CORRECTION ON DIAMOND-ORSZAG. It's been brought to my attention that Thursday's gloss of the Diamond-Orszag Social Security plan is misleading in several respects. It does not "write off" the trust fund, and does contain important pre-2040 changes including revenues enhancements, higher disability benefits, survivor benefits, low income worker benefits, and expands the system to cover some new classes of employees, as well as the beginnings of other adjustments in benefit levels. Apologies to readers, and after the holidays I'll try and write a more complete (and more accurate) account of the plan.

--Matthew Yglesias

SIGNING OFF. TAPPED will be offline until Monday, January 3. Until then, Happy Holidays to all.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

WHAT IRAQIS WANT. The International Republican Institute has released new polling data on Iraq that I've just been pouring over. At first glance, the results look like good news for old-fashioned class-based populism. Iraqis tell the IRI their top two issues are jobs and healthcare, 65 percent say they'd like to see a "large role for [the] state in the economy," and by an overwhelming margin of 62-8 Iraqis prefer an "urban/cosmpolitan" party to a "rural/tribal" one.

In other respects, however, Iraqis look more red than blue. By a margin of 53-20 Iraqis want a "faith-based" party rather than a secular one. More substantively, the conventional wisdom that the mullah-backed United Iraqi Alliance has the inside track to victory seems supported by the fact that 33.2 percent say they will "follow all decrees issued by clerics concerning the elections," and a further 16.1 percent say the views of clerics will be a "major" factor in determining their vote. Just 12.7 percent say they don't care what the clerics say. Oddly, IRR chose not to do any polling on the specific question of who people are going to vote for. In general, Iraqi public opinion paints a brighter picture than it did in September, but a worse one than it did before the summer.

From the US perspective, the most important result is probably that our presence in the country continues to be very unpopular. On the other hand, people remain very concerned about the lack of security. The desire for the Americans to go home, and the desire for someone to do a better job of maintaining law and order are in significant tension. What Iraqis want is for the local security forces to improve their performance. But all experts think it will take years to accomplish that.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE PRO-FAMILY DEMOCRATS. Intrigued by Rep. Rahm Emanuel's comments in yesterday's Washington Post about the need to avoid being seen as the party of the status quo, I found this Dec. 8 op-ed by him in The New York Times, making the same general point but on a different set of issues:

In 2002 and 2004, Democrats were the party out of power and by definition should have been the party of change. Yet they failed to provide credible alternatives to Republican policies. In a presidential race during which 55 percent of Americans asked for a new direction, we...allowed ourselves to be positioned as the party of the status quo.

To regain the public's trust, we must offer new ideas to build a better future for all Americans, not just a favored few; ideas that contrast with the special-interest policies Republicans promote. The current tax debate provides such an opportunity.

Our tax system is broken. We live in a society espousing the principles of work and responsibility, yet our tax code penalizes those who work for a living while benefiting the well connected. Rather than resisting change in the tax code, Democrats should embrace it.

Four tax cuts in four years allowed Republicans to use the tax code to reward their benefactors by expanding loopholes and turning a blind eye to tax cheats. Their recent corporate tax "reform" bill, which sought to correct a $5 billion tax break became a $136 billion handout for corporate expatriates, importers of Chinese ceiling fans and Nascar track owners, while further shifting the tax burden on to working Americans.

Real tax reform, like the simplified family credit I've proposed, would reverse this trend. It replaces 2,000 pages of the tax code with 12 questions by combining the child credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the dependent exemption. In contrast to the two Republican tax ideas - a flat tax or a national sales tax - the simplified credit is pro-family, progressive and rewards work.

Rather than constantly playing defense, it would seem worthwhile for the Democrats to take Emanuel's suggestion and try to get out in front of the president and the GOP congress by picking a few key legislative changes and pushing them hard in the court of public opinion. Family policy is one critically important area on which to do this, both from a policy perspective and from a political one. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and the women of the Senate have already proven themselves leaders in trying to make the tax-code more family friendly. But overall, voters with children have not adjudged the Democrats to be the party that's most on their side, perhaps because of perceived Democratic stances cultural issues.

That's a view that could be changed. Terry Neal's Washington Post online political column on Tuesday contained a trove of facts documenting the ways in which "GOP Corporate Donors Cash In on Smut" and are some of the nation's biggest distributors of pornography. So it sure looks like there's room for a unified Democratic assault on GOP-backed filth and tax policies that hurt families -- a joint cultural-economic push -- if only someone would step up to the plate and organize it.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CONSTITUTION STATE SPECULATION. The wires are reporting that former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland has copped a plea with federal prosecutors, raising the possibility for prison time for the disgraced Governor. Upon hearing this news, acting Governor, and my hometown’s hero, Lt. Gov. Jodi Rell, laid into her former boss:

“Simple words cannot express the deep personal disappointment I feel," Ms. Rell said in her statement. "While we knew that this day might come, we were never really prepared for the reality of it. Today the state of Connecticut was humiliated, and I, as John Rowland's former running mate and colleague, feel personally betrayed. When I first heard the news, I felt like I was punched in the gut."

Harsh words, but well deserved. I don’t doubt Rell’s sincerity here, as Rowland was a crook, but behind this public rebuke, I sense an embattled incumbent posturing to keep her seat in 2006. This will be very, very hard; her two potential Democratic foes are heroes of state politics. If State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut’s version of Elliot Spitzer) decided to run, he would almost certainly beat Rell. Of course, the two ton elephant here is Chris Dodd. If his rumblings about running the state turn out to be more real than rumored, Blumenthal would be wise not to challenge him in a primary and instead vie for Dodd’s vacant seat. Presumably, he would still face a tough race if Republican Congressman Chris Shays were his opponent.

The best case scenario here (and I’m dreaming from the perspective of a liberal nutmegger) would be some good old Democratic party backstabbing aimed at ousting Sen. Joe Lieberman. If Dodd runs for Governor, but backs a Blumenthal primary challenge to Lieberman in 2006, the AG may have a shot. Because the State Republican party will likely mount only minimal opposition to the Lieberman seat the winner of that primary will easily cruise to the Senate. The vacant Dodd seat may then be a hotly contested battle between Shays and seven term Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (who would receive some superb political consulting from her husband.)

Whatever happens, Democrats are well poised to make some gains in the State and 2006 will be a fun, fun, fun year in Connecticut politics.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

NOT WORTH THE PAPER IT'S PRINTED ON. I know that it's an end-of-the-year column and is intended to strike a reflective tone, but was this Richard Cohen column really worth publishing? This is the second Washington Post column in as many days dedicated to whining that Washington isn't the clubby cocktail party it used to be, ever since nasty "partisanship" came wafting in with the wind. How many more of these are we meant to endure?

One either takes the current problems of American politics seriously, or one does not. Cohen sighs about Republicans only mingling with Republicans and Democrats with Democrats, and quips that "a little bourbon would do wonders for our dysfunctional government." I know that's meant to be flippant, but really: Bourbon hasn't gone anywhere in D.C., so maybe, just maybe, there are some other developments underlying all this stinky partisanship that's ruining Cohen and David Broder's night life.

And not to be petty, but who edits this stuff? Cohen bookends his column with an anecdote about how George Tenet confronted him at a party over a negative column, but the tension was diffused when they started discussing their mothers. He addresses his readers:

It cannot come as news to you that both Tenet and I have mothers and yet, in some way, maybe it does.

No, Richard, it really doesn't. In no way does that come as news. Good God, man.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SPEAKING OF NON-CRISES. I'm not going to pretend to be sufficiently expert in the arts of forestry to say whether or not the Bush administration's new guidelines for national timber management really are the disaster environmentalists say they are. What I do know is that if the administration really thinks a lack of easy access to felled trees is a significant drag on economic growth, the obvious solution would be to repeal the large tarrif on Canadian lumber that was imposed several years ago.

Liberals tend to have mixed feelings, at best, about trade in general and NAFTA in particular, but none of the usual anti-trade considerations apply here. We're talking about Canada not some low-wage, union-busting, anti-environment third world country. Canadian lumber is at a competitive advantage because, basically, it's a giant sparsely populated country filled with trees. Besides the usual economic arguments against protectionism, there's also a national security component to this. In the wake of 9/11, the United States would very much like stepped-up Canadian cooperation on border control issues, and this trade dispute (along with a couple of other equally ill-motivated trade disputes we've initiated) is a non-trivial stumbling-block to achieving that cooperation.

But if Bush is willing to jeapordize national security and American prosperity in even a small way for the sake of his allies in the domestic tree-cutting industry, it's by no means hard to believe he's willing to wreak environmental havoc for the same reasons.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ARLEN, BARACK, PARIS, AND MORE. Packed with fightin' Dems, restive Republicans, and a whole slew of would-be presidential candidates, 2005 is sure to be an exciting political year. Terence Samuel offers a countdown of the top twenty reasons political junkies should be looking forward to the new year.

--Sam Rosenfeld

STALLING TIME. Kevin Drum observes:

"Staying the course" is the worst possible strategy we can follow in Iraq. We either need to commit enough troops to get the job done or we need to pull out. Since the Bush administration isn't willing to do the former, the only option left is the latter. We should no longer be asking American soldiers to pay the price for Don Rumsfeld's vanity and George Bush's stubbornness.

Mark Kleiman comments:

I'm not sure he's right, though. Is it obvious that staying in Iraq for 10 years has worse consequencs than pulling out? And if the best strategy, all things considered, is to commit enough resources to do the job right, then why shouldn't we be demanding exactly that?

I normally criticize the liberal instinct to try and dodge tough choices on national security issues, but right now I think dodging the question is the precise right thing to do. Several months ago, it would have been nice for the Democrats to vigorously seize one or the other horn of that dilemma, and deciding which horn to seize would have been an important part of that. But at the moment we're less than six weeks away from an Iraqi election that will significantly change the situation. Not in the sense Bush is promising, where the vote somehow solves our problems, but simply in the sense that our problems will be very different depending on how things turn out.

Right now, the best thing to do probably is to "stay the course" until January 30, and start reassessing the situation depending on what happens as the new government takes shape in February. At that point, we ought to decide to either invest more in this venture, or else to invest less and start going home. But December 23, 2004 is a very bad moment at which to try and make that decision.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE ON YOUR OWN SOCIETY. Bush's latest salvo in the creation of an ownership society where everyone is on their own will be keenly felt by college students next year, who will see a reduction in eligibility for financial aid and reduced Pell Grants. From today's New York Times comes this news:

College students in virtually every state will be required to shoulder more of the cost of their education under new federal rules that govern most of the nation's financial aid.

Because of the changes, which take effect next fall and are expected to save the government $300 million in the 2005-6 academic year, at least 1.3 million students will receive smaller Pell Grants, the nation's primary scholarship for those of low income, according to two analyses of the new rules.

In addition, 89,000 students or so who would otherwise be getting some Pell Grant money will get none, the analyses found.

"Season's greetings from Uncle Sam," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, which conducted one of the analyses and represents about 1,800 colleges and universities. "Your student aid stocking is going to be a little thinner next year."

Beyond the implications for Pell Grants, the new rules are expected to have a domino effect across almost every type of financial aid, tightening access to billions of dollars in state and institutional grants and, in turn, increasing the reliance on loans to pay for college. Taken together, many education experts say, the consequences for the nation's core financial aid programs are among the most substantial in a decade.

It's very important if you are trying to create a society where no one expects government help that you first teach the young that they are going to have to do everything on their own and finance their own educations through debt-instruments, such as credit cards and student loans, rather than relying on any sort of collective assistance program, such as federal grants. You might think that reducing aid for young people to go to college would negatively impact the nation's economic future by reducing pathways into the middle-class and the number of skilled workers in the labor force. But it's quite essential to the ongoing Republican effort to re-educate the American public toward a more individualistic philosophy of government that the citizenry be taught early that they can expect no outside assistance and that as soon as they leave the parental nest, they are really and truly on their own.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IN OTHER NEWS. As we look back on the year that was, it's clear that the Sturm und Drang of the campaign season and such blockbuster news events as Janet Jackson's exposed breast helped to overshadow some important, under-reported stories. Prospect staff writers offer four news stories -- two campaign-related, two pertaining to important international issues -- that never got the coverage or follow-up they deserved.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE DIAMOND-ORSZAG ALTERNATIVE. (Updated, correction below). Those of us who think there's a need for a liberal alternative to the Bush Social Security phase-out plan may want to take a look at the CBO's new analysis (PDF) of the proposal that's been put forward by Brookings' Peter Diamond and Peter Orszag. This is basically an effort to fully-fund projected benefits without any major changes to the structure of the program. Perhaps its most noteworthy feature, however, is that it attempts to do this while simultaneously just writing off the trust fund that Social Security has accumulated since the early 1980s, rather than simply insisting that the general fund repay its obligations rather than keep giving tax cuts to the rich. There are some policy reasons to think that's a good idea (and some reasons to think it's a bad idea) but it's pretty terrible to concede so much to the Greenspan/Bush shell game.

Leaving the purported political necessity of putting an alternative plan on the table, I think looking at this proposal tends to illustrate the general lack of a policy rationale for trying to "fix" Social Security at this point. The Diamond-Orszag plan doesn't differ significantly from the status quo until the mid-2040s because that's how far off this grave problem we're supposed to be fixing is. But as I've been saying, it's not actually within the capacity of the CBO (or the Social Security Administration or anyone else) to accurately project macroeconomic trends forty years in the future. Having a big legislative fight right now about how to respond to a problem that may or may not arise several decades from now is a questionable use of the congress' time. The reasonable thing to do would be to work on the short-term budget deficit first, the medium-term crisis posed by rising health care costs second, and deal with Social Security's hypothetical budget imbalance if and when it actually occurs.

