WHERE'S THE BEEF? As funny as Ahnold's interview with Oui magazine is, Tapped really doesn't care much whom he had sex with and how much pot he smoked in 1977. We're with Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom McClintock, whose campaign director told The Washington Post:

"We're not interested in his secret sex life," John Feliz said. "What we're interested in is his secret political views."

Exactly.

EVEN CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS . . . Think John Ashcroft's gone too far in eroding civil liberties, according to The Washington Post. Yet Ashcroft dances on, oblivious. Indeed, he continues to imply that those who disagree with him on what's necessary to fight terrorists are in fact aiding those terrorists.

AGAINST INNOCENCE. It's beyond Tapped why prosecutors fight so hard against the use of DNA evidence to exonerate people already convicted of crime. We realize that it inevitably calls into question the prosecution's case against a given defendant, so there's an egg-on-face issue here. But this article in The New York Times gives Tapped the sense that pure vindictiveness is what's at work.

DIVINE RIGHT. By now, most people have heard about how the conservative governor of Alabama is backing a tax hike in the statewide referendum scheduled for Sept. 9. Today at TAP Online, Francis Wilkinson reports from Montgomery, Ala., on the backstory behind that referendum -- how a divinity student argued in her thesis that evangelical Christians have a duty to support higher taxes; how a number of extremely conservative intellectuals and politicians bought into her argument; and how the tax proposal that grew out of this debate is forcing plenty of conservative Christians in Alabama to rethink their place on the political spectrum.

CLOSER AND CLOSER. This New York Times article makes it look like Wesley Clark is almost certainly going to run, which jibes with what Tapped's been hearing around Washington. If you're interested in knowing more about Clark, here are a few things to read. Start with Michael Tomasky's excellent Clark profile from the Prospect. For a more extensive understanding of how Clark views America's role in the world, read this article he wrote for The Washington Monthly; it lays the groundwork for a smart, pragmatic defense of multilateralism (one the other Democrats have not been able to make). Finally, if you're wondering whether Clark could really win the nomination at this point, we'd urge you to examine this article by Amy Sullivan.

Hear that tinkling? It's the sound of Karl Rove wetting his pants.

BACK IN THE DAY. Here's the now-infamous Arnold Schwarzenegger interview with Oui, a kind of Playboy knockoff from the 1970s. Linked to without comment.

OK, one comment: If the Democratic candidate for governor had given this kind of an interview, do you think Fox News would ever let us stop hearing about it?

TAKE NOTE. There's a pretty clear air of condescension and dismissiveness in Howard Kurtz's Washington Post profile of Al Franken, and although Franken is no doubt glad about the publicity, we must quibble with one of Kurtz's jabs:

"Lies" contains lots of citations and statistics because Franken, during a fellowship this year at Harvard's Shorenstein press center, was given 14 research assistants to help him scour the media archives.

Perhaps this is just a fault of unlovely prose, but does Kurtz really believe that the availability of research assistants inspired Franken's voluminous use of footnotes and statistics? Perhaps Franken used a lot of footnotes because, um, he wanted people to be able to judge his evidence for themselves? You know, because he's intellectually honest and stuff? Yeah, that's the ticket.

WRITER'S BLOCK. Leonard Downie, executive editor of The Washington Post, tells the good folks at "On the Media":

I think as time goes by, under the strains of both domestic and foreign challenges and as the administration itself begins to change internally -- the departure of Karen Hughes to Texas, for example. There are feuds going on within the administration. There are differences of views. We're beginning to see the kind of seams, if you will, in their protective armor and that opens it up to more fact-finding by the media.

Sure -- if reporters' editors will allow it. Didn't we just read, in Washingtonian, all about how editors at the Post (including, presumably, Downie) "continually underplayed" scoops by crack national security reporter Walter Pincus and "discounted their stories that ran counter to Bush's call to arms"? We already know, of course, that the Post's editorial board leans somewhat right, especially on matters of war. That's fine. But it would be unfortunate if the paper's top editors let their biases affect their news judgement on the front page.

STICKING IT TO FEDERAL WORKERS. President Bush has decided to wave the "war on terorrism" wand again, this time to justify a lower pay raise for federal employees. The Washington Post reports:

President Bush exercised an escape clause in federal pay law yesterday that allows him to stick to his proposed 2 percent pay raise for civilian employees next year rather than agree to a formula that would trigger an increase of about 15 percent.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Bush said the larger increase "would threaten our efforts against terrorism or force deep cuts in discretionary spending or federal employment to stay within budget."

Tell us, Mr. President, do massive tax cuts for the wealthy, which balloon federal deficits and starve the government of needed funds, also threaten our efforts against terrorism? By your logic, yes.

THE WONDER YEARS. National Review's Rich Lowry has a book coming out this fall. It appears to be another in Regnery's long line of Clinton-bashing tomes, and is titled Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

We can't wait to see how Lowry does this one. Because, as we all now know, that's some dreadful legacy. Tapped is really glad we no longer have to worry about dropping crime and poverty, a growing economy with plenty of jobs, a robust stock market, peace, the respect and approval of our allies and all that jazz. Gosh, what a drag it was.

GET READY. It's obvious by now that members of the Conintern are prepared to brand just about any Democrat who runs for president as a slippery, untrustworthy liar. They did it to Bill Clinton, who gave them plenty of ammunition. It worked so well that they decided to do it to Al Gore, too, and a politician long regarded as painfully square and scrupulous became, in the hands of editorialists at the The Weekly Standard and National Review, a pathological liar. The mainstream press, sheep that they often are, swallowed.

Will it work on the next guy? You can tell how much Wesley Clark scares the smarter conservatives from the way they've already begun to deploy the "slippery" meme against him. Here's the first shot, by the Standard's Matthew Continetti, who preposterously argues that Clark is "a slippery character whose public statements remind you of a fellow Rhodes scholar from Arkansas . . . Clark is more Clinton than Eisenhower."

Get ready, folks. It's going to be a long, muddy slog.

IF YOU CAN'T TAKE THE HEAT . . . Get out of the kitchen. Now it looks like Bill O'Reilly is calling up a columnist for The Oregonian and berating him for daring to be critical. Once again, O'Reilly is denying that he ever implied that his last show, Inside Edition, won a Peabody Award while he was there. The columnist, Peter Ames Carlin, makes short work of that claim. In the Age of the Internet, transcripts settle these things pretty easily.

WHO'S THE BIGGEST LIAR? Our friends at The Washington Monthly have unveiled their latest creation: The Mendacity Index, used to rate lies told by the last four presidents, including George W. Bush. They based their rankings on the opinion of nine Washington pundits, and the (highly scientific!) results will no doubt send conservatives on a tear. It looks like Bush was rated the most mendacious president of the last two decades -- and Bill Clinton the least. (Although to be sure, Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were all pretty closely stacked; it was the younger Bush who really leapt ahead of the pack.)

If you don't trust the Monthly's experts, be your own: In partnership with Beliefnet.com, they're running an online poll. Check it out here.

THE DEATH OF "COMPASSION." The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller has a superb and surprisingly sharp-edged rundown of President Bush's dismal failure to follow through on the "compassion agenda," as Washington types call it. The article is basically chapter-and-verse of broken promises -- from education reform to AIDS in Africa to AmeriCorps to child tax credits. And readers will get a decent sense of what's behind all this: Bush doesn't care enough about his compassion agenda to either take on House Republican leaders or roll back parts of his tax cuts. It's pretty clear that these are mere rhetorical moves, ways to entice moderate voters, and not part of a serious, coherent domestic policy agenda:

"After three years, he's failed the test," said one prominent early supporter, the Rev. Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal, a network of churches that fights poverty.

Mr. Wallis said Mr. Bush had told him as president-elect that "I don't understand how poor people think," and appealed to him for help by calling himself "a white Republican guy who doesn't get it, but I'd like to." Now, Mr. Wallis said, "his policy has not come even close to matching his words."

Joshua B. Bolten, White House budget director and formerly Mr. Bush's chief domestic policy adviser, responded in an interview last week by saying that "I think that is one of the most unfair criticisms that has been leveled against the president."

At issue is Mr. Bush's willingness to demand financing from Congress on his signature "compassionate conservative" issues, like education reform and AIDS, with the same energy he has spent to fight for tax cuts and the Iraq war.

Critics say the pattern has been consistent: The president, in eloquent speeches that make headlines, calls for millions or even billions of dollars for new initiatives, then fails to follow through and push hard for the programs on Capitol Hill. [emphasis added]

On one central piece of such legislation, the so-called faith-based bill to help religious charities, Mr. Bush, after two years of objections from Democrats, retreated this spring and agreed to strip the bill of provisions specifically related to religious groups. Instead, it now largely offers tax incentives to encourage giving to charities of all kinds.

On a proposal this summer to extend a $400-a-child tax credit to low-income families, Mr. Bush at first demanded that Congress appropriate the money, then backed off in the face of opposition from his conservative allies in the House, most notably the majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. The issue is now bottled up in a dispute between the House and the more moderate Senate, and several Republican senators have called on Mr. Bush to step in and break the impasse.

Financing for another item on Mr. Bush's compassion agenda, the national volunteer program called AmeriCorps, faltered this summer under similar opposition from Mr. DeLay. Although Mr. Bush forcefully called for expanding that Clinton-era program in his 2002 State of the Union address, he was largely silent last month amid objections to a $100 million emergency infusion that it needed to maintain its current level of operations. The House rejected that spending, leaving AmeriCorps with an uncertain future.

"Even the president is not omnipotent," Mr. Bolten said of the House opposition to the AmeriCorps money. "Would that he were. He often says that life would be a lot easier if it were a dictatorship. But it's not, and he's glad it's a democracy."

Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat who called on the White House to intercede with Republicans to help AmeriCorps, rejects that argument, saying Mr. Bush has simply been unwilling to spend political capital by standing up to Mr. DeLay.

Education reform is one compassion issue that has left Democrats particularly bitter. In January 2002, with great fanfare, Mr. Bush signed his No Child Left Behind Act, a landmark bill that mandated annual testing of children in Grades 3 through 8 and greatly enlarged the federal role in public education. Democrats like Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George Miller of California were crucial to its passage, and say they went along with the president on his assurances that the government would give states enough money to comply with it.

But the White House has now asked for $12 billion to continue that financing next year, $6 billion less than the legislation authorizes.

"We raised this in the Oval Office, we raised this in our meetings with the president," Mr. Miller said. "He assured us that the funds would be there if the reforms were there. This is calculated conservatism, and they calculate just as much as they can get away with. You can dress it all up, but at the end of the day he broke his promise. It's not much more complicated than that."

Mr. Bolten, the White House budget director, responded by saying that the president had asked for "some very substantial increases" in education spending -- in fact, such spending has risen during his administration -- and that the government's budget deficit "would be really way out of control" if the White House asked that all bills be financed to the limits allowed by law.

Democrats have also been angry over Mr. Bush's AIDS legislation, saying that on this issue, too, he has delivered less than promised. Last month, they note, the president toured Africa and heavily promoted his recently enacted bill to fight global AIDS, a measure that authorizes spending of $3 billion a year for five years.

"I'm here to say you will not be alone in your fight," Mr. Bush said on July 12 in Nigeria, to applause. "In May, I signed a bill that authorizes $15 billion for the global fight on AIDS."

"The House of Representatives and the United States Senate," the president added, "must fully fund this initiative, for the good of the people on this continent of Africa."

But that very week in Washington, the White House asked for only $2 billion, $1 billion less than authorized, for the first of the five years.

It would actually be funny if it weren't so sad. The same president who smirkingly invites terrorists to "bring 'em on" is afraid of Tom DeLay. Which shows either that Bolten is spinning shamelessly or that DeLay is the true power in the Republican Party -- Tapped isn't sure which would be worse. (Bolten's claim that deficits would be out of control if education reform were fully funded, when the administration's own tax cuts are largely responsible for the deficits, is particularly galling.) But the truth is, this administration has never had a problem getting what it wants done when it is willing to throw some weight behind a given goal.

THE OVERSTRETCHED MILITARY: A PRIMER. Time magazine's cover story this week is an excellent resource for anyone interested in a reasonably comprehensive, readable, and relatively brief overview of why our troops are stretched so thin. It gives Don Rumsfeld perhaps too much of a pass in certain areas -- Rumsfeld says he will reduce the overstretch and save money by turning support troops into combat troops, but you still have to pay the civilian contractors who replace the support troops. Still, the piece is quite good. If you want a slightly deeper, more technical understanding of why the U.S. Army uses its forces so inefficiently, read this article. And if you want to go whole hog, buy this book.

FAREWELL TO FRITZ. Pundit Mark Shields gives Democratic senator Ernest Hollings a nice send-off in this column. Aside from Hollings' positions on intellectual property and technology, Tapped has always found a lot to admire about the guy. And like his fellow old-timer Robert Byrd, the senior Democratic senator from West Virginia, Hollings provided a voice of reason during the debates over Iraq. We're sorry to see him go.

