The New York Times reports that Hillary has finally released her family tax returns, and they demonstrate that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet better start worrying about their spots on the Forbes 400 List of Richest Americans should Hillary win this coming November.

The Clintons’ charitable donations have not always matched their rhetoric, typically going only to their personal foundation, but their foundation’s disbursements have dramatically increased recently for some reason.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton released tax data Friday showing they earned $109 million over the last eight years, an ascent into the uppermost tier of American taxpayers that seemed unimaginable in 2001, when they left the White House with little money and facing millions in legal bills.

The bulk of their wealth has come from speaking and book-writing, which together account for almost $92 million, including a $15 million advance — larger than previously thought — from Mr. Clinton’s 2004 autobiography, “My Life.” The former president’s vigorous lecture schedule, where his speeches command upwards of $250,000, brought in almost $52 million.

During that time, the Clintons paid $33.8 million in federal taxes and claimed deductions for $10.2 million in charitable contributions. The contributions went to a family foundation run by the Clintons that has given away only about half of the money they put into it, and most of that was last year, after Mrs. Clinton declared her candidacy. …

Mr. Clinton has earned $29.6 million from two books, “My Life” and “Giving,” while Mrs. Clinton has collected $10.5 million from two books, “Living History” and “It Takes a Village.” She donated $1.1 million from book proceeds to charity.

Mr. Clinton last year earned $6.3 million from “Giving,” a book on philanthropy, and reported giving $1 million of that to charity. In the book, Mr. Clinton espouses his own formula for charitable donations, recommending that people give away 5 percent of their income to charitable causes. “If giving by the wealthiest Americans even approached these levels,” he wrote, “I’m convinced it would spark an enormous outpouring of contributions from Americans of more modest means.”

The pace of the Clintons’ own charitable giving, which peaked last year at $3 million, has not always kept up with their income, and by at least one measure, has sometimes fallen short of the spirit of the 5 percent goal, which is to get money into the hands of charities that do good works.

In 2002, for instance, they reported income totaling $9.5 million and $115,000 in gifts to charity. In other years, they have given much larger amounts to their family foundation, but it has yet to disburse all of the money.

The Clintons took a tax deduction in 2004 for $2.5 million in charitable gifts, $2 million of which went to their family foundation, which as a tax-exempt nonprofit is considered a charity under the tax code. That same year, the foundation gave away just $221,000 to charitable groups, according to its tax return.

A representative of the Clintons said that when they and their foundation filed their 2007 tax returns, the records would show that all of the $3 million they gave to the foundation last year had been passed on to other charities. That will account for more than half of all the charitable donations that the foundation has made since 2001, according to a review of its tax returns.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine this week had a feature by Benjamin Wallace-Wells profiling Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and discussing Cole’s uphill task this year.

Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party’s representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend — Deborah Pryce’s seat in Columbus, Ohio; Mike Ferguson’s in central New Jersey; Heather Wilson’s around Albuquerque; Thomas M. Reynolds’s in Buffalo. Reynolds, Cole’s predecessor at the N.R.C.C., just narrowly held his seat in 2006. Rick Renzi, a Republican congressman from Arizona, was indicted last month on federal corruption charges, putting what was another safe Republican seat in play. These vacancies mean that in a year when, by historical standards, his party would be expected to win back seats, Cole will have to defend many more seats than he will be able to attack (only six Democratic incumbents have announced they are leaving office). His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. …

Many within the Democratic Party believe that the gains of the 2006 election weren’t merely the result of good strategy. They believe that the map was undergoing a fundamental shift. Perhaps the most-studied Democratic detailer of the map’s evolution is a consultant named Mark Gersh, whose analysis of the 2006 election results has become the Democratic Party’s official version. “Most people think of politics as changing from the grass roots up,” Gersh says. “It doesn’t. It changes from the top, from presidential races on down.”

For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich’s insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. “The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992,” he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: “I believe there’s a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts.” …

Many Republican operatives now worry that crucial segments of the electorate are slipping away from them. Republicans had traditionally won the votes of independents; in 2006, they lost them by 18 percent. Hispanic voters, who gave the Democrats less than 60 percent of their votes in 2004, cast more than 70 percent of their votes for Democrats in 2006. Suburban voters, long a Republican constituency, favored Democrats in 2006 for the first time since 1992. And Democrats won their largest share of voters under 30 in the modern era, a number particularly troubling for some Republicans, since it seems to indicate the preferences of an entire generation.