UPDATE: It's been brought to my attention that this gloss of the Diamond-Orszag plan is misleading in several respects. It does not "write off" the trust fund, and does contain important pre-2040 changes including revenues enhancements, higher disability benefits, survivor benefits, low income worker benefits, and expands the system to cover some new classes of employees, as well as the beginnings of other adjustments in benefit levels. Apologies to readers and after the holidays I'll try and write a more complete (and more accurate) account of the plan.

--Matthew Yglesias

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS. Steve Sailer has responded to Garance Franke-Ruta’s blog item about him by promoting on his Web site an “article” about her and The American Prospect that was originally published on the Web by an individual purporting to be named Ana Sofia. Further, Sailer has repeated the charges in this article and sent links to it to the New York Daily News.

Consequently we believe it is necessary to inform the internet community and journalists doing web research on Franke-Ruta and/or Sailer that the article in question was written with malicious and defamatory intent and that any reproduction of the article will constitute a participation in libel for which the reproducer can be held responsible. The information in that article is false.

The article by “Ana Sofia” was based on allegations made by one Louis E.V. Nevaer, who operates the Web site in question. We have good reason to believe that Ms. “Sofia” is, in fact, Nevaer. In addition, Nevaer has a lengthy legal history. He was arrested last month on felony stalking charges stemming from a case being prosecuted by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. He has been held in police custody since that time on $1 million bail, according to the San Francisco Police Department. The alleged victims in that case, Trenton Norris and Scott Wiener, are two attorneys in San Francisco who previously provided pro-bono legal services to a non-profit organization that represented a former partner of Nevaer’s in a domestic violence case against Nevaer. Nevaer has signaled an intention to plead not guilty; his motion to reduce bail was denied on Dec. 14.

Beyond that, two domestic violence cases were filed against Nevaer in 1998, by different individuals, and since then Nevaer has had five separate civil harassment cases filed against him (two in 2004 and three in 1999) and been sued for libel (in 1998). The Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, has approved multiple restraining orders against Nevaer as part of these cases. (Records of all these cases are available free of charge from The San Francisco Superior Court Electronic Information Center.)

Additionally, Nevaer is currently the subject of a civil stalking and defamation suit, available through PACER, filed in United States District Court, Northern District of California, on behalf of Norris. There is no record at PACER that Nevaer has responded to this complaint despite being served with a summons to respond by the court.

The Prospect has taken the appropriate legal steps against Nevaer to ensure that he not persist in spreading these defamatory and false allegations. Any individual or organization who reproduces his false allegations may face similar action.

-- The editors.

A FESTIVUS MIRACLE. Having aired their grievances loudly, American women appear to have won their holiday-season wrestling match with the Transportation Security Adminstration, which now promises to do a bit less prodding into the bosoms of the womenfolk:

Airport security screeners this week will be instructed not to touch women passengers between their breasts as part of the new pat-down procedures, the Transportation Security Administration said today.

The agency said it is making a modification to its new searching methods that began in September after more than 400 passengers -- mostly women -- formally complained that the experience was invasive, humiliating and even akin to being molested.

This is a real and welcome Christmas present for the millions of travellers flying home for the holidays. Now if only they'd start providing disposable paper slippers at the X-ray counters so that you don't have to tread barefoot on dirty, wet carpets when you send your shoes through, we'd almost be a civilized country again.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. KRAUTHAMMER. Forget “apartheid in reverse” – the war being waged against Christmas in this country is just straight-up apartheid. It’s a pitched battle, and Matthew Yglesias understands the stakes.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BUSH'S DETAIL-FREE PLAN. The Bush administration, which knows a thing or two about how to persuade/bully a reluctant public into going along with radical plans to change America despite the absence of supporting evidence of a need for such changes, is apparently going to continue its push for Social Security reform without getting into the details:

President Bush will spearhead an election-style public relations campaign early next year to try to convince Americans that Social Security is in urgent need of change but will keep dollar and cent details deliberately vague, analysts and officials say.

With Bush's political capital riding on a successful overhaul of the popular retirement program, the White House and its allies plan to bombard the public with presidential speeches, television and radio ads, newspaper op-ed articles and grass-roots rallies between now and early 2005.

"It's going to be a battle royal, very much like an election campaign but over an issue rather than a candidate," said Stephen Moore, executive director of Club for Growth, a Republican group that hopes to spend $15 million on a media campaign backing the White House....

The administration, long known for its secrecy, will likely keep details away from opponents, until a bill emerges possibly as late as April.

"The initial focus of the campaign is that we have to do reform. But they don't want a lot of details out there," said Mike Tanner of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that is preparing to distribute 25,000 Social Security guides to help community leaders shape public opinion for Bush....

By focusing on principles rather than details, analysts said the White House would have an easier time rallying popular support necessary to win a majority of votes in Congress.

"This is about winning, and Bush can't afford to lose."

Given that the Washington Post has already reported that "74 percent think the system faces either major problems or is in crisis," it would seem imperative for the Dems not just to argue against but to try to neutralize that perception by proposing a specific, easy-to-understand plan of their own to "save Social Security." Either way, they're going to have to get out in front of the president on this or they will, I fear, get steamrolled. And they are going to have to get cracking quick.

Expanding on what I wrote earlier, it seems to me the best way to fight back here is the tri-partite strategy of NEUTRALIZE-OPPOSE-PROPOSE. 1) Dems need to neutralize and address the perception that there's a problem by proposing some kind of Social Security fix, even if this bill is basically just cosmetic. The online Post headline this morning, like the USA Today one from last week, shows just how solidly this framework is set, at least with copy-writers: "Social Security Fix Favored." "Fix" is a word we're going to hear a lot more of because Bush will keep repeating it and also because it's really short and fits easily into headlines. 2) They need to aggressively oppose and paint Bush's plan to privatize Social Security in the harshest, most negative light possible. (Where, one might ask, are the 25,000 pamphlets being sent to community leaders in defense of Social Security and attacking privatization?) 3) They need to propose and come out strongly for private retirement accounts outside of the Social Security system so that the debate is not between "doing nothing" and "the Bush plan to fix Social Security" but between the Democratic plan to give you new ways to save for retirement and the Bush plan to dismantle a savings instrument you already have.

Former Clinton adviser and Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel seemed to get this in the Post story this morning. "The best critique is a plan of our own rather than a defense of the status quo, and our plan must reveal the weaknesses in Bush's own plan," he told the Post. Reading his statement it occured to me that this whole debate is a huge opportunity for some energetic young Congressperson to take a very public role opposing the president and boosting his or her national profile, and I don't see why that person shouldn't be Emanuel. Still in his early-to-mid 40s, he's young enough to have credibility talking about this from the perspective of the generation likely to be impacted (good message-messenger unity), he's well-spoken on television, tough as nails, and has a reputation for being aggressive as all get out. Plus he seems to get it, at least from a political perspective.

As for the deep skepticism about Social Security's future among the young, let me suggest one way in which the Democrats can revive their faith. I too am skeptical that Social Security is going to be there 35-40 years from now when I need it, paying out the sums promised me by the Social Security Administration. But it's not because I need to be re-educated and taught the facts about the program. I know the facts. I don't believe Social Security will be there for the simple reason that the Democratic Party has lost political ground in every election save one (1992) since I've been old enough to vote, and has consistently lost on most of the major issues they've fought against the Republicans on in the past four years. I'm skeptical about the future of Social Security because I don't see a political party that's strong enough to defend Social Security against another 40 years of organized Republican assault on the program. I know that, left unmolested, the program would likely be there for me. This isn't a problem of factual understanding, but of political faith.

If the Democrats are going to lose on this one -- and the fact that we're even having this debate here in what's nearly 2005 is a symptom of how just much ground the Dems have already lost on it since 1992 -- I'd rather they lose sooner rather than later so I can know where I stand and how to plan for my future. But if the Democrats can fight and win on this one, they have an opportunity to renew faith in the Social Security system -- and, by extension, in their own party -- simply by successfully defending it from assault. If the Democrats can demonstrate that there is still a powerful constituency for Social Security, they can renew the program politically. If they can turn it into an issue that makes Republicans lose seats in 2006, they can begin to turn the political tide that's been pushing them out to sea. They will be back in the game, and they will prove, to the whole generation that comes after them, that messing with Social Security really is like trying to grab hold of that crackling, electrified third rail.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JACK THE GIANT. Michael Tomasky honors the late great Jack Newfield, tireless investigative reporter and trailblazing pioneer of advocacy journalism.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT'S HE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? Chuck Hagel's on-again off-again strident criticism of the Bush foreign policy is really nothing new, but the latest episode does contain one interesting development:

"I went through one of these wars," he said.  As a member of the Senate, he said, "I am not going to stand back and allow it to happen again."

That at least sounds like a promise to try and do something instead of just complaining on talk shows from time to time. The Republican congressional majority isn't so overwhelming that Republican critics of the president (or, as they prefer to call him "Donald Rumsfeld") and his policies couldn't join forces with the Democrats and try to force some changes.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TOOTHLESS TIGERS AND "TORT REFORM". Just as the revelations about Vioxx and Celebrex remind us of how toothless the FDA has become, Republicans are pushing for tort reform legislation that will ensure Americans lack the ability to sue drug companies for damages incurred from their harmful products. Robert Reich fills us in on the steady erosion of any and all effective public safeguards under Republican leadership.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BARNES' CATCH-22. According to Fred Barnes, Harry Reid doesn't count as genuinely pro-life even though he opposed legal abortions because his opposition to legal abortions hasn't sufficiently upset other liberals. It's an excellent Catch-22 -- if we all get mad that the Democrats picked a pro-life leader, that shows the party is extreme, fanatical, intolerant, etc. But if we don't get mad, that shows that he isn't "really" pro-life.

--Matthew Yglesias

EVALUATING DNC CHAIRS. Via Josh Marshall, I came across this Wall Street Journal profile of Steve Rosenthal, the political chief of Americans Coming Together. Rosenthal, according to the Journal, has some ideas about the primary calendar:

He suggests Democrats place the five closest states from the previous general election (Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, New Mexico, and Wisconsin) first in the 2008 primary calendar to help tune up for fall battles.

I agree with Josh that this is a pretty smart idea for the Democrats. And I think you could take it even further. Two points. First, a party that was thinking long-term and strategically about how to become a majority party would make a habit of this practice -- of continually shifting the primary calendar every cycle to put whatever states were closest in the last election at the top of the list for the next one. Such a schedule would put a premium on Democrats who fit the "persuader" type, who can win back the voters who in many respects should be voting for their party, but for various reasons did not.

Second, I think a stated willingness to reform the primary calendar, either a la Rosenthal or with some other system of rotation, should be considered a threshold qualification of any aspiring party chairman who wants to earn the "reformer" label. There are lots of things the party chairman doesn't have a lot of influence over and can't really be held accountable for. But this is one of the things he or she does have influence over. And the New Hampshire and Iowa potentates who insist, against all logic and reason, that they should be first on the schedule are no less a part of the party's problem than the Beltway class that gets so much grief.

So who among the candidates supports changes to the primary calendar? E-mail me links if you've got'em, at nconfessore-at-gmail.com.

--Nick Confessore

DEATH PENALTY APOLOGETICS.Yonatan Lupu has a thoughtful piece up on TNR about the utility of the UN’s refusal to second personnel from the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals to help train Iraqi Judges who will preside over the trials of Saddam Hussein and others at the Iraqi Special Tribunal. At the core of the UN’s objections to the court is a principled opposition to the death penalty.

Writes Lupu:

The Times and Human Rights Watch are right that the death penalty spat is partially to blame for the shoddy state of the tribunal. The problem is, they're wrong about who is to blame for the death penalty spat. It's true that Iraqis could have--and probably should have--given in on capital punishment. But at the same time, the United Nations should have recognized that no matter how strongly one feels about the death penalty, there are more important issues. And conducting fair, legitimate trials in Iraq is one of them.

Lupu could not be more correct. To make matters worse, as I’ve mentioned before, European countries have even refused to send teams of forensic archeologists to exhume the mass graves because that would be contributing to a process that results in the death penalty.

On this blog, I’ve made the same argument as Lupu— and received angry letters from readers, who, like I, oppose the death penalty for moral and practical reasons. No doubt Lupu’s inbox will fill up as well, but the point he stresses is important: In the isolated case of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, one’s opposition to the death penalty must be weighed against the potential for good that can result from an Iraqi judiciary well trained in the intricacies of international humanitarian and human rights law.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

POLITICAL CAPITAL. If this Washington Post account is correct, some congressional Democrats are actually taking Bush's soi-disant electoral mandate for ending Social Security as we know it seriously as a consideration in formulating legislative strategy. That's just dumb. Much as the president may like to boast that "This is an issue on which [he] campaigned," it simply wasn't. Anyone whose ears have been functioning for the past twelve months knows perfectly well that the Bush campaign was heavily focused on foreign policy, moral values, and John Kerry's putative flip-flops. Insofar as Bush campaigned on any economic policy issue at all it was the permanent expansion of his tax cuts. Indeed, Bush hasn't even outlined a proposal to support now and he's apparently taken a principled stand against the idea that he ever needs to put specifics on the table. The Social Security campaign hasn't yet begun.

