Yet I agree with Rod Dreher’s rebuttal to those who argue that the salvation of the Republican Party will come from expelling the Religious Right:

John McCain didn’t get his clock cleaned because of his ardent advocacy for unborn life or his stout defense of traditional marriage — neither of which played anything but a bit part in the tragicomic McCain-Palin campaign.

No, McCain lost because the economy is collapsing on the watch of an unpopular Republican president, and he had no idea what to say about it. McCain lost because his party is incompetent. McCain lost because his choice of Sarah the Unready cast doubt about his judgment. And McCain lost because Barack Obama ran a great campaign.

Where is Jesus in any of that?

Besides, was it the religious right that conceived and executed the disastrous Iraq war? Did preachers deregulate Wall Street? Did evangelical leader James Dobson screw up the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Katrina? Jack Abramoff — did he concoct his crooked lobbying schemes during long protest vigils outside abortion clinics? To be fair, religious conservatives didn’t stand up to any of this. We own a share of the GOP’s failure. But to scapegoat us for the Republican implosion is preposterous.

I do think GOP leaders have mistakenly courted these voters in a way that makes it difficult to attract non-devout voters, but that’s a different thing.  The answer is to find a way to do Religious Right Plus, not to expel the largest part of the base from the party.

That said, Dreher couldn’t be much more wrong here:

Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom. Look around you: Americans have been poor stewards of our economic liberty, owing to cultural values that celebrate unfettered materialism. Our families and communities have fragmented, in part because we have embraced an ethic of extreme individualism. Climate change and a peak in oil production threaten our future because we have been irresponsible caretakers of the natural world and its resources. At best, the religious right stood ineffectively against these trends. At worst, we preached them, mistaking consumerism for conservatism.

All political problems, traditional conservatism teaches, are ultimately religious problems because they result from disordered souls. In the era now dawning, Americans will learn again to live within limits — and together. Religious conservatives are philosophically positioned to lead the way, but we can’t do it by pouring new wine into old skins.

We’re going to have to learn to think and talk in terms — and not overtly religious ones — of building up civil society and its mediating institutions.

There are roles for government at the margins in all these issues.  But we’re supposed to regulate against materialism in order to save ourselves from ourselves?  Really?!

Hurricane Gustav is barreling down on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who has dubbed this “the mother of all storms,” has once again ordered the evacuation of New Orleans.  Aside from the obvious humanitarian and logistical issues, this is also a huge wild card going into the GOP convention.

President Bush is unlikely to make it to the Republican National Convention, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) may deliver his acceptance speech via satellite because of the historically huge hurricane threatening New Orleans, top officials said.

[...]

Officials insisted that the convention, scheduled to open here on Monday, will go on — albeit in a more limited and sedate form — even if Hurricane Gustav stays on its projected path. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation beginning at 8 a.m. Sunday after federal officials said Gustav could grow to a catastrophic Category 5 and hit Monday afternoon somewhere between eastern Texas and western Mississippi.

McCain made plans to travel to a threatened area of the Gulf Coast on Sunday, accompanied by his wife, Cindy, and running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. They planned to meet Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) in Jackson, Miss., aides said. McCain was scheduled to deliver his acceptance speech Thursday but now may do so from the devastation zone if the storm hits the U.S. coast with the ferocity feared by forecasters.

[...]

Officials of the convention, the Republican Party, the White House and the McCain campaign were all scrambling this weekend to rewrite more than a year of planning for what they had hoped would be a joyful four days starting Monday.

McCain told Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” in an interview taped for broadcast Sunday that the convention could be rescheduled. “It just wouldn’t be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near-tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster,” McCain said. “So we’re monitoring it from day to day, and I’m saying a few prayers, too.”

Realistically, the convention can’t be rescheduled. Or, at least, they’re not going to be able to hold anything like the massive, organized convention they otherwise would have between now and the election. It’s just not logistically possible: Even if they could get a space for it, getting enough hotel rooms, booking that many airplane flights, getting the network coverage set up, getting food catered, and so forth for something on that scale in short order is next to impossible.

Beyond that, one wonders what the impact is on campaign finance law.  As I understand it, the end of the conventions marks the legal start of the general election season.  If the convention were to be postponed, would it also extend the primary season fundraising and spending period?

On the other hand, if they go on with the show, but in a more somber and low key manner, what impact does that have on the race?  Does it reduce McCain’s expected bounce?   Or does delivering a speech by satellite from a disaster area make McCain look more “presidential”?

