Locals know that in DC, there are two endorsements that can really swing a race: that of the Washington Post, and that of the former mayor-for-life, Marion Barry.  The Post’s endorsement is key in Wards 2, 3, and 6 (aka the white belt) and Barry’s is key everywhere else (aka the black belt).

The Post has endorsed Fenty.

Barry has endorsed Gray.

This should be fun to watch. . .

Ay, caramba! Those dark-skinned foreigners are now severing the heads of fair-haired Americans? Maybe they’re also scalping them or shrinking them or putting them on a spike.

There was, of course, nothing about hair or skin color in what the governor said.* If Milbank would get out of his Beltway bubble, where most “Mexicans” are in fact Guatamalans or Salvadorans with very dark skin, he’d know what those of us in the southwest know, which is that a very large number of Mexicans are not dark-skinned at all. A couple of hours watching Telemundo would leave you to believe that Mexicans are as white as the king of Spain. Certainly there are tons of Mexicans here in Austin who, at the end of a Texas summer, are whiter than me.

Mexico is a racially diverse country, ranging from tall and pale people of pure Spanish decent to short, dark people of unbroken Mayan lineage. Arizona and Texas border the northern, whiter regions of Mexico – except for their, um, different driving style, it is difficult to tell these people from native Texans. In large part, because there’s very little difference. Those of us who have daily interaction with actual Mexicans fully understand this, and don’t stereotypically think of them as “dark-skinned.”

That’s just the editorial overlay of a jackass east coaster who thinks so poorly of his countrymen that he believes opposition to illegal immigration simply must come from a bunch of racist bumpkins. Few things so greatly display one’s ignorance as to incorrectly presume the ignorance of others.

*Indeed, she claimed that bodies were being found without heads, so we would have no clue what color hair they had. But a good journalist should never let details get in the way of a race mongering cheap shot.

From: Your constituents

Re: Revenue Enhancement Measures (Formerly known as taxes and fines)

Please stop ticketing people for parking in their own driveways.  Start ticketing cab drivers for talking on cell phones while driving.  If my last two cab rides are any indication, these guys should be a gold mine.  Thank you.

POLICY FORUM
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
11:00 AM (Luncheon to Follow)

Featuring Tim Reif, General Counsel, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (remarks off the record);Anne Kim, Economic Program Director, Third Way; and Dan Ikenson, Associate Director, Center for Trade Policy Studies, Cato Institute.

. . .

To register for this event, please fill out the form below and click submit or email events@cato.org, fax (202) 371-0841, or call (202) 789-5229 by 11:00 AM, Monday, April 27, 2009. Please arrive early. Seating is limited and not guaranteed. News media inquiries only (no registrations), please call (202) 789-5200.

If you can’t make it to the Cato Institute, watch this forum live online.

How, exactly, does Mr. Reif give off the record remarks at an advertised forum?  Particularly one that’s going to webcast live?  Erik Wemple at the Washington City Paper suggests this as a possible story under the given constraints:

Yesterday, Tim Reif, general counsel of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative participated in a discussion about trade policy at the Cato Institute. The session touched on the splintering of a political consensus that guided the country through NAFTA and other free-trade pacts but fell apart under the Bush administration. In a heated discussion, the Cato Institute’s Dan Ikenson argued that low trade barriers are so important that the United States should consider taking unilateral steps in that direction. Reif responded.

Picking up on Reif’s comments, Anne Kim argued that what Reif said wasn’t necessarily the case. Reif then said something else.

Ah, DC.

Remember, the $700 billion bailout he was talking about there was last year’s $700 billion bailout, not this year’s $800 billion “stimulus.” This all would be less confusing if they would have just taken my advice and passed an $∞ bailout, but I guess we’re getting there in bits and pieces.

Also remember, the consistent story line with Obama was “He’s so eloquent,” not, “He’s plainly lying and making crap up.” Nope, journalists and a surprisingly large section of the American electorate fell for this, and fell hard.

I got this from David Bernstein. The situation he describes of upper middle class yuppies in DC is precisely the reason Dorothy and I decided not to move back there after grad school. There’s simply too much good living to be had in the rest of this country to put up with that place.

For those who don’t know, Ward Three is a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live. Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.

The good news for rich people is that people in this neighborhood are very nice and cerebral. On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids’ play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies).

Nonetheless, many people in Ward Three do have certain resentments toward those with means, which those of you in the decamillionaire-to-billionaire wealth brackets should be aware of.

In the first place, many people in Ward Three suffer from Sublimated Liquidity Rage. As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can’t afford full-time household help.

Third, they suffer the status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class. As law school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.

I’m in Ward One, so don’t worry, you’re safe from (if not with) me.