The same story also indicates that such scant public support as exists for the Bush Social Security phase-out is tied to the fact that "A strong majority of respondents, 63 percent, do not think Social Security will have enough money to pay the benefits they are entitled to." According to the Congressional Budget Office's overly pessimistic set of assumptions, this is simply false for anyone over the age of 29. This, to me, drives home the need for liberals to put the alleged "crisis" in perspective. I liked Peter Orzag's flat tire analogy, but it doesn't go far enough. Bush isn't trying to fix a tire by replacing the car, he's trying to fix the tire by destroying the car. It's as if we were to respond to the "insolvency" of the federal general fund by eliminating the government.

--Matthew Yglesias

IS IT OVER? It appears that Democrat Christine Gregoire has achieved a stunning reversal in the hand recount for the Washington state gubernatorial race, and has defeated Republican candidate Dino Rossi by, um, 8 votes.

Chris Bowers argues that, since Gregoire is the one with a lawsuit pending that could only stand to increase her lead, this race really is finally over. He’s been following this closer than I have, but I’m skeptical of any “stick a fork in it” declarations when it comes to Republicans losing close recount fights. They tend to raise a ruckus:

Neither King County nor the state Republican Party could confirm the recount results that led to the Democrats' analysis. GOP officials have said they were likely to take the matter to court in the event of a Gregoire win.

…

About 350 people gathered Tuesday to show support for Rossi in front of the Supreme Court, at a rally sponsored by a conservative talk-radio station.

The crowd chanted "No more fraud!" They held signs saying "Welcome to Ukraine" and wore orange, a tribute to the signature color of demonstrators in Ukraine who protested a fraud-marred election there.

Assuming Rossi eventually does concede, he’s presumably the top Republican contender to take on Maria Cantwell in her 2006 Senate re-election bid.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE ZIONIST-CRUSADER ALLIANCE REALIZED. Remember when we were meant to believe that the abuse at abu Ghraib was confined to a few renegade soldiers who merely humiliated (rather than abused) detainees with impunity during a relatively short period of time? Of course, as we all now know, that turned out to be a big lie, and this Washington Post scoop provides further evidence that detainee abuse at abu Ghraib continued for a long while after Lyddie England’s amateur photo-shoot.

While the Taguba, Schlesinger and Fay reports may have opened our imaginations to the various techniques employed for interrogation and torture, the Post reports on one particularly disturbing innovation.

The documents disclosed by a coalition of groups that had sued the government to obtain them make it clear that both regular and Special Forces soldiers took part in the abuse, and that the misconduct included shocking detainees with electric guns, shackling them without food and water, and wrapping a detainee in an Israeli flag.

Based on what this Israeli Shin-Bet interrogator had to say, I harbor serious doubts that wrapping a prisoner in an Israeli flag helped produce any actionable intelligence. What is less doubtful is how this may have helped to confirm the darkest fears of those whose country we occupy, who see the invasion of Iraq as part of some larger Zionist-Crusader alliance to suppress Muslims around the world.

With anti-Semitic conspiracy theories already running so rampant in the Middle East, and with a population deeply resentful of both the United States and Israel, it is hard to imagine an interrogation technique that could be more counterproductive to American interests in Iraq.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE MOVING GOALPOSTS. The New York Times's Richard Stevenson ably uses the "news analysis" format to cut through some of the cant that's surrounded US Iraq policy from the beginning:

For a year, the administration has suggested that Iraq would move closer to stability as it reached one milestone after another: the capture of Saddam Hussein; the handover of sovereignty and the appointment of an interim government; the deployment of Iraqi security forces; the military campaign to expel the insurgents from strongholds like Falluja; and the first round of elections next month.

Yet most of those milestones have passed with little discernible improvement in the security situation. Now some analysts are concerned that the elections could make the political situation in Iraq even more unstable by producing an outcome in which the Sunni minority feels so marginalized by the Shiite majority that it fuels not just further violence against Americans and Iraqis working with them but also more intense sectarian strife or even civil war.

At this point, I think that the hope for the elections has to be not that they'll drain political support for the insurgency, but that they'll create a government that's at least regarded as more legitimate by Iraq's Shiite majority. Both the CPA and the Allawi-led interim government have had an odd relationship with the Shiite clerical and political leadership which has advocated against resisting the United States but hasn't been very enthusiastic about us either. Relatively few Iraqi Shiites seem motivated to put their lives on the line for the sake of the American occupation, but they might be willing to do so for their religious leaders.

The alternative possibility that no one's really talking about, however, is that the election results themselves could become a bone of contention between different groups inside the US-led political process, with accusations of fraud and intimidation flying back and forth. Something like that could cause our efforts to totally collapse. It's also possible that the post-election government will try and organize a hasty departure for American troops and simply hope that the integration of party-affiliated militias into the government will sufficiently boost the capacity of Iraqi security forces to get along without us. Or, at least, to get along just as poorly without us as they're doing with us. Either way, while this data about American public support for staying the course is interesting, the real issues here have to do with Iraqi politics.

--Matthew Yglesias

TIME FOR HIM TO GO. William Safire's last column was pretty bad, but today's is just pathetic. First he admits he underestimated how long it would take to win in Iraq. Then:

In return for today's grudging concession of tactical misjudgment, however, I claim this expectation: When and if we discover hidden supplies of germ weapons in Iraq or Syria, and as future confessions reveal the extent of connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam, the legion of war critics will forthrightly admit their certitude was misplaced.

Yeah...that's the ticket, it's the war critics whose certitude is misplaced. After all, those WMD will be turning up any day now.

--Matthew Yglesias

TOM DELAY AGAINST THE APPEASERS. Apparently our illustrious House majority leader believes that critics of Donald Rumsfeld are providing aid and comfort to our enemies in a time of war:

What worries me is that we are aiding and abetting the enemy," DeLay told Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was filling in on Sean Hannity's ABC Radio network broadcast.

Without naming names, DeLay pointed the finger at "all these naysayers" who he said "constantly criticize and call everything a mistake."

The repeated attacks on Rumsfeld are only emboldening terrorists and their allies, the Texas conservative said.

[...]

DeLay complained that "most of those who are criticizing [Rumsfeld], starting with the national media, never wanted us in the war to begin with. And then you have a lot of these Democrats who voted against the war. They're the appeasers ..."

This is probably so obvious it's not worth anyone's time to point out, but a 20-second Nexis search will yield plenty of evidence that Tom DeLay knows a thing or two about emboldening an enemy and "call[ing] everything a mistake" in a time of war. As he told Tim Russert in May of 1999, regarding the war in Kosovo:

I am opposed to this policy. I think it's a flawed policy. It was flawed going in. We haven't been told the truth about what's going on. This administration told us it would just be a couple of days of bombing. Milosevic would come to the table. If that didn't happen, it would be a couple of more days. And now they're saying that we've got to be in there to win to save face. Well, they have been proven wrong every day, and even the bombing has not made much difference other than weaken Milosevic's ability to defend his nation. But they have strengthened the resolve of the Serbian people. [italics added]

MR. RUSSERT: Peter King, fellow Republican in Congress, said that you view Kosovo as Impeachment II. You didn't get Bill Clinton the first time, you want to get him now. Barney Frank, the Democrat, said, "In Tom DeLay's eyes, hatred of Clinton is the dominant emotion." Why do you dislike the president so much?

REP. DeLAY: I prayed for the president. I prayed for the president this morning. I don't--it's not that I dislike the president.

MR. RUSSERT: You don't like him.

REP. DeLAY: It's not that I don't dislike him.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you respect him?

REP. DeLAY: I don't respect the president, but I don't agree with the president either. I think this president is one of the most ineffective presidents of my lifetime. His foreign policy is disaster, not just Kosovo but China, North Korea, the Middle East. He has put--he has hollowed out our forces while he's running around having these adventures all over the world.

We're right now 18,000 sailors short, over 700 pilots short. We're supposed to have 1,000 cruise missiles. We have less than 70 and no production line to build more. And yet, he is sending our boys to Kosovo. The majority leader flew to Kosovo on a plane with a Bradley fighting vehicle and was told by some of the crewmen that was going to Kosovo that they had not even fired live rounds. We don't have the wherewithal to even provide ammunition for our soldiers to be trained and practice with before they go into harm's way. This is just a horrible, horrible situation.

I'm utterly certain that one could find examples of more vociferous "naysaying" on DeLay's part if one devoted, say, two minutes to the task. But as I said, why bother? His latest comments are as unsurprising as they are disgusting.

--Sam Rosenfeld

HANDING THE BATON TO THE PROS. One thing to recall about all this intra-blogosphere chatter on Social Security is that none of the chatterers are experienced political strategists or policy makers. Peter Orszag is. Here's his take:

"Social Security is like a car with a flat tire," said Peter Orszag, an economist at the liberal Brookings Institution and adviser in the Clinton White House. "There is a problem. We need to fix the flat tire. But we don't need to replace the car."

This is what effective rhetoric looks like. He's using simple, clear, understandable language and no confusing numbers. He doesn't deny there's a problem, but he puts it into perspective as being relatively minor. The simile makes the Bush plan look like overkill -- you wouldn't junk your car just because it got a flat -- while at the same time framing the problem as something small and fixable and familiar. Everyone's changed a flat tire, after all. Overall, this is a great way of saying there is no permanent crisis, just a routine but minor problem along the road with a program that's otherwise holding up very well.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DON'T INDULGE THEM. I love E.J. Dionne's writing as much as anybody, but I wonder if he lends just a bit too much credibility to the ludicrous "Christmas under siege" hysteria currently being stoked by the usual culture-war suspects by engaging in a reflective philosophical discussion of the issue in his column today. The bloviations of Bill O'Reilly and co. really don't deserve such indulgence. Much more appropriate than Dionne's sober essay is Frank Rich's hard-hitting column on the right-wing mau-mau masters emboldened by the election results and looking for new fights:

In the latest and most bizarre twist on this theme, even Christmas is now said to be a target of the anti-Christian mob. "Are we going to abolish the word Christmas?" asked Newt Gingrich, warning that "it absolutely can happen here." Among those courageously leading the fight to save the holiday from its enemies is Bill O'Reilly, who has taken to calling the Anti-Defamation League "an extremist group" and put the threat this way: "Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest -- and has to be dealt with."

...

What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

That's right, but not the whole story. More than simply trumping up an imagined anti-Christmas enemy to marginalize opponents of the Christian right agenda, the "save Christmas" brigade is concocting this threat in order to perpetuate a sense of imminent cultural imperilment among ordinary Americans, the better to stoke the politically beneficial fires of cultural resentment and What's the Matter With Kansas?-style anti-elitism. This isn't exactly rocket science. (It's a curious sight indeed to see some right-wing Jewish commentators manfully playing along in this whole charade, whether it's Michael Medved defending The Passion or Charles Krauthammer condemning of the dastardly assault on Christmas.)

With the Christian right seizing the post-election moment on all fronts, with the Senate majority leader refusing to acknowledge that AIDS cannot be transmitted through sweat out of fealty to the conservative Christian movement, with a broken and battered Arlen Specter soon to be flanked on the Judiciary Committee by two cultural right radicals, I rather wish a thoughtful Christian liberal like Dionne would refrain from lending this faux controversy legitimacy it doesn't deserve. These guys are doing just fine at the moment and aren't in need of any assistance.

UPDATE: Just scroll down and take a look at these headlines to see what I mean about the hysteria being concocted around this issue. Do mainstream Americans have some legitimate grievances with cultural elites in this country? Yes. Do Democrats need to do a better job of recognizing and grappling with those grievances -- even the illegitimate ones? Yes. Is Christmas really under assault in America? No. That's not even a question worth taking seriously. (Thanks to J.R..)

--Sam Rosenfeld

BADR CORPS: THEN AND NOW. My fellow liberal magazine Iraq-bloggers Spencer Ackerman and Brad Plumer have both noted Abdul Aziz Hakim's trial balloon to have the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) deploy "100,000 militia fighters to protect polling stations" during the January vote, which is expected to be won by the list Hakim heads. Brad and Spencer both note that an election that kicks off with a mass mobilization by a Shiite fundamentalist militia is unlikely to win hearts and minds among the Sunni Arab public.

I'm more excited about the opportunity for this week's round (see earlier episodes) of "remember when." This time our guest will be the U.S. Department of State and their classic press release "Rumsfeld Warns Syria, Iranian Badr Corps Not to Interfere in Iraq":

Asked more about the Badr Corps, Rumsfeld said there are reports of numbers in the hundreds operating in Iraq and more on the other side of the border. He described the corps as "the military wing of the Supreme Council on Islamic Revolution in Iraq" and said it is "trained, equipped and directed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard." . . .

Rumsfeld said the coalition would hold the Iranian government responsible for the corps' actions, and armed Badr corps members found in Iraq "will have to be treated as combatants."

Whether or not the Badr Corps spends Election Day providing security and incidental pro-SCIRI intimidation, or just unofficial incidental pro-SCIRI intimidation, this particular Iranian "trained, equipped, and directed" militia is almost certain to be a key security institution in post-election Iraq, since SCIRI will be very influential in the new government and Rumsfeld has failed to bequeath Iraq anything like the requisite number of competent and loyal troops. Incidentally, one doesn't hear much any more about the military effectiveness of Ahmed Chalabi's Free Iraqi Forces, despite Rumsfeld's best efforts to put them in charge.