There are also the optics.  This has already brought back the specter of what was perceived as the poor response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina.  Does this redouble that perception?  Or does another shot at “doing it right” help erase it?

Regardless, this highlights a point that all of us at OTB have been making for months:  External events totally outside the control of the two campaigns will have a tremendous bearing on what happens on Election Day.

John McCain has repudiated, rejected, denounced, distanced, and otherwise made it clear that he’s not a big fan of John Hagee, who he thinks is a nut.

In the face of mounting controversy over headline-grabbing statements from Pastor John Hagee, CNN has learned presumptive Republican nominee John McCain has decided to reject his endorsement.

The Huffington Post had published a recording of Hagee saying that Adolf Hitler had been fulfilling God’s will by hastening the desire of Jews to return to Israel in accordance with biblical prophecy.

“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well,” McCain said in a statement to CNN Thursday.

Hagee is miffed.

“I am tired of these baseless attacks and fear that they have become a distraction in what should be a national debate about important issues. I have therefore decided to withdraw my endorsement of Senator McCain for President effective today, and to remove myself from any active role in the 2008 campaign,” he said in a statement.

The gays are ecstatic. Brent Childers, the Executive Director of something calling itself “Faith In America” has sent out an announcement saying,

Sen. McCain’s refusal to accept Hagee’s endorsement is yet another milestone in religious America’s slow but steady ascent to that pinnacle in the future at which gay and lesbian individuals are no longer harmed by those who use misguided religious teaching to justify a climate of rejection, condemnation and violence.

Watching Sen. McCain’s appearance on the Ellen Digeneres show yesterday and observing his body language, it raises the question in our minds as to the conflict between what Sen. McCain really believes and what people like Hagee have espoused for so long.

McCain had previously distanced himself from other nutty ideas espoused by Hagee but not declined to reject his endorsement. Responding to Hagee’s declaration that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for New Orleans’ sinfulness, McCain declared, “It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense. I don’t have anything additional to say. It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, I don’t have anything more to say….it’s nonsense. I reject it categorically.”

My strong guess is that McCain, like myself, had never heard of this Hagee yahoo but was approached by staffers telling him that he was a big muckety muck among a certain subset of the evangelical community and he should seek out his endorsement. Whoever’s responsibility it was to perform due diligence failed. I don’t think that person is McCain — that’s probably a step or two below his pay grade — but McCain hired that person, so he is accountable.

John McCain has a nice, pithy response to his endorser Rev. John Hagee’s claim that the “sins” of New Orleans and the city’s acceptance of homosexuality were the reasons why God punished the City by sending Hurricane Katrina:

“It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense. I dont have anything additional to say. It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, I don’t have anything more to say….it’s nonsense. I reject it categorically.”

Good for him.

Yesterday, John McCain announced that he was “honored” to receive the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, a Texas-based preacher who can probably be most charitably described as “pro-Apocalypse”. McCain lavished praise on him for being “pro-Israel”, but as Sarah Posner (via Matthew Yglesias) points out, what he actually stands for is the destruction of Israel in order to facilitate the End Times.

Comparing Ahmadinejad to Hitler, Hagee argues that Iran’s development of nuclear weapons must be stopped to protect America and Israel from a nuclear attack. Preying on legitimate worries about terrorism, and invoking 9-11, he vividly describes a supposed Iranian-led plan to simultaneously explode nuclear suitcase bombs in seven American cities, or to use an electromagnetic pulse device to create “an American Hiroshima.”

When addressing audiences receptive to Scriptural prophecy, however, Hagee welcomes the coming confrontation. He argues that a strike against Iran will cause Arab nations to unite under Russia’s leadership, as outlined in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Ezekiel, leading to an “inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” During his appearance on Hinn’s program at the end of last March, for example, the host enthused, “We are living in the last days. These are the most exciting days in church history,” but then went on to add, “We are facing now [the] most dangerous moment for America.” At one point, Hinn clapped his hands in delight and shouted, “Yes! Glory!” and then urged his viewers to donate money faster because he is running out of time to preach the gospel.

Paging Tim Russert: How about asking McCain if he supports uniting the Arab nations against Israel under the control of Moscow?

In addition to Hagee’s pro-Apocalypse views (and, for the record, let me state that I am anti-Apocalypse), he also has a long, long record of bigotry.

For example, John Hagee is on record as stating that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to punish New Orleans for hosting a gay pride parade:

All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.

The newspaper carried the story in our local area, that was not carried nationally, that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it would was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other gay pride parades.

