Scooter's out, 'Scalito' is in

So when Rove was not indicted in the CIA leak case Friday, it almost seemed like a victory for the White House.  But it was clearly not a victory for the reporters and commentators who climbed far out on the limb of handicapping what a special prosecutor operating in secret might do.

IIPM has never explained discrepancies with its ads and the information unearthed by journalists and bloggers.  Instead, IIPM has served legal notices, and a plethora of nameless blogs, allegedly by IIPM alumni, have sprouted up overnight defending IIPM and smearing the bloggers."None of this does IIPM the slightest bit of credit, nor does it enhance its reputation," wrote Kanika Datta in Business Standard, India's leading business daily.  "If it wants to defend itself with dignity and credibility, the institution would do well to set up a blog of its own rebutting the facts in the JAM piece and publicly dissociating itself from the more injudicious comments of its enthusiastic alumni.  The Net is increasingly becoming a pain point for corporations, especially large multinationals in controversial businesses.  If there is a larger lesson for them in this incident, it is how not to deal with negative stories." Instead, the scrutiny of bloggers helped get the notice of mainstream media, who then piled on with their own reporting.  CNBC-TV18 -- a joint venture of CNBC and Indian TV18 -- ran a story on Oct. 24 stating that IIPM did not have approval from the Indian government's University Grants Commission (UGC) to offer an MBA....Sabnis, the blogger who quit his IBM job, told me he is weighing various new job offers. He said that IIPM has made a few changes to their ads since the JAM story."I expect them to keep making changes because now there is literally an army of bloggers exposing lies of IIPM," Sabnis said.

The White House is still nowhere to be found on the budget.Where are John Snow and Josh Bolten? What are they doing? Where is the new list of budget cuts? Where are the rescissions? Where are the comments on pro-growth tax reform?...Instead of offering direction, the players on the Bush team are still watching from the sidelines. No wonder the most recent Gallup poll shows a whopping 72 percent of Americans lacking confidence in the economy, and only 31 percent satisfied with the state of the country.This is not the time for wallflowers.We need leadership.

The real annual growth rate of federal government outlays is nearly at its highest modern percentage.  Under President Clinton it was only 1.5%, under Ronald Reagan 2.6% and under Lyndon Johnson 5.7%.  Spending has grown 5.6% a year since George W. Bush took office, and it seems likely to keep rising.  Of course the war in Iraq is a part of it, but the current administration's domestic spending increase is 7.1% a year, the highest since the 1960s. Nor has the Republican Congress been of any help. When Bill Clinton was president and the GOP controlled the House, congressionally approved nondefense spending was $57 billion less than the president requested; under Mr. Bush the Republican Congress has spent a total of $91 billion more than he requested....The president could help by vetoing a spending bill or two to get the message to Congress that he intends to reduce the substantial growth in spending that he has put in motion over the past four years. Add a $50 billion recession submission to the Congress--President Reagan's was $43 billion--and the right message will be coming from the White House to the legislative branch of government. But the better solution to the huge increase in federal spending would be a constitutional amendment to hold the growth of federal spending to specific percentages of revenue unless there is a supermajority override by both houses of Congress. It is not a new idea--Delaware, for example, passed a constitutional amendment in 1980, when I was governor, to limit state government spending to 98% of revenue unless there is a three-fifths vote of each legislative house to spend more. The extra 2% goes into a Rainy Day Fund--the kind of fund that could be used for relief in Katrina-type national catastrophes. The amendment has produced 25 consecutive years of balanced Delaware budgets, a fiscal discipline that the federal government needs even more that state governments do. Another approach is the Taxpayers Bill of Rights, or Tabor, which Colorado put into place via a constitutional amendment in 1992. It limits annual state government spending to inflation plus population growth, with any extra revenue going back to the taxpayers. From 1995 to 2000 Colorado ranked first in the nation in GDP growth and second in personal income growth. Its success has generated a furious effort to allow more spending that will be on the 2006 ballot.

What hath Katrina wrought?  Could the worst natural disaster to strike the United States, a storm that permanently altered the geography of the Gulf Coast, be so powerful it changes the spending habits of the U.S. government? That's the hope of opinion-mongers on both sides of the blogosphere, and they were in full-throated uproar last week.  Electronic pundits on the left and the right briefly joined forces behind a movement dubbed "Porkbusters" and an amendment in the Senate that would trim alleged fat from government projects and use the money for reconstruction in Louisiana and Mississippi. You want to funnel millions to Louisiana?  OK, how much are you willing to deny North Dakota? The initial proposals failed in Washington, suggesting that though Katrina may have swamped a major American city and killed more than 1,000 people, it lacked the punch needed to make elected officials give up pet projects. Nevertheless, supporters vowed that the synergy unleashed by the hurricanes that battered the Gulf Coast this year and a bloated federal budget that both liberals and conservatives bemoan for differing reasons could produce a watershed moment in fiscal management.