--Matthew Yglesias

REGARDING HENRY. Francis X. Clines has a nice “Editorial Observer” piece in The New York Times in which he suggests that Senate Democrats setting up their new investigative operation should take a look at the work of Rep. Henry Waxman’s office to learn how effective minority muckraking is done. This is a very good suggestion. Waxman is an incredible asset to the party, and has been for years. The reports his office puts out have often had a real impact -- they're not just drops in the well. Byron Dorgan and his staff should take some notes.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SENSE ON IRAN. Having authored a brief hit piece on the group, it would be churlish not to note that the Committee on the Present Danger has released a sensible report (via my friend Rachel Friedman at The Corner, who does not approve) on nudging Iran toward regime change through constructive engagement with the Iranian people. This is the kind of approach that has more in common with the patient, successful approaches we've taken to Serbia and Ukraine than to the Iraq War and some of the MEK-related schemes I've heard tossed around.

The fly in the ointment here, as far as I'm concerned, is that the payoff of this sort of thing is unpredictable; while it might work quickly, it also might work very slowly or not at all. Thus, even a good regime-change policy is no substitute for a real anti-proliferation policy, which still needs to be focused on expanding America's willingness to engage Tehran and Europe's willingness to wield economic sticks. Even an imperfect Iranian disarmament-and-inspections deal would buy a considerable amount of time during which we could hope other policy initiatives would bear fruit.

--Matthew Yglesias

POLLING SOCIAL SECURITY. Looking through the latest Washington Post poll, I'm starting to think that the political challenge of taking on Bush's Social Security elimination "plan" may not be quite the uphill battle some of us have been assuming. The public disapproves of Bush's handling of Social Security by a 38-53 margin, which comes in the context of generally widespread skepticism about George W. Bush's domestic policies (37-56 on health care, 46-51 on the economy) and a basically even division about the man himself.

Indeed, disapproval of Bush on the Social Security front extends to every age group. My fear had been that the GOP had a secret reservoir of support on this issue because generally anti-Bush under-30s have historically had a soft spot for ending Social Security. But the issue bleeding seems to have operated in the other direction, with the youngest cohort disliking Bush by the same 38-52 margin as the 65-and-overs. The closest thing to a supportive age cohort is the 31- to 44-year-old group, which disapproves of Bush by a "mere" 39-49. Fortunately, this is the demographic class where the self-interested argument against privatization is at its most obvious. These folks have paid into Social Security all their lives and now Bush wants to cut their benefits to pay for tax cuts to the rich.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE. Since Brad DeLong took me to task as a "he" and since my editors apparently get a fair number of letters in which readers have made the same not unwarranted presumption -- that a person with an uncommon name writing about politics is very likely male -- I felt I should clarify this point: I am not a man (except in the most general, 18th-century, rights-of-man sense). The first name comes from the movie Les Enfants du Paradis and is and has always been a woman's name. Frank Ruta is a man's name, but it is not mine.

The question is often raised why there are so few women bloggers. That's a topic for a longer post some other time, but Brad's post makes me wonder if there hasn't also been some kind of Peter Steiner lack of transparency issue at work here underlying the question.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE POLITICAL PROBLEM WITH FACTS. And following up on these posts, while I commend Matt on putting together a great group of statistics that proves his point about how the Social Security crisis is trumped up -- facts with which, I may add, I have no argument -- I still think it will be exceptionally difficult as a matter of rhetoric and politics to condense these numbers and facts into the kind of explanation your average, kind of out-of-it American voter who pays attention to politics with only one ear and only episodically will instinctively get. George W. Bush's rhetoric about "fixing Social Security" is easy to understand and is in line with a decade's worth of bipartisan framing and rhetoric on this topic. It doesn't even sound very different from Bill Clinton's promise to "save Social Security." That's about as much as a lot of people are going to hear. And there's certainly no counter-message out there yet, what the Congress in recess, the holidays, and the interest groups still gearing up. So this is a good time for some back and forth.

If liberals learned anything from 2004 -- and so many have written and spoken eloquently on this topic -- it is that they have an instinctive overconfidence in the capacity of clear facts, simply presented, to change people's minds and consistently underestimate the power of easy-to-understand rhetoric that doesn't involve a lot of facts and numbers. All I'm saying is that if Democrats have learned anything, this is their chance to show it and come up with a simple, credible message of their own that takes the lessons of 2004 to heart.

Josh Marshall's rhetorical contribution, that this is an effort to "phase out Social Security," strikes me as being on the right track. I happen to be partial to the "if it's confusing, it must be bad" argument, which honors the average, kind of out-of-it voter's inability to wrap their mind around actuarial tables and the distinctions between trust funds and general funds and how rates of productivity growth and GDP impact the program. Mike Tomasky's suggestion that this be addressed in simple, easy-to-understand television ads is also good, as is all of this back and forth.

I want to emphasize that last point again, because some of the least successful arguments during the general election also managed to become incredible popular on liberal Web sites, and I sincerely hope that people in the liberal blogosphere don't get caught up in similar rhetorical eddies during this debate. There is a very real danger of people in online communities arriving at an enthusiastic consensus about a position that they find pleasing but that doesn't actually help them accomplish anything. It'll be important to avoid that sort of satisfying yet ineffective message on Social Security privatization.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHY THE CRISIS MATTERS. Readers should check out Brad Delong's response to Garance's reasonable concerns about whether, after years of bipartisan consensus that we need to act to solve the Social Security crisis, it's really viable to start arguing that there's no crisis. But that was a policy response, and Garance was largely raising a political question. Prospect editor Michael Tomasky today argues that for political purposes all these fancy charts will do no good -- it's all about self-interest, which suggests an argument centered around Bush's looming benefit cuts.

Looking for a higher synthesis here, the way I see it is that making the crisis case is the necessary foreground for making the benefit-cuts case. I was talking to some libertarians last night who expressed incredulity that I actually believed I will be drawing full benefits under an un-reformed system when I reach full-eligibility age in 2048 even though the Congressional Budget Office's overly pessimistic projections indicate that I'll be able to do just that. As long as people think the system will "go bankrupt" sometime in the reasonably near future, then arguments about benefit cuts won't get you anywhere -- reduced benefits plus a chance to earn some money in the stock market sounds a lot better than no benefits whatsoever.

This isn't an either/or choice -- liberals need to simultaneously appeal to individual self-interest (Bush's favored tactic of finding examples of "ordinary people" to illustrate his point would work nicely here) with efforts to reframe the conversation from "how do we solve to crisis?" to "should we abolish a healthy and successful program and replace it with something less generous?"

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THERE IS NO SOCIAL SECURITY CRISIS. Matthew Yglesias is going to say this very slowly: There. Is. No. Social. Security. Crisis. Unless the rest of Matt's age cohort understands that, Social Security is doomed.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: HARRY AND LOUISE REDUX. So there's no Social Security crisis. What makes you think that fact will get in the way of George W. Bush's quest to abolish Social Security? Michael Tomasky explains why the truth of the matter isn't enough, and how the battle will have to be fought: with a couple at a kitchen table.

--Jeffrey Dubner

REAL SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM. While everyone's talking about Social Security reform, it might be a good moment for the Democrats to reach out to a constituency they'd like to make headway with, whose votes have been critical in the past, and with whom they are on increasingly shaky ground: mothers. Social Security as it currently exists doesn't do much for stay-at-home moms. The Older Women's League has been talking about this for years. But it really hits home when you talk to someone in her mid-60s, as I did recently, who's looking at a monthly Social Security check of $300 per month because she spent her prime working years raising kids. No one can live on that.

Stay-at home moms who devote their working lives to child-rearing get screwed under the current system. How is adding more complications to the system in the form of private accounts going to help them? That strikes me as a question worth asking -- and not least because this group is becoming part of the GOP base.

Further, given that the majority of Social Security beneficiaries are women -- "60 percent of beneficiaries over 65 and 72 percent of recipients over 85," according to OWL -- this whole upcoming reform discussion should have some kind of gendered component. According to OWL:

Today in America, the average woman age 65 and over lives six years longer than the average man. As a result, she is typically widowed and living alone. She struggles to make ends meet on an annual income of $15,615 (compared with over $29,171 for men). During her lifetime she probably spent 17 years caring for children and 18 years caring for elderly parents. Her retirement income is also smaller because she probably did not receive a pension, and was paid less than the average man. As a result, she receives lower Social Security benefits. She spends a higher proportion of her income on housing costs — leaving less for vital necessities such as utilities, medical costs, food, and transportation.

Looked at in the context of these facts, this whole discussion about Social Security privatization is one about the future of American women and who's going to take care of us when we get old. Talking about providing young people with personal accounts is a very different thing than talking about asking 85-year-old women to figure out their finances and not get fleeced by some smooth-talking scam artist on the phone. At least with Social Security, no one can scam you out of it when you're old and disoriented.

Add to this the fact that, despite all the progress women have made in the past 50 years, women still are not as likely to know how to seize control of the reins of their own finances, and you have a prescription for all sorts of unpleasant complications for America's women, and for the doddery, doting grandmothers of the future.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NOW ONLINE! The January print issue of The American Prospect is now available online! We've got Michael Lind, John B. Judis, Ruy Teixeira, and David J. Sirota on the electoral map of 2004 (and 2006 and 2008); Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr on Social Security privatization; Susan Jacoby on the threat of a new kind of Supreme Court conservative; and much more -- including an extensive package on electoral reform, both how far we've come and how much is left to fix. Take a look.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WILL'S CHEAP SHOT. So George Will identifies "Kuttnerism" as the sin of condescension? Robert Kuttner, as you'd imagine, doesn't quite agree. And which is the greater form of condescension -- recognizing bigotry or pooh-poohing it?

--Jeffrey Dubner

DOES BUSH BELIEVE IN THE CRISIS? Following up on the post below and a suggestion from Nick Confessore, I thought it would be instructive to compare the Social Security Administration's economic forecasts on which the alleged "crisis" is based to the administration's own growth forecasts. The SSA says that "the average annual growth in real GDP is projected to be 2.9 percent over the short-range projection period (2004-13), a slower rate than the 3.3 percent average observed over the historical 40-year period (1962-2002)." Meanwhile the White House's Council of Economic Advisors has recently released its own economic forecasts (PDF) for the years 2004-10, concluding that we'll see an average of 3.4 percent growth for that seven-year period.

For the numbers to work out, we'd need to see an extraordinary collapse to 1.87 percent average annual GDP growth for 2011-13. Another way of putting this would be that for five out of the seven years in which their projections overlap, the administration's estimates for productivity growth are higher than those used in the SSA's intermediate forecast. If even the White House doesn't believe the SSA's short-term forecasts (i.e., the ones that are most likely to be accurate) why should the rest of us (and the press and politicians in general) be expected to take their 75-year (and even infinite horizon!) forecasts seriously?

--Matthew Yglesias

SOCIAL SECURITY'S RHETORICAL CRISIS. Though I'd hardly consider myself an "older liberal," I have to disagree with my esteemed younger colleagues Matt Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld about the utility of arguing that there is no Social Security crisis. I seriously doubt that asserting that there is no Social Security crisis will work as a Democratic strategy at this late date, even though it's largely true. It simply won't sound credible. Not after Paul Tsongas founded the Concord Coalition in 1992 with Warren Rudman and ran for office on a platform of fiscal responsibility and saving Social Security from collapse -- a platform widely hailed as being too courageous and truthful to win. Not after the young Democrats at Lead -- or Leave declared that "America's Social Security system is in trouble. It has become an unfair, unsound program... ." Not after the 2030 Center's Hans Riemer won plaudits for launching a Gen-X think tank to, according to a 1999 NPR report, "save Social Security before America's 75 million baby boomers begin retiring." Not after his right-leaning generational compatriots at Third Millenium launched their Campaign to Reform Social Security project. Not after Ross Perot. Not after Bob Kerrey and Warren Rudman wrote in The Washington Post just two years ago that:

the clear danger is that without a free lunch to promise, politicians will fall back on an equally bad option: the Do Nothing Plan. Voters shouldn't let that happen. ...

Doing nothing means deep benefit cuts or steep payroll tax increases for future generations, which is why the Social Security trustees warn that prompt action is essential. ...

Not acting is itself a choice -- one that has grim consequences for today's midlife adults and even bigger ones for their children. Politicians of both parties should get behind specific reform plans or be held accountable for supporting the consequences of the Do Nothing Plan.

The need for Social Security reform is not a Republican rhetorical set-up the Democrats now need to counter-frame. It has been the dominant bipartisan national narrative for more than a decade and I don't think that's the kind of thing that gets successfully reframed during a four- to six-month legislative battle with a powerful president whose party controls both houses of Congress. Just look at the USA Today headline on Thursday: "Bush: It's Time to Fix Social Security." The narrative frame here is already set.

Saying there is no problem with Social Security just allows the Republicans to once again paint the Democrats as the behind-the-times defenders of the status-quo while the Republicans go ahead and take action to fix something that people have been arguing about fixing for decades. Denial will allow the Republicans, once again, to claim the mantle of being the party of political reform. "But he's lying!" may be a common Democratic complaint about the president, but it's not a rhetorical or political strategy. Nor, as we saw on Nov. 2, is it a particularly effective charge.