So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the Day of Judgment, and I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans. (link via Glenn Greenwald)

In addition to his antiquated views on meterology and homosexuality, Hagee also has a long history of anti-Catholic bigotry, to the point where he blames the Holocaust on Hitler’s education in Catholic schools. Seriously.

Of course, I suppose that according to Hagee, Hitler was merely doing God’s will:

In “Jerusalem Countdown: A Prelude To war” Hagee has stated that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves by rebelling against God and that the Holocaust was God’s way of forcing Jews to move to Israel where, Hagee predicts according to his interpretation of Biblical scripture, they will be mostly killed in the apocalyptic Mideast conflict Hagee’s new lobbying group seems to be working to provoke and which John Hagee believes to be a necessary precondition for the “Rapture” that will lift Christians, but not Jews, bodily into Heaven to enjoy physical immortality amidst paradise.

You heard that right, folks. John Hagee, the man that John McCain is “honored” to have the support of, believes that God is reponsible for the Holocaust.

Look, I understand that a candidate cannot necessarily be held responsible for the thoughts and opinions of their supporters. I am on record as saying that. Nor do I believe that a political candidate has any kind of obligation to repudiate every bad idea of every supporter–that’s mostly a waste of time.

But when a political candidate makes a plane trip to accept the endorsement of a prominent person, in public, and states that they accept that endorsement and are “honored” to do so, I think that speaks volumes about the candidate. I think that John McCain has a lot of explaining to do about what, exactly, is “honorable” about having the support of a pro-Apocalypse, homophobic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, pro-Holocaust bigot.

The New Orleans city council today defied protestors and voted unanimously to tear down the first of four remaining major housing projects in the city to make way for mixed-income housing that will accommodate some, but not all, of the pre-Katrina public housing population. Needless to say, the self-appointed community activists were displeased:

The scene outside New Orleans’ City Hall boiled on the brink of a riot Thursday as protesters stormed the gate and were met with police spraying mace and firing Tasers. Protesters broke through the gates outside City Hall shortly after 11 a.m.

A woman identified by bystanders as Jamie Bork Laughner, was sprayed and dragged away from the gates.

She was taken away on a stretcher by emergency officials on the scene. Before that, she was seen pouring water from a bottle into her eyes and weeping.

Another woman said she was stunned by officers, and still had what appeared to be a Taser wire hanging from her shirt.

“I was just standing, trying to get into my City Council meeting,” said the woman, Kim Ellis.

Arrests were made as officers tried to establish order.

The first brawl of the day broke out in the New Orleans City Council chamber shortly after the council convened to take a vote on demolishing a group of local housing projects Thursday.

After a few minutes of chanting and clapping by the audience, a melee ensued and police waded into the fray. Shortly after the scene calmed down, the city cut a televised feed from inside the chamber.

It’s a rare day when I’m in agreement with the editorial pages of both the Times-Picayune and Washington Post, but the latter correctly recognizes the disconnect between the rhetoric of public housing advocates and their supporters like lightweight Sen. Mary Landrieu, the Democratic leadership in Congress, and presidential candidate John Edwards and the reality of the city’s projects, even pre-Katrina:

Corruption and mismanagement led to a federal takeover of the city’s housing authority in 2002. The Department of Housing and Urban Development moved quickly to break up these concentrations of poverty and dysfunction. Redevelopment of five of nine complexes into mixed-income communities is well underway. The remaining four complexes — B.W. Cooper, St. Bernard, C.J. Peete and Lafitte — hang in the balance. The City Council must vote for demolition.

Preservationists and advocates wax poetic about the historical and architectural significance of the barracks-style structures, which were built in the 1940s. Yet their romantic vision doesn’t jibe with the gritty reality faced by the people who lived in them. These residents survived in cramped quarters in apartment buildings that were cut off from the flow of life in the city and were incubators of crime. They didn’t have showers. They had to choose between running the water in the bathroom sink or the tub. They didn’t have central heating in the winter or air conditioning in the summer. Returning residents deserve better. …

What makes no sense is perpetuating a housing policy that trapped people in poverty. As the saying goes, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Maintaining New Orleans’s failed public housing would be a prime example of that.

Of course, demolishing one empty housing project is relatively easy; the real question is whether the council will maintain its resolve when it comes to tearing down the still-occupied projects elsewhere in the city that must also go to make the firm break with the decades of failed federal and local urban policy that public housing residents–and, more generally, the people of New Orleans–can finally have as one of the few positive legacies of Hurricane Katrina in the city.

