So, when it became known that AIG was giving bonuses totalling in the hundreds of millions of dollars to its executives and other key people, and many of them were in fact part of the financial derivatives group within the company that caused the collapse of AIG, there was a huge outcry. Joe Smith, the average guy, was bound to scream and protest, and wanting action from the politicians. The politicians in turn were struck at 2 extremes. Here was a major public pressure to do something, and they were unable to respond because there was apparently legal advice that the bonuses were not revocable, and had to be granted. Politicians, being people with power and a need to showcase that they were in tune with public pressure, immediately crafted a bill that would get these bonuses back through taxes (never mind that many of these same politicians had voted to spend huge amounts of money in pork-barrel projects in the past, such as the Bridge to nowhere in Alaska).
Obama did not come out of this smelling of roses. Obama had come to power with a huge sentiment for him, that here is this young beacon of hope who will change things and take Government away from the usual wheeling-dealing ways and into a new era. However, Obama, like many other politicians, is finding that you can be hit by your own agenda; so, it would seem like that many of his actions were taken in the belief that there will not be much opposition (after all, he is the people’s darling). However, first in the manner of many of his initial nominations of whom some had to back down because of some defect in their past history, and now, in the matter of this AIG stuff, the Obama Administration is struggling.
First, Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner was criticized for not doing enough to block these bonuses (in all fairness, the guy is up to his neck in trying to turn the economy around, and yet, it would be equally fair to expect him to keep track of any economic issue that could inflame public sentiment); and even more so, he was somewhat dismissive of the scandal initially; it was only later when the pressure started building up very rapidly did Obama start expressing his outrage so that it would seem like that he is also opposing these bonuses to ‘fatcats’. He eventually used his weapon of claiming full responsibility and trying to defuse the situation, a policy that seems to have worked to some extent. However, Obama has to contend with this bill that would add a huge amount of tax to any bonuses for companies that have received money from the Government, and a number of such institutions are opposing any such bill.
One lesson from this episode for Obama would be to not keep on expecting that his popularity will defuse issues; the Republicans are still smarting from the drubbing that they received, and will use any opportunity to highlight issues that could crack the high popularity of Obama.

With 10 days until Election Day, long-brewing tensions between GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin and key aides to Sen. John McCain have become so intense, they are spilling out in public, sources say. Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin “going rogue.” A Palin associate, however, said the candidate is simply trying to “bust free” of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged roll-out.
“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser. “She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else. “Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.” But two sources, one Palin associate and one McCain adviser, defended the decision to keep her press interaction limited after she was picked, both saying flatly that she was not ready and that the missteps could have been a lot worse.

No matter whether she decides to increase her national persona, and campaigns for the 2012 election (assuming that McCain loses this one), she will remain a deeply polarizing figure – somebody very popular with the conservatives and who turns off a large section of voters on the center and the Democratic voters. If a section of the Republican Party feels that with her current appeal to conservatives, she can become a national figure who could stand for President in the following election, they have another think coming.

However, it was the next shock of her involvement in the constant bringing of pressure on as well as the firing of the head police man (who refused to fire the state trooper Wooten, in a messy divorce with the sister of Sarah Palin) that made things even worse. An enquiry just barely cleared her, but made it clear that she had not acted appropriately (what the enquiry said was that she had the right to fire the police chief, but there were ethical issues involved). And now this:

Even if it was legal for the Republican National Committee to drop $150,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, it went against the spirit of the campaign finance law John McCain championed in the Senate, legal experts said. The news of how the party laid out the big bucks to put Palin in fancy frocks, leather stiletto boots and a new hairdo divided the electorate.
But Russ Glines, 48, a McCain supporter from Salem, N.H., said her Alaska governor’s wardrobe should have been good enough. “She’s a fine dresser on her own,” he said. “We should use our money more wisely. “Her appeal is not in her dress as much as in her belief system,” Glines added. Amy Elliott, 37, of Dunedin, Fla., a stay-at-home mom at a pro-Obama rally in Tampa, was shocked by the expense.
“I would be a Republican if they would do my hair and makeup for me,” she said. “I didn’t even spend $150 on my [three] children’s clothes this year.”