The Democrats' best option here, it seems to me, begins with what Kerrey and Rudman laid out. The Dems need to come up with an alternative to Bush's plan that can be framed as change and as solving the Social Security problems that they too have been yammering about for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, the seeds of the best counter-argument to Bush's plan that I've heard thus far were scattered about Sebastian Mallaby's Washington Post column this morning, "Trouble with Choices." He argues against Social Security reform on the grounds that people are already overwhelmed by choices and don't actually want that all that many more. I think this is exactly right. Most young people I know don't even understand how Social Security works to begin with, and these folks are about as educated and politically engaged a subset as you're likely to find. All this talk about reform is even more confusing. Matt's strategy posits the existence of an informed, engaged citizenry capable of quickly understanding and eager to learn the actual details of Social Security accounting and budgeting. I think most young people just find this whole topic confusing and boring and guilt-inducing (i.e., you know you should take the time to really understand it but you don't want to), and wish it would just go away. There was no public groundswell for Social Security privatization in 2004, just as there was no public groundswell for deposing Saddam Hussein before Bush brought the issue up, so this is basically another one of those hugely important but complex issues being foisted on a reluctant public by the national GOP leadership. Which means there is no on-the-ground, native interest in this topic sweeping across the nation.

These attitudes, rather than being an obstacle, though, are a huge opportunity for the Democrats. All they need to do is what the GOP did on the Clinton heathcare plan -- which is make the GOP plan permanently associated in the public mind with every one of the negative thoughts people already have about this topic: that it's complicated, it's confusing, it's boring, it's intimidating, it's anxiety-provoking -- and if Bush gets his way, you're going to have to deal with it every year for the rest of your life.

Mallaby is basically arguing (though what follows are my words) that Bush's Social Security plan will replace something that's simple and works well with a system that's as complicated and confusing as doing your own taxes. And who wants to deal with that for the rest of their life? Besides, Mallaby argues, America already has the best public-private retirement system in the world. Social Security is the public part, and if you want private accounts, well, that's what 401(k)s and IRAs are for. Bush's plan will be one more thing to worry about in a world where everyone's got enough on their minds already. Instead of our current public-private system where you're already free to earn and save as much as you want, on top of the existing low-level public baseline, Bush wants a pure-risk, all-private system where there's no baseline at all. He wants to trade simplicity and security for paperwork. Now that strikes me as a argument people will understand.

Besides, if anyone really wanted to fix the private retirement account planning system (and if we're going to enter the private account arena, let's really enter it, I say), they could start by making it mandatory for employers to offer employees the opportunity to buy into 401(k)s before they've worked somewhere for more than one year, and make it easier for people to stick with one account even when they switch jobs. These are retirement planning issues I'm pretty sure young people would get behind. Today's young people live life in the churn, switching jobs every few years, but this widespread ineligibility to participate in company 401(k)s (even without an employer contribution!) before a year of employment can really eat into their ability to plan for the future. For example, if you switch jobs three times in your 20s -- a not uncommon experience -- you can lose 30 percent of your retirement-planning capacity during that decade.

All this would give the Dems a tripartite plan: 1) unite behind a legislative proposal that will show that the Dems are serious about fixing the Social Security crisis; 2) make the Bush plan look as complicated and hated as taxes; and 3) propose novel and desirable and appealing changes to the private retirement account system, and explain why they are vastly superior to Bush's plan for confusing, paperwork-heavy, private accounts.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: AIN'T NO EASY CODE. For every top-secret decoder ring that promises to show the Democrats how to win 100 Senate seats and 538 electoral votes by 2008, there's a debunker ring waiting in the next box of cereal. Our current print issue (now available online!) contains David Sirota's instructions for pulling off red-state conquests -- but after you've read that, take a look at Democratic Leadership Council Policy Director Ed Kilgore's counter-argument asking whether "economic populism" is the answer to all problems.

--Jeffrey Dubner

NO CRISIS. Here's a nice quick response from Nancy Pelosi to the president's comments on Social Security at his press conference today:

"Today, President Bush disingenuously stated that as the first step toward Social Security reform, 'we're going to have to explain to Members of Congress that crisis is here.' Mr. President, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has determined that Social Security is secure for nearly 50 years, without any changes whatsoever. A better first step would be for the President to stop pretending otherwise.

This is good. Framing the question around these 50-year projections is rather silly anyway, but assuming that people continue to discuss the issue in these terms, the next step in debunking the "crisis" language is to stress that even in 50 years when the trust fund is projected to be depleted, the program doesn't somehow all of a sudden stop. Social Security won't "go bankrupt". In fact, at that moment of true, disastrous reckoning around 2042 or 2052 -- the dreaded moment when the trust fund finally disappears, unless of course it doesn't -- the program will pay out benefits that, in real terms, exceed what retirees are receiving now.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE CRYSTAL BALL. For the wonkishly inclined, check out this paper (PDF) from Northwestern's Robert Gordon looking at the Social Security Administration's economic forecasting, which Gordon concludes i's far too pessimistic. Gordon estimates that we'll see GDP growth of around 3.28 percent per year for the next twenty years instead of the SSA's projection of 2.4 percent average annual growth. Unlike the SSA, Gordon doesn't pretend to be able to foresee events in the year 2066, but the clear implication of his work is that the SSA is being systematically too pessimistic.

I don't know if it's in any way possible to accomplish this, but it would be extremely useful if people could get the press to stop treating the SSA long-term economic forecast as if it were the word of an infallible God. It isn't. They change their projections regularly, and have consistently become more optimistic about Social Security's future with each passing year. For dull and technical reasons explained here, it's extremely likely that if we don't change the system at all for a few years and the SSA holds their methodology constant, the forecast is going to be revised in a way that makes the whole alleged problem vanish.

--Matthew Yglesias

RUNAWAY TRAIN. Coverage of yesterday's horrific carnage in Iraq centers around the theme that the insurgency is trying to "derail" Iraq's January elections. That, however, is just an abstraction and a cliché that's served to prevent real analytical thinking about the vote and potential problems with it. The elections certainly won't be "derailed" in the sense of "not held" -- the insurgents simply can't do anything about that no matter how many people they kill. They certainly can depress turnout, especially in the Sunni Arab parts of the country, and they can even kill people on Election Day, but none of that will prevent the election from happening.

On the flipside, insofar as the hope was that the election will derail the insurgency by building Sunni Arab support for the new regime in Iraq, that hope's already been largely dashed. Sunni and Shiite leaders are at odds and have been for some time. The likelihood is that the election will further empower elements of the Shiite communitiy that the Sunni Arabs most fear.

The biggest genuinely open question in my mind concerns the prospects for fraud. Having raised warning signs about this for weeks before Afghanistan's presidential election only to see things go smoothly, Bush's critics seem shy about making the point this time around. It's important to see that these are very different circumstances. There was fraud in Afghanistan -- a lot of it -- but it didn't undermine the legitimacy of Hamid Karzai's election because he was clearly the most popular figure in the race, so the fraud didn't make a difference. Iraq, by contrast, is holding a parliamentary election featuring proportional representation, and it's unlikely that any list will secure an outright majority. That means the ultimate result is much more sensitive to fraud. What's more, the incumbent leader, Iyad Allawi, is expected to lose power to the United Iraqi List, which creates incentives for fraud and could lay the groundwork for a post-election dispute.

Election monitoring, meanwhile, will be scant-to-nonexistent. Beyond outright fraud, you've got party-affiliated militias operating in many cities that will potentially use force or the threat of force to influence the outcome. If all the major contenders accept the results as legitimate then, irrespective of whatever problems may arise, things will likely be okay (by Iraqi standards) and the new government will keep on fighting the insurgents. But if the UIL decides it's been cheated out of its fair share of power, or Allawi decides he's being forced out by an Iranian-orchestrated conspiracy, then things could rapidly deteriorate.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE LAME DUCK'S LAMENT. I've just been reading The Washington Post's writeup of the new, more quarrelsome Republican Congress that Sam linked to earlier, and it struck me that the authors are missing what's probably the key factor here: George W. Bush's lame-duck status. Uncertainty about who the party's leader will be in a few years undermines the power of the current leader, both because he won't be around to reward loyalty and punish defection, and also because it creates incentives for various Republicans to start jockeying to be Bush's successor or line up behind their favorite candidate.

Since Harry Truman, second-term presidents have all tried to eliminate this problem by handing off the nomination to their vice president, and they've invariably succeeded. Dick Cheney, however, has at least implicitly been taking himself out of the running for the 2008 nomination ever since he was first selected. Indeed, this was widely cited as a factor that, in Bush's mind, worked in Cheney's favor. Many of us assumed the plan was to nominate Jeb Bush and keep the dynasty going, but he's bowed out of the sweepstakes. Either man might reconsider and, frankly, I'd be a bit surprised if one doesn't. One way or another, I think Bush is going to discover that if he wants to keep his coalition together, he needs to dedicate a successor in a way that will knock other establishment Republicans out of the race and marginalize the rest as deviationists. Otherwise, it's hard to see how the party can remain united around a legislative agenda but divided about who its leader should be.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEATH AND PREGNANCY. In the predictably gruesome media melee over Scott Peterson's sentencing early last week, I kept feeling vaguely angry that there was such an incredible amount of attention being paid to the Peterson trial. This is to take nothing away from the tragedy of Laci Peterson's death, but the focus seemed to be at the exclusion of any larger conversation on domestic violence or violence against pregnant women. (Notwithstanding my aversion to the so-called "Laci and Connor's Law," i.e., the Unborn Victim of Violence Act, which was not an ode to those murdered, as it pretended to be, but rather a shameless ploy from the Christian conservatives to give rights to the "unborn.") Now the Washington Post has started a brilliant and important, if terribly depressing, series on violence against pregnant women -- homicide being the leading cause of death in pregnant women in several states. You can find today's story, the second in the series, here.

--Sarah Wildman

BUSH, STRETCHING OUT AND GETTING COMFORTABLE. Ah, it’s going to be a great four years. George W. Bush just wrapped up a rare, hour-long, real-deal press conference, without the usual backup from a visiting world leader that he usually relies on when facing the media. Bush’s answers were alternately petulant and philosophical, all delivered in that dependably incoherent manner the American people have come to know, love, and reward with reelection. We’ll have to wait for the official transcript for verbatim quotes, but here are some highlights from my notes:

• Philosophical Bush. The president fielded the first of two questions on Donald Rumsfeld with this rumination, delivered very slooooooowly with lots of emphatic hand gestures: “The Secretary of Defense is a complex job. It’s a complex job in times of peace; and it’s a complex job in times of war.” He answered a question regarding the Bernard Kerik nomination in similar, pedantic man-child fashion: “We’ve vetted a lot of people in this administration. We’ve vetted a lot of people in the first term; and we’ve vetted a lot of people in the second term ... The lesson is to keep on vetting.”
• Sensitive Bush. He answered the second question regarding Rumsfeld this way: “I know Secretary Rumsfeld’s heart. He’s a good, decent man. He’s a caring fellow ... a good human being.” As for the first man whose heart Bush famously assured the world he understood, Vladimir Putin came up early in the press conference. Bush answered a question about the U.S. position on Putin’s recent power grabs in Russia with a rather remarkably tepid acknowledgment of “a difference of opinion” on the matter between the two countries. The important thing to know, Bush reiterated, was that he and Putin had a “good personal relationship,” which is a crucial, crucial thing, given that disagreements can be aired among people with such “close” relationships in a civil and mutually respectful manner. (In other words, his answer wasn’t exactly “freedom is on the march”.)
• Principled Bush. The president got a tad petulant when fielding questions on Social Security. His emphatic response to any and all queries about his position on the subject was an indignant, righteous refusal to answer: “You’re not going to get me to negotiate with myself,” he repeatedly told the perplexed reporters. “I know what you’re trying to get me to do. You’re trying to get me to answer ‘Why this,’ ‘why that,’ to take positions -- don’t bother to ask me.” Rather than merely dodge the questions, Bush seemed intent on staking out an explicit, principled position in favor of dodging the question. There may have been a method to this madness above and beyond Bush’s stated explanation that “Congress writes legislation” and therefore he, as the president, shouldn’t be setting specific guidelines for a Social Security reform proposal. The president isn’t usually a big separation-of-powers, checks-and-balances kind of guy.
• Inexplicable Bush. He fielded a question about the recent revelations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay with some standard-issue boilerplate, then ended his answer with a bizarre assurance: “We’re gonna continue to push this issue hard.” Push what? Prisoner abuse?
• Hubristic Bush. The president, strangely, seemed perhaps at his most passionate and animated when describing his guest-worker proposal and his intention to push for it in Congress, apparently not quite grasping the fact that immigration may turn out to occupy the central axis of intra-GOP conflict this term between Congress and the White House.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SO CLOSE, AND YET SO FAR. There's a curious perversity, or paradox, in how the relatively narrow balance of power in Congress winds up backing the Democrats into precisely the kind of organized timidity the party's grassroots finds so wanting. To put it more succinctly: The congressional Democrats are ineffective in part because the majority seems so tantalizingly within reach. And the very closeness of the balance of power induces the leadership to pursue tactical advances at the expense of strategic ones.

Recall that in the election cycles after 1994, when they lost about 50 House seats -- and the majority -- Democrats started to gain back seats with some regularity. During the first two years of George W. Bush's first term they were only nine seats down, or five wins away from being back in the majority (congressional margins being zero-sum). For senior House Democrats who were around in the days of the Democratic ascendancy, and never really expected to be out in the wilderness for this long, the narrowness of that margin must have had an intoxicating effect. If you squinted a little, if you let yourself be swayed by those poll numbers showing that a majority of Americans in principle agree with Democratic stands on major issues, it was easy to fool yourself into thinking the party was (and is) about to turn the corner.