John McCain has received all the key newspaper endorsements for the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, despite being a non-factor in the polls in the former and trailing in the latter.

The Des Moines Register backed McCain despite his being in 5th place in their own polls; apparently, they’re not so much trying to influence the outcome as to go on the record.

McCain is most ready to lead America in a complex and dangerous world and to rebuild trust at home and abroad by inspiring confidence in his leadership.

In an era of instant celebrity, we sometimes forget the real heroes in our midst. The defining chapter of McCain’s life came 40 years ago as a naval aviator, when he was shot down over Vietnam. The crash broke both arms and a leg. When first seeing him, a fellow prisoner recalls thinking he wouldn’t live the night. He was beaten and kept in solitary confinement, held 5 years. He could have talked. He did not. Son of a prominent Navy admiral, he could have gained early release. He refused.

The one-time playboy emerged from prison a changed, more serious man. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982 and the Senate in 1986, he has built an unconventional political career by taking stands based on principle, not party dogma, and frequently pursuing bipartisanship.

[...]

Time after time, McCain has stuck to his beliefs in the face of opposition from other elected leaders and the public. He has criticized crop and ethanol subsidies during two presidential campaigns in Iowa. He bucked his party and president by opposing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. A year ago, in the face of growing criticism, he staunchly supported President Bush’s decision to increase troop strength in Iraq.

In this campaign, he continues to support comprehensive immigration reform — while watching his poll standings plunge. Some other Republican candidates refuse to acknowledge that climate change is a serious threat caused by human activity. McCain has worked on the issue for seven years and sponsored bills to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.

McCain would enter the White House with deep knowledge of national-security and foreign-policy issues. He knows war, something we believe would make him reluctant to start one. He’s also a fierce defender of civil liberties. As a survivor of torture, he has stood resolutely against it. He pledges to start rebuilding America’s image abroad by closing the Guantanamo prison and beginning judicial proceedings for detainees.

The Manchester Union Leader gave McCain its coveted endorsement a week ago.

Our next President should not be someone who needs on the job training when it comes to making military decisions. It should instead be someone intimate with military affairs who has a history of making sound decisions on matters of war and diplomacy. The only one who fits that description on either side of the aisle is Sen. John McCain.

Sen. McCain is much more than just a war hero who chose to endure years of abuse at the hands of a sadistic enemy rather than abandon his comrades. In his political career he has demonstrated real wisdom on foreign policy, and never more impressively than after Sept. 11, 2001.

Of all the candidates for President, it was John McCain and only John McCain who not only opposed Donald Rumsfeld’s Iraq strategy from the start but offered a viable alternative for winning that ill-fated war. When the Democrats cried “Retreat!” and other Republicans shouted “Stay the course!” McCain listened to the commanders on the ground.

He discerned the path to victory early, and only after the President finally did what McCain had urged for years did the tide begin to turn in our favor.

That is the kind of judgment America needs in the oval office.

McCain is by far the most informed candidate on military and foreign affairs. In our interviews with nearly all of the presidential candidates, only McCain offered a comprehensive and detailed strategic vision for maintaining America’s position as the world’s lone superpower.

The Boston Globe — from frontrunner Mitt Romney’s state, no less — joined suit this morning.

McCain is a conservative whose views differ from those of this editorial page in a variety of ways. He opposes abortion rights. At least in the current election cycle, he has shown no particular quarrel with his party’s knee-jerk view of tax cuts as the cure to the nation’s economic problems.

Also unlike this page, McCain has strongly supported the current war in Iraq, including the troop surge. Yet the Arizona senator has never been an uncritical booster of President Bush’s policies. Early on, he accurately predicted that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t sending enough troops to maintain order after Saddam Hussein fell. Today, he straightforwardly acknowledges the fragility of the Iraqi government and the corruption that pervades that country. He understands that US failures in Iraq, along with President Bush’s torpid response to Hurricane Katrina, have damaged the nation’s credibility abroad and at home.

McCain’s honesty has served him well on other issues. As a longtime public official from a border state, he recognizes that illegal immigration is a complex problem – for which better border control is only part of the solution. His thoughtful stance may be a tough sell politically at a time when many Republicans (and many Democrats) are anxious about the number of people living and working in the United States illegally. But his opponents’ get-tough poses are unlikely to close the gap between immigration law and immigration practice; McCain’s comprehensive approach is far more likely to bring the two back in line.