A WARM WELCOME. To occasional Prospect contributor and brand-new blogger Laura Rozen, a journalist specializing in national security issues and the Balkans. Check out her new blog, War and Piece, here.

WHO SETS IMMIGRATION POLICY? It's supposed to be the federal government. But a new trend is undermining that authority. According to The New York Times, cities across the Midwest have begun to accept "matricula consular" cards -- which are issued by Mexican consulates to keep track of Mexican citizens in the United States -- as legitimate identification for everything from building permits to taxi-driver licenses. The problem is that these cards are given out to illegal immigrants as well as people here legally. That means treating these cards as real IDs constitutes a de facto legitimization of illegal immigration.

Why should that bother you? One issue here is the principle that municipalities shouldn't be deciding immigration policy any more than they should be conducting foreign policy on their own; if you want to upend our immigration regime and offer citizenship to anyone who can sneak across the border, you should write your representatives. (Sadly, the Bush administration, probably out of an instinct to pander to Hispanic voters, doesn't seem interested in cracking down. But neither are Democrats, for the same reason.) Another concern is the legitimate interest of homeland security. Just a few weeks ago, a Times magazine article made Mexico its case study in corrupt government. The country remains a place where almost anything can be bought with a bribe (and some things, like garbage pickup, can only be gotten with one); it's hard to imagine that those who issue these cards -- or those who issue the supporting documents required to obtain one -- are the exception to the rule. Dick Lugar, a moderate Republican senator, claims "cards that simplify identification of immigrants and facilitate their contact with Americans and our institutions are a benefit to public safety, not a liability." This doesn't pass muster. The trick to effective anti-terrorism is to make long-term conspiracies -- like the one that led to 9-11 -- difficult to sustain. Part of the way to do that is to keep terrorist plotters from being able to live normally, embedded in, say, communities of legal immigrants, for long periods of time. Wide acceptance of matricula consular cards is a hindrance to that effort.

P.S. Longtime readers know that Tapped regards right-wing claims of pervasive liberal media bias as absurd. Nevertheless, such bias does manifest itself in particular areas of coverage, usually in subtle but apparent ways. One of these areas is immigration. The Times article plays it reasonably straight, but the story is presented essentially as one of "here's a nice thing that helps immigrants, but a few fuddy-duddy conservatives are against it." The reporter, Rachel Swarns, neglects to collect the essential information of how many cardholders are illegal immigrants. Indeed, what's far more worrisome is that, in her lede, Swarns (or her editor) substituted the term "undocumented immigrants" for "illegal immigrants." This is a nice bit of politically correct patty-cakes, but it's also a decidedly unneutral term and one that is something of an insult to those people who follow the rules and immigrate to this country legally. If someone were caught, say, impersonating a cop, would the Times describe that person as an "undocumented law enforcement officer"?

THAT'S SOME JOBS PROGRAM. According to this New York Times article, publishers and studios are pushing out fall releases of various Ahnold films and biographies, which have been selling like hotcakes since the movie star declared his candidacy for governor of California. This is the closest thing to an economic stimulus plan Schwarzenegger has yet unveiled. The Times also notes that Ahnold has been springboarding off the release of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines:

He made a round of television appearances in late June to promote its theatrical release, then returned to many of the same venues in early August to promote his candidacy for governor. Now Warner Brothers, which released the film, is beginning the promotional drumbeat for the home video edition, which goes on sale shortly after the election.

Mr. Schwarzenegger found new uses for signature bon mots from his Terminator films like "hasta la vista," baby, in effect promoting both his candidacy and his videos. A star like Mr. Schwarzenegger typically shares in the proceeds from home video sales, so he stands to make back in sales a small rebate on what he spends on the campaign

Serious candidacy, or an attempt to revive his flagging movie career? Who knows? The point is, Schwarzenegger is clearly engaging in a little politico-cultural synergy -- which is absolutely fine. But if that's the way Schwarzenegger wants to play it, Fox News has no business putting out a snitty little memo instructing staff not to use any Ahnold film references during coverage of the race. According to another article in the Times, Fox executive John Moody instructed staffers:

The urge may seem irresistable to play off Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting career. Resist it. Otherwise the effect is to belittle the candidacy of the front-runner for one of the most important offices in the U.S., and that's not fair and balanced...Ask yourself if your clever turn of phrase is suggesting that Schwarzenegger's candidacy isn't a serious one. That's exactly the case his political opponents want to press. We need to play it down the middle.

Yeah, right. Tapped wonders if Fox would exercise such diligence if, say, Jerry Springer decided to run for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat. Besides, Ahnold's candidacy will contine to be an unserious one so long as he flashes that smile to reporters in lieu of a couple of white papers. Indeed, if not for his movie career, Schwarzenegger's campaign would be nonexistent; his poll ratings are purely a function of the name recognition he derives from his films, so to ban movie references actually does him something of a disservice.

But the most absurd thing about Moody's memo is this: As that first Times article shows, Schwarzenegger himself has no qualms about playing off his movie career. So why should the press have any?

P.S. According to what polls is Ahnold "the front-runner" in the California race? Perhaps the motto should be "Fair, balanced, and innumerate."

THE SECRET OF HIS SUCCESS. Tapped knows the rap on Howard Dean is that he's surly, mean and doesn't like the press. Now, we've noted his downsides ourselves -- check out Prospect senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta's April assessment of Dean here, where she gets at both his defensiveness and his incipient rockstardom -- but all the same, the Dean campaign itself is the only one that makes Tapped laugh out loud just about every single day. Many people think the Dean blog is populated only by high-tech hipsters and politically obsessive wired young men. And to some extent that must be true. Dean's much-discussed polling advantage with men -- or polling disadvantage with women -- certainly has crept up as a topic on the blog, mainly in the form of guys at Meetups wondering where all the ladies are. Which has led to such tongue-in-cheek advertising pitches as "ATTN: SINGLE WOMEN Do you want to meet great, winning men who are not afraid to make commitments? Then come to a Dean Meatup, I mean Meetup!" and this humor page: "Howard Dean's MeetUp: it's not just for getting elected."

But Tapped has thought for a while that the great unacknowledged secret of the Dean campaign's wildly succesful blog -- at least during this slowish news month of August -- is that it has a heck of a lot more in common with Parade Magazine and US Weekly than it does with Slate. The Dean Blog is as goofy and cheesy and low-brow as the American people themselves -- God bless them -- and it is loaded with recipes, pictures of pets and people going to sporting events (here and here). It is often hilarious, both intentionally and unintentionally. Take this recent, lo-fi, clip-art animation for Dean's upcoming Sleepless Summer Tour. It looks like the kind of so-bad-it's-good animation you'd see on Letterman, featuring a pop-up Dean at the end who looks a little too much like Dr. Phil for comfort. And the Blog has recurring themes in photos and comments: campaign manager Joe Trippi with his ubiquitous Diet Pepsi, the McFun Iowa van, transportation snafus and, of course, the governor's fondness for cookies. (Believe it or not, whether the Guv is eating too much ice cream or too many cookies was a huge debate topic on the blog for an entire week. One representative comment, post-Iowa State Fair: "It would seem that the cookies, Krispy Kremes, Fried Oreos, etc. etc. ARE A REPUBLICAN PLOT TO CREATE A VERY FAT NEW PRESIDENT WITH ADVANCED ATHEROSCLEROSIS!!!!" [sic] This was after they discussed whether his shirt-collars were too tight, that weird thing he did with his lip on Larry King, what was wrong with his hair at the Sheet Metal Workers' International Association Candidates' Forum, and whether he should get his teeth whitened.) It's like watching a reality TV show with a very chatty audience -- and even has the same weird mix of edited-for-consumption real moments and self-consciously authentic presentations, like Trippi's recent stump speech, delivered while standing on a stump.

Anyway, Tapped's personal Dean Blog favorite will always be this shot of Trippi in the dunk tank during his Vermont birthday party. (Bet Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan wishes he could have taken a throw!) It's great political theater, it's fun to watch and to read -- heck, sometimes they even talk about politics! -- and, often enough, it makes us LOL.

A LICENSE TO POLLUTE. This is essentially what the Bush administration's proposed rules for power plants, under deliberation and debate for over two years, will give the energy companies. Hardly a surprise, but hey, guys -- what took you so long? The proposed rules were leaked to Natural Resources Defense Council (which leaked them to the New York Times), probably by some mid-level EPA official who believes that the mission of his agency is to, you know, protect the environment. (Here's the article.) Ten bucks says the Bush administration was planning to release these rules next Friday, just before Labor Day weekend. Twenty says they still do. These guys have no shame.

JUDGE NOT. Roy Moore is unfit to be a judge. That's the only conclusion we can draw from this New York Times article, in which Moore seems to believe that when civil laws -- and his oath to uphold them -- conflict with his religious beliefs, the latter should win. Tapped has no problem with people believing there's a higher law than human law. But if you're a judge, you need to enforce the latter. And if he can't do so in good conscience, as Moore says, he should resign immediately.

LIKE PRESIDENT, LIKE GOVERNOR. Paul Krugman has an excellent column in today's New York Times. In it, Krugman does what he does best: Explain fiscal policy in simple language that clearly illustrates the deception at hand. In this case, the deceptions at hand are manifold:

The key moment in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Wednesday press conference came when the bodybuilder who would be governor brushed aside questions with the declaration, "The public doesn't care about figures." This was "fuzzy math" on steroids -- Mr. Schwarzenegger was, in effect, asserting that his celebrity gives him the right to fake his way through the election. Will he be allowed to get away with it?

Reporters were trying to press Mr. Schwarzenegger for the specifics so obviously missing from his budget plans. But while he hasn't said much about what he proposes to do, the candidate has nonetheless already managed to say a number of things that his advisers must know are true lies.

Even Mr. Schwarzenegger's description of the state economy is pure fantasy. He claims that the state is bleeding jobs because of its "hostile environment" toward business, and that California residents groan under an oppressive tax burden: "From the time they get up in the morning and flush the toilet, they're taxed."

One look at the numbers tells you that his story is fiction. Since the mid-1990's California has added jobs considerably faster than the nation as a whole. And while the state has been hit hard by the technology slump, it has done no worse than other parts of the country. A recent study found that California's tech sector had actually weathered the slump better than its counterpart in Texas. Meanwhile, California isn't a high-tax state: through the 1990's, state and local taxes as a share of personal income more or less matched the national average, and with the recent plunge in revenue they're now probably below average.

Hear that, Californians? Ahnold thinks you are a bunch of morons, and expects to keep fooling you until he ends up in the governor's mansion. Tapped can't help but note that this is similar to the George W. Bush strategy: Cut taxes to please party ideologies and your base, promise this won't affect spending on education and other things people actually want, and pass the resulting bill down to your grandchildren. The only different is, Ahnold isn't allowed to deficit spend. So he's basically hoping he can float this lie all the way through election day, after which it will become clear that he can't work magic any better than Gray Davis could.

WHAT THE PRESIDENT CAN LEARN IN OREGON. This week, President Bush is expected to travel to the Pacific Northwest for a fundraiser. While he's there, as reader J.W. points out, he'll be visiting the Metolius Basin to tout a Forest Service-run thinning project as part of his so-called "healthy forest initiative." The problem isn't that the project in question isn't a success -- it is a success. The problem is that the project actually represents a repudiation of Bush's views on forest management. As The Oregonian reports:

When President Bush travels to Oregon this week, he is expected to call national attention to this sort of effort to thin the overgrown forests of the West. The dangers of fire, the president has argued, justify limiting environmental reviews and speeding the momentum to cut.

But the story around Camp Sherman, where the cold clear Metolius River runs through the Deschutes, is more complicated. The decision to selectively prune and log more than 12,000 acres was forged under long-standing procedures and took several years, during which environment advocates like Lillebo and a diverse range of community members and foresters had a voice in the planning.

For decades, Lillebo and other conservationists fought against logging the Metolius River Basin, a spectacular but increasingly tinder-dry landscape about 15 miles northwest of Sisters.

But they now tentatively support a U.S. Forest Service plan to use logging, pruning and prescribed burns to reduce the severe fire risk within a 17,000-acre area that includes old-growth ponderosa, one of the nation's largest spring-fed rivers and a popular vacation playground for generations of Oregonians.

The president's trip follows his weekend radio address in which he stressed the importance of logging for the protection of forests and nearby communities and precedes a U.S. Senate vote this fall to speed environmental reviews and limit appeals on logging. Bush started this conversation a year ago in Oregon following the mammoth Biscuit fire.

A textbook example The White House estimates more than 190 million acres of forest and rangeland nationwide -- an area twice the size of California -- face elevated fire risk. The Metolius Basin offers a textbook example of densely packed stands, insect infestation and progressive disease.