Why is this important? If you believe the game is pretty close, it follows that you can win elections with a little tweak to the message, a slight alteration of the policy, marginally more fundraising, and a bigger rapid-response team. There's no incentive to throw the long ball, to innovate, to try something completely different. You play it safe. If you're a Democratic leader, and you think you're only a handful of seats away from being back in control, you become afraid to do anything that might bleed five or six seats of what you have now. Perversely you're more fearful -- more paralyzed, more risk-averse -- than if you were, say, 50 or 60 seats down.

The same dynamic occurs, more or less, during the legislative process. Democratic leaders continue to act like the junior partner in some national unity government, where the main purpose of keeping the caucus together seems to be pushing slight changes to awful Republican legislation rather than mounting wedges and laying traps that will help define the political debate down the road and vault the party back into the majority.

Under different political circumstances, this kind of caution might make sense. The problem is that the Republican majority is, in fact, fairly stable, and is likely to remain so for some years. The Democrats will not return to power on the Hill until there is a major change in the underlying political dynamic in this country, a fact which the relative smallness of the GOP majority (by historical standards) tends to obscure. And the only way to effect a major change in the underlying political dynamics is to bet the table -- to really change the order of business. In part, this will likely have to involve a genuine reform agenda, one which requires Democrats to take risks and exercise some self-discipline. (For instance, denying themselves absurd pork-barrel projects, even if hurts some members, the better to make the deficit an albatross around the free-spending GOP Congress' neck.) But winning will also require of the Democratic minority a willingness to suffer tactical defeats in the service of strategic victory. A good example here is, as Josh Marshall has been pointing out, a willingness to sacrifice Democratic members who waver on Social Security abolition, even to work for their defeat if they defect in the coming months and years. Why? Because "[m]aking the elimination of Social Security a strictly Republican gambit raises the political stakes dramatically. Many Republicans will be far more cautious without bipartisan cover. Democrats must deny them even the thinnest of fig leaves. Making it a strictly Republican affair will also provide valuable clarity in the coming election, rather than the muddled picture created by Democratic defections on the 2001 tax bill." Indeed, in the long run it's probably better for the Democrats to lose a few members in 2006 than to allow the GOP that fig leaf. It's a lesson Newt Gingrich understood well and used to his advantage. Indeed, the conservative movement essentially sacrificed a president -- George H.W. Bush -- to enshrine opposition to taxation as a bedrock principal of Republican belief. (If there are any political history buffs out there, I'd be curious to know if conservative anti-tax groups succeeded in knocking off any Republican members who voted for Bush's 1990 tax increase.) I suspect that when the Republicans were in the minority, and especially in 1993, when they were really in the minority -- Bill Clinton in the White House, 82 seats down in the House, 14 down in the Senate -- the very height of the climb back proved liberating.

Let me stress that this is not, or does not have to be, an ideological argument. The problem I'm describing is often pitched as one rooted in attempts at Clintonian "triangulation," but that misses the point. There will be times when it's better to let a member defect rather than lose him or her on Election Day. But there will also be times when allowing defections sets the party back strategically in ways that make it hard to mount an effective fight for power. Good leadership for the Democrats will perforce consist of knowing which is which.

UPDATE: Mark Schmitt has some more thoughts here, along with some well-put caveats about the uses and misuses of party discipline.

--Nick Confessore

MERE IOUS. Reason's Jacob Sollum makes an argument that's key to propping up the notion that there's a Social Security crisis:

[B]y accepting as a fact to be "noted" the claim that "Social Security can pay full benefits for at least 38 years," the story overlooks the crucial point that Social Security benefits are expected to start exceeding payroll taxes 24 years sooner than that. Taxpayers will have to make up the difference one way or another, since there's nothing but government IOUs in the "trust fund."

In non-Social Security contexts we call those IOUs "bonds" and they're considered a perfectly reputable asset. Saying the trust fund's bonds are "nothing but government IOUs" is like saying the cash in my wallet is "nothing put green pieces of paper," my credit card is "nothing but plastic," my bank account is "nothing but a computer file somewhere," or a contract is "nothing but a bunch of ink."

It's true, as Sollum says, that since these bonds are issued by the government "taxpayers" will need to foot the bill to redeem them, but there's a crucial distributive angle here. The trust fund, as set up by Ronald Reagan to ensure Social Security's viability, was created with excess payroll tax revenue, derived primarily from working- and middle-class Americans. The general fund to which the money was lent and which bears the obligation of repaying the debt is financed mainly through income taxes, which fall primarily on the wealthy. The reason the general fund is currently projected to be unable to make good on these payments is that the president has drastically scaled back taxes on the wealthy. Now he'd like to pay for those tax cuts by having the general fund default on its debt to the trust fund. It's not a question of whether "taxpayers" will pay, but a question of which taxpayers will pay.

One also wonders about the impact on the financial markets of the president of the United States and the leaders in Congress adopting the slogan that our bonds are "IOUs" that don't really need to be repayed. Right now the president is financing, among other things, two ongoing wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) by borrowing money. The only reason he's able to do that is that bond purchasers are confident that their money will be repaid with interest. In some sense, of course, we don't really need to repay any of that money; no one is going to arrest the U.S. government for non-payment of debt. But any hint that we were contemplating that course of action would -- rightly -- set off a financial panic.

--Matthew Yglesias

ADMITTING YOU DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM. I got an email today from a reader containing the talking points the Democratic leadership is developing on Social Security. Fortunately, it does contain the crucial line, "Social Security faces challenges, but is not in crisis -- the Trust Fund is projected to remain solvent until 2052." Unfortunately, this point comes fifth in the list when it should be first. The president, at his still-ongoing press conference, was refreshingly candid about his strategy for Social Security abolition: He won't be outlining any specific proposal; instead he's going to simply tour the country talking up the purported crisis, singing the praises of private accounts and pressuring Congress to "do something." Then, once Congress starts producing a bill, he'll start negotiating.

This is a losing game for Democrats to play. Once the terms of the debate become "how do we solve the crisis?" then the constellation of forces inside the Beltway leads naturally to the conclusion that we solve it on Bush's terms. Even a bad bill will look good compared to passivity in the face of the program's alleged bankruptcy. So while Democrats probably will need some kind of alternative reform agenda to put forward, they shouldn't lose sight of the need to fight and win this first debate: Is there a crisis? The fact is that there is not. Not only is the trust fund solvent until 2052, this long-off insolvency is based on unduly pessimistic forecasts of future productivity growth and immigration. Pressure should be on the administration to do something about the very real crisis in the general fund caused by Bush's tax cuts, and the very real crisis in rising health care costs caused in part by the administration's ludicrous prescription drug bill.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FOREVER AND EVER, AMEND. So Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to be president? It'll take a constitutional amendment to get him there. Believe it or not, Harold Meyerson is all for it -- if a little something is thrown in there for Bill Clinton as well...

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE RUMSFELD GAMBIT. As conservatives continue to pile on with criticisms of Don Rumsfeld, it's worth asking what's going on here. Certainly some of the critics are foreign-policy moderates like Chuck Hagel aiming to shift us toward a reality-based national-security strategy. At the same time, as Justin Logan points out, many of Rumsfeld's post-election detractors come from the camp of conservatives who think our foreign policy has been too restrained and may fear that Rumsfeld has gone squishy lately on the need to "stay the course" indefinitely in Iraq.

The key question for the future, then, probably isn't whether Rumsfeld will stay or go, but rather, if he gets replaced, who will replace him? Either way, Dick Cheney will still be around to provide a Rumsfeld-ish take on things from his unusually powerful perch in the Office of the Vice President.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Shifted into vacation mode a bit early? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Michael Kinsley. Blogs are great!
• Nicholas Kristof. Genocide, on the other hand...
• Jim Hoagland. A rare moment of clarity and correctness.
• Thomas Friedman. From me, too.
• David Broder. I, on the other hand, prefer to live in a fantasy world.
• George Will. I have the best interests of the Democratic Pary at heart. That's the ticket!

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Gail Bell on poison.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: OTHER VOICES, OTHER COUNTRIES. A little behind on your Christmas shopping? Devin McKinney recommends recent albums ranging from Björk and Thievery Corporation to the rereleased Ennio Morricone and reggae Bob Dylan tributes.

--Jeffrey Dubner

ACTUAL DEMOCRACY PROMOTION. While Bush administration officials have been hanging in Morocco, agreeing with sundry Arab dictators that it would be better to promote economic growth than political reform, we've seen some recent stirrings of protest in Egypt and now Saudi Arabia. Would it kill the Bush administration to say a word or two about this and start moving to distance itself from the Saudi and Egyptian regimes?

In an era when everyone seems to agree that we lack the military capacity for another round of invade-occupy-democratize, doing what we can to pressure our dictatorial allies is the only feasible method of advancing political reform. It's clear, meanwhile, that Osama bin Laden uses our ties to these hated regimes as the key organizing principle of his efforts to recruit and inspire his followers. The political status quo in the Middle East is clearly unsustainable, and if we're smart, we'll get out in front of change rather than continue trying to endlessly prop up a series of dying regimes.

--Matthew Yglesias

DO IT FOR THE KIDS. Edmund Andrews' otherwise excellent write-up of George W. Bush's astroturf privatization tactics winds up letting a little incidental dishonesty slip by:

Mr. Bush chimed in a moment later. "One of my visions of personal savings accounts is that Sandy will be able to pass her account on to [her daughter] Wynter as part of Wynter's capacity to retire as well."

Now if Sandy happens to die before retirement, this is quite true. But if Sandy makes it to retirement age, she's going to be faced with a problem under the Social Security abolition system. Let's say the market continues to grow nicely between now and then (in which case there would have been no need to change anything in the first place) so Sandy has a decent-sized nest egg. The problem is that Sandy doesn't know how long she's going to live, and if she lives a long time (as people increasingly do nowadays) may wind up outliving her investment. Under the current system, that's not a big problem -- she would have been guaranteed Social Security benefits proportional to the wages she used to earn for the rest of her life.

Abolition advocates say Sandy can solve this problem by buying an annuity from an insurance company. This is a sort of reverse life insurance that lets you hedge against longevity by converting your lump sum of savings into a guaranteed monthly benefit (just like today's Social Security). But if Sandy does this she won't have anything to pass on to Wynter after all, though Wynter will spend her working life paying taxes to repay the $2 trillion (plus interest) that Bush borrowed in order to finance the transition. Another major problem with the annuity proposal is that even if the market does perform well over the long run (it has in the past -- I should emphasize again that if it does in the future Social Security doesn't need any fixing), if Sandy happens to retire during a down year (and these happen pretty frequently, even in the context of long-term growth) then she'll be stuck with lower monthly benefits for the rest of her life.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE REST OF THE REPORT. Warren Christopher and -- more interestingly -- James Baker team up to point out that there was more in the 9-11 Commission Report than just intelligence reform and that the country ought to move on the rest of the agenda, notably by "investing in the non-military tools of national security." These are basically the elements of section three of chapter 12 of the report, which is full of good ideas that I think liberals of all stripes could be uniting around instead of refighting the past. In principle, at least, John Kerry endorsed the full content of the commission's recommendations, but he and his team managed to not articulate what that meant beyond creating a National Intelligence Director. Doing so might be a good place to start as the party tries to move forward.

--Matthew Yglesias

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE? Today's piece in the Washington Post on President Bush's economic summit is about as humorous as a news article about fiscal policy can be:

Throughout a two-day conference on the economy, President Bush and his allies extolled the virtues of his tax cuts and "pro-growth" policies, which they said have lifted the nation from recession and propelled it well above its international economic competitors. If Washington adheres to the path of fiscal restraint while following the president's tax prescriptions, it was suggested, policymakers could secure powerful economic growth far into the future.

Yet when the subject turned to the nation's legal or Social Security systems, the picture grew suddenly dark. Frivolous lawsuits have hobbled America's businesses and have put them at the mercy of their enlightened overseas competition, administration officials said. As for federal entitlements, a rising tide of retiring baby boomers will inevitably slow economic growth and bankrupt Social Security.

"The crisis is now," Bush warned in his closing speech.

Such contradictions emerged repeatedly, pointing up the delicate balancing act that Bush faces as he tries to sell his economic proposals. On tax changes, the president must convince constituents that four years of tax cutting has worked so well in promoting economic growth that his tax policies should be not just continued but enhanced. The cuts of his first term should be made permanent, the president says, while the broader tax code must be changed further to cut taxes on savings and investment.

But Bush must also convince lawmakers that no matter what they do to spur growth through tax changes, the future will remain dire for the U.S. legal and Social Security systems.

Read the rest. The quotes are priceless.

Noam Scheiber has some more thoughts here.

--Nick Confessore

THERE IS NO SPOON. Playing off what Sam wrote yesterday, I'm not sure the older liberals who run the show quite understand how overwhelmingly important it is to keep the "there is no crisis" message front and center in the Social Security debate. Most of the young people I know -- including myself until very recently -- have been taken in by a decades-long effort on behalf of privatizers into believing that Social Security is in "crisis," and that if we do nothing the system will "go bankrupt" before we retire, meaning that the system will somehow collapse and we won't get any benefits.