I’m not sure how much these endorsements matter, or even how much they should.

McCain has hardly campaigned in Iowa, ceding it to the better financed Romeny, and is a distant fifth in the average polling in that state: 5.8 percent to Huckabee’s 34, Romney’s 23.3, Giuliani’s 9.8, and Thompson’s 9.5. Even with the vagaries and unpredictability of the caucus system, it’s inconceivable McCain will have even a respectable showing there.

New Hampshire is another matter. He’s climbed into distant second place there, trailing Romney 32-18.5, with Giuliani close behind at 16.5. McCain’s got a long way to go between now and January 8th. Still, on October 30, when the McCain blogger relations people sent along a Paul Bedard post “McCain Plans ‘Comeback Kid’ Surge,” outlining McCain’s strategy to win the race by putting all his eggs into the Granite State basket, I scoffed, wondering if they had a Plan B. Now, winning seems at least plausibly within reach.

Bob Novak excoriates Trent Lott for resigning from the Senate in order to cash in as a lobbyist.

Members of Congress talk among themselves about “getting out to make some money,” and they do not mean pocket change. The swollen federal government and concomitant growth of massive lobbying firms means ex-lawmakers such as Lott and Pickering will quickly be able to pull down seven-figure incomes. For many in today’s Congress, big money trumps public service.

Actually, federal legislators know how to build tidy nest eggs without spending one day in the private sector — none of them much better than Trent Lott. Except for one year as a practicing attorney fresh out of law school, Lott has spent his career on the public payroll — four years as a congressional staffer, 16 years in the House and 19 in the Senate. Nevertheless, the Center for Responsive Politics in 2005 calculated his net worth at between $1.4 million and $2 million, or 42nd among 100 senators. It put his annual income from the Senate and private sources at $289,710, in the top 1.5 percent of American income earners.

That’s not bad for the son of a shipyard worker, and it exceeds the fondest dreams of most of his fellow citizens, but it is not enough for Lott.

I don’t have any objection to Lott trying to make more money. Who among us wouldn’t prefer seven figures to six? My problem is with him doing so barely a year after committing to six years of service.

That he can cash in so easily by lobbying his former comrades is also problematic, of course. But the real problem there is that lawmakers can be lobbied to begin with, not that former Members can hop on the bandwagon. As Ed Morrissey notes,

There is a big connection between swollen federal government and growth of massive lobbying firms — and they connect in Congress. Representatives and Senators like Lott keep expanding federal government in order to get more resources to aggrandize themselves and wield more power. Lobbyists exist to deliver favors as a means to get a share of the spoils.

Why shouldn’t Lott cash out? He helped build the system that now delivers an unconscionable number of pork-barrel projects to lobbysist and their constituencies. Ronald Reagan once vetoed a bill because it had over 160 earmarks in it. Appropriations bills now routinely include over 2,000 such line items of pork — each. Congress just overrode a Bush veto on a water-projects bill that increased in spending over 50% in conference committee, mostly by adding pork when the leadership of both chambers insisted that they would not use conference reports for that purpose.

So, as is often the case, the crime is what’s legal.

Of course, there are also illegal crimes. Lott’s brother-in-law, “Richard F. Scruggs, a prominent trial lawyer who has been fighting insurance companies over payments for damage from Hurricane Katrina, was indicted yesterday by federal authorities on charges of offering a bribe of $50,000 to a Mississippi state judge in a dispute over fees with another lawyer,” the NYT reports. Mustang Bobby wonders if there isn’t some connection here.

So far no one has said that Mr. Lott is in any way connected to his brother-in-law and nephew’s doings. But then again, Mr. Scruggs represented Mr. Lott in a lawsuit against State Farm for unpaid damages from Hurricane Katrina, so if there’s an investigation of Mr. Scruggs, it might skate a little too close to Mr. Lott for comfort.

Then again, it might not. It’s not unreasonable to raise the question, though.

Story via Memeorandum. Photo credit: Reuters via Albion Monitor.

Trent Lott is resigning mid-term, reportedly in order to get out ahead of more restrictive ethics laws.

MSNBC:

NBC News has learned that Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., the minority whip is in the midst of informing close allies that he plans to resign his senate seat before the end of the year. It’s possible a formal announcement of his plans could take place as early as today.

Lott’s office initially denied that he he would step down, but subsequent requests for information about his plans went unanswered.