Even so, the Metolius Basin cut embraces forest management the old-fashioned way: slowly, deliberately and bureaucratically. Conservationists, community members and even Forest Service officials say the years it took to develop the Metolius Basin Forest Management Plan helped build trust between the public and the government, and a consensus about how to manage a much-loved forest.

"Frankly, one of our concerns about the president's visit is that we're going to be co-opted into supporting his healthy forest initiative, and that's not what we have here," says Kent Gill, a resident and secretary of the Friends of the Metolius, a conservation group formed in the 1980s to battle logging.

It's the same old story: The Bush administration takes something that's happening -- in this case, a success -- and claim it's a justification for whatever it is the administration wanted to do anyway.

Tapped wonders why the conservatives who got so exercised over Bill Clinton lying about his personal life never seem bothered by the steady stream of political deception coming out of this White House.

THE BIG LIES TOUR. Our friend Joe Conason is on the trail now, introducing readers to his new book, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth. We read the book in galleys, and cannot recommend it highly enough. It's an important source for understanding how the conservative counterestablishment had hoodwinked the media and embedding in the public mind a series of myths about liberals, politics, and American life. But if you want a preview, check out this sample in Salon, one of several exerpts the magazine has published this week, all of them worth reading.

THAT'S MORE LIKE IT. Just when Tapped thought the media wouldn't resort to shark stories to fill the August news hole...they did.

There is, in fact, a whole bunch of wacky stuff on the wires today, from "Cell phone burns Dutch woman's face," to "Thai man dies while laughing in sleep," to "Schwarzenegger convenes economic summit." It's a laff riot, we tell ya!

ABSTINENCE RE-EDUCATION. On the one hand, it's probably unethical to send a letter to the Attorney General under the guise of collecting stories about abstinence, when in reality you're trying to get grist for your book about conservatives. But on the other hand, when we're talking about Al Franken, the results are pretty funny. Click here for the letter Franken sent to John Ashcroft. Sample: "Be funny! Did a woman ever think you were homosexual just because you wouldn't have sex with her?"

STRATEGIC FAILURE. Tapped is with Kos in thinking Joe Lieberman a damn fool for trying to pull a Sister Souljah on the entire Democratic Party over the past few weeks. Among the things the Connecticut senator has been booed for at recent candidate forums is his support for limited school vouchers -- a position antithetical to many Democratic primary voters. But a new study shows it's not just primary voters -- most Americans oppose school vouchers, too. Risking the boos of party activists in order to win the hearts of general election voters is a tricky but defensible move. But going out of your way to alienate your party's base in order to defend a program that most Americans don't support either is just plain idiotic. No wonder Lieberman has dropped 7 points this summer in the American Research Group polls in New Hampshire. From a respectable 11 percent as recently as July, he's now down to 4 percent support there. Meanwhile, his unfavorable ratings have gone through the roof. In short, it seems very clear that Lieberman's strategy of becoming the anti-Dean is backfiring spectacularly, and that the opposite of Dean is unpopular.

Tapped predicted a few weeks back that Lieberman's new strategy was to go down swinging, but even we didn't expect such a rapid decline. Now, if Tapped were a suspicious sort, or had been reading Machiavelli recently, we might be moved to wonder if Lieberman's DLC advisors haven't been playing him for a patsy. Let's be clear: we've got zero evidence that this is the case. But it wouldn't surprise us if someone, somewhere, in some backroom decided that Lieberman was going to be the DLC's sacrificial lamb -- a clearly unelectable candidate whose only role in the race is to sow doubts about Dean, then fall on his sword and allow some more electable DLC-approved candidate to emerge, like Sen. John Edwards. Again, Tapped has no evidence that this is the case. But the growing groundswell of doubt among New Democrats about Lieberman's latest Mark Penn-designed strategy, as documented by the Post's Jim VandeHei, really does make us wonder.

HAWKS OR HACKS? The Washington City Paper's Erik Wemple has a must-read column today on journalistic ass-covering. Namely: How have all the editorial boards that advocated the invasion of Iraq based on faulty premises reacted to revelations that they were suckered? Some better than others, apparently. We particularly enjoyed Wemple's skewering of the Washington Post:

When faced with the prewar deceptions of the Bush administration, the Post editorial board reacted just like a disenchanted '00s liberal: It blamed Al Gore.

A bit of background: In early August, Gore gave a speech at New York University criticizing the Bush administration for amassing phony evidence to support various foreign, environmental, and economic policies. "The very idea of self-government depends upon honest and open debate....The Bush Administration routinely shows disrespect for that whole basic process, and I think it's partly because they feel as if they already know the truth and aren't very curious to learn about any facts that might contradict it," said Gore, who spoke with particular passion about the administration's case for war.

In an Aug. 10 editorial, the Post attacked not the people responsible for fraud, but the guy who was calling public attention to it. Saying that Gore "validated just about every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left," the piece hammered the former veep for his contention that "we were all somehow bamboozled into war."

Funny thing: The Post's editorialists were mocking Gore's bamboozle argument on the same day that its reporters were documenting the bamboozlement. In the Aug. 10 news pages, reporters Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus laid out the utter mendacity of the Bush administration's nuclear case. Amid new revelations about how the Bushies misled the public about Hussein's nuclear capability, the reporters noted, "The possibility of a nuclear-armed Iraq loomed large in the Bush administration's efforts to convince the American public of the need for a preemptive strike."

Yet over on the editorial page, a different worldview -- an ass-covering worldview -- prevailed: The Bush administration didn't frame the debate for war. In fact, argued the Post, the case for war came from the Clinton administration. "In the end, most members of Congress accepted the logic that President Clinton put forward in 1998: that, if Saddam Hussein was not stopped, he would 'rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal,'" reads one editorial.

That's some fancy revisionism by the Post -- or at least a very sophisticated dance to distance itself from the administration. Put simply, Post editorialists are saying that even though Bush's messages about imminent Iraqi threats dominated the airwaves for nearly an entire school year, the decision to forgo United Nations support and immediately invade was based on four-year-old assessments.

"There was a very intense debate during the fall about the wisdom of going to war and that was partly because most people believed that Saddam Hussein was not an immediate threat to us," says Post editorial page Editor Fred Hiatt.

That's quite an admission.

THE OVERSTRETCHED MILITARY. Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, with whom Tapped almost never agrees, has a decent column in today's Washington Times looking at the U.S.'s worldwide troop shortage. It doesn't get deep into the particulars, and of course Hutchison, who has several Army bases in her state, has an interest in keeping the service large. But that doesn't make her wrong.

GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. The Dallas Morning News' Ruben Navarrette has some interesting, sensible thoughts about immigration reform in today's columns. The upshot: Labor protections for vulnerable day laborers who may or may not be here illegally, and a crackdown on businesses that unscrupulously and knowingly employ illegal immigrants:

Many of these employers are so tightfisted that they won't provide health insurance to illegal immigrants yet shamelessly expect you and me to pick up the tab when ailing and uninsured immigrants walk into the county hospital. They're so greedy that, rather than be content with having more immigrants than they can use, they continue to pressure members of Congress to allow for guest worker programs to keep the labor supply high and wages low.

And it's not just the big companies. On the domestic front, the hiring of illegal immigrants as nannies, gardeners and maids is commonplace in many U.S. cities.

Busting employers doesn't seem to be a major concern for those pushing ballot initiatives aimed at curbing social services for illegal immigrants. Nor is it what you typically hear from those who suggest that the United States put troops on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Go ahead. Do your worst. It won't make any difference. People will keep coming and coming -- until we send the message that we can live without them. And the best way to do that is to crack down on the parasites living off them.

Well put.

A NEW CONSTITUENCY FOR THE DEMS? Ticked-off veterans. This one should really be a no-brainer. Veterans are just one of the many groups that have done poorly under Republican governance, and Democrats should be courting them. John Kerry, Wes Clark, we're looking in your direction.

THE BAD NEWS. Those deficits just keep on growing, don't they? July's deficit was twice as large as that in July of last year. This would be a good time to remind everyone that no Republican president has balanced a budget in modern history. Remind Tapped why you trust them with your taxes?

SWEET, SWEET BEEB. CalPundit delivers a fair-minded but still devastating beating to Josh Chafetz's Weekly Standard cover story charging the BBC with gross bias and anti-Americanism. Seems a good part of Chafetz's beef with the Beeb is that it sometimes makes mistakes (don't tell Fred Barnes!), doesn't call the Iraq occupation by the loaded term "liberation," puts phrases like "liberation" in quotes, and doesn't reflexively believe everything the Bush administration or the Pentagon tells the press. Well, heck. Off with their heads!

Elsewhere, Political Aims examines the perception that one can't be religious and smart. Jesse at Pandagon interrogates Bill O'Reilly's claim about how Fox News started from nothing and went straight to the top. (As Homer once said to Marge, "Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?") Matt Yglesias wonders when the Bush administration will start proposing policies designed to address actual problems at hand, like the blackout, rather than pulling old agenda items off the shelf and just pretending they are solutions to actual problems at hand. Rittenhouse Review looks at Cheesesteakgate, and finds it wanting. And Brad DeLong, who should know, looks at Dick Gephardt's role in the 1993 deficit reduction legislation and says his critics are being unfair.

GEORGE W. BUSH, NOT A RADICAL? Peter Berkowitz is neither stupid nor blind. But to arrive at the conclusions he does in this article in the Boston Globe's Ideas section, he is forced to be extraordinarily tendentious and breathtakingly oblivious to facts on the ground.

[T]he portrait of President Bush as a fiend bent on destroying all that progressives hold dear is a partisan caricature. It prevents them from recognizing that Bush's priorities differ from theirs not because he rejects their deepest principles -- individual freedom and equality before the law -- but because he espouses a conservative interpretation of them. Moreover, his is not a radical conservatism. By maintaining high levels of domestic federal spending, intervening cautiously in the country's continuing cultural conflicts, and waging a war to remove the threat posed by Saddam Hussein that was also consistent with the imperatives of "humanitarian intervention,"' Bush has governed in a manner that should not leave progressives foaming with rage.

Bush's conservatism is certainly less rigid and doctrinaire than that of Newt Gingrich and his minions, who swept to power in 1994 and, in a most unconservative spirit, sought to remake the federal government by drastically reducing its size. Bush seems to have more or less made his peace with a New Deal-style welfare state.

With Senator Edward M. Kennedy, he supports extending federal oversight of public schools; in line with the hopes of many Democrats, he proposed in his 2003 State of the Union address an additional $400 billion over 10 years to strengthen Medicare; and going beyond Clinton administration rhetoric, he also asked Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years to fight AIDS in Africa.

Bush's conservatism is less moralistic, more live-and-let-live, than that of many traditional conservatives. In the culture wars, Bush generally prefers quiet diplomacy. During the 2000 campaign he had little to say about abortion, affirmative action, or gay rights. True, early in his administration he did order the withholding of US funds from organizations abroad that performed abortions. But this year, even though the administration filed briefs opposing the University of Michigan's affirmative action programs, he ended up giving low-key approval to the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the Law School's affirmative action approach.

While he supported anti-sodomy laws as governor of Texas, he did not object when the Supreme Court struck them down last month. However, with the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts expected to rule on gay marriage any day now, Bush may be drawn into a painful public struggle. In fact, he already has been, affirming at a recent news conference both his respect for gays as individuals and his opposition to gay marriage.

Bush's preference for cultural diplomacy may reflect in part a political calculation, an effort to appeal to the sizeable center in American politics that has been critical to victory in the last three presidential elections. But whatever his motives, he has been assiduous in this diplomacy. He appointed Michael Guest, an openly gay State Department official, to be ambassador of Romania. He named Dana Gioia, a serious poet, to head the National Endowment for the Arts (and head off conservative critics of the institution). In the dark days following Sept. 11 he declared Islam a "religion of peace." And when Trent Lott clumsily endorsed segregationist sentiments, Bush issued a strong rebuke that made Lott's position as Senate majority leader untenable.

Moreover, having appointed the first black secretary of state and the first black (and female) national security adviser, Bush has provided exemplary role models in the fight for racial and sexual equality. The familiar image on the evening news of a Republican president with strong ties to big business and Southern majorities flanked by and entirely at ease with Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice does more to promote respect for the individual based on the content of his or her character than do all the schemes for national conversations about race and all the campus seminars and consciousness-raising programs combined.

When it comes to economics, the furious criticism that the Bush tax cuts provoke often disguises the ideas or sensibility that inform them. Bush is not cutting taxes to pay off the rich. Rightly or wrongly, he believes that cutting taxes almost always leads to a growth in production and consequently to an increase in jobs, which benefits everyone. These beliefs are rooted in a confidence in the market and in the ability of individuals to make the best decisions about how their income ought to be spent, coupled with a distrust of distant government bureaucrats and their ability to spend money and administer programs wisely on other people's behalf.

