House Minority Leader John Boehner has tapped an old friend to be his new chief of staff: Barry Jackson, an architect of the Contract With America, a minor player in the saga of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Karl Rove’s former right-hand man.Actually I don’t know how “minor” a player Jackson was in the Abramoff scandal when you review this Daily Kos 2006 post, in which we also learn, among other things, that Jackson was the principal schemer behind Dubya’s privatization hustle on Social Security. We also learn the following…
The Ohio native is a fierce, if low-profile, Boehner defender whom allies described as the obvious choice to succeed Chief of Staff Paula Nowakowski, who died suddenly of a heart attack on Jan. 9.
“He’s a loyalist,” said John Feehery, a Republican consultant and spokesman for former Speaker Dennis Hastert. “He was very loyal to Bush, and he will be very loyal to John. ... He’s always going to have John’s back.”
From early on Jackson was GOP policy player. He helped form and sell the Contract with America. He was the Executive Director of the House Republican Conference from 1995 to 1998. This means that he has been at the table for every GOP scam over the last 16 years. He, like Boehner, was present at the birth of the K Street Project and they were both present when Jack Abramoff was chosen to be the point of the GOP spear for the Party's effort to control all Lobbying money in DC.Daily Kos diarist dengre also tells us that Jackson was behind Dubya’s campaign for president in 2000 as a “reformer with results” (gag me), having wormed his way into Number 43’s “graces” since Boehner lost his chair in the House Repug Conference to former rep J.C. Watts – as a result, Jackson looked for a new benefactor and latched onto Karl Rove, hence becoming pals with eventual-President Nutball (before recently reuniting with Boehner, of course).
Back on April 17, 1996, the Hill published an article, (Repug CA U.S. House Rep Elton) Gallegly blasts GOP aides' trip to Saipan amid charges of labor abuses in Pacific territory by Marcia Gelbart and Eamon Javers. The article dealt the chairman of the House Resources Subcommittee on Native American and Insular Affairs and his anger at Congressional aides taking trips to Saipan without getting his approval.
Now this would have been at the very beginning of Jack Abramoff's efforts to block legislation that would end sweatshops on the US territory of CNMI. Organizing junkets for the GOP elite was key to protecting the labor abuse on Saipan from justice.
I have not found the article online (so I am posting much of it), but Rep. John Boehner's Chief of Staff, Barry Jackson, was one of the first to take a trip on Jack Abramoff's dime…
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"I'm really disappointed" Gallegly said. "It is common courtesy around here that the chairman of the committee should know what's going on in his own jurisdiction," he added, noting that full committee Chairman Don Young (R- Alaska) was also unaware of the trip.
Oh, and did you know that Jackson was behind the Medicare Part D scam also?
And I mentioned the Social Security fiasco earlier; it turns out that one of the front groups involved was called the United Seniors Association, which links Jackson to none other than…yep, you guessed it, Jack Abramoff.
No one should have any illusions that the congressional Repugs, sensing a return to power this fall, are going to put back into place all of the players (or, at least, as many as they can of those who aren’t doing time) who flourished when they ran our government like the foxes raiding the proverbial hen house. This move to bring back Barry Jackson is a herald of such future bad tidings.
To be sure, we have large budget deficits and ample money growth. The federal government’s budget deficit was $390 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2010, or about 11 percent of gross domestic product. Such a large deficit was unimaginable just a few years ago.In response, I give you Brad DeLong (from February 2008 here)…
The Bush administration and its flacks and flunkies have long promised that the administration was going to "cut the deficit in half" by the time in left office in fiscal 2009. The press by and large reported this straight--not pointing out that the "cut in half" was from a highballed projected peak deficit number that was artificially inflated in order to set the bar artificially low, not pointing out that such a deficit still left fiscal policy far from where it ought to be, and not pointing out that the Bushies' policies would produce such a reduction only if everything broke right and we had four uninterrupted years of macroeconomic good news. Republican economists who cared more about pleasing White House communications than in informing their audience chimed in--why, I get 100 hits on Google for Greg Mankiw saying both when he was under and since he came out from under message discipline that George W. Bush's proposals were projected to reduce the deficit by half by 2009. Not under any projection that I would recognize as straight.So if our deficit was “unimaginable,” it was probably because imagination was the only tool Mankiw used to crunch numbers who would please his handlers in power at the time.
And Mankiw does some more “navel gazing” here…
In light of the large fiscal imbalance over which Mr. Obama is presiding, it’s a good bet he will end up raising taxes for most Americans in coming years. Higher tax rates mean reduced work incentives and lower potential output. If the Fed fails to account for this change, it could try to promote more growth than the economy can sustain, causing inflation to rise.Funny, but Mankiw said here that we need more inflation to supposedly speed the economic recovery, not less.
And get a load of this for a true laugh from Mankiw…
Yet, despite having the two classic ingredients for high inflation, the United States has experienced only benign price increases. Over the last year, the core Consumer Price Index, excluding food and energy, has risen by less than 2 percent.Memo to Mankiw – I don’t know what planet you live on, but on the one upon which I reside, food and energy are probably our two highest costs, along with medicines. Why you would exclude food and energy from the CPI is something I cannot fathom, unless of course your intention is to fudge numbers and do nothing more than that.
Yep, this is some majorly fracked-up opinionating on the economy, I’ll grant you. But at least Mankiw doesn’t consider a gas tax as economic stimulus as he did here.
The nation’s police chiefs are finding an alarming increase in criminals’ use of assault weapons — the high-powered battlefield rifles that used to be banned, back when the federal government showed greater concern for public safety. The 10-year ban expired in 2004, despite the vows of presidential nominees from both parties to fight for renewal. Congress hasn’t mustered the guts to try, preferring to roll over for the gun lobby.As I said here, the gun rules over all in this country.
A survey of more than 130 local police chiefs and officials found 37 percent reporting an increase in assault weapons in street crime. Front-line police find criminals generally packing more powerful heat, with more than half of the chiefs citing increases in large-caliber handguns and high-capacity semiautomatics — the real-life stuff of tough-guy movie fantasies. Miami police reported that four years after politicians allowed the federal ban to lapse, homicides by assault weapons increased sixfold, including the murder of two police officers.
The findings were part of a police brass “summit on guns and crime” in Washington last November that was studiously ignored by the capital ruling class. Meeting as members of the Police Executive Research Forum, the attendees underlined the disheartening fact that “there seems to be little or no appetite for gun control legislation in the U.S. Congress or the Obama administration.”
In their frustration, the chiefs deserve credit for trying to come up with some local and state solutions — for example, requiring owners to immediately document lost or stolen guns as a deterrent to the current dodge of selling them as “lost” in the underground market.
The chiefs were collectively enlightened, discovering that in most states gun dealers are monitored not by state or local police but by federal firearm inspectors. They have a force of but 600 covering 115,000 gun dealers — who may be visited no more than once a year. Polls regularly show that the public, including most gun hobbyists, wants more realistic gun controls. But don’t tell that to the timorous politicians of Washington.
Deal with it, America.
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