While the exactly reason Lott is stepping down before he finishes his term is unknown, the general speculation is that a quick departure immunizes Lott against tougher restrictions in a new lobbying law that takes effect at the end of the year. That law would require Senators to wait two-years before entering the lucrative world of lobbying Congress.

Martin Kady II and Josh Kraushaar for The Politico:

The announcement took Capitol Hill by surprise because Lott, the former majority leader, seemed to be relishing his job as minority whip, the second-ranking GOP leadership job. He had regained a post in leadership after he resigned following racially insensitive remarks at a birthday party for the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.).

Lott’s departure opens up a position within Republican leadership, and there could be a fight to replace him. Lamar Alexander, who ran for the position last year, would be a natural candidate, but there are plenty of GOP up-and-comers who could compete for the slot, including Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who are part of the current leadership team and could be looking for a promotion to the no. 2 spot in the hierarchy.

Lott would become the sixth Republican senator to announce plans to step down this election cycle. His term expires in 2012; and a resignation would prompt a special election to fill the remainder of his term.

[...]

A Republican adviser close to Lott said: “He’s ready to move on. It’s that simple. He only stayed to help through the Hurricane Katrina recovery, and Mississippi is doing well.” Lott lost a beloved house in the hurricane.

AP’s Jack Elliot:

No reason for Lott’s resignation was given, but according to a congressional official, there is nothing amiss with Lott’s health. The senator has “other opportunities” he plans to pursue, the official said, without elaborating. Lott was re-elected to a fourth Senate term in 2006.

One hopes that Lott’s health is indeed fine. Resigning in order to pursue a career as a lobbyist, though, would further tarnish his public image. Elections are expensive, wrenching events and create an obligation to serve out the term. It’s considered kosher to leave early to pursue higher elective office, since it ostensibly allows the candidate to better serve his constituents, but doing so for private financial gain is rather unseemly.

Via Memeorandum, which is quickly collecting other blogger reactions.

The political fallout of Hurricane Katrina has culminated in the first majority-white city council in New Orleans in 22 years.

A former councilwoman won an at-large seat on the New Orleans City Council, creating the first white majority in more than two decades.

Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson defeated Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who is black, with 53% of the vote. With all votes counted, Clarkson won with 27,740 votes to Willard-Lewis’ 24,874. Clarkson, 71, will take a seat vacated when councilman Oliver Thomas, who is black, resigned in August after pleading guilty to a bribery charge.

Analysts had said the race could set a baseline for the changing political landscape in a post-Hurricane Katrina city in which the gap between the numbers of white and black voters is narrowing. Blacks remain the majority but are now about 58% of the population, down from 67% before Katrina struck in August 2005.

Clarkson, a real-estate agent who campaigned on a corruption-fighting platform, served terms on the council in the early 1990s and from 2002 to 2006. Her election creates the first white majority on the seven-member body since the mid-1980s, when blacks consolidated political gains that began in 1978 with the election of the city’s first black mayor, Ernest “Dutch” Morial. Morial succeeded New Orleans’ last white mayor, Moon Landrieu.

A rather stunning development. New Orleans has two at-large council seats which tends to heavily favor the majority race. Michelle Krupa of The Times-Picayune reports that, “The shift appears to be part of an emerging trend in city politics” away from race-based voting.

Though the examples hardly represent a wholesale takeover by white candidates, political observers said Sunday that the changes suggest black politicians may be losing their monopoly on certain elected posts in New Orleans, particularly citywide seats.

“Symbolically what it shows is that we have a realignment politically, and that advances made by African-American elected officials and the African-American political structure over the last 30 years … right now are in neutral or being lost,” Xavier University pollster and sociologist Silas Lee said.

Like most changes to hit the city in the past 27 months, the effect appears to be a direct result of Hurricane Katrina. Despite the fact that at least on the voting rolls African-Americans still outnumber whites by a ratio of more than 2-to-1, both white and black voters in New Orleans have gone to the polls in nearly equal numbers since the storm. Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters Sandra Wilson has estimated that more than 100,000 people on the rolls have left New Orleans and eventually may be removed from the list, and recent voting patterns suggest the bulk of those voters are black.

[...]

Political pundits said these results should serve as a lesson to candidates considering a run for public office. “Now, politicians are going to have to construct a coalition” to get elected, [University of New Orleans political scientist Ed] Chervenak said. “There’s no more relying on a particular community to be elected.” Chervenak noted that the influx of Hispanic residents will likely impact the balance, but to what degree remains unclear. “In the future, you’re going to have to satisfy the entire city of New Orleans,” said Lambert Boissiere, a former City Council member and state senator. “You can’t just… satisfy one sector.”

