Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty May 29, 2013 I'm scheduled to appear on Jake Tapper's The Lead on CNN sometime in the 4 p.m. hour today. But then again, breaking news can always interrupt and pre-empt the usual political-roundtable portions . . . Michele Bachmann: I'm Out of Here The Minnesota congresswoman announced this morning she will not be running for reelection to the House in 2014. POLITICO reported over the weekend that the Minnesota Republican faced "existential" political threats. The Federal Election Commission and the Office of Congressional Ethics are investigating the finances of last year's Republican primary bid. And she was being challenged again by Jim Graves, a Democrat who came within 5,000 votes, or 1.2 percentage points, of unseating her last November. Bachmann added on the 8½-minute video: "[T]he law limits anyone from serving as president of the United States for more than eight years. And in my opinion, well, eight years is also long enough for any individual to serve as a representative for a specific congressional district. "Be assured: My decision was not in any way influenced by any concerns about my being reelected to Congress. … I have every confidence that if I ran, I would again defeat the individual who I defeated last year, who recently announced he is once again running.
Reid Wilson: "Her political troubles made her one of the few members of Congress who would be more difficult for her party to defend than an open seat would be. That is, Republicans would rather run a fresh candidate without Bachmann's baggage than try to defend her suburban Twin Cities district. In 2012, Mitt Romney took 56.5 percent of the vote in Bachmann's district; Bachmann eked out a win over Democrat Jim Graves by just 1.2 percentage points, or about 4,300 votes. Bachmann may have been the loudest member of the class of 2006, the one who inspired the most heated arguments. But she will hardly be the most consequential; her enduring legacy may be the lessons she taught in how to lose friends and become completely uninfluential. With her exit, Democrats lose a potent fundraising tool. Republicans lose a headache they would just as soon do without." Byron York summarized her presidential bid last year: WEST DES MOINES -- If Michele Bachmann was ever intimidated by running for president, ever scared of taking a position, ever cowed by advisers urging caution -- if she was ever any of those things, she never showed it. Hers was the most fearless, flat-out, in-your-face presence in the Republican presidential field, and as a candidate she was capable of launching searing attacks on her GOP rivals -- just ask Rick Perry, or Newt Gingrich, or Ron Paul. But when Bachmann bowed out of the race on Wednesday morning, just hours after finishing sixth in a seven-candidate field in the Iowa caucuses, she spoke kindly of her now-former adversaries and kept the focus on the man who gave birth to her candidacy: Barack Obama.
I'm Sure Those Nearly-Weekly IRS Commissioner Visits to the White House Are Nothing, Really Hey, remember how the conventional wisdom was that as awful as the Internal Revenue Service scandal was, there was no reason to think that the White House knew anything about the effort to target conservatives for special, unfair scrutiny? Yeah, maybe that line of defense doesn't look so solid, either: Top IRS officials, whose agency was under investigation for targeting conservative groups, visited the Obama White House more than 100 times over two years while the probe was going on, far more often than in previous administrations and frequently enough that Republicans suspect White House officials knew about the targeting. Lawmakers now investigating the Internal Revenue Service practice zeroed in on those nearly weekly White House meetings to determine whether an IRS official — or someone higher up in the administration — had approved the targeting and whether it was politically motivated. The frequent meetings also raised questions about the White House's claims that it couldn't have instigated the targeting of conservative groups because it took a hands-off approach to the tax agency, going so far as to describe it as independent of the administration even though it's part of the Treasury Department. Former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman visited the White House 118 times between 2010 and 2011. Acting Director Steven Miller, who took over at the IRS in November, also made numerous visits to the White House, though variations in the spelling of his name in White House visitor logs makes it difficult to determine exactly how many times.
Okay, how many different spellings of "Miller" can there be? Meet the Wealthy Apparel Magnate Backing the Early Effort to Help Hillary The America Rising opposition-research shop introduces us to the first major Democrat celebrity-with-gobs-of-money to back a super PAC encouraging a 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign: Today, Pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC announced it had signed on Democrat fundraiser Susie Tompkins Buell, co-founder of clothing line Esprit. In the 1990s, while Tompkins Buell held control of Espirit, the Bay Area sweatshops which were contracted to make garments for Espirit were raided by the federal government. The Department of Labor found that the sweatshops doctored payroll records, paid workers less than minimum wage, and refused to pay overtime. When asked to cut ties with the manufacturer an Espirit company spokesman said it was more important for the "socially responsible" Espirit to stay in business than to pay its workers the government mandated minimum wage.
For further perspective, she withheld financial support from Barack Obama in 2012 because he hadn't done enough on climate change to suit her tastes. Espirit's whole process of growing cotton and manufacturing clothing, that doesn't generate any carbon emissions, right? She's also credited with delaying the White House's decision on the Keystone Pipeline: In October, Buell made headlines after she led a protest of monied Democrats in San Francisco against the controversial 1,700-mile Keystone XL oil pipeline. Her fellow protesters outside an Obama fundraiser included Michael Kieschnick, co-founder of CREDO Mobile and Working Assets, which has donated $75 million to progressive causes; IT executive David desJardins; and Anna Hawken McKay, wife of Rob McKay, a wealthy philanthropist whose father founded Taco Bell. The Democrats, who could have easily afforded the $5,000-a-plate Obama fundraiser, stood on the curb outside the W Hotel as Buell delivered a tough assessment of the president: "I don't know where he stands on anything," she said. Kieschnick said Buell's decision to take an aggressive stance was pivotal to the eventual outcome - a White House announcement last month that the application for the pipeline from the Canadian province of Alberta to Texas refineries would be rejected. "Before her involvement, the powers that be clearly dismissed our concerns" about the long-term environmental impacts of the pipeline, said Kieschnick, who has known Buell for 20 years. People inside the White House "clearly noticed," he said. "Then they realized this was not only bad policy, this was bad politics."