“What is concerning is that we lost ground in every one of the highest-growth demographics,” said Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman and Bush political adviser, who is now a lawyer at the lobbying firm Akin Gump.

Tom Cole, however, thinks the situation is not hopeless.

Cole’s basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party’s resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. (“Those three little words — ‘San Francisco liberal’ — are just magic for fund-raising,” one of Cole’s staff members told me.) He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain’s emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. Cole might have come up with a grand and unifying policy vision for his insurgents to run on. But Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party’s other grand strategists having abandoned the field — five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired — Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. “I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher,” Cole says. “And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective.”

But Wallace-Wells believes the GOP coalition and platform are in serious trouble.

Part of the problem, for a Republican Party that wants to get back to basics, is that George Bush and Karl Rove’s party was not theirs alone but a pretty precise articulation of decades of post-’60s Republican strategy. “You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend,” Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole’s committee, told me. “The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we’ve tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it’s not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there’s more of a libertarian view on social issues.” Cole says that the party’s rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. “My problem on social issues is the tone — sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us.

In other words, he is repeating the conventional viewpoint that the Reagan coalition of anti-communist neocons, religious and social conservatives, and economic conservatives has fallen apart.

I think it’s more the case that the Republican coalition, under George W. Bush, has fallen into disarray for lack of articulate and firmly principled leadership.

Bush is so inarticulate that it isn’t easy at all to identify a coherent Bush philosophy, but it seems clear that he has always been a moderate on Government, and is in many ways a liberal (resembling Woodrow Wilson) in foreign policy. Bush’s so-called conservatism has generally consisted of a manifest rejection of the consensus of the elect as articulated in the elite media outlets, which is widely recognized as an expression of a visceral animosity on Bush’s part to his own native elite culture.

Therein really consists his unforgivable sin from the point of view of the Establishment left. And Bush’s folly has proven to be his willingness to provoke their ultimate degree of wrath in the absence of an effective ability to fight them in public debate or within government.

Amusingly, Bush got away with his fundamentally happy-go-lucky approach right up until 2005 Hurricane Katrina. He seemed to be made of teflon. Media attacks simply bounced off him, and the American public in general indifferently shrugged off his malapropisms with a smile until along came New Orleans. The MSM was able to flood televisions screens with images of disaster while blaming them on Bush Administration incompetence and callousness. Blame for Katrina finally stuck.

Simultaneously, the disinformation operation conducted by disaffected elements of the Intelligence Community proceeded without White House interference or effective opposition. The passage of a couple of years proved adequate for the media echo chamber to persuade large portions of the public that “Bush lied.” There were no Iraqi WMD, and Bush knew it all along. He started the war “for the oil,” or to avenge Saddam Hussein’s attempt to assassinate his father.

The collapse of Bush Administration political activity coincided with a series of Republican Congressional scandals, and together produced the public perception of a failed and discredited GOP and the subsequent loss of both houses of Congress.

Bush’s failures seem to be amplified by the failures of the Conservative Movement. The Conservative Movement chose the time of Republican disarray to try mobilizing the base with a red meat issue. And what did they chose? Anti-illegal immigration. Anti-illegal immigration politics worked beautifully in transforming California into a firmly democrat stronghold. Why not take the same strategy, certain to alienate Hispanic voters, nationally?

Both George W. Bush and the current organized Conservative Movement demonstrably arrived at the 2008 primary campaign season without a defined candidate, a coherent strategy, or a clue.

The consequence was John McCain’s victory, produced by a combination of media bias and cross-over democrat voting in open primaries. Essentially, we are running the moderate democrat candidate this year as the Republican nominee.

If the Conservative Movement and the GOP does not return to the kind of politics practiced by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, to a politics based on a coherent and principled philosophy, to clearly articulated ideas, to a policy of winning elections by winning the long-term national debate, they are going to find the GOP stool has no leg to stand on at all.

In Newsweek, Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political strategist supreme, pitches in to help out the Clinton and Obama campaigns.

It will be a contested convention, Karl predicts.