That certainly sounds like a good thing.

via OTB News

Photo credit: Eliot Kamenitza/Times-Picayune

The idiots at FEMA stagged a fake news conference to highlight their efforts in California wildfire relief.

The White House scolded the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday for staging a phony news conference about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California.

The agency — much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago — arranged to have FEMA employees play the part of independent reporters Tuesday and ask questions of Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency’s deputy director.

The questions were predictably soft and gratuitous.

Heck of a job, Brownie. (Surely, he’s involved somehow?)

Bobby Jindal has been elected governor of Louisiana.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal became the nation’s youngest governor and the first nonwhite to hold post in Louisiana since Reconstruction when he carried more than half the vote to defeat 11 opponents. Jindal, the Republican 36-year-old son of Indian immigrants, had 53 percent with 625,036 votes with about 92 percent of the vote tallied. It was more than enough to win Saturday’s election outright and avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.

“My mom and dad came to this country in pursuit of the American dream. And guess what happened. They found the American Dream to be alive and well right here in Louisiana,” he said to cheers and applause at his victory party.

His nearest competitors: Democrat Walter Boasso with 208,690 votes or 18 percent; Independent John Georges had 167,477 votes or 14 percent; Democrat Foster Campbell had 151,101 or 13 percent. Eight candidates divided the rest. “I’m asking all of our supporters to get behind our new governor,” Georges said in a concession speech.

The Oxford-educated Jindal had lost the governor’s race four years ago to Gov. Kathleen Blanco. He won a congressional seat in conservative suburban New Orleans a year later but was widely believed to have his eye on the governor’s mansion. Blanco opted not to run for re-election after she was widely blamed for the state’s slow response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

[...]

Political analysts said Jindal built up support as a sort of “buyer’s remorse” from people who voted for Blanco last time and had second thoughts about that decision. Blanco was widely criticized for the state’s response to Hurricane Katrina and she announced months ago that she would not seek re-election. “I think the Jindal camp, almost explicitly, (wanted) to cast it this way: If you were able to revote, who would you vote for?” said Pearson Cross, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette political scientist.

Jindal has held a strong lead in the polls since the field of candidates became settled nearly two months ago. But the two multimillionaires in the race — Boasso, a state senator from St. Bernard Parish, and Georges, a New Orleans-area businessman — poured millions of their own dollars into their campaigns to try to prevent Jindal’s victory.

Jindal’s an impressive figure, a Rhodes Scholar who has been entrusted with incredibly high profile jobs since his early twenties. I remember reading about him in the Chronicle of Higher Education several years ago when he was appointed to run the state’s university system at the age of 28. From Wikipedia:

In 1995, U.S. Congressman Jim McCrery (R-LA) introduced his former aide (Jindal) to Republican Governor Murphy J. “Mike” Foster, Jr..[4] Foster subsequently appointed Jindal, then age of twenty-four, to be Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals, an agency then representing about 40 percent of the state’s budget; he served from 1996 to 1998. From 1998 to 1999, he was executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. He was also the youngest-ever president of the University of Louisiana System between 1999 and 2001. Newly-elected President George W. Bush appointed him Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Planning and Evaluation; he held that post from 2001 to 2003.

Quite extraordinary, really.

The general who presided over the Abu Ghraib scandal gave a speech yesterday railing against the incompetent administration of the Iraq War. David Cloud summarizes for the NYT:

In one of his first major public speeches since leaving the Army in late 2006, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez blamed the administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current “surge” strategy as a “desperate” move that will not achieve long-term stability. “After more than fours years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” Mr. Sanchez said, at a gathering here of military reporters and editors.

[...]

But his role as commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal leaves General Sanchez vulnerable to criticism that that he is shifting the blame from himself and exacting revenge against an administration that replaced him as the top commander in the aftermath of the scandal and declined to nominate him for a fourth star, forcing his retirement. Though he was cleared of wrongdoing in the abuse matter by an Army investigation, he nonetheless became a symbol, along with officials like L. Paul Bremer III , the chief administrator in Iraq, of the ineffective American leadership early in the occupation.

Questioned by reporters after his speech, he included the military and himself among those who made mistakes in Iraq, citing the failure to insist on a better post-invasion stabilization plan. But his main criticism was leveled at the Bush administration, which he said he said has failed to mobilize the entire United States government, other than the military, to contribute meaningfully to reconstructing and stabilizing Iraq. “National leadership continues to believe that victory can be achieved by military power alone,” he said. “Continued manipulations and adjustments to our military strategy will not achieve victory. The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat.”