If you approach the issue from inside that frame, then no amount of cavailing about benefit cuts or "risky" stock market transactions is going to get you anywhere. A smaller benefits package and a stock portfolio that may or may not pay off looks like a really good deal compared to a bankrupt pension plan that gives you nothing. Once you understand that even if we do nothing whatsoever to fix Social Security and the Trustees' overly pessimistic predictions come true, the system will still have enough money to pay my generation more in real terms then current retirees get, everything looks different. Bush is offering us a guarantee of lower benefits and $2 trillion in debt to forestall the possibility that benefits will need to be lowered sometime in the 2040s. That's a terrible deal in a straightforward way. But only if you try and see the truth: There is no crisis. If you can't make people see that, everything else becomes pretty irrelevant.

--Matthew Yglesias

DON'T SAY YOU WEREN'T WARNED. The Washington Post's David Ignatius writes "How Iran is Winning in Iraq":

If you had asked an intelligence analyst two years ago to describe the worst possible political outcome following an American invasion of Iraq, he might well have answered that it would be a regime dominated by conservative Shiite Muslim clerics with links to neighboring Iran. But just such a regime now seems likely to emerge after Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. . . .

[F]uture historians will wonder how it happened that the United States came halfway around the world, suffered more than 1,200 dead and spent $200 billion to help install an Iraqi government whose key leaders were trained in Iran. Our Iraq policy may be full of good intentions, but in terms of strategy, it is a riderless horse.

I would never hold a single columnist responsible for the situation, but writings like "Possibilities of a New Iraq" by David Ignatius on October 7, 2002 surely played a role here:

Many analysts warn of the disasters that await in this postwar Iraq, but frankly I'm not convinced. . . .

And the talk of Iraq's internecine strife is overblown, too. The long-repressed Shiite community forms a majority of its population, which leads some analysts to fear Shiites will create a radical Muslim regime. But the Shiites of Iraq are Arabs who stayed loyal to Hussein through nearly a decade of war against the Persians of Iran. Iraq's Shiite elite has been the country's leading modernizers, supplying more than their share of scientists and engineers.

This notwithstandig, Ignatius chooses to blame "ethicists in San Francisco" for the current situation. Somehow, I'm not buying it. See also last week's episode of "Remember When?" featuring Ignatius' Post colleague Charles Krauthammer.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: HYPER ACTIVISTS. There's nothing religious conservatives like to rag on more than "judicial activism" (except maybe "liberal Massachusetts") -- but what is "judicial activism"? TAP talked to Thomas Keck, who dissects the topic in his new book, The Most Activist Supreme Court in History. His conclusion: If you want to criticize activist judges, you have to start at the top.

--Jeffrey Dubner

KRUGMAN V. THE TIMES. I love it when Paul Krugman makes veiled swipes at his own paper:

Yet, aside from giving the Cato Institute and other organizations promoting Social Security privatization the space to present upbeat tales from Chile, the U.S. news media have provided their readers and viewers with little information about international experience. In particular, the public hasn't been let in on two open secrets:

Privatization dissipates a large fraction of workers' contributions on fees to investment companies.

It leaves many retirees in poverty.

Now what might he be referring to?

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEFINE "SOME." Via “Today’s Papers” in Slate comes this nice little example of SCLM evenhandedness. Do you think The Los Angeles Times could have stood to be a bit bit more categorical when describing the expert take on Dick Cheney’s call for more tax cuts? Somehow a claim that “some analysts said [more tax cuts] could deepen the budget deficit” seems just a tad timid.

--Sam Rosenfeld

ON BUSH'S TERMS. As the President’s grand Solutions In Search of Problems Summit wraps up today with a panel on Social Security reform, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have issued a joint statement on the issue that, one supposes, sets the terms for the Democratic position in Congress, just as the Campaign for America's Future begins framing the issue for liberal interest groups. “Battle,” though, is not quite the word that comes to mind reading this:

The President's economic summit should have been an opportunity to begin an honest discussion about strengthening and improving Social Security, and we have been encouraged to hear that the President would like to work on a bipartisan basis.

Don’t worry, the whole thing’s not all like that. There’s a strong positive affirmation of the historical success of Social Security, and a series of guidelines for any reform plans the Democrats could consider -- no reduction in funding, no benefit cuts, no large-scale borrowing -- that pretty much invalidates anything the president might possibly propose. (Significantly, though, they say nothing explicitly one way or the other about the idea of private accounts.)

What’s missing, above all else, is a strong and clear claim that this is a phony crisis -- something trumped up by the GOP. If the White House manages to win the argument that a real Social Security crisis exists, it seems likely that Democratic piddling over the details isn’t going to make any difference. Once there's agreement that something needs to be done to address a crisis, it'll be done on the president's terms. (As a colleague pointed out to me, does that remind you of any other high-profile policy debate in this country's recent history?)

UPDATE: The Stakeholder calls me to task for seeming to overlook the fact that Reid and Pelosi do, in fact, say explicitly that Social Security is not in crisis in their statement. This was a pretty silly omission on my part, and I stand corrected. I hadn't really intended my post to add to the usual piling on in the liberal blogosphere about the spineless Democratic leadership, but that's how it seems to have come across. The Stakeholder's post features plenty of recent statements from Dems stressing that Social Security isn't in crisis, and one should take a look at those comments before doing too much carping about the clueless Dems -- I think it's obvious the party is having some early trouble getting this message out loud and clear, but that's different from not delivering the message at all. It's the easiest thing in the world to bemoan the lameness of the congressional Dems and assume that it's obvious what they ought to be doing to take on Bush. The party certainly can be quite lame, but the carping comes cheap and is often wrong to boot. Read the post.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE BATTLE BEGINS. George W. Bush's as-yet unreleased Social Security privatization plan will divide the Republican Congress and be unpopular with the public at large. So why do so many people consider it a done deal? In our upcoming January issue, Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner explains why the "third rail" of American politics may prove just as deadly as ever. Read it now online.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE WAR OF WORDS. Here's a press release from the Campaign for America's Future, which is now -- as it did during the first term -- organizing liberal groups against George W. Bush's plans to get rid of Social Security as we know it. I'm quoting it here at length to highlight the early choice of rhetoric:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, December 16, 2004
CONTACT: Toby Chaudhuri, (202) xxx-xxxx
GROUPS MOUNT MAJOR CHALLENGE TO BUSH PLAN THAT WOULD CUT SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS

White House Economic Conference Rewards Big-Money Campaign Donors
Bush Plan Undermines Social Security, Puts Retirees at Great Economic Risk

WASHINGTON - Leaders of organizations representing millions of working Americans today declared at a Campaign for America's Future news conference that they will work together to stop President Bush's plan to dismantle Social Security shortly before the president delivered his closing remarks at the White House economic conference. ...

"Social Security is at risk from the ideologues again and we're here to declare our opposition to President Bush's plan to dismantle America's most successful social protection and anti-poverty program," said Hickey. "The president's plan would dramatically cut guaranteed benefits that are very popular with the American people."

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney noted that every American worker deserves a secure retirement and that the 69-year-old Social Security program, which offers retirement and disability income to more than 47 million Americans, is under attack.

"America's working families are being squeezed as never before. Too many people are losing good jobs, health insurance, pensions and now they face the prospect of losing the one thing that has been a guarantee - Social Security," said Sweeney. "The only group that would benefit from privatization is the financial service industry, to the tune of nearly one trillion dollars in fees to manage the private accounts. This would be the largest windfall for that sector in American history."

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said that African Americans can not afford to see their future raffled off in a risky stock market gamble.

"For African Americans already suffering from high unemployment, privatizing Social Security would only cause more harm," said Bond.

National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy also spoke at the news conference, noting that dismantling Social Security disproportionately hurts women and children because they are twice as likely to depend on its benefits for their sole income.

"Social Security is not in trouble. George Bush is in trouble," said Gandy. "More than half of elderly women would live in poverty without the benefits of this guaranteed insurance program. This destructive proposal is effectively economic violence against women - he's risking our financial safety net to satisfy Wall Street donors and corporate cronies."

"Seniors don't believe President Bush's false claim that benefits will not be cut," said George Kourpias, president of the Alliance for Retired Americans, at the news conference. "We will mobilize our forces because retirees, their children and their grandchildren, can't afford the president's gamble."

Obviously this is the beginning of a broader mobilization, one intended to bring together disparate elements of the Democratic coalition. And I'm not necessarily one to tell CAF how to do its work, since the group was very effective in turning Bush's previous efforts on privatization into a rolling fiasco.

But I notice that there's a variety of overlapping messages here, some of them effective, some of them not. For instance, you have charges that Bush's plan amounts to privatization, that it's a risky scheme, that it will enrich Wall Street fat cats, that it's especially bad for black people, even that it is "economic violence against women" -- memes that, as Josh Marshall noted in this very thoughtful post, either seem to have declining impact among voters, or put the Democrats in precisely the rhetorical box that the GOP wants them in on this issue, or both. (I think Josh is especially right that, however much it juices lefties to talk about evil Wall Street financiers, such rhetoric undercuts the case against abolition more than it advances that case, by painting abolition as rooted in resentment that some guys will get rich.) But you also have the charge that Bush's plan will abolish Social Security, which is closer to the mark both rhetorically and substantively.

The point is, all of these arguments may serve a purpose within the anti-abolition coalition, as a way of pulling more and more groups in. But when it comes to the public message against Bush's plans, shouldn't these folks take a page from Bush's own playbook? Pick one broadly effective message, and stick with it.

Let's see how this progresses.

--Nick Confessore

WHITHER NATION-BUILDING? The Weekly Standard continues its newfound criticism of the Bush administration with a Tom Donnelly slam of the Bush-Rumsfeld vision of military transformation and its conduct of the Iraq War. Relatedly, Peter Beinart argues that liberals shouldn't let Iraq cause them to lose faith in the viability of nation-building, and that we should focus instead on the extent to which it was conservative ideological hostility to the nation-building enterprise that brought it down. In both cases, the fact that there weren't enough troops on hand to properly provide security from the beginning features heavily.

I think that's right in principle, but the question of what it would have taken to pull Iraq off better deserves a rigorous look. As Beinart writes, "at the beginning of the fairly successful Bosnia and Kosovo nation-building efforts, NATO boasted more than 22 troops for every 1,000 local civilians. In Iraq, when Saddam fell, there were six." That implies we should have had almost 480,000 soldiers in Iraq. The Army only has about 500,000 active duty soldiers, backed up by 700,000-odd National Guard and Reserve troops. That's not even close to enough to sustain a 480,000 person commitment to Iraq for a long enough time on top of the other things the Army needs to do. The operations in the Balkans, meanwhile, while "fairly successful," haven't been nearly as successful as those of us who supported interventions there had hoped. Meanwhile, Iraq is futher from friendly U.S. bases in Europe, making deployment harder to sustain, and in Bosnia and Kosovo we don't have a meddling neighbors problem of a nearly Iraq-sized scale.

So it's really not clear that nation-building in Iraq could have been pulled off without an earlier, major upsizing of the Army or major reorganization of U.S. security commitments around the world. Then there's politics. Beinart argued persuasively last Friday at an event I attended that there's no sense dreaming up policies that can't possibly be implemented politically. Does he really think that it would have been possible to build public support for the war in the absence of the over-hyped evidence of an immediate Iraqi threat and with an acknowledged need for a massive, long-term military deployment? It doesn't seem likely to me. On top of this, TNR has argued over the past couple of years (at times persuasively, at times less so) for more robust U.S. commitments to nation-building and/or humanitarian intervention in Afghanistan, Haiti, Liberia, and Sudan even in the context of a military that's badly stretched by the too-small deployment we've made in Iraq.

I don't have a problem in principle with that vision of a super-sized military jetting around the world stabilizing and rebuilding other countries, but the voters are only going to put up with a certain amount of this business -- they'd like the government to help them, too. That means liberal interventionists are going to need to learn to choose our battles. As a practical matter, the instances where it would be nice to see robust U.S. intervention pretty dramatically outstrip America's capacity -- to say nothing of the electorate's willingness -- to provide it.

--Matthew Yglesias

MISSING THE MARK. Like Peter Beinart, I consider Islamic extremism an existential threat to our lives that must be forcefully countered. But precisely because I feel the same way, I'm seriously troubled by Beinart’s newest incarnation of his vision for a stronger American liberalism.

In his response to critics who questioned his bona fides as a spokesman for liberalism after he followed George W. Bush into Iraq, Beinart opines:

If Iraq doesn't prove that nation-building is futile, neither does it invalidate the connection between dictatorship and totalitarian Islam. In an operational sense, it's clearly true that Saddam had little to do with Al Qaeda (no matter what the Bush administration claims). But ideologically, secular dictatorship promotes jihadist extremism--both because secular dictators fuel the popular rage that leads people to turn to Islamist opposition movements and because secular dictators seek legitimacy by ceding control over civil society to Islamists.

Beinart's intensity is necessary, but his focus is off. Immediately after September 11, his formula -- secular dictatorship promotes violent Islamic extremism -- seemed about right. The remnants of Egypt’s Free Officer corps had been suppressing remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood, the result of which was that Ayman al-Zawahiri got radicalized in jail; similarly, the Saudi royal family had long depended (and still depends) on the religious ulema to bolster its legitimacy, thereby leading to the state-sponsored Wahhabi brand of Islam to which the September 11 hijackers subscribed; and so on, and so on.