After the last Democratic primary is held in early June, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama will have enough votes from delegates elected in caucuses or primaries to be declared the nominee. Obama would have to win 76 percent and Clinton 98 percent of the 535 delegates that are at stake in the final eight contests. Neither will happen.

How do you win one of those?

Control the Convention Mechanism. If you set the rules, decide who votes, organize the event and control what is said, it’s almost impossible to lose. So while Democratic National Committee chief Howard Dean is ostensibly in charge, both candidates would be well advised to gain control of the levers of the convention.

Three committees are key. The Rules Committee is where trouble can begin. Someone will come up with a smooth-sounding rules change that will give one candidate the advantage or the appearance of having a majority of the delegates. There will be an early test vote: the key is to pick what it is and win it. It’s likely to be obscure—the election of a temporary chairman, say—or contrived. But it will establish who’s in charge.

Read the whole thing.

Martin Kady II describes it an old Senate trick, and predicts no one will notice, but I wouldn’t be so sure.

Sen. Wayne Allard, a Republican from Colorado, has crafted a massive budget amendment that claims to fund every policy proposed by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on the presidential campaign trail. Allard’s amendment — doomed to fail by a significant margin — includes $1.4 trillion in spending over five years by proposing Obama’s universal health care program ($65 billion a year), expanding the Army ($6.6 billion a year) and eliminating income taxes on lower income seniors ($10 billion a year). …

Allard is a prime candidate to sponsor the amendment — he is retiring from the Senate and there’s no political cost to actually sponsoring $1.4 trillion in Democratic policy proposals.

Allard said his proposal was “an amendment that I think needs to be a part of the process — that will budget for some of the rhetoric we are hearing on the campaign trail.”

The only thing to watch with this proposal is to see if Obama actually votes in favor of it the way it has been packaged by Allard.

Rick Moran explains that B. Hussein Obama secured the support of the Daley Machine for his presidential run by making a deal, and that Machine tactics, deals, and political corruption are really the standard operating procedure for the supposed “candidate of Change.”

1. His very first race for state senate, he used the time honored Machine tactic of challenging the nominating petitions of every other candidate, getting all 4 of them removed from the ballot.

2. He cultivated a relationship with the ancient President of the Illinois State Senate Emil Jones who told a colleague in 2002 after the Democrats swept into office “I’m gonna make me a senator.” Jones then proceeded to give Obama credit on the passage of 26 key legislative measures – almost all of which had been pushed by other state senators for years – thus giving Obama a record of sorts to go with all that charisma. Obama calls Jones his “political godfather.”

3. While in the Senate, Obama has had numerous opportunities to live up to his promised “post partisan” reforms and has never – repeat never – participated in any bi-partisan agreement reached by Democrats and Republicans on any issue. He has gone so far as to reject the outcomes of those compromises on immigration reform and an agreement on confirming federal judges.

4. When faced with a choice between supporting a mayoral candidate who stood for clean government and the corruption of the Chicago Machine, Obama chose old fashioned power politics.

Obama’s political career is replete with examples of opportunism, cynical deal making, hack politics, and business as usual relationships with crooks and scam artists like Tony Rezko. His entire presidential campaign is built on a lie; that he is a different kind of politician and will be able to change the way business is done in Washington.

When given the opportunity in the past, Obama has usually chosen doing things the old fashioned way. Why in God’s name should we believe him now? Did he try and “reform” Chicago politics? Did he try and “reform” the Senate while his colleagues worked on bi-partisan agreements on vital issues?

You can support the man’s policies without holding him up (and throwing in our faces) the idea he is some kind of “new” politician who will change everyone’s lives. And if he keeps pushing that meme, he will look like the emperor with no clothes as facts about his relationships with various shady Chicago characters come to light, giving the lie to his grandiose claims like “We are the change that we are seeking.”

Jeffrey Bell looks at the Bush Administration’s record and identifies its lack of attention span as a key problem: the pattern is excellent initial judgment, strong will, fair to decent early execution, culminating in distraction and in an ultimate failure to finish.