One of the main talking points, particularly among left-wing bloggers, was that Wurzelbacher was a tax cheat because, it was revealed by ABC News, he had a tax lien of $1,182 for back Ohio state taxes. This fueled the argument that he was a fraud, his opinion didn’t matter. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Fast-forward to today. Timothy Geithner, President Obama’s choice to be the next treasury secretary, quite clearly tried to defraud the government of tens of thousands in payroll taxes while working at the International Monetary Fund. The IMF does not withhold such taxes but does compensate American employees who must pay them out of pocket. Geithner took the compensation—which involves considerable paperwork—but then simply pocketed the money.

His explanations for his alleged oversight don’t pass the smell test. When the IRS busted him for his mistakes in 2003 and 2004, he decided to take advantage of the statute of limitations and not pay the thousands of dollars he also failed to pay in 2001 and 2002. That is, until he was nominated to become treasury secretary.

Obama defends Geithner, saying that his was a “common mistake,” that it is embarrassing but happens all the time. My National Review colleague Byron York reports that, at least according to the IMF, Geithner’s “mistakes” are actually quite rare. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to believe that the man didn’t know exactly what he was doing given that he would have had to sign documents, disregard warnings, and all in all turn his brain off to make the same “mistake” year after year. And keep in mind, Geithner is supposed to run the IRS. So maybe sloppiness isn’t that great a defense anyway.

One somehow suspects that had John McCain nominated Geithner to be Treasury Secretary—which could conceivably have happened—Geithner would have been run out of town on a rail by now.  So there’s a certain partisan tinge to the coverage.

Beyond that, however, government officials tend to mostly talk to other government officials, and it’s difficult for pundits (let alone ordinary people) to get points across to them.  Eliot Cohen, though writing about foreign policy rather than economic, explains:

My first, sobering observation is that government pays only intermittent attention to talk on the outside. To a remarkable extent, in fact, government talks only to itself.

Officials in the foreign policy and defense worlds go through vast quantities of official data, briefing papers and talking points. They meet urgently with one another. They fly to foreign capitols and back in a few days. They telephone and email incessantly. Every day in the office I spent hours reading a three- to six-inch stack of intelligence, plus all the other cables, messages and memoranda that are the lifeblood of the Department of State. I scanned the press clips, reading an opinion piece rarely, usually when it was written by someone who had a track record for good judgment. By and large, the buzz on the outside was just that — a background noise of which I was dimly aware, unless it was either unusually nasty, or unusually perceptive, which often merely meant that it fit my own views.

Most commentators have a radically imperfect view of what’s going on. Those on the inside, including at the very top, know more, though less than one might think. Government resembles nothing so much as the party game of telephone, in which stories relayed at second, third or fourth hand become increasingly garbled as they crisscross other stories of a similar kind (”That may be what the Russian national security adviser said to the undersecretary for political affairs on Wednesday, but it’s not how the Turkish foreign minister described the Syrian view to our ambassador to NATO on Thursday.”) Add to this the effects of secrecy induced by security concerns, as well as by the natural desire to play one’s cards close to one’s vest, and the result is a well-nigh impenetrable murk of policy making.

But it’s even murkier on the outside. “Occasionally an outsider may provide perspective; almost never does he have enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves,” Henry Kissinger once remarked. Or as the White House correspondent of one major national newspaper once confided to me, “We really don’t have a clue what’s going on in there.”

Cheery thought: Cohen was describing the last few years of the Bush administration.  The Geithner blunder is in the first few days of the Obama administration.  The unforced errors are probably going to compound.

Although he introduced in each Congress a bill to socialize health care, he was hardly a down the line liberal.  He was a long time member of the NRA board, and a skeptic of environmentalists.  He managed to pass bills and beat the leadership of both parties on occasion.  If I recall correctly, President Bush said upon meeting him that he was supposed to be the biggest pain in the a** on Capitol Hill, and Dingell replied, “Thank you, Mr. President.  I worked long and hard to get that reputation, and I’d hate to lose it.”  He’s lost it.

Now this powerful committee will be headed by Henry Waxman, who’ll be a puppet of Speaker Pelosi.  The independent Dingell was long a thorn in Pelosi’s side, to the point where she backed a primary opponent against him in 2002; he returned the favor later by backing Steny Hoyer for majority leader over Pelosi’s choice, John Murtha.  It looks very much like Pelosi is consolidating her grip on the House.  Once, there were many committee chairment who’d go there own way: Dan Rostenkowski and Bill Thomas on Ways and Means, Les Aspin on Armed Services, Howard Smith on Rules.  Dingell was pretty much the last Democratic committee chairman who’d oppose the party leadership.  The days of powerful committee chairmen going against the Speaker seem to be ending.  She’s well to the left of most of the nation, but it looks like the House is firmly under Pelosi’s control.