Where to begin? Let's leave aside foreign policy. On domestic policy, Bush is a radical. He has not, by any measure, made peace with the New Deal; he seeks to dismantle it. Unlike Newt Gingrich, Bush simply learned that to carry out radical policies he would have to pitch them in the language of progressive problem-solving. For the most part, his conservatism is no less radical than, and not much different from, that of Gingrich. Last we checked, Bush supports the privatization of Social Security and a quasi-privatization of Medicare. He doesn't believe, period, in the notion of social insurance programs that spread risks and benefits. On education, Bush has expanded federal involvement in education, but in a way that ensures increasing pressure for vouchers. The president neglected to fully fund his education bill (ask Ted Kennedy and George Miller, the California Democrat who worked on Bush's education bill in the House, if they're happy with the way things turned out.) As schools are forced to shut down, they'll need someplace to put those kids -- and as this article points out, lots of areas don't have enough public school slots to fit'em.

Then there's tax cuts. Berkowitz preposterously argues that "Bush is not cutting taxes to pay off the rich" and that "he believes that cutting taxes almost always leads to a growth in production and consequently to an increase in jobs." The simple fact is that Bush's tax cuts are heavily tilted towards the wealthy, and that none of could be plausibly described as promoting job growth in the short term. Rather, Bush's tax cuts have several other aims. One, they reward his financial base -- yes, the rich -- and keep the GOP coalition unified. Two, they dismantle the system of progressive taxation that is a bedrock of progressive governance, by shifting more of the tax burden onto the middle class. Three, they starve the government of general revenues, thus constraining government activism and eventually creating political pressure to finish off the privatization of government programs, including Social Security. The GOP today is attempting nothing less than a radical shift in government's place in American life. Bush is not a tinkerer, and he is not a moderate. Only a fool could believe otherwise -- or a smart person trying to sell a "counterintuitive" article to his editors.

How about social issues? Here, Berkowitz has a point. Bush doesn't want to reopen the culture wars (and pace Berkowitz, Tapped doesn't see a lot of liberals who accuse of wanting to). But he is straining to give Bush credit here. That $15 billion for AIDS in Africa? It was a sham -- most of the funding came out of other aid programs, some of it never appeared, and the rest was backloaded so that most of it comes after Bush leaves office. (Berkowitz needs to keep up with current events. Or read this Prospect article.) That $400 billion to strengthen Medicare? Yes, it's money that will be spent in part on drugs for seniors, but in a way designed to lure them to private health providers, which doesn't strengthen Medicare but start us on the road to dismantling it. Trent Lott? Bush didn't issue a "strong rebuke." He hedged for over a week after the controversy started, then maneuvered to allow Lott to be deposed without ticking off the conservatives who thought Lott was being unfairly maligned. As one of his advisors told the Washington Post, "The president is allowing the process to work itself out in a way that will seem natural and doesn't have a lot of fingerprints on it...When the inevitable happens, the president can be in a position where he hasn't coerced the process but also hasn't stood by someone who will create problems." That's not principle. That's politics. And equivocating about whether a man with fond memories of Jim Crow should remain as the Senate Majority Leader rather undercuts the good of appointing a black secretary of state and national security advisor, doesn't it?

There's more, but we can only take so much of this crap at once. This really may be one of the most intellectually shallow articles Tapped has ever read.

"MISSION ACCOMPLISHED"? ER, NOT QUITE. It sure was nice of President Bush to have himself flown out to that carrier a few miles off of San Diego and tell our troops that "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." Unfortunately for them, Bush was rather...premature. Now that our boys (and girls) are being killed just about every day, he's "revising" his view. Now only "major military operations" are over, according to Dana Milbank. Tapped bets that this statement is of small comfort to the folks in the field. And substantively, it's worrying: If Bush thinks that the hard part is already over, we're all in for a nasty surprise. Conquering Iraq turned out to be relatively easy, far easier than Tapped and other critics thought it would be. But occupying and reforming Iraq is turning out to be just as hard as we worried.

Read the rest of Milbank's article for the funny White House attempt to pretend this isn't an example of Bush being inconsistent.

TOM DELAY, UNPATRIOT. Via Talking Points, we came across this transcript of Wesley Clark on CNN. Here he is responding to charges by Tom DeLay that he's one of the "blow-dried Napoleons that come on television and, in some cases, have their own agendas":

BLITZER: But during the war, early in April, Tom DeLay, the majority leader in the House, really hammered you directly. I want you to listen to what he told our Judy Woodruff then.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) REP. TOM DELAY (R-TX), MAJORITY LEADER: Frankly, what irritates me the most are these blow-dried Napoleons that come on television and, in some cases, have their own agendas.

General Clark is one of them that is running for president, yet he's paid to be an expert on your network. And he's questioning the plan and raising doubts as he becomes this expert.

I think they would serve the nation better if they would just comment on what they see and what they know, rather than putting their own agenda forward as an expert.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Well, pretty strong words from Tom DeLay going after you. What do you say to that criticism?

CLARK: Well, first of all, I'd be happy to compare my hair with Tom DeLay's. We'll see who's got the blow-dried hair.

But beyond that, Wolf, he's got it exactly backward. It's upside down. I am saying what I believe. And I'm being drawn into the political process because of what I believe and what I've said about it.

So it's precisely the opposite of a man like Tom DeLay, who is only motivated by politics and says whatever he needs to say to get the political purpose. And so, you know, it couldn't be more diametrically opposed, and I couldn't be more opposed than I am to Tom DeLay.

You know, Wolf, when our airmen were flying over Kosovo, Tom DeLay led the House Republicans to vote not to support their activities, when American troops were in combat. To me, that's a real indicator of a man who is motivated not by patriotism or support for the troops, but for partisan political purposes.

That last incident is definitely worth retelling. Sidney Blumenthal gets at DeLay's pure, unprincipled vicousness best:

On April 28, the House of Representatives voted a resolution on the air war in the Balkans. Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) had assured the White House that he could secure a majority in favor, but the true power within the Republican Party unmasked Hastert once again as a figurehead. Republican whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) ensured that there would be no positive vote for President Clinton. The final vote in the House was a carefully stage-managed tie, 213-213. "Shame! Shame!" chanted the Democrats in unison. But DeLay gloated. He saw Kosovo as "act two of impeachment," according to Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.). DeLay believed, as he told Republicans, "When the sun rises following the election of 2000, I think we will control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue because of it."

Some patriot, huh?

EARTH TO DEMOCRATS. It's not surprising that Howard Dean showed up at the Young Democrats of America meeting this year. But it's shocking and depressing that none of the other Democratic candidates did. Young people may not vote in huge numbers, but they are tomorrow's activist corps. Remember how Karl Rove got his start?

LABOR-BASHING 101. Conservative writer Steve Malanga doesn't like it that universities devote entire programs to studying organized labor:

Just when you thought our universities -- with their multiculti curricula, anti-Americanism and intolerance of debate -- couldn't possibly get any more partisan, along comes the next new thing: the labor movement's successful co-opting of academic departments and programs. For years, universities have offered courses in "labor studies," often taught by ardent labor activists. Since the mid-'90s, however, when the movement began to revive under AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, these departments have defined their mission chiefly as supporting labor and its organizing efforts rather than educating students.

The nearly 50 such programs operating today churn out new initiatives in support of labor. In 1995, for instance, U-Mass. at Amherst began an M.A. program in union leadership and administration -- in essence, a school for union leaders that is emblematic of the transformation of the labor studies field from a backwater of continuing education to postgraduate academic status. In the late '90s, the labor center at Wayne State University, working with the radical left-wing group Acorn, began providing technical support to living-wage campaigns around the country, which helped to spark successful efforts to raise the minimum wage for some workers in dozens of cities and provided a model of how academics could advance union causes. In 2001, the California legislature, in response to union lobbying, dedicated millions in state money that has gone for research supporting Big Labor positions.

We're a bit mystified by Malanga's hyperventilation. After all, does he expect divinity schools to churn out atheists? Business schools to turn out Marxists? English departments to turn out French speakers? And does their failure to do so constitute a conservative conspiracy to empower clergy, capitalists, and Anglo-Saxons, respectively?

Of course not. Then Malanga writes:

Savvy labor leaders have forged close alliances with the modern university. The labor studies field's umbrella group, the United Association for Labor Education, now holds its annual "education" conference in conjunction with the AFL-CIO.

And:

These programs also draft students through internships to do labor's bidding, often against the interests of taxpayers."

Perhaps. But to offer a counterexample, publicly-funded business schools, which have the temerity to maintain close relationships with recruiters and businesses that will hire their graduates, churn out generations of business leaders who believe it's necessary to outsource blue-collar jobs to Mexico. These schools are probably also working against the interests of some taxpayers. But you don't see Tapped complaining that we should abolish business schools. (You will, however, see Tapped complaining about the Bush administration's insistence on wasting taxpayer dollars and abstinence education and "faith-based" programs, even though there's no evidence either one works particularly well, just because conservatives want to empower and provide pork to social conservatives. But we digress.)

None of what labor programs at universities around the country teach is wrong, of course, unless you believe, as radical conservatives like Malanga do, that organized labor is illegitimate and has no place in American life. The heyday of organized labor is over, but unions are far from a "tiny constituency," as Malanga writes. You want a tiny constituency, try neocon policy entrepreneurs with corporate grants paying their salary and an axe to grind.

See Jordan Barab for more, including examples of the many ways corporations have insinuated themselves into and profit from taxpayer-funded universities.

GRAMMAR CHECK. Bad grammar on the campaign trail has been one of Tapped's pet peeves for months now. It's one thing when Kate O'Connor, an aide to Howard Dean, gets her homophones confused (hear vs. here, two vs. too) while writing late-night Blog for America entries from airports -- we're willing to chalk that up to fatigue. Besides, combined with her use of about a million exclamation points, it's sometimes charming in a real-people-can't-spell kind of way. But we've noticed a disturbing jump recently in the number of press releases in which full-time media aides can't seem to keep their thats, whos and whiches straight. This is annoying to those of us who receive the releases and who write for a living. For example, today the Dean campaign released a statement in which Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Az.) endorsed the former Vermont guv, saying: "I believe that Governor Dean is the only one that can unseat President Bush and take this country into a new era." And the Kerry camp released an advisory about the Senator's upcoming formal campaign announcement on Sept. 2, instructing that: "Members of the media that are interested in accompanying John Kerry on the campaign charter, should notify the campaign immediately."

Here's the deal, according to Tapped's handy AP Stylebook: "Use who and whom for references to human beings and animals with a name. Use that and which for inanimate objects and animals without a name."

Presidential candidates and members of the press are not inanimate objects or animals without name. (Well, not usually.) Therefore, who, not that. Capiche?

FIRE GRILES. The good people at Friends of the Earth have unveiled a new website dedicated to perhaps the most ethically challenged top official in the Bush administration -- Steven J. Griles. Here's the link. For more information, check out this Prospect profile of Griles by Sasha Polakow-Suransky. And if you happen to subscribe to Vanity Fair, check out the excellent takedown of Griles in the current issue.

BAGHDAD ON THE HUDSON. The Associated Press has helpfully compiled a list of tips from Iraqis on how to cope with blackouts, from taking frequent showers and sleeping on rooftops to taking it to the streets. "We held protests. After that we had fewer blackouts," Ahmed Abdul Hussein told the AP. "I'd suggest Americans go out and demonstrate."

A NEW HOPE? Via Daily Kos, we see that the Democratic candidate for governor in Kentucky, Attorney General Ben Chandler is running a pretty tight race -- and better yet, he's doing it by tying his opponent to President Bush (in a state that voted for Bush in 2000 and where seven of eight congressional seats are held by Republicans). From the New York Times report:

"It's hard to believe that just three years ago, Kentucky had a surplus, had an economy that was growing," Mr. Chandler, 43, said Monday at a campaign event outside a shuttered I.B.M. plant in Lexington. "What has changed is the team in charge in Washington. And my opponent is in the starting lineup."

He has mocked his Republican opponent, Representative Ernie Fletcher, as "the job terminator." He jokes that Mr. Fletcher's motto is "leave no job behind," a jab at President Bush's vow to "leave no child behind."

That's a pretty good jab. So is this one:

Asked if he expected the president himself to campaign for him, Mr. Fletcher said, "I sure hope so." Mr. Chandler said he would also welcome a visit by Mr. Bush.

"We'll ask him if he brought along any jobs," Mr. Chandler said.

As Kos points point, Chandler's election will be a good test case. If he wins -- heck, if he runs close on Election Day -- Tapped hopes other Democrats take notice.

WHY COLLEGE IS GOOD. "One of my life-long pet peeves is the American insistence that every clod who stumbles out of high school with a B average be sent on to a taxpayer-subsidized college career," writes Michael Graham on The Corner. "This policy drives up the costs of higher ed for students who really want an education, half the kids drop out anyway (but keep their costly student loans) and the value of every college degree drops by a significant percentage."

