Prairie Weather

Please, could you fix it so's I can do that with my AmEx card too, Rudy?

...Giuliani's administration sent a check for $400,000 to American Express.  Though it was billed to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, an office that provides lawyers for indigent defendants, the money served as an advance against future travel and other expenses later incurred by the mayor's office and his security detail.

The unusually large prepayment, as yet unreported, adds weight to the theory that the Giuliani administration was using accounting gimmicks to obscure his office's travel expenditures.

With $400,000 prepaid on the Amex account, the mayor and his staff drew down on the credit card for a number of trips, including a handful out to the Hamptons, where Judith Nathan had her condo. Giuliani's administration ultimately spent approximately $100,000 of the $400,000 before leaving office in January, 2001. ... Muckraker...

Better off than in 2001?

The lead editorial in the New York Times today asks some of the hard questions about Iraq.  Yes, violence is down.  But no, political reconciliation is far from being a done deal.

Consider this all too familiar horror: yesterday, police said they pulled six bodies from the Tigris River about 25 miles south of Baghdad. They were handcuffed and showed signs of having been tortured. And five, including a child, had been beheaded.Perhaps 160,000 American troops could hold down the overall casualty numbers indefinitely, but they cannot wipe away that sort of hatred.

The Bush administration has developed a habit of lowering the bar about every six months when it comes to "achievements" -- those pesky benchmarks -- in Iraq.  In this respect, Bush is saddling America with the problem of what to do next.

Even after putting another 30,000 Americans in harm’s way, Mr. Bush still sees no need for a strategy to get all 160,000 troops in Iraq safely home. And as long as they know that this is the case, that Mr. Bush is willing to go on paying the bills — and protecting the Green Zone — Iraqi politicians will see no reason to compromise.

Americans need to ask themselves the questions Mr. Bush is refusing to answer: Is this country signing on to keep the peace in Iraq indefinitely? If so, how many American and Iraqi deaths a month are an acceptable price? If not, what’s the plan for getting out?

Another question or two need an answer.  Is Iraq better off now than it was in 2001?  Has America learned anything from the mistakes made by its leadership?

What grieves many Americans, in addition to the horrendous loss of lives in Bush's "mission accomplished" fantasy, is the fact that so few of our elected officials appear to have absorbed any wisdom after making such enormous mistakes.  Their energies are spent instead on cover-up, self-justification and self-defense.  The beheaded, floating child in the Tigris -- if they're even aware of that inexcusable happening -- is only a speed-bump on the way to holidays and then another round of political campaigns. 

Either warmth or food. Tough choice.

Food banks are having hard time.

Experts attributed the shortages to an unusual combination of factors, including rising demand, a sharp drop in federal supplies of excess farm products, and tighter inventory controls that are leaving supermarkets and other retailers with less food to donate.

Sounds like "rampant Republicanism."   Less help from the federal government; less generosity on the part of corporations and other businesses.  Keep in mind that this is happening as fuel prices rise and that a lot of people this winter will be forced with a choice between warmth and nutrition.

So this is a plea.  If you live in an area (as we do here) where the food banks are doing very, very well, look north, look to the less well-off areas, google "food bank Rochester NY" or "food bank Farmington NM."  Send $25 to the food bank in the area where you were born or where you got your first job or where you spent a summer vacation at the lakes.  New England's food banks could use your help.  In Alaska they're closing food banks for lack of funding. 

When will they ever learn?

Personal attacks by candidates on each other tends to be very counterproductive.  McClatchy reminds us of a sad loss in Iowa four years ago.

In the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gephardt and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean were leading in polls in Iowa until a few weeks before the state's kickoff caucuses. They went negative on each other in bruising rounds of speeches and TV ads. The bad blood was so prevalent that a Gephardt campaign staffer scuffled with a Dean staffer at a Gephardt event in Des Moines.

The result: mutual assured destruction for Gephardt and Dean, as above-the-fray John Kerry and John Edwards took two-thirds of the vote between them.

Giuliani and Romney are out-Deaning and out-Gephardting each other.  Can we count them out?

One reason for the nastiness, whoever is at fault, is the lack of an established — and establishment-favored — front-runner in the eight-man Republican field. Modern-era Republican primary campaigns have tended to have one heir apparent — Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, the first Bush, Dole — which kept negative jibes to a minimum.