The overwhelming consensus is that Sanchez is correct on almost all counts. The main exception is the last of these; both rhetorically and in deed, there has been substantial attention paid to the non-military part of the equation.

Still, Cloud is right on Sanchez’ vulnerability as a critic. As Kelly Kennedy’s report for the Army Times (an independent paper owned by Gannett, not a government publication) makes clear, he comes across as a bitter man trying to shift blame away from himself.

Sanchez was head of coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004. When asked where accountability lay while he headed the forces, as well as for his part in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Sanchez said it was too late for him to do anything when he took over.

Sanchez retired in 2006 after he wasn’t offered another command position after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004.

[...]

He berated the room of about 30 to 40 reporters, saying he had been portrayed as a “liar” by people who had never met him. Many of the reporters, in Arlington, Va., for a Military Reporters and Editors conference, had covered the trials that came from photos leaked to the media showing pyramids of naked Iraqi prisoners, a hooded man convinced that if he fell off a crate he would be electrocuted, and dogs snapping inches away from a prisoner.

[...]

Jaws dropped as Sanchez glared out at the room, and then eyes rolled as he spent an hour blaming everyone but himself. Most of what he said about the military has been said before: There’s no grand strategy, the Iraqi Army should not have been disbanded, there was no planning for stabilization or recovery past the initial invasion and, “the administration has failed.”

He said deployment cycles aren’t working with current troop levels, that it will take decades to fix the “military’s full-spectrum readiness,” and that if the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq, it would lead to “chaos that would lead to instability in the Middle East.” And, he said the Powell Doctrine — which requires a clear exit strategy as part of a war plan — was violated.

He said some poor strategic decisions in Iraq had become “defeats because of the media,” and that some reporters feed from a “pigs’ trough.” He lamented the media’s treatment of Federal Emergency Management chief Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina. Brown resigned from FEMA after accusations that he had mishandled the hurricane.

This is especially bizarre:

When asked for specific names involved in failures he cited, he said, “I’m not into second-guessing decisions of our political leadership.”

From reading Fiasco and Cobra II, I got the impression that Sanchez was “a micromanager with a conventional warfare mentality” and very much the wrong man for the job. Presumably, appointing Sanchez is part of the long list of things the administration did wrong in carrying out this war.

Update (Dave Schuler)

Here is the complete text of Gen. Sanchez’s speech. I didn’t take quite the same thing away from the speech as the NYT apparently did. Criticism of the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war? Sure. But I think the emphasis is more on a “unity of effort”, impossible with an antagonistic press:

America has sent our soldiers off to war and they must be supported at all costs until we achieve victory or until our political leaders decide to bring them home. Our political and military leaders owe the soldier on the battlefield the strategy, the policies and the resources to win once committed to war. America has not been fully committed to win this war. as the military commanders on the ground have stated since the summer of 2003, the U.S. military alone cannot win this war. America must mobilize the interagency and the political and economic elements of power, which have been abject failures to date, in order to achieve victory. Our nation has not focused on the greatest challenge of our lifetime. The political and economic elements of power must get beyond the politics to ensure the survival of america. Partisan politics have hindered this war effort and America should not accept this. America must demand a unified national strategy that goes well beyond partisan politics and places the common good above all else. too often our politicians have chosen loyalty to their political party above loyalty to the constitution because of their lust for power. Our politicians must remember their oath of office and recommit themselves to serving our nation and not their own self-interests or political party. The security of america is at stake and we can accept nothing less. anything short of this is unquestionably dereliction of duty.

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight from 7-8 Eastern. The show will return to Wednesdays next week.

I’ll be joined tonight by my co-blogger Dave Schuler as well as special guest Jim Henley from the excellent blog Unqualified Offerings. We’ll be discussing Senator Craig’s trials and tribulations; animal rights; today’s Washington Post story about the draft GAO report on Iraq; and the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

We’ll also take your calls at (646) 716-7030.

Update: We had an excellent show tonight, with some good discussion about social conservatism in the GOP as well as animal rights and libertarianism. There was also a long, insightful discussion about Iraq war metrics which evolved into possible coming military action with Iran. I’d like to thank Dave and Jim for an excellent show.

If you missed it live (or, for some odd reason, want to hear it again) you can click the link above. Alternatively, the embedded media player below will play the show for you.