This is apparently what passes for tough-minded common sense on the talk-radio circuit. In reality, it's quite stupid.

First, rising enrollment rates don't by themselves drive up the cost of college for everyone; they do so only in concert with decreasing government funding for public universities and, to a lesser extent, private ones. (If you don't think the government should be financing higher education at all, keep reading.) Second, the actual proportion of university students who drop out is about one-third, according to the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis, so Graham should get his facts straight. Finally, the notion that college degrees are less valuable when more people have them is plain silly. College enrollments have been going up for decades now, but as of the 2000 Census, holders of a bachlor's degree enjoyed lifetime earnings of nearly twice as much as people with only a high school degree. That number isn't going down. (This article lists a number of other attendant benefits of having gone to college.)

Now, that 1/3 dropout rate is high -- significantly higher than in, say, Japan. By Graham's logic, it would be better if those people had never bothered to enter college in the first place. Tapped believes Graham would be hard-pressed to find a single Fortune 500 CEO who agrees with him. American businesses need educated workers to thrive and be competitive in the global marketplace, and mostly for demographic reasons, more and more of the U.S. workforce is going to come from less-advantaged parts of the population. If you want America to stay at the top, you need to get more of these folks past a high school diploma. But we're doing a worse job at it these days than we used to. As recently as the early 1990s, the U.S. ranked at or near the top of all countries in terms of the proportion of its young people who enrolled in college. We now rank no better than the bottom half of the thirty or so industrial nations that are members of the OECD. These are the countries with whom the U.S. competes. To put it another way, in a world in which wealth and prosperity is driven by human capital, the U.S. has fallen to the bottom of the heap.

The truth is, it is in the interest of every citizen -- that is, every citizen who wants to see the U.S. maintain its edge among the service- and ideas-driven economies of the world -- for higher education opportunity to be spread as widely as possible. Education not only fuels economic growth; it is the engine of class mobility -- a key driver of the dynamism of American culture and business that most conservatives usually (rightly) celebrate. Compulsory college education may be a kooky idea, but in general, lowering barriers to higher education (in part by subsidizing tuition and public universities), getting more young people into college, and finding better ways to keep them there, are all good things.

Tapped prays that Graham does not represent serious conservative thinking -- or even semi-serious conservative thinking -- on this subject. Otherwise, we're all screwed.

CUTTING OFF OUR NOSE TO SPITE OUR FACE. The Bush administration has rejected the idea of a greater U.N. presence in Iraq, reports The New York Times. Instead, they will "widen its effort to enlist other countries to assist the occupation forces in Iraq, which are dominated by the 139,000 United States troops there." These efforts, of course, have been ongoing for some months, with little success. We are now in the position of needing help from countries our top officials have snubbed and gratuitously insulted during the past year. But they insist, not unreasonably, on U.N. participation as a perequisite. Those administration hawks who are so determined to preserve our freedom of action in Iraq will not, of course, suffer the consequences; our overburdened military, for whom 1-year Iraq tours are likely to become standard, will.

A moral pygmy like Rep. Bob Ney might be pleased he got french fries banned from the House cafeteria, but Tapped bets your average soldier sweating it out in Tikrit right now would trade Ney's infantile sense of self-satisfaction for a brigade or two of French infantry.

REALITY INTRUDES. SORTA The Houston Chronicle's invaluable Bennett Roth reports that President Bush has finally figured out what half the economists in the country have been saying for months: We don't need another round of tax cuts to boost the economy. And it only took "a two-hour huddle at his Texas ranch with his top economic advisers." Of course, we probably didn't need the last two rounds of tax cuts to boost the economy, as Bush surely knows, since depending on what month it was the administration sold those packages in three or four different ways, not limited to the cause of getting the country out of recession.

And of course this modus operandi hasn't changed. The Bush administration's basic approach to government is to sell whatever agenda the right has always had as the solution to whatever problem is currently on the table -- and to do it with a perfectly straight face. So Tapped is not surprised to see that, as Roth reports, the administration's new solutions to boosting the economy include tort reform and more oil drilling.

The Washington Post's Mike Allen also provides a preview of how the Bush administration will defend it's record should the economy not rebound: Blame the last guys. "We inherited a tough situation," he says. "But most importantly, the Americans know that I'm not afraid to lead and to make a tough decision. And I made a tough decision, a series of tough decisions." Tapped fails to see how blaming the last administration for one's own dismal fiscal policy is a tough decision. Seems like an easy call to us! So much for the responsibility era.

SCHWARZENEGGER'S GAMBIT. Tapped should be clear about our basic position on the California election: California voters wanted a stupid recall provision in their state laws, and some of California's voters wanted to dump the current guv. If California's voters are also dumb enough to elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, they will get, as journalist Martin Walker once wrote of Bill Clinton and the Boomers, the governor they deserve.

That said, this washed-up movie star shouldn't be too hard to beat. His campaign chief tells the Sacramento Bee that "This is not a position election. This is a character election. People are looking at character here. They're looking for somebody who will go in and clean house." It's hard to believe that Ahnold really wants to run a character election, what with all the rumors of marital infidelity, early-career drug use, and so forth. But the press -- CNN analyst William Schneider's rather shocking cynicism notwithstanding -- shouldn't give Ahnold a pass on the issues. California needs good policy more than it needs good biceps. "Where's the beef?" worked for Walter Mondale. It can work for Gray Davis (or Cruz Bustamente). Time for a reprise of "Where's the beef?"

WHY WE NEED FRIENDS. The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt makes the smart case for multilateralism -- that is, the selfish case.

The neo-conservatives, the dominant force in this administration's foreign policy, overestimate what America can do by itself, disdainfully viewing diplomacy and coalitions as signs of weakness.

This view has proven disastrous in post war-Afghanistan and post war-Iraq. The failure to make a serious effort at nation-building after driving out the despicable Taliban has resulted in an Afghanistan that borders on complete anarchy. The abject failure to plan for after Saddam is a policy disaster.

These mistakes entail considerable costs; America is going to bear the burden for Iraqi reconstruction. Important issues -- from terrorism to weapons proliferation to disease control -- can't be waged unilaterally. Moreover, there will be a commercial and economic reaction to American unilateralism, despite our economic clout.

What the Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd ignores is basic politics. Over the long haul, it is virtually impossible for political leaders to sustain positions at variance with most of their people, especially as the world moves to more representative political systems. To pretend we will pay no price for rampant anti-Americanism around the globe is to ignore history and politics. The contention that this isn't unique -- citing the Vietnam War and controversies over putting nuclear missiles in Germany in the 1980s -- is incorrect. Opinion then was divided; it isn't today.

There's no special virtue in playing nice. Just because the rest of the world thinks the U.S. is wrong on something, it doesn't necessarily mean we are. But as the hard-nosed liberal internationalists of the Cold War understood, a smart, multilateralist foreign policy ultimately helps the U.S. get done the things it needs to do.

FAIR AND BALANCED DAY, AND MORE FROM AROUND THE BLOGS. Neal Pollack declares this Friday to be "Fair and Balanced Day," during which bloggers are encouraged to use and abuse Fox's preposterous trademark. Amy Sullivan looks over the key details contained in the Justice Department's report on federal law enforcement's involvement in the Texas redistricting standoff. Daily Kos says a federal marriage amendment would never pass. Phil Carter says Paul Krugman was flat wrong on military privatization. And &tc. weighs in with a solution to the troop shortage.

AL FRANKEN'S REVENGE. The Washington Post reports that in the 24 hours after Fox's lawsuit became public, Franken's book, due next month, had shot up from #489 on the Amazon.com sales rank to #4.

Roger Ailes is a sucker.

UPDATE: Franken's book is now at #1.

"THE WORST POLICY IN 200 YEARS." Let's stipulate that the economists cited in this CBS Marketwatch article, even the two Nobel Prize winners, are political center-left types. Even so, when Gene Sperling, George Akerlof, and Robert Solow are this angry and inflamed over...fiscal policy, they're probably worth listening to. None of them is, tempermentally or politically, a radical. Yet each is concerned that the Bush administration's budget and tax policies are leading us on the road to ruin. Take note.

THE POST BEATS THE TIMES. The New York Observer's Sridhar Pappu, echoing many bloggers, deems the Washington Post "hot" for its coverage of the WMD hunt. This is certainly the case; the New York Times has broken some big stories here but not nearly as many as the Post. Interestingly, the Times' lag came after Joe Lelyveld took over from Howell Raines. It's hard to believe that Raines would have allowed the Times to ignore the WMD story the way Lelyveld did. So it looks like conservatives, and their constant attacks on Raines, accomplished what they hoped they would. The ref has been worked.

BOOTS ON THE GROUND. Michael O'Hanlon's L.A. Times op-ed is the fairest, clearest argument Tapped has seen yet for why we need a bigger Army. While O'Hanlon is sympathetic to Don Rumsfeld's desire for a smaller, more mobile and efficient Army, our existing commitments plus the requirements of troop rotation mean we are going to hit a wall in the near future.

The Army's brutish deployment math specifically works like this. Sixteen of its 33 active-duty combat brigades (there are typically three brigades per division) are now in Iraq; another two are in Afghanistan; two more are in Korea; one more is in the Balkans. That leaves only 12 available for other missions, and most of those are now preparing to go to Iraq.

For example, when the 3rd and 4th Infantry divisions, 1st Armored Division, 101st Airborne Division, 2nd and 3rd Armored Cavalry regiments and 173rd Airborne Brigade come home, they will be replaced by the 1st Armored Cavalry Division, 1st Infantry Division, much of the 82nd Airborne Division, about two brigades of the Army National Guard, a new medium-weight brigade of the Army and more multinational forces. Allies will, it is hoped, also replace elements of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force still in Iraq.

For those doing their Army math, that leaves only the 2nd Infantry Division, 10th Mountain Division and 25th Infantry Division that will not spend time in Iraq in 2003 or 2004. But the 2nd and 25th are dedicated to the Korea mission, and the 10th is needed in places such as Afghanistan. There is no one left for the following rotation to Iraq, in late 2004 or early 2005.

O'Hanlon believes that even contributions from more allied nations won't be enough. (Withdrawing from the Balkans wouldn't even put a dent in it.) His conclusion: We need a bigger Army.

Tapped agrees. And as far as we're concerned, that's just one more reason to repeal President Bush's tax cuts. The government is already in deficit and we're not paying for things we need to be paying for.

IS WES CLARK ALMOST IN? That's what the Boston Globe reports. Tapped thinks this would be nothing but good for the Democratic race. On the one hand, we're half-convinced that he may be the best guy to beat George W. Bush, and the more we see and hear of Clark, the more we like him. And even if he doesn't get the nomination, his presence would hopefully compel the other candidates -- particularly Howard Dean, but also John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, and John Kerry -- to move national security issues to the forefront of their campaigns. This means more than just a token reference to homeland security in the stump speech or drumming on about their fall '02 positions on the war in Iraq. To get serious on security, these candidates have to change the culture of their campaigns. They need to think through and develop real ideas about America's place in the world and the proper use of our power. (Even Kerry, the war hero, and Joe Lieberman, the hawk, haven't really gone through this process.) They need to keep bringing national security experts from the Clinton administration into their campaigns and reach out to that portion of the military community which leans Democratic (yes, they actually exist). They need to convince voters that they can be leaders in the war on terrorism.

Let's hope Clark runs.

THE WAR AGAINST FACT. If a politician seeks to implement policies that he or she knows will have negative or unpopular consequences, it's important to discredit those institutions the public relies on for accurate, fair-minded assessments of how the policies will play out. This is the impulse behind the Bush administration's continued suppresion of environmental reports that reflect poorly on the administration or point towards policies which the administration does not wish to embrace. And if the attorneys general of Maine and Connecticut are correct, it's also the impulse behind the Competitive Enterprise Institute's lawsuit demanding that the government invalidate the National Assessment of Climate Variability and Change and the Environmental Protection Agency's Climate Action Report of 2002.

CEI is one of the more overtly corrupt thinktanks in Washington -- a mere mouthpiece for business interests, chiefly in the energy and automobile sectors, as Media Transparency reports. The thinktank, if it can be called that, exists to produce reports and studies that agitate for whatever its funders want, which is usually less regulation. And according to the attorneys general, the Bush White House, via the Council on Environmental Quality, actually asked CEI to launch the lawsuit. In other words, it would look bad if the administration squelched the report iself. So the administration wants its friends at CEI to do the dirty work for them.

PRIVATIZING THE MILITARY. Paul Krugman rightly calls into question the growing role of private military contractors in U.S. military operations. Many of the Pentagon's "back-office" functions, of course, can and should be outsourced, if outsourcing saves the taxpayer money and gets the job done more efficiently. (It often doesn't.) But Tapped thinks the principle to keep in mind is that you generally shouldn't privatize personnel and operations you'll need to deploy into the field, because unlike soldiers, private personnel can quit and decide not to go. Krugman suggests this is what has happened in some instances in Iraq, with consequences for our troops in the field, and cites reporting in the Financial Times and elsewhere that calls into question the Pentagon's increased reliance on private firms, especially for logistics.