This is an issue that can stoke a lot of controversy. In these tough economic conditions where there is a problem with respect to consumer spending, such behavior can be a problem. It puts off a lot of people who suddenly feel squeamish about the amount of spent, the sheer disregard for feelings of people, and has the potential to reduce her support to some extent. There are others who are unconcerned about such things, and would try to decide on a candidate based on their policies and past history.

However, it is very hard to justify locking people up for years altogether without bringing in charges against them; it goes against the concept of law and the rights of man whereby everybody is entitled to a trial in a free society. The United States is not a banana republic whereby laws and the rights of individuals are at the whims and fancies of a single person. In this overall discussion, the US courts are slowly changing their stance, from initially supporting the policies of the Bush administration to questioning their treatment of the detainees:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo prisoners have constitutional rights has fundamentally changed the rules for trying them and could bring down the special war crimes court, defence lawyers said. Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling did not directly address the legality of the Guantanamo court but it gave the defendants a new avenue to challenge its jurisdiction to try them. The 2006 law that laid the foundation for the trials at the U.S. naval base in Cuba said that court can only try “unlawful enemy combatants,” a term used by the Bush administration for fighters it considers undeserving of the legal protections granted to civilians and soldiers.
That status was determined by an administrative panel of military officers, a system that critics said allowed the jailers to be the judges. Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling said prisoners had the right to challenge that status in the U.S. federal courts, forcing the government to show evidence to continue holding them.

This ruling forces the Bush administration to think anew over its policies in the area of the treatment of the detainees; even though the administration, and even the Republican candidate, McCain has opposed the judgment, and the judgment was delivered by a razor thin minority of 5-4.

On the Republican side, Senator McCain had almost seemed like a spent force a few months back, with very few funds and having retrenched most of his staff. But he continued to keep on, and with the large support of undecided voters as well as voters on the center, he managed to make some spectacular wins, enough to whittle the field down to primarily a fight between himself and Gov. Romney.
And today is the day when 24-25 states will vote for their candidates and most likely decide the winners:

Today voters in two dozen states, many of them unaccustomed to having a say in the nomination of candidates for president, finally get invited to the party, in the first nearly national primary in U.S. history. Until now, a busy political week had two races in four days; today we watch 24 unfold in parallel, a giddy preview of battles to come.
All the activity just spoke to the stakes, 1,681 Democratic delegates to be divided up in proportion to the popular vote in 22 states. Though that is more than half the 2,025 needed to win the nomination, it’s unlikely either candidate will emerge the presumptive favorite. The rules are so convoluted that either candidate could win more states and still not emerge with a significant edge in delegates; in some places the strategy has come down to focusing on congressional districts with an odd number of delegates in hopes of picking up one here, one there.

Voting has already started at the time of writing this entry, and within a few hours, the results will be known. IT will be interesting to know whether some final decisions will be made, or will some uncertainty still be there ?

Embattled Republican Sen. Larry Craig resigned his seat Saturday after a weeklong political maelstrom triggered by revelations he was convicted of soliciting sex in an airport bathroom stall. Amid unceasing pressure from his party’s leaders, the 62-year-old Idaho senator said he feared fallout from the scandal would not allow him to “devote 100 per cent of the time and effort” to his job.

Political analysts say the scandal involving Craig was magnified because he was convicted of a crime and kept silent about the incident. “It is a truly remarkable thing that politicians get in trouble this way all the time — thinking they can keep quiet negative information about themselves,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“But with so much scrutiny on top level politicians, it was bound to come out … It’s fairly clear to people that he did enough that he thought he needed to plead guilty.”

The last line is the important part. There is so much politics and so much focus on the politicians that any indiscretions, however small, gets magnified. Politicians are supposed to be clean, but they also come from society; there would hardly be anyone in society who is as lily-white as a politician is supposed to be. After all, American society has a fair amount of second and more marriage, there are high divorce rates and people living alone, and there are a number of children being born outside marriage. When these are accepted among society, it seems scary that politicians are supposed to come into politics and stay there keeping totally clean all the time.
With these kind of expectations, it would seem normal that there would be a large number of prospective politicians who do not have such a clean family life, but are otherwise good administrators and would be good for the country; but who will stay out of politics because of these very reasons. The hounding a determined media can give to a person accused will be enough to shake the convictions of even a determined person. It would be far better if the media focuses on effective administrative policies; the amount of pork-barrel and corruption in Congress would be a far better judge of how good a politician is.