Reagan made some unusually good calls. Speaking as a Reaganite, I believe Bush did too, particularly in his first three years in the White House. But too often, he didn’t let his bet ride. At other times he was proven right, but became distracted or forgetful when it was time to get to completion, to bank his winnings. We’ve seen how this worked to undo or render negligible some of his bravest and most innovative domestic moves, such as the first-term tax cuts and the faith-based initiative. The same failure to follow through demoralized Bush’s supporters and threatened his achievements in foreign policy as well.

He also, correctly, identifies the mishandling of the Plamegame as key ingredient in the dégringolade.

A somewhat bigger turning point, it seems to me, was the fall 2003 appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor to investigate the public disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. Looking back on it, several elements of this episode appear truly absurd, indeed almost comical: the indictment and conviction of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice, even though the prosecutor had concluded there was no underlying crime; the fact that the prosecutor seemingly pursued only people who were hawkish on Iraq and never people who were dovish on Iraq; the fact that from the beginning, even before Fitzgerald’s appointment, all of the key players knew that the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, was the original source of the leak to columnist Robert Novak, rather than anyone in the White House. If nothing else, the criminal investigation cursed and complicated several years of the life of Karl Rove, the president’s most gifted and most combative political adviser, who it turned out had nothing to do with disclosing the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson.

In part because the Plame affair succeeded in criminalizing or semi-criminalizing effective defenders of the Iraq invasion, in part because the weapons of mass destruction were missing–perhaps even in part because the partisan polarization that predated 9/11 was never destined to go away for long–the administration lost its voice. This affected not so much voters’ support for Bush’s handling of Iraq–that would have plummeted during the Iraq bungling of 2004-06 no matter what the administration had said about it–as the president’s ability to persuade the country that U.S. involvement in Iraq is a difficult but indispensable part of battling jihadism worldwide.

The loss of voice that began to be apparent in the second half of 2003 opened a wide avenue for a liberal Democratic storyline, which quickly dovetailed with the realist storyline of Republican critics such as Brent Scowcroft, not to mention the storyline of members of the permanent government inside the national security apparatus in Washington: World war? What world war? What war at all, other than Afghanistan and the one blundered into by George W. Bush in Iraq? Yes, 9/11 was terrible, but the Bush “obsession” with Iraq, obvious to insiders long before the actual invasion, enabled the perpetrators of 9/11 to escape the clutches of allied forces in the Afghan mountains, and has resulted in inexcusable neglect of the war in Afghanistan ever since.

That it has been possible for critics to isolate Iraq as an issue–making it into a giant, stand-alone Bush blunder–accounts in large part for the failure of the president to get much benefit in public opinion from the turnaround achieved by his appointment of General Petraeus. Improved prospects for getting the United States out of a difficult situation with only limited damage doesn’t change the “fact” that our being there at all is a mistake. Even a completely unpredicted Bush success–the lack of new terrorist attacks against the American mainland since September 2001–lends further plausibility to the Democratic storyline. In the words of the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh in a C-SPAN interview, after all, 9/11 was “not that big a deal.” In the revealing words of John Edwards, the war on terrorism is nothing more than a bumper sticker.

Read the whole thing.

AP reports that the Justice Department has reminded Nancy Pelosi that the Executive Branch of the US Government has the ability to decline to enforce Congressional edicts which overstep the bounds of the separation of powers.

The operations of government require that members of the Executive Branch have the ability to discuss policy decision frankly, freely, and in privacy. Cynical Congressional fishing expeditions seeking material for political scandal-mongering over legitimate Executive Branch decisions (like the hiring or firing of US attorneys) ought to be refused cooperation.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Friday rejected referring the House’s contempt citations against two of President Bush’s top aides to a federal grand jury. Mukasey says they committed no crime.

Mukasey said White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential counsel Harriet Miers were right in refusing to provide Congress White House documents or testify about the firings of federal prosecutors.

“The department will not bring the congressional contempt citations before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute Mr. Bolten or Ms. Miers,” Mukasey wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The House voted two weeks ago to cite Bolten and Mukasey for contempt of Congress and seek a grand jury investigation. Most Republicans boycotted the vote.

Pelosi requested the grand jury investigation on Thursday and gave Mukasey a week to reply. She said the House would file a civil suit seeking seeking enforcment of the contempt citations if federal prosecutors declined to seek misdemeanor charges against Bolten and Miers.