For more on this topic, check out P.W. Singer's new and groundbreaking book, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.

RACISM? Our friend Nathan Newman says that there's a whiff of racism in Arianna Huffington's statement that she wouldn't run if Dianne Feinstein was in the California governor's race, but has no problem running against Latino Democrat Cruz Bustamente. Here's the relevant exchange:

Q: You said before you announced your candidacy that you wouldn't run if Diane Feinstein ran. She isn't running, but if someone else you thought was a viable Democratic candidate stepped up, would you withdraw your candidacy at that point?

A: No, Diane Feintstein [sic] was the only candidate. Not, let me say, because I agree with her. There are many things on which she and I disagree, many national issues including the war in Iraq. But Diane Feinstein could easily have won if she were on the ballot, and I have absolutely zero interest in being a spoiler.

Huffington's reasoning seems pretty straightforward here. It has nothing to do with Bustamante's race, and everything to do with his electoral viability. The point here is that Feinstein would be an 800-pound gorilla in this race; she would almost certainly win if voters decided to toss out Gray Davis, and so Huffington would be at best a spoiler. Bustamante is far from a sure thing, so Huffington thinks she has a shot at beating him and the other candidates and actually winning the race. She may be wrong. But if wanting to beat Bustamante in an election is racist, or even carries a whiff of the stuff, we'll have to radically revise the term. CalPundit's analogy is apt: It's like calling the Democrats anti-Catholic for opposing William Pryor when everyone knows the Democrats oppose him because he is a conservative judicial activist.

There are other reasons for Huffington to drop out, but racism isn't one of them.

WAAAAH. Fox News has decided to sue Al Franken for using the phrase "fair and balanced" in the subtitle to his new book, arguing that Franken's "intent is clear -- to exploit Fox News' trademark, confuse the public as to the origins of the book and, accordingly, boost sales of the book." Actually, guys, as anyone can see -- not that you don't already know it -- Franken is making fun of you.

Tapped can't figure out which moron at Fox decided this was a good idea. Roger Ailes is surely smart enough to know that the very best thing Fox could do to promote Franken is to sue him. All it does is make Fox look thin-skinned and lame, and inspire discussions about idiocy of the slogan itself.

The filing itself has already provide its share of fun. According to the New York Times, the written complaint -- and that's the right word -- says that "Franken is neither a journalist nor a television news personality." (Says who? What, do we carry badges now?) The complaint continues, "He is not a well-respected voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight." Funny -- that never kept Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, or Geraldo Riviera off the air.

THE BANANA REPUBLIC OF FLORIDA. Florida congresswoman Katherine Harris and onetime dramatis persona of the Florida recount was not very popular at a Medicare town hall meeting this weekend. She spoke for nearly half the allotted hour and then didn't answer questions until they had all been asked. "The lines at the microphones were long," reports the Associated Press. "The boos were loud." Moreover, it seems Harris's taste for larceny has not abated:

Security guards and Harris' staff confiscated literature handed out by opponents that included the drug plan's details and a chart of Harris' voting record since she began her term in January.

The fliers were distributed during an earlier news conference staged in the parking lot by senior citizens to protest the Medicare bills.

"This is wrong," said Tony Fransetta, president of the Florida chapter of AARP, as he was asked to hand over fliers.

"We have never been restricted in what we could hand out at other town meetings," Fransetta said. "We have talking points that simply list questions that would help people better understand and articulate their concerns. They have been denied that right."

Connie M. McKee, a Harris staffer, said Congressional ethics rules made it illegal for people to distribute political information during a town hall meeting.

"All of the material is still here, and they can pick it up when they leave," McKee said. "They just can't take it into the hall. The ethics laws do not allow us to let them take it in. We have to be very, very careful that there are no laws broken."

Better late than never! But seriously, folks: Although Harris' staff confiscated everyone else's "political information," they did distribute Harris' own literature to the audience.

ANOTHER BROKEN PROMISE? In today's Christian Science Monitor, the DLC's Will Marshall and Marc Magee argue that AmeriCorps is in drastic need of -- and more to the point, deserves -- an emergency appropriation.

Emergency funding for AmeriCorps has won support from an unprecedented coalition of 44 governors, 148 mayors, 190 college and university presidents, 250 business leaders, and 1,180 civic organizations, as well as 71 Senators.

But, so far, not from President Bush.

The president, in fact, bears a special responsibility to help assure the passage of these emergency funds. Not only did he promise in 2002 to expand AmeriCorps, but his budget requests, combined with mismanagement by his political appointees, helped create the present crisis. This mismanagement has also provided a handy pretext for many Republicans to oppose the emergency funding for a program they have never supported in the first place. As House Majority Leader Tom DeLay asked recently, "They violated a statute. Should we give them $100 million for that?"

You can see how this one is playing out. But let's hope AmeriCorps can be saved.

DO THE MATH. Like Matt Yglesias, we were suprised to see how soft Matt Bai went on Stephen Moore and his Club for Growth in this New York Times Magazine profile. You could literally line up a dozen Nobel Prize winners to explain why Moore's views on economics are those of a crank and an ideologue, and yet Bai focuses mostly on tactics and horse-racing, as they say. Some of it is, admittedly, quite interesting. Bai points out that the Bush administration may use the Club, which targets Republican moderates and is nominally at odds with Karl Rove (see the article to learn why), as a cudgel to drive centrist legislators into White House arms. But Bai spends only a few sentences on Moore's policy arguments.

Like all good supply-siders, Moore and his members hold that the best way to stimulate economic expansion is for government to drastically reduce the amount of money it collects from its citizens. This practice, as recent history shows, has a tendency to create budget deficits, but the supply-siders say that's all right, because deficits force government to scale back spending on inefficient programs.

"Growth is the answer to all our problems," Moore told me over lunch at Morton's, a favorite Republican hangout. '"Poverty, income disparity, disease -- all of these things can be alleviated through rapid income growth.'"

That's it? You'd think that a fellow who thinks Ronald Reagan deserves credit for the 1990s boom, that FDR caused the Great Depression, who, indeed, sometimes has trouble with algebra, would deserve to have his views interrogated more thoroughly. (For more on Moore's crankery, check out Brad DeLong's offhand evisceration of a Cato pamphlet Moore co-authored. As DeLong likes to say, better to call them "The Club for Stagnation.") But no. Sadly, this is just one of a long line of examples of journalists treating empirical questions as matters of opinion or taste. And in a time when the Bush administration is willing to say almost anything to defend its fiscal policies, this tendency of the press is a boon to conservatives.

THE GERRYMANDERED HOUSE. The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin runs down the list of reasons why Democrats won't take back the House in 2004. It's a little depressing. One thing that's required is a strong anti-incumbent, anti-institutional wave; leading up to 1994, three-quarters of voters thought Congress was doing a lousy job. But that was in large part thanks to the work Newt Gingrich did to discredit the institution and brand it as corrupt.

Today's House is at least as corrupt, arrogant, and dictatorial as the old Democratic-controlled House used to be. It beats Tapped why more Dems aren't running against Tom DeLay and the shenanigans he uses to keep the Republican majority intact. But they aren't.

THE PATTERN OF DECEPTION. If you haven't seen it yet, this Sunday Washington Post article is a magnum opus of sorts, detailing the myriad of ways in which President Bush and his advisors built a case for the Iraq invasion which outpaced the evidence.

The Vienna briefing was one among many private and public forums in which the Bush administration portrayed a menacing Iraqi nuclear threat, even as important features of its evidence were being undermined. There were other White House assertions about forbidden weapons programs, including biological and chemical arms, for which there was consensus among analysts. But the danger of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein, more potent as an argument for war, began with weaker evidence and grew weaker still in the three months before war.

This article is based on interviews with analysts and policymakers inside and outside the U.S. government, and access to internal documents and technical evidence not previously made public.

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied.

CalPundit (here), Talking Points (here), and Tom Spencer (here) have more thoughts.

BITTER HARVEST. Two new articles up today on the Prospect Online. One, by Robert Kuttner, looks at the long-term economic trends that portend badly for President Bush. "It almost doesn't matter how well voters explicitly connect the dots," Kuttner writes. "A bad economy spells bad news for an incumbent president." Elsewhere, Prospect contributor Merrill Goozner wonders whether the hawks' plan for North Korea -- yep, more pre-emptive war, presumably after the president gets back from his vacation -- may not be the best way to go.

PRETTY SOON THEY'LL BE FORMING MILITIAS AND MARCHING THROUGH SKOKIE. Brent Bozell, a man who has wasted much of his life already, wasted a few more hours in the writing of this fulminating rant against Bravo, which runs "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."

The premise of the show is for a "Fab Five" of gay men to "transform a style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab" in each of their respective categories: fashion, food and wine, interior design, grooming and culture. Bravo's publicity copy also explained: "Straight guys turn in their pleats for flat fronts, learn about wines that don't come in a jug and come to understand why hand soap is not a good shampoo (and vice versa). When the journey is done, a freshly scrubbed, newly enlightened, ultra-hip man emerges."

And I want to vomit.

Tom Shales of The Washington Post objected to the "stereotypes on parade" in this series, and I agree. It's stereotypical to think of only gay men as top-notch connoisseurs of food, wine, culture, design and grooming. How heterophobic. It's the Gay Supremacy Hour. I'm sure I'm not the only one who reads Bravo's ad copy and wonders if we're talking hate crimes here. Ever seen a show more dedicated to a "straight-bashing" proposition? [Emphasis added.]

You'll have to read the rest of the column to watch Bozell really go off the rails. It's kind of sad. Speaking of stereotypes, Tapped has always wondered if people like him sit around their studies at night worrying -- really worrying -- about how gays are destroying the country, etc. In any case, judging from that author photo next to his column, Brent could use a few tips from Kyan Douglas, the show's grooming expert. Get that beard trimmed, guy! You look like a yeti.

COULD GEORGE W. BUSH GO TO JAIL? Did you know it's illegal to make false statements before Congress, even if you aren't under oath? It's punishable by five years in jail. That's how they got most of the Iran-Contra conspirators.

Seems like there were quite a few false statements in President Bush's State of the Union speech.

BUSH'S WAR ON SCIENCE. Henry Waxman's minority staff at the House Government Affairs committee has released a devastating report that, according to the Washington Post, charges the Bush administration with "repeatedly mischaracterized scientific facts to bolster its political agenda in areas ranging from abstinence education and condom use to missile defense." Waxman's report puts some more meat on the bones of this excellent piece by Nick Thompson in the Washington Monthly. White House press office unconvincingly blows off the report as "partisan sniping," but the facts don't lie. (Unlike the Bushies.) In fact, half a dozen medical journals have recently editorialized against the White House's insistence on injecting politics into science.

AH-NOLD AS CLINTON. In what fantasyland is Tim Graham living that he thinks Bill Clinton got a pass on his pot-smoking, ass-pinching, and draft-dodging in 1992?

Somebody please connect the poor guy back to reality. He's already halfway to Never-Never Land.

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A CONINTERN*. If you haven't see this new study by soon-to-be Prospect executive editor Michael Tomasky, Slate's Tim Noah has an excellent summary here. Tomasky recently spent a few months as a fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein center, during which he compared editorials in several of the nation's major papers. His findings lend empirical evidence to something liberals have long suspected:

[W]hile the pages are more or less equally partisan when it comes to supporting or opposing a given presidential administration's policy pronouncements, the conservative pages are more partisan -- often far more partisan -- with regard to he intensity with which they criticize the other side. Also, the paper finds, conservative editorial pages are far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than liberal pages are willing to take issue with a Democratic administration.

It's definitely worth taking a look at.

What he said.

*For explanation, see this excellent Jacob Weisberg piece in Slate.

GORE GETS IT. Tapped never thought we'd find ourselves saying this, but Al Gore rocks. Today's speech on Iraq to MoveOn.org was Gore's first big foray into talking about foreign policy since the fall, and boy, was it worth the wait. Nuanced, sensitive, articulate and sharp as a tack -- why couldn't he have been like this when he was running for President? Here's one of the most interesting passages:

It seems obvious that big and important issues like the Bush economic policy and the first Pre-emptive War in U.S. history should have been debated more thoroughly in the Congress, covered more extensively in the news media, and better presented to the American people before our nation made such fateful choices. But that didn't happen, and in both cases, reality is turning out to be very different from the impression that was given when the votes -- and the die -- were cast.

Since this curious mismatch between myth and reality has suddenly become commonplace and is causing such extreme difficulty for the nation's ability to make good choices about our future, maybe it is time to focus on how in the world we could have gotten so many false impressions in such a short period of time.