One of the Alaska bridges, dubbed the "Bridge to Nowhere" by its critics, would connect one small town to a tiny island. It received $223 million in the highway bill that Congress passed this summer. The second bridge, named "Don Young's Way" in honor of its patron, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska), received about $230 million -- but that is just a down payment on a cost that could hit $1.5 billion. Coburn had wanted to shift all the money to the I-10 rebuilding project, which is expected to cost $500 million to $600 million. Because of restrictions in the way highway dollars are distributed, Coburn's amendment would have redirected $75 million to the Pontchartrain bridge while unfunding the two Alaska bridges. "I believe that we should spend taxpayer dollars where they are most needed," Coburn wrote fellow senators asking for support.The amendment became a cause celebre on the left and the right, with watchdog and conservative groups reporting updates on their Web sites throughout the day. The Club for Growth alerted readers early yesterday on its Web log, or blog: "As of last night, the opposition is putting up a big fight. They sense this amendment, if successful, as establishing a precedent. A precedent where all pork is vulnerable and no lawmaker is safe."

And, there is a curious twist to the story: Many residents of Alaska appear to support forfeiting the bridge money for hurricane relief.  "This money, a gift from the people of Alaska, will represent more than just material aid; it will be a symbol for our beleaguered democracy," reads a typical letter to the Anchorage Daily News. Young, who made sure his state was one of the top recipients in the highway bill, was asked by an Alaska reporter what he made of the public support for redirecting the bridge money. "They can kiss my ear! That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard," he replied.

JB: Well, does that bother you, Senator?  I mean, are you worried so much about Oklahoma projects? TC: No. I don't ask for any projects.  I ran on a platform of saying the biggest problem we face in our country is financial and economic, and cultural in Washington, that if we don't change that, I promised you I will not earmark a thing until the budget is in surplus. JB: Wow. TC: So I don't have any earmarks.  So I don't have any...you know, there's no power over me to withhold earmarks, because I have none. JB: Well, how tough is it going to be, though, to undo this culture of pork?  I mean, the porksters are all around you.  I mean, we're not naming names, but you're outnumbered there pretty solidly, so... TC: Look, when the American people want things to change, they will change.  Just as like in 1994, they changed?

It's embarrassing that Feingold was the only Democrat voting for it.  What a great way to show the country that Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility.  Sheez... This is becoming a gross failure by both parties and the institution of government.

Sabnis told fellow blogger Amit Varma: "You know, we bloggers are always writing about principles, about freedom of speech, about standing up for what we believe in, for the truth. It's very easy to write all that. But I'm being tested on those principles in real life. If I don't stand by those principles now, I will lose all respect for myself." Varma posted this on his blog. From that moment on, IIPM is now virtually the only topic on Indian blogs....Bloggers have discovered in a week more than what a mainstream reporter may have in a month. They called up IIPM's Toronto office and found it was not an IIPM office at all. Even Chaudhuri's educational qualifications, along with IIPM's sister concerns are under the scanner. Bloggers also dug out a scanned page of an affidavit on submitted by Malay Chaudhuri, IIPM founder and father of Arindam, as a Lok Sabha candidate from Balasore in Orissa in 2004 claiming.he did his MSc, PhD and DSc from Berlin School of Economics from 1962-1970. They found that the institute was founded in 1971! As Varma, says, "Blogging is public regulation at its best. Both government and private enterprises should know they will be held accountable for any lies they tell, and will not be able to get away with deception."

In his book, The New Industrial State, economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that companies like the Big Three could stimulate, through advertising, as much demand for their products as they wanted and that high capital costs protected them against competition. That was arguably true in 1967, when Galbraith's book was published. It ceased to be true, at least for the Big Three, shortly afterward....Most of the leaders of the UAW and the Big Three companies who negotiated these generous contracts were very smart men, and they thought that the costs could be passed along to consumers. For the two decades immediately after World War II, they were, because the Big Three auto companies had no effective competition. Then sales of imported cars started rising. The Big Three executives can be criticized for not responding to this challenge. They, like the UAW, sought to wall themselves off from competition by getting the government to limit imports or to require certain percentages of "domestic content" in autos sold in the United States.