Mukassey took only a day to get back to her. But he had earlier joined his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, in telling lawmakers they would refuse to refer any contempt citations to prosecutors because Bolten and Miers were acting at Bush’s instruction.

Rodger Kamenetz (a liberal resident of New Orleans) writes on our class list:

Since I’m in sabbatical, I may — may– get up at 7 so I can wait in line
at 7:45 (when doors open) to hear Barack Obama on the Tulane Campus
(a few blocks away from me.)
I may…
I am skeptical about Obama– hugely.
But I understand he will be dropping a lot of g’s and I thought I’d collect some…
Hillary is more like a very familiar annoying relative you have to include because she’s family.
McCain.. he’s grandpa by the fireplace telling war stories…
Ron Paul is a nutty uncle… Huckabee is like a door to door salesman
who ends up not only selling you a vacuum cleaner but sponging a meal.
Romney is clearly not of the human species, & I wonder if there’s a way to replace his batteries.

O America I love you but how did we get here…

Barack Obama and all his rivals have done an excellent job of getting Americans on both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum to get beyond their differences and share nearly identical low opinions of the available candidates this year.

Paul Mingeroff quotes Dave Keene putting into perspective the increasing volume of calls for Republican unity urging conservatives to get behind John McCain.

There are people who don’t like the idea of a being off a campaign or being on the bad list if the guy gets into the White House,” Mr. Keene said. “This is a town in which 90 percent of the people balance their access and income on the one hand versus their principles on the other.”

Chuck Asay comments in this cartoon on the intrinsic logic of democrat party approaches to several policy issues.

From Dr. Sanity via Bird Dog.

The Sacramento Bee reveals the fundamental strategy of the Obama campaign: warm, fuzzy emotionalism and no specifics about policy.

It’s obvious that Obama can charm, but is that any reason to promote a State Senator who got into the US Senate by a fluke to the White House? The more I see of him the more convinced I am that he should be selling cars.

On the verge of a hectic few weeks leading to Super Tuesday, the crucial Feb. 5 multistate primary including California’s, Mack wanted to drill home one of the campaign’s key strategies: telling potential voters personal stories of political conversion.

She urged volunteers to hone their own stories of how they came to Obama – something they could compress into 30 seconds on the phone.

“Work on that, refine that, say it in the mirror,” she said. “Get it down.”

She told the volunteers that potential voters would no doubt confront them with policy questions. Mack’s direction: Don’t go there. Refer them to Obama’s Web site, which includes enough material to sate any wonk.

The idea behind the personal narratives is to reclaim “values” politics from the Republican Party, said Marshall Ganz, a one-time labor organizer for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers who developed “Camp Obama” training sessions for volunteers.

When people tell their stories of how they made choices and what motivates them, they communicate their values, Ganz said in an interview.

“Values are not just concepts, they’re feelings,” Ganz said. “That’s what dropped out of Democratic politics sometime in the ’70s or ’80s.”

To convey these values, the Obama campaign claims to be taking grass-roots organizing to a new level, harnessing what they describe as a groundswell of enthusiasm.

Andrew Sullivan is currently running the above photograph captioned only:

US President George W. Bush (C) leans over to talk with a girl (R) after Bush participated in a lesson for young children on the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day during a tour of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, 21 January 2008.

But, at Free Republic, Andrew Sullivan’s post is linked (by a correspondent signing himself america4vr) with the following text which appears to have been originally Andrew Sullivan’s.

This picture will forever be branded in my memory as one of the most disturbing images ever. What child would not be thrilled, ecstatic to meet the President of the United States, particularly one with the goofy,likable charm of President Bush? Here you see him greeting, warmly embracing this child in the loveliest, purest of emotions. The look of revulsion, of vehemence, of utter contempt for the President on this child is one of the most haunting, disturbing images I have ever seen.

Certainly the family was aware that the president would be coming to the school in celebration of the holiday.This child has been brainwashed, her palpable prejudice is not one that can be ingrained overnight, one that requires an extended period of incubation.

What an absolute utter disgrace.

It’s possible that that comment is actually by america4vr, but one wonders if Sullivan may not have first posted it and then later removed it.

In any event, it is the interpretive comment which supplies the crucial food for thought and makes one look seriously at the picture.