At first, I thought maybe the President's advisers were a big part of the problem. Last fall, in a speech on economic policy at the Brookings Institution, I called on the President to get rid of his whole economic team and pick a new group. And a few weeks later, damned if he didn't do just that - and at least one of the new advisers had written eloquently about the very problems in the Bush economic policy that I was calling upon the President to fix.

But now, a year later, we still have the same bad economic policies and the problems have, if anything, gotten worse. So obviously I was wrong: changing all the president's advisers didn't work as a way of changing the policy.

I remembered all that last month when everybody was looking for who ought to be held responsible for the false statements in the President's State of the Union Address. And I've just about concluded that the real problem may be the President himself and that next year we ought to fire him and get a new one.

But whether you agree with that conclusion or not, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican -- or an Independent, a Libertarian, a Green or a Mugwump -- you've got a big stake in making sure that Representative Democracy works the way it is supposed to. And today, it just isn't working very well. We all need to figure out how to fix it because we simply cannot keep on making such bad decisions on the basis of false impressions and mistaken assumptions.

Earlier, I mentioned the feeling many have that something basic has gone wrong. Whatever it is, I think it has a lot to do with the way we seek the truth and try in good faith to use facts as the basis for debates about our future -- allowing for the unavoidable tendency we all have to get swept up in our enthusiasms.

That last point is worth highlighting. Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we're all used to that. I've even been guilty of it myself on occasion. But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.

Unfortunately, I think it is no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that what the country is dealing with in the Bush Presidency is the latter. That is really the nub of the problem -- the common source for most of the false impressions that have been frustrating the normal and healthy workings of our democracy.

Two things are worth noting here. The first is that Gore seems to be rebuking Lieberman's reprehensible equation of democratic debate and anti-war questioning with political extremism. And the second, as readers will recall if they studied political philosophy, is that the phrase "totalistic ideology" is a polite and rather academic way of saying "totalitarian," or pretty darn close to it. And that's a pretty harsh criticism of the administration.

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'. At least, Tapped hopes we're dreaming. In between Ah-nold, Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt, and, oh, the other politicians running for governor out on the Left Coast, we can officially conclude that this is a nightmare. For the inside scoop on why labor decided to stick with Gray Davis, check out Prospect editor-at-large Harold Meyerson's new column in L.A. Weekly.

THE BLOGS PROPOSE... The papers dispose. It's nice to see the Minneapolis Star-Tribune smack Fred Barnes for taking part in the smear campaign against Gene Robinson, and nicer still to see them nod to the websites and blogs, chiefly Atrios, that first connected the dots. The paper also says that this story was shopped around to a number of journalists, but that Barnes was the first to bite. Shame on him. Tapped doubts his old bosses at the Baltimore Sun would've let that story see print.

Good to see the smear was unsuccessful. Bad to see Barnes is still repeating it.

WHO'S MORE CONSERVATIVE, EDWARDS OR LIEBERMAN? Tapped argued yesterday, as per Daily Kos, that Lieberman ranked as less conservative than Edwards, according to the American Conservative Union. Today we'll note that other political rankings, such as ProgressivePunch.org, rank Edwards as more progressive than Lieberman. We're sure there are other rankings, as well. The main point, though, is that there is surprisingly little ideological variation in the whole Democratic field, and that as much as we enjoy watching Lieberman tarred as Bush Lite, he's actually much closer in most of his opinions to his Democratic brethren than to the Republican senators.

EDWARDS STARTS THE TV CAMPAIGN. So Tapped hears from a reliable source that the presidential campaign of Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) is starting to air television ads in Iowa and New Hampshire today. Coupled with the release today of a 60-page down-loadable booklet summarizing and fleshing out the policy proposals Edwards has been making for the past year, that move signals the end of the invisible phase of the Edwards campaign. From here on out, there are no more excuses. If Edwards doesn't begin to get traction after this, it won't be because he's not running full speed ahead. Tapped also hears that if the Edwards team had waited just a week, they'd have found the New Hampshire airwaves getting a tad crowded. And it's not just that former Vermont Governor Howard Dean launched television ads in the Granite State today and in Boston last night. Another possible future prez is slated to go on the air in New Hampshire starting next week. Sounds like the campaign is heating up.

BAKER BOTTS VS. THE VICTIMS OF 9-11. Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek report that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has hired Bush family friend James Baker's lawfirm Baker Botts to represent it in a lawsuit filed by families of victims of September 11:

A few of those officials, sources say, see the 9-11 lawsuit as a useful tool to turn up the public heat on the Saudis. In that sense, there is a growing view among U.S. counterterrorism officials that it might be a good thing for the case to proceed—no matter how embarrassing it might prove to the Saudis. To keep that from happening, sources close to the case say, members of the Saudi royal family and the country’s wealthiest businessmen—many of whom are defendants in the case—have offered up seven-figure retainers to some of the toniest and most politically connected law firms in the country. Baker Botts, Sultan’s law firm, for example, still boasts former secretary of State James Baker as one of its senior partners. Its recent alumni include Robert Jordan, the former personal lawyer for President Bush who is now U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. .... But legal sources say some high-priced firms and their senior partners have been wary of the Saudi overtures—despite offers of retainers that, in some cases, have ranged as high as $5 million. One former Clinton administration official at a big law firm said he was personally approached to represent a high-ranking Saudi prince in the case but turned it down. "I kept asking myself, 'do I want to be representing the Saudis against the 9-11 families—especially after all the trouble we had getting cooperation from the Saudis on terrorism'," the official said. "I finally just said no."

DO REPUBLICANS HATE CATHOLIC JUDGES? Many conservatives have lately been saying that the Democratic position on judicial nominees effectively bars some devoted Catholics from serving on the federal bench. So it's worth looking at how the Republican position on judicial nominees can effectively bar a devoted Catholic from serving on the federal bench. We're going to quote the following op-ed at length, but urge you to read the entire thing here. According to Michael Schattman, a Catholic judge who was nominated by Bill Clinton to the federal bench but blocked by Republican leaders:

I was opposed by Republicans because my adherence to Catholic principles of social justice put me at odds with them and their values of social injustice.

I helped a police chief prevent a race riot. I believed in the 14th Amendment, equal rights under the law, the dignity of every individual. I questioned the wisdom of the death penalty but not its constitutionality. I rejected war's morality but recognized its historic unavoidability.

They did not.

Why? It begins, I think, with Pope Leo XIII. In his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, he taught the dignity of work, the rights of the worker to a living wage and the justice of organized labor.

Since then, the principles of Catholic social justice have matured under successive popes and the leadership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to include:

• An end to racial discrimination.

• A minimum wage.

• Equal employment opportunity.

• Housing assistance.

• A consistent respect for human life, encompassing opposition to abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, the death penalty and war (with the current pope condemning the U.S. attack on Iraq).

• More generous immigration and refugee policies.

• An end to the Cuba embargo.

• Increased Medicaid eligibility.

• National health insurance and a patient's bill of rights.

And the list goes on.

As the bishops (not [Orrin] Hatch) put it in the publication "Faithful Citizenship" before the 2000 election, America needs a kind of politics focused on "the needs of the poor … the pursuit of the common good" and a system designed "to pursue greater justice and peace."

Republican rhetoric is more aligned with Catholic teaching on abortion, but that is the only point of convergence.

Once the unaborted are born, will Hatch and his gang support unemployed teen-age mothers, milk for poor schoolchildren, Head Start, jobs programs or housing assistance? In a pig's eye. But that would be the Catholic position.

Why does this matter? Because of Hatch's hypocrisy and [C. Boyden] Gray's craven attempts to deceive voters with false claims that Democrats oppose Catholic nominees.

Surely among the 140 Bush nominees approved by the Democrats there was one Catholic. I cannot say. The Democrats never asked. Nor will they.

Senate Democrats are holding up only four nominees who have been voted out of the Judiciary Committee. One of those is William Pryor, Alabama's attorney general, who sings out his absolute rejection of Roe vs. Wade and so is proclaimed by Pope Orrin to be a "good" Catholic, while the senator rejects all other elements of Catholic social justice. What is so good about that?

Catholic teaching, as I learned from St. Alice Grade School, through Laneri and Nolan High Schools and Georgetown University, is that personal morality is not the business of government -- but social morality is.

So a nominee's religious beliefs matter only to the extent that they interfere with the nominee's ability to support and defend the Constitution. The issue is not what kind of church you believe in, but what kind of America you believe in.

Well said.

FIXING THE DATA -- AGAIN. Blogger and UCLA professor Mark A.R. Kleiman takes a closer look at the supposed success of InnerChange, a faith-based prison ministry run by former jailbird Chuck Colson and touted by, among others, the White House, The Wall Street Journal (here) and Tom DeLay. Turns out the study results were rigged.

Conservatives rigging the data to come up with an answer you like? Gee, sounds familiar.

No shame. No shame at all.

THE DEATH OF OBJECTIVITY. The Hartford Courant writes up Jim Fallows' excellent Atlantic cover story (not online), which argues that Rupert Murdoch's FOX is changing the ground rules of journalism by treating media as merely a business and not a public trust. The Courant piece nicely pulls together a couple of different recent stories on this same topic, and it makes for an interesting read. Definitely also take a look at Brent Cunningham's exhaustive Columbia Journalism Review story on the same topic.

Tapped is of two minds on this question. On the one hand, we're sick of watching conservatives work the ref -- see Tim Graham's painfully tedious posts on The Corner, in which softball questions to Democrats from network anchors, newsweekly coverage of Howard Dean and replays of Democratic political ads during chat shows are all evidence of "liberal bias." Pace FOX, conservatives have zero interest in an objective press, they just know it pays to mau-mau those who do. When it comes to policy, press objectivity favors conservatives, who have mastered the art of the press-friendly white paper. During coverage of tax cuts and budget policy, for example, the nuttiest supply-side nostrums get equal time with the opinion of mainstream economists. If The New York Times or The Washington Post had been explicitly partisan papers, for instance, Tapped is convinced neither of President Bush's tax cuts would have passed Congress at the size they did. Debates over the effects of Bush's policies were covered not on empirical grounds but as "he said, she said" arguments. It was a national disgrace.

But for the most part, the objective press provides reliable, accurate information to the public. And this is no small thing. As an opinion journalist and blogger, Tapped absolutely relies on these papers to get it right, even if we give them guff when they don't.

Reader comments welcome and encouraged.

UM, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE TRYING TO BEAT BUSH. We know it's hard for the Democrats to exploit growing divisions in the Republican ranks when they could be picking fights among themselves. But can't they at least try? Take the growing dissatisfaction of libertarians with the Bush administration, which is starting to reach politically significant levels. From the CATO Institute we learned, yesterday, that "'Conservative' Bush Spends More than 'Liberal' Presidents Clinton, Carter". While Sen. Joe Lieberman, (D-Conn.) is busy, as he said yesterday, "standing for the same values I've stood for for 15 years" -- such as attacking other Democrats based on outdated tax-and-spend stereotypes -- the political ground under his feet has shifted dramatically. Lieberman can attack a Democratic presidential field led by a gang of fiscal conservatives all he likes, but the real electoral money will go to whoever figures out how to pick off the increasingly discontented libertarians at CATO who are busy blasting Bush for being "the most gratuitous big spender to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter. One could say that he has become the 'Mother of All Big Spenders.'"

BARNES' SMEAR. Fred Barnes is among those leading the charge against Gene Robinson, currently the Episcopalian bishop-elect for New Hampshire. "The controversial gay Episcopal bishop-elect of New Hampshire," he writes . . .

is a founder of a group called Outright that supports gay, lesbian, or "questioning" young people 22-years-old or younger and gets them together with older gay and lesbian role models. On its website, Outright had a link to a pornographic website -- until the link became an issue in the fight at the Episcopal Church's national convention in Minneapolis over ratifying the election of the bishop-elect, Gene Robinson, by New Hampshire Episcopalians. The link, indeed all links, were removed from the website today.

Robinson was reported to have denied any knowledge of the link. But he has made no secret of his connection with Outright. In his official biography, he takes credit for founding Outright, "a support group for gay/lesbian/questioning teens." Robinson has said his aim is not to be a "gay bishop," but his connection to Outright and his public appearances with his gay partner may make that label unavoidable.

Imagine if Tapped had written the following of Barnes:

The controversial heterosexual Episcopal journalist is co-founder of The Weekly Standard, a conservative political magazine. The Standard's website includes links to the web magazine Salon, which posts pornographic material, including pictures of nude heterosexual couples. Barnes was reported to have denied any knowledge of the link. But he has made no secret of his connection with The Standard. Barnes has said his aim is not to be a "straight journalist," but his connection to the Standard and his public appearances with his wife may make that label unavoidable.