Oh, and her corporate management style wasn't all hearts-and-flowers: But Esprit de Corp. also ultimately came to epitomize the worst side of another decade, the me decade, the 1980s and its junk-bond daddies and S&L pirates and slick-suited sharpies. After helping manage the company with her then-husband, Doug Tompkins, for 22 years, Susie Tompkins led a 1990 leveraged buyout that gained her control of the company, and netted her an estimated $150 million. Esprit emerged from the buyout so deeply in debt -- and Tompkins Buell's subsequent helmsmanship left the company in such desperate financial straits -- that it went into technical default on its outstanding loans within less than two years. Esprit then spent five years shriveling to a morsel of its former self before Tompkins Buell relinquished all ownership of and involvement in the company in December.
More background on Espirit and sweatshops: [In 1993] the Department of Labor raided a San Francisco garment shop that works on contract for Esprit and owed its workers $127,000 in back wages. Although the minimum wage is barely livable at $4.25 an hour, the shop contract by Esprit paid only $3.75 with no overtime. Just six months earlier, in a bust of eight Bay Area garment contractors, three of those cited were working for Esprit. Those three, according to D.O.L. documents, were doctoring payroll records and not paying overtime. After the shops paid the back wages, at least one seamstress complained to the state Labor Commission that the employer was asking for kickbacks. Esprit's affable spokesman Dan Imhoff says that garment workers should be paid a wage that "allows them a reasonable life style." But asked specifically about what Esprit could do to insure this, he shifts the responsibility back to the contractor. "The bottom line is Esprit has to pay its own workers a fair wage. Do you think a socially responsible business would survive if it would pay twice as much to its contractor? How can a company stay in business? This is getting in a very tough nerve. "Perhaps," he continues. "Esprit isn't the shining example that you want . . . [Esprit] can only change so many things at one time."
I guess it's easier to support raising the minimum wage when you find it optional. Are America's Men 'Going on Strike' and Boycotting Marriage and Fatherhood? I think Helen Smith is on to something in her new book, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream — and Why It Matters. She discusses her book with Lisa DePasquale here: Nearly every TV commercial seems to show the husband or father as bumbling, emasculated basement-dwellers. One commercial that sticks in my mind is a laundry detergent commercial that shows a husband and wife folding their triplets' clothes. The husband says, "You're cuter than clean clothes." The wife responds, "Thanks, honey. You suck at folding." So much for positive reinforcement. It's a common theme in commercials and sitcoms that men just can't do anything right. In her new book, Men On Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters, Dr. Helen Smith tackles how men got to the point of not even trying. Popular wisdom keeps telling us that men are stuck in an adolescent stage of non-committal relationships, video games and beer pong. However, Smith notes that men are putting off marriage and fatherhood as a rational, not immature, choice. She writes, "The discrepancy between the life of the freer, single man and the life of the less respected, less free life of the married man is at the heart of why so many men have gone on strike. This discrepancy between the perks of single life and the punishment of married life for men has become wider in modern times given the unequal legal terms, cultural empowerment for married women –but not men – and the lack of reproductive rights that men face in comparison to their female counterparts."
Popular culture certainly doesn't think much of fathers. The irony is that single, pre-parenthood, quasi-slacker "just a guy" males are the staple of television comedies (Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother [for most of the run, anyway], Friends [Ross's son was mentioned once every few episodes], the guys on The New Girl) . . . but the portrayal of the single guys is actually better than the average portrayal of a father. Once a male character becomes a father, he becomes exponentially more hapless: Modern Family, Two and a Half Men, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Suburgatory, American Dad, The Middle. Very rarely do you see male characters on dramas like Grey's Anatomy, NCIS or its spinoff, CSI or its spinoffs, and Elementary or others dealing with fatherhood issues. Even on Castle, the protagonist's daughter gets forgotten about or ignored for long stretches. I think the last father on television who was anything resembling a role model was Jack Bauer.* 
Madison Avenue: "See, the Baby Bjorn is comedy gold! Don't those guys look silly! Don't they look pathetic for trying to be 'cool' with their dark sunglasses, when the fact that they're carrying their offspring in Baby Bjorns means, ipso facto, they can't be cool? . . . Hey, where did this culture-wide disinterest in parental responsibilities come from?" As TV Tropes notes, the "bumbling dad" was once seen as a comedic subversion of the "Father Knows Best" authoritative patriarch. But both our popular culture in terms of entertainment and much of American culture has long since forgotten the concept of the father being the reliable, assured, rock of the family. And yes, this is indeed the Helen Smith who Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds refers to as "the InstaWife." * "Jim, Jack Bauer is a role model?!? This man kills dozens of people in the course of a day, engages in 'enhanced interrogations' regularly, never has time to explain, and when his back is really up against the wall, he's willing to chop a low-life's head off just to help establish his credibility with a terror cell he's trying to infiltrate." "And your objection is . . . what?" ADDENDUM: In case you missed it, yesterday's appearance with Kristina Ribali on her podcast, The FreedomCast . . . Also in case you missed it, Louisiana state senator Karen Carter Peterson, the Louisiana Democratic-party chairman, declared Tuesday afternoon that opposition to Obamacare is driven by racism.
NRO Digest — May 29, 2013 Today on National Review Online . . . To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com
Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital. National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives. Conservatives — stay healthy! Get plenty of Vitamin Sea on the next National Review cruise. Visit www.NRCruise.com for complete information. |
National Review, Inc.
| 
Comments
Post a Comment