The Senate approved the Bush administration’s plan to remove a legal obstacle to eavesdropping on overseas terror suspects, putting pressure on the U.S. House to accept it before leaving for an August recess. President George W. Bush demanded that Congress close an intelligence gap that he said was hobbling the capability of U.S. spy agencies to eavesdrop on terrorists.

A proposal by House Democrats to fix the problem failed today to obtain the two-thirds margin required after McConnell said it “would not allow me to carry out my responsibility to provide warning and to protect the nation.” The measure, like the Democratic alternative in the Senate, would have required a court order to authorize interceptions of e-mails and phone calls of foreign-based terrorists routed through U.S. telephone switching points. In the Senate-passed measure, the secret court that oversees surveillance would have a more limited role. The court would review the program to ensure it was adhering to guidelines drafted by the attorney general and the national intelligence director to ensure Americans’ privacy is protected.

In essence, the Republican version loosens a fair amount of the controls. Now, one knows that the threat is real, but it is never very clear whether the administration is going overboard in its attempts. This measure now goes to the House, but if it cleared the Senate, it is much more likely to pass the House. After all, it has been the Senate in the past that has done a lot of cross-questioning in the past, not the House. With this measure, one can only hope that the administration still respects the right to privacy.

The director, Robert Mueller III, told the House Judiciary Committee that the confrontation was about the National Security Agency’s counterterrorist eavesdropping program, describing it as “an NSA program that has been much discussed.” His testimony was a serious blow to Gonzales, who insisted at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that there were no disagreements inside the Bush administration about the program at the time of those discussions or at any other time.
In a separate development, Senate Democrats, who were unaware of Mueller’s comments, demanded the appointment of a special counsel to investigate whether Gonzales committed perjury in his testimony on Tuesday about the intelligence dispute. The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, issued a subpoena to Karl Rove, the White House senior political adviser, and another presidential aide, J. Scott Jennings, for testimony about the dismissal of U.S. prosecutors, another issue that has dogged Gonzales.

It is almost universally acknowledged that after the repeated battering that Gonzales has had at the hands of Congress and the image of a Justice Department not totally in control of things, he would be on the way out. However, it would appear that President Bush is keeping him out of loyalty, otherwise for a man causing such serious image issues to the White House, his days would seem to be numbered.

The House Judiciary Committee Wednesday passed two measures to hold former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten in contempt for failing to answer subpoenas related to the firings of eight U.S. Attorneys last year. The resolutions will now go to the full House for consideration, where they will likely be voted upon after the August recess, according to a senior Democratic aide.
Earlier this year the Administration offered to let Miers and senior advisor Karl Rove meet with the committee for a one-time, off the record interview, which would not be under oath and would not be transcribed. Since then, Democrats have rejected that proposal out of hand, and White House Counsel Fred Fielding has said both Miers and Bolten are immune to the committee’s requests because they fall under executive privilege.

The White House will continue to claim privilege, and is unlikely to give up easily. It would also be worried about the precedence of letting the House question White House officials over this matter could be used again later; and this is not something that the current White House is guilty of. Previous White Houses have also taken this defense and only when the courts have forced such testimony has it been given.

Eight bitter months and nine major Iraq-related votes later, the meaning of Reid’s pledge has come into sharp focus: Democrats will work with any GOP lawmaker willing to vote for a mandatory troop withdrawal; other Republicans need not apply. This bellicose, uncompromising legislative strategy — on display again this week as Reid refused to allow votes on nonbinding GOP-backed Iraq proposals — has been an obstacle to any real bipartisan compromise on the war all year. And it effectively ended any chance that a significant number of Republican lawmakers critical of the war would join with Democrats this summer on any Iraq-related legislation.
Instead, in the face of continued defiance from the White House, Democrats in the House and Senate are focusing their efforts on making their Republican colleagues as uncomfortable as possible in the belief that that is the only way to get through to the president. All year, Democrats have forced GOP lawmakers to vote on withdrawal proposals, betting that with each vote Republicans who back the president will feel the renewed rage of voters at home.

This strategy will make the Republicans uncomfortable, but is likely to cause some confusion in the Democratic voter base as well due to the rigid stance; and something that the Republicans are likely to use as their main strategy. Expect the Republicans to push more strongly as depicting the Democrats as unbending and against the troops, and more interested in scoring points rather than stopping the war.