Exactly. Did we mention (via Atrios) that Barnes is on the board of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, a conservative Episcopalian organization that opposes gay marriage? (Seems like that's enough of a conflict that Barnes could have disclosed it.)

It's an old tactic, of course, to attack some organization or person for having a website that links to a site that links to a site that links to a site where you can pay to access porn or other objectionable materials. It's a stupid game. And it's basically the game that Barnes has played. If Tapped is reading all the information correctly, a couple of years ago Robinson helped found a chapter of a youth group for gay teenagers, known as Outright. There are many Outright chapters across New England, and they are basically autonomous. The Portland chapter, with which Robinson had never been involved, had a link to a site called www.allthingsbi.com, a resource for bisexual people that includes links to bisexual erotic and pornography. That chapter says it didn't know the site had those links, that it has since taken down the link, and that Robinson, duh, had no knowledge of what was on its website.

How about those allegations of "inappropriate conduct" you've been hearing about? According to this website, Robinson was accused of touching "a married man in his 40's on his bicep, shoulder and upper back in the process of a public conversation at a province meeting around two years ago." Give us a break. This smells like a smear campaign -- designed, rather cynically, to capitalize on the furor over pedophiles in the Catholic priesthood -- and probably is. CNN is reporting that the church's probe, which had delayed a vote that would confirm Robinson as bishop, has already ended.

Barnes and the other character assassins should be ashamed of themselves for being part of this.

WILD THING. And while Tapped is at it, let's take a look at this whole into the wilderness business that Lieberman and Al From have been bandying about. "Most of the other Democratic candidates are threatening the change that Bill Clinton and Al Gore brought on the Democratic Party and threatening to take us back into the political wilderness," Lieberman told the audience at the National Press Club Monday in response to a question. "I'm not going to stand back and let this party be taken over by people who would take us into the political wilderness again."

Maybe one of Lieberman's high-priced consultants could sit him down and explain to him the fact that the Democrats are already in the political wilderness. And that they got there with him at the helm, as the vice presidential candidate in 2000. Yeah, yeah, we all know that Gore and Lieberman won the popular vote and if weren't for the Supreme Court . . . blah, blah, blah. Tapped sympathizes, really. But the fact of the matter is that you don't lose the game in the final play; that election was Gore and Lieberman's to lose and they lost it. Politically, it's not 1972; it's 1973. But things are actually worse this time around, because Nixon was a relatively liberal Republican and Bush is a conservative radical. Combined with the loss of the House in 1994 and of the Senate in 2000 and 2002, the situation facing the Dems in 2003 is much more dire than it was three decades ago, or even in 1992. No candidate who doesn't get this can win the Democratic nomination. It's not a question of avoiding the wilderness; it's a question of finding someone to lead Democrats out of it. Because they are already in there, and deep.

GOING DOWN SWINGING. Tapped has long thought that Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) would be a better candidate if he'd stop droning sonorously and just run hard on his own record. So Tapped was intrigued to read over the weekend that Lieberman had decided to become the anti-Dean. Certainly, it's a great role for some candidate to take, especially in a race where everyone is running in ideological drag. After all, Dean is a moderate running as a liberal; Kerry is a liberal running as a moderate; Edwards is a conservative (for a Democrat) running as a moderate; and Lieberman is a moderate running as a conservative.

(And if you don't believe that Lieberman is more liberal than Edwards, check out these figures Daily Kos pulled from the American Conservative Union and the League of Conservation Voters last week. And remember that Lieberman is from New England and Edwards represents a Southern state.)

On Sunday, The Associated Press previewed Lieberman's new anti-Dean strategy:

In an appearance Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition," Lieberman said Dean would "take the Democratic Party into the political wilderness."

"There is an important role for government, but the era of big government is over," he said. "We're going to be fiscally responsible. We're going to be strong on security, and we're going to be socially progressive."

Yesterday's speech "Fighting for the Future of the Democratic Party and the Security and Prosperity of America" at the National Press Club made the new strategy even clearer. But Tapped is disappointed that, rather than offering an optimistic New Democratic vision to counter Dean, Lieberman seems largely to be trying to go down swinging. The new strategy does little to solve the biggest problem with Lieberman's campaign thus far: an approach that is out of sync with the times.

To begin with, there's no evidence that the era of big government is actually over, and saying it doesn't make it so. Even Andrew Sullivan, in this great formulation from his blog, notes that "the difference between Republicans and Democrats right now is not between big and small government. It's between the Democrats' Big, Solvent Government and the Republicans' Big, Insolvent Government."

The only parts of big government that seem to be over are the parts provided by localities around the country, which are furiously slashing popular social programs as a response to massive budget short-falls brought on by excessive tax cuts at the state and local levels. Rather than attacking the new reality and defending threatened schools and health programs, though, Lieberman seems to prefer to attack old Democratic stereotypes about "old, big government solutions." Contrast Lieberman's approach with Rep. Dick Gephardt's speech ("Economic Security Through a Stronger Middle Class") on the economy yesterday in New York: "George Bush ran on a platform of making government as small as it could possibly be, but he got confused along the way. Instead, he’s exploding the deficit and exploding government spending, while making the private sector economy as small as it can possibly be to the tune of three million lost jobs." [italics added]

That's a very nice piece of rhetoric and it has the added benefit of being true. Instead of accusing the Democrats of "grasping failed solutions that will not meet our 21st Century needs," as Lieberman did in his speech today, Gephardt rightly focuses the attack on how Bush is doing so: "President Bush has taken us right back to the broken policies of the past, the economics of debt and regret: unaffordable tax cuts for the few, zero new jobs, surging unemployment. I've got to hand it to him: never has so much been done, in so little time, to help so few."

The fact of the matter is that a fundamental transformation has occurred in American politics. The Democratic Party has become the party of fiscal restraint, balanced budgets and efficient government. Republicans, meanwhile, are the party of deficits, runaway spending, and uncompetitive contracts. To a shocking degree, we are all fiscal conservatives now. The Democratic presidential candidates have been acknowledging this, with wonderment, for several months in their tours through conference rooms full of insiders -- but the transformation has yet to reach the level of conventional wisdom and Lieberman's attacks on "old, big government liberals" only delay the emergence of this new understanding. And that doesn't just hurt Dean or Gephardt, but all of Lieberman's congressional colleagues, as well.

Instead of providing a compelling, affirmative vision of what the Democratic Party stands for, Lieberman's speech was summed up by The Associated Press with a title that was only too accurate: "Lieberman: Dems Must Shun Gov't Programs." Now there's a winning agenda!

QUEER FACTOR. Do two new shows on Bravo -- Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Boy Meets Boy -- represent the new gay minstrelsy? Noy Thrupkaew examines that question today at TAP Online.

WHAT REBOUND? Looks like The New York Times is getting on the John Andrew train. In today's paper, Elisabeth Bumiller recounts her travels with the John Snow/Elaine Chao/Don Evans bus tour:

"This week, three members of my cabinet -- Treasury Secretary John Snow, Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao -- visited business owners and their workers in the Midwest," Mr. Bush said in his weekly radio address on Saturday. "They received reports that the economy is picking up."

Well, yes and no.

Anyone on the trip, which was a very un-Air Force One-like, two-day, six-city bus journey across Wisconsin and Minnesota (Ms. Chao dined on Tuesday night at Burger King), could see that the cabinet members charged with promoting the president's tax cuts also heard a lot of anger from workers about foreign competition and laid-off relatives and friends.

"Right now I am very disillusioned with the Republicans' policies," said Michael Retzer, a Republican and a consultant to a supplier for Harley-Davidson. Mr. Retzer told Mr. Snow at a Harley plant near Milwaukee that he did not see how the tax cuts would stimulate the economy when so many consumers would spend the extra money on goods made overseas.

Later, in the kind of confrontation with a disgruntled citizen almost never seen on the president's trips, Mr. Snow tangled with an unemployed software programmer at the drive-through at Culver's Frozen Custard and ButterBurgers in Wausau, Wis.

The full story of John Andrew, and why he's relevant to this bus tour, can be found here.

MORE OF THAT LIBERAL MEDIA. Time (here) and Newsweek (here) both have Howard Dean on the cover this week. Time's article is quite standard, as Dr. Evil would say. Newsweek's is a little more interesting. But both emphasize -- Time more heavily than Newsweek -- Dean's so-called "Park Avenue upbringing." Why is it that Tapped feels that when George W. Bush was running for president, the mainstream media portrayed him largely as a country boy who happened to have some Northeastern roots, but that Dean is portrayed as a Park Avenue snob who happens to be running as a populist? Perhaps we're misremembering the coverage from 2000. But that's the impression we have.

The problem here, Tapped believes, is that reporters think it is unsurprising when a Republican comes from a wealthy family, and therefore unworthy of discussion, but "news" when a Democrat comes from a wealthy family. So the wealthy Democrat gets pummeled for being a faker.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK. The Justice Department is investigating "allegations of criminal price-fixing and collusion among top fashion-modeling agencies, adding to a growing list of legal troubles for the industry," according to The Wall Street Journal. Hey, lawbreaking is lawbreaking, right? But Tapped suspects this is actually a ploy by the Bush administration to prop up the ailing reality-TV and made-for-cable-movie industries. Aaron Spelling, your office is calling!

SPEAKING OF CARTOONS. Tom Tomorrow, who graciously contributes an installment of This Modern World to each issue of the Prospect, has published a new collection of cartoons, The Great Big Book of Tom Tomorrow. We got ours in the mail this weekend, and it looks great. Speaking personally, Tomorrow is one of our favorite cartoonists -- funny, smart and usually right on the money. So head over to the local bookstore, or click here, and pick up a copy. It's well worth the money. And it even looks good on the Tapped coffee table.

HUH? This is the Doonesbury cartoon that some papers wanted to have changed.

Is it Tapped, or have big media become so petrified of offending anyone that they now have the urge to censor even fairly uncontroversial material? You can see this both in the repeated dust-ups over anti-Bush cartoons (especially The Boondocks) and in the deeply annoying -- to Tapped -- spread of "bleeping" when they show movies on TV. It used to be that they would bleep only the dirtiest words. Now they bleep far more innocuous words. Watch the movies on TV, and you'd think Navy SEALS talk like kindergarten teachers. We blame two trends: political correctness, and the essential conservativism -- by which we mean unwillingness to get ahead of the cultural curve -- of the business world.

CLEANING HOUSE. It's official. Washington insiders have been buzzing for months now over the likely retirement of Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, from the Bush administration. Now, according to The Washington Post, both have signaled that they will leave even if President Bush is elected. This is not unexpected news, but it's still a big deal. Even if Powell is telling the truth when he tells associates that "a commitment made to his wife, rather than any dismay at the administration's foreign policy" is the reason he's leaving, the likely ascension of Condi Rice or Paul Wolfowitz to Powell's position will greatly solidify the position of administration hawks. (That is, the people who have so thoroughly bungled our foreign policy and gratuitously damaged our relations with other countries. Yay.) Especially with Wolfowitz in charge, the growing Pentagonization of foreign policy will proceed apace. Without Powell to shield them, most of the like-minded people Powell has salted throughout State will probably leave.

Anybody up for invading Iran?

GOOD NEWS? The Washington Post reports today that things are looking up for the economy. The headline says, "Economic Rebound Gains Speed," and the lede reports:

The U.S. economic recovery picked up some steam this spring as consumers bought more cars, trucks and appliances, defense spending surged because of the war in Iraq, and businesses invested more, the Commerce Department reported yesterday.

The economy expanded at a 2.4 percent annual rate in the April-June period, a better pace than many analysts had expected and a moderate improvement from the sluggishness of the previous six months, bolstering predictions of stronger growth later this year.

A fair assessment? As CalPundit pointed out, if you take out the boost in defense spending, annualized GDP growth would have been only .67 percent. The lede should have read: "The U.S. economic recovery picked up some steam this spring, driven largely by increased defense spending related to the war on Iraq." But the lede, as written, is good news for the Bush administration.

What he said.

UPDATE: At least the wire services are getting it right.

CASHING IN. The Nation has a pretty devastating short piece on Richard Perle, revealing that Perle actually charges media outlets for doing interviews with him.

A typical Perle appearance came on April 4, 2003, on Canadian Television's morning news show, Canada AM, for which -- according to a CTV news producer -- Perle was paid $900. The host introduced Perle as a lead architect of Iraq policy and "one of the closest advisers of Donald Rumsfeld and a member of the influential Defense Policy Board." In the interview, Perle described the war in Iraq as certain to be "a quick war by any standards" and asserted that "we will find weapons of mass destruction when the people who know where they are are free to talk to us." On May 29 he was invited back and was paid for discussing Bush's Middle East policy.

It's not crystal-clear whether or not doing so violates federal law. But there's a good case to be made that it does. Of course, compared to Perle's previous attempts to cash in on his advisory job, this one is small beer. But still . . . it's pretty funny. Tapped has to ask: Do non-profits get a discounted rate?