Impatience, bitterness, and angry frustration just don't turn worried candidates into winners.

They're watching. Do you have the wrong bumper stickers?

Sheesh!  What does this remind you of?

Such is life spent trailing the Clinton juggernaut, where reporters can generally get close enough to watch but no further, as if separated from the candidate by an invisible sheet of glass.

National correspondents are increasingly frustrated by a lack of access to Clinton.

What's next?  "Private security"  checking you at the door?  Party flacks turning away people wearing Ron Paul t-shirts?  Contacts with "the people" limited to contacts only with sworn supporters? 

There may be some good reasons for nervousness at the Clinton campaign.  Walter Shapiro reports today from New Hampshire that the state is no safe haven for Hillary.

...The gap has narrowed, with six published polls this month all giving Clinton a lead of between 10 and 14 percentage points. And for the first time this political season, there is an inkling that Clinton might not be able to rebound from an Iowa defeat here in the Granite State. "I think it's very difficult for this to be Hillary's firewall state if she loses Iowa, unless she is a close second there," says Andy Smith, who directs the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. "Historically, there is a 10 percent bounce in New Hampshire for the Iowa winner," Smith points out. "And equally important, the loser of Iowa takes an 8-10 percent hit." Even the Clinton campaign acknowledges the potential for a bumpy ride...

"Heavily armed, fragmented, and corrupt"

The New Yorker's George Packer, whose influential book, "Assassin's Gate," gave us a chilling account of how the US screwed up in Iraq, writes today about mid-surge Iraq and what we might expect to see in coming years.  "Caveat lector," he warns.  It's hard for even the most informed foreigner to come to any clear conclusions.  "I’ve always believed that anyone who seems certain about the state and direction of Iraq, for better or worse, shouldn’t be trusted."

With all the necessary qualifications and disclaimers, here are a few points. First, the reports of a new breathing space for civilians in Baghdad and other cities are accurate—not a return to “normal life,” since Iraq hasn’t been normal for more than a quarter century and won’t be for a long time, but a degree of security that has allowed some brave families to pretend that they can live the way normal people do. (Earlier in the war, this was the single most commonly expressed desire among the Iraqis I interviewed.) But this security goes only so far. The large-scale sectarian cleansing by militias, much of which was completed in 2006 and 2007, has halted or paused. The days of dozens of bodies turning up every morning in Baghdad’s garbage dumps and side streets are over, at least for now. But most Iraqis live under the rule of some armed group or another, enforced by teen-agers with Kalashnikovs, and, to survive, ordinary people have to comply with the code of what amounts to a fundamentalist gangland. The violence persists on a smaller scale, not with roving bands of militiamen purging whole districts but inside the walled sectarian enclaves that used to be Iraq’s urban neighborhoods.

"Heavily armed, fragmented and corrupt" is Iraq's future, Packer writes.  Don't expect democracy.

The central government continues to be almost irrelevant in the lives of most Iraqis. Politics will be local, and it will not be democratic. The Americans will keep making deals where they can, and the price of these deals is that the likes of Hajji Abu Abed (see Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s hair-raising story) will have the run of neighborhoods like Ameriya.

While the American military have the central part of Iraq under some sort of control, the outlying areas are turning to non-Iraq neighbors, into another sphere of influence.

The question for American policymakers and politicians is whether this new phase can add up to a real strategic change.

Prospective presidential candidates should do better than talk in cliches about Iraq -- all we've had from them so far.  Here are the important questions.

Should we capitalize on recent gains and continue General David Petraeus’s counter-insurgency strategy across central and north-central Iraq, shifting to a supporting role as gradually as possible? Given that we have to pull out the surge brigades in early 2008, can we still try to build a balance of power that allows for regional development and consolidation, if not national reconciliation? Or is the war still moving in the same basic direction as it has in the past few years, toward the disintegration of Iraq? In that case, might withdrawal be the only reasonable response? What does Iraq’s future in the next few years mean to ours?

Hillary?  Mitt?  Ron?

NB:  Packer has put together a helpful list of recent articles by Tom Ricks, Jon Lee Anderson, and other Iraq watchers for anyone seeking some clear-eyed reporting.