It all made sense back then, but the world has changed dramatically in the last three-and-a-half years. The ideological seeds of Islamic extremism have spread far from the secular dictatorships from whence they came and now threaten us much closer to home. Peter Bergen pointed out in a recent op-ed on the subject:

The most significant evidence of Al Qaeda's growing ideological appeal in Europe beyond the Madrid bombings were last month's assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam by a Moroccan who said that Van Gogh had blasphemed Islam; the 2003 arrests of a group of men in London experimenting with ricin, a biological toxin used in assassinations; and the breakup by British police of an Al Qaeda plot to attack Heathrow Airport.

After toppling a brutal dictatorship abroad and putting the squeeze on others, we're learning that western liberal democracies are no less likely to incubate jihadist extremism than are secular dictatorships in the greater Middle East.

Throughout western Europe, Muslims of North African and Middle Eastern origin are often treated as second-class citizens. To the extent that the alienation of Muslim youth in Europe contributes to the growing appeal of European-based Islamist organizations like al Muhajiroon, and more radical mosques like Finsbury Park in London or Al Tahweed in Amsterdam, the radicalization of Europe’s Muslims poses a greater threat to Americans and our allies than a secular dictatorship like Bashir Assad's Syria. As the Muslim population of Europe swells, the relative success or failure or western Europe to respond to new demographic trends will have a greater impact on American security than the number of secular dictatorships we topple.

Beinart’s thesis is so troubling precisely because it indicates a short-sighted version of the post–9-11 mindset; the relationship between an Arab secular strongman and his Muslim detractors is far less urgent a threat than the growing ideological appeal of extremist Islam closer to home.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

HOPPING ABOARD. Apparently not content to let the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, a federal grand jury, the IRS, the Department of the Interior, and the FBI hog all the fun in investigating the seemingly bottomless Jack Abramoff-Mike Scanlon casino-lobbying scandal, the House Ethics Committee is now looking into Ohio Congressman Bob Ney’s involvement in Abramoff’s operation. The various shenanigans going on here are so numerous and so complicated they can be hard to sort out, but here’s the rough-and-ready version of what Ney was allegedly involved in:

Ney has landed in hot water over his decision to try to advance a legislative measure that would help a client of Abramoff’s, the Tigua tribe of El Paso, which was hoping that Congress would help it reopen a casino closed by federal court order in early 2002.

Shortly after Ney agreed to help with the issue in spring 2002, the tribe gave him $32,000 in campaign contributions at Abramoff’s urging.

Ney approached Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) that summer to try to add the measure to an election-reform bill the two were shepherding through Congress. Ney said later that he had been told by Abramoff that Dodd was strongly supportive of the casino measure. But Dodd said that he knew nothing about it and that in fact he would oppose such a measure.

“I then asked Jack Abramoff why Senator Dodd was apparently not supporting it and Mr. Abramoff told me that someone had lied to him,” Ney said in a statement Nov. 17. “The matter was then closed from my perspective and this provision was not included in the [election reform bill]. At that point, the issue was closed for me. … I, like these Indian tribes and other members of Congress, was duped by Jack Abramoff.”

Yet just over a week after that incident, on Aug. 3, 2002, Ney went on a $150,000 golfing trip to Scotland with Abramoff, according to e-mails released at the hearing, and on Aug. 14, five days after returning to the United States, he met with Tigua representatives in his Washington office and reiterated his interest in the measure.

That fall, Ney held a conference call with the Tigua Indians in which he said that Dodd had gone back on his word and nixed their provision from the bill, Tigua representatives testified.

Since this all surfaced, Ney has managed only to offer this confidence-inspiring defense: “I understand it doesn’t look good. But I have nothing to fear because we have done things in the correct way.” (And lest we forget, the Tigua casino that Abramoff and Ney were pushing to get reopened was only shut down in the first place due to the lobbying efforts of -- you guessed it! -- Jack Abramoff, at that point working on behalf of some Louisiana tribes.)

With the ethics committee apparently indicating it will provide yet one more stage for political theater over this scandal at the same time that House leadership scourge John McCain takes the helm of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, it looks like those who have been hyping this story as the one that might finally cause irreparable harm to Tom DeLay and his machine could be proven correct. The only major problem I see for the prospects of this story really breaking open is the complexity and multi-faceted quality of Abramoff and Scanlon’s escapades. This doesn’t have the simple, punchy resonance of a lot of effective scandals in the past. (Think of the trumped-up House Bank story that Newt Gingrich wielded against Speaker Tom Foley in the early 1990s.) But with enough investigations and hearings happening simultaneously and fueling news coverage, the stench of it all just might rise above the confusing minutiae on the ground -- particularly if the opposition party makes a point of hammering away at the story, and the whole rank culture of Republican corruption on the Hill, every chance it gets.

Two essential primers on the Abramoff-Scanlon scandals came out recently, one by Lou Dubose and the other by The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson. Early in his piece, Dubose puts the scandal in the context of the K Street Project:

Norquist’s discreet approach to the Indian tribal leaders provides rare insight into the elaborate lobbying and fund-raising machine that American Enterprise Institute congressional scholar Norm Ornstein describes as a modern-day Tammany Hall: a pay-to-play operation that moves congressional Republicans into high-paying lobby jobs and then requires them to contribute to the party and its various ancillary groups. While Abramoff and Scanlon enriched themselves, they never forgot who provided them their opportunity to plunder. Both men gave lavishly to Republican PACs and candidates. Abramoff, for example, was a Bush Pioneer, raising $100,000 for the 2004 presidential campaign while giving $40,000 to DeLay’s PACs. Before he was run off the reservation, Abramoff was ranked 93rd nationally among Republican Party donors. Scanlon, only a few years after he finished paying off his college loans, contributed $500,000 to the Republican Governors’ Association -- the single largest donation it received in 2002. The influence the two men wielded in Republican circles was further leveraged by the money they persuaded their Indian clients to contribute.

The machine is still, of course, chugging along.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ARMCHAIR CHAIRMEN. The list of potential DNC chairmen keeps getting longer. For every John Edwards who's taken himself out of the race, three more Tim Roemers (or Ron Kirks or Donnie Fowlers) show up. So what does the Democratic Party need from its chairman? Terence Samuel reports on a few of the suggestions making the rounds.

--Jeffrey Dubner

ABORTION QUALMS. Reader C. writes in "concerning [my] little blurb about 'qualms about abortion'" to say "if you're going to write about abortion at least consider including actual women in your musings." Fair enough. I'll happily endorse the thoughts expressed in this article by Sarah Blustein in the current print Prospect, along with this post from The Washington Monthly's Amy Sullivan, along with Amy's article on the subject from about a year ago.

--Matthew Yglesias

AFTER ALL, MONEY JUST COMES FROM TREES. As Matt points out below, the National Missile Defense program can best be understood as a vehicle to funnel federal cash back to states. Even some comments by legislatures about yesterday’s colossal failure reek of provincial, pork-barrel politics. Searching for a comment on the issue, The New York Times reports that Arizona Senator John Kyl, "a strong advocate of the program, said 'one bum test' would not alter support for it."

I’ve never been to Arizona, but as soon as I read Kyl’s comment, my spendy sense started tingling. Within three Google searches I found out that Raytheon Missile Systems, one of the NMD program's main manufacturers, is southern Arizona’s largest employer. In 2003 the Tucson office of Raytheon was awarded an $888.1 million-dollar contract to work on the system.

For those most interested, I highly recommend checking out the Center for Defense Information, a D.C.–based non-profit staffed mostly by retired military folks that tracks the Pentagon’s wasteful spending habits.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: OSAMA BEEN NOMINATED. Good bye, Bernie Kerik. Your days as the most upstanding law enforcement officer in the land will truly be missed. (As will your jeweled Tiffany's badge -- so tasteful!) And now for the hard question: Who could possibly top this nomination for sheer idiocy? As you might expect, Charles P. Pierce has an idea...

--Jeffrey Dubner

NO REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY HERE. As the president's missile defense boondoggle fails yet another test, The Washington Post reports that Pentagon officials "have insisted that the decision to declare [the system] operational would be made independent of the outcome of the flight test," which is about as good an explanation of the Rumsfeld theory of defense policy as you can find. On one level, of course, the fact that the system doesn't work is irrelevant -- there's no actual threat for it to counter, it's just a political bludgeon and a piece of pork barrel spending, so a non-functional system will work just as well.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE REVOLVING DOOR. Billy Tauzin, having shepherded through Congress a disastrous Medicare bill that promised to bring tens of billions in profits to the pharmaceutical industry, is now taking as his reward a job as the industry's chief lobbyist. Offering one of the great moments in journalistic relativism, The New York Times notes that "Drug makers said that the job was not a reward for Mr. Tauzin's work on the Medicare bill, which followed the industry's specifications in many respects," a laughable contention belied by the fact that it's still essentially impossible to find a reputable conservative economist anywhere who thinks this bill was a good idea.

--Matthew Yglesias

OFF TO THE RACES. The rich, rich irony of George W. Bush warning Iran and Syria to stop their "meddling" in the internal affairs of Iraq, a country he's invaded, occupied, and whose current prime minister he appointed, is rich and should be savored. More interesting, however, are the similar warnings coming from Iyad Allawi and -- especially -- from Defense Minister Hazim Shalan, like Allawi a secular ex-Baathist Shiite. Most observers think this crowd is going to get beaten in the January elections by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's United Iraqi Alliance, which is led by parties with ties to the Iranian government.

Shalan and Allawi (and last week, the government of Jordan) are partly raising the Iranian connection as a campaign tactic, but may also be laying the groundwork for an argument in the event of a loss that the cause was Iranian-orchestrated fraud. Could Bush be joining in that effort? It hasn't gotten a lot of discussion relative to the Sunni participation issue, but the January vote will be very open to fraud, manipulation, intimidation, and cheating due to the absence of international monitoring, lawless conditions, the proliferation of party militias, and the low level of professionalism exhibited by most of the Iraqi security forces. If a major controversy over the results breaks out between Allawi's Iraqi List and Sistani's United Iraqi List (the principle of brand differentiation doesn't yet seem to have penetrated to Mesopotamia) there's no telling what will happen.

On the general subject of Iranian meddling, by all accounts it's certainly the case that Tehran has built up a substantial intelligence infrastructure in Iraq with unknown capabilities. So far, however, that network seems to have mostly lain dormant -- something Iran will break out to retaliate against a U.S. military strike or if they don't like the direction in which events are headed. You see a certain amount of breathless reporting on this fact, but I don't know what, exactly, people expected would happen. If Iran invades Canada, occupies it for over a year, stations 130,000 troops there, and commences construction on military bases, I would certainly hope that the U.S. would work on building an intelligence network. The notion that we could take over a country sandwiched between Iran and Syria, maintain hostile relations with bost Tehran and Damascus, and expect our regional rivals to accept that with equanimity is pretty absurd. Everyone is "meddling," the United States included -- there's hardly any choice under the circumstances.

--Matthew Yglesias

RED-STATE READERS WRITE BACK. Some interesting letters in the inbox replying to my item on cultural figures from the red states. One current red stater, M.G. of Pheonix, Arizona (one-time home, he notes, "of Alice Cooper and The Meat Puppets"), wanted to add that "Athens, Georgia - home to, inter alia, REM, The Indigo Girls, and The B-52s - surely deserves a mention, or a 'shout-out' as they say today, in any roster of national musical influences." Fair enough. More broadly, American musical culture over the past half century owes a great debt to people from the Peach State. All kinds of things get and have gotten created in the red states, and not always what you'd expect either, given our current politics. (Certainly finding posters in Columbia, South Carolina for a band called Confederate Fag, which takes "The South Will Rise Again" as its tongue-in-cheek, semi-obscene motto, was not something I ever anticipated. But there they were, in '03.)

And former-Coloradan reader Tom Cleaver, managing editor of online political journal Redress and a self-decribed "brie-chomping, chardonnay-swilling Hollywood liberal (with the produced credits to prove it)" wanted to add his own sociological note about the psychology of those who leave the red states behind:

Hollywood is populated with refugees from Red America (I still think "fly-over America" is an accurate description), who couldn't get out whatever narrow-minded hell-hole they were unlucky enough to be born into fast enough. In the larger blue cities, one finds both the anonymity that allows for "alternative" lives, and the likelihood of running across like-minded people with whom to become friends. I always think of this place as the ultimate revenge of The Weird Kids on the Jocks and Prom Queens, all of whom marry each other, live six blocks from where they grew up, and become failed high school football coaches and real estate sales ladies (or variations on that theme). I know when I went to my most-recent high school reunion, it was interesting that all those who grew up doing as they were told were Republicans and largely bitter over what life had handed them, and worried about where their kids had moved to ten years earlier, while for all of us for whom the best day of high school was the day the cage door was opened and the bird flew free - all of whom had ended up a minimum of 500 miles from Denver - they had interesting lives, an optimistic view of things regardless of how their lives turned out (we're talking the 40th year reunion, where you really do see How Things Turned Out), and were Democrats.

Now, there's clearly some ire in his letter directed back at the state he left behind -- but that was precisely my point (and his). In my years living in New York City, I always found the most interesting (and sometimes conflicted) people you'd meet were the ones who didn't grow up there but risked everything to come there and try to figure out a new way of living. These internal emigres had the same dogged ambition as the actual immigrants, and that's part of what gave New York its unique and energetic flavor. Many of the former red-staters, however, were also exceptionally resentful of the narrowmindedness of the places they'd left behind, where they'd experienced everything from quiet discrimination to outright violence. Many of the native New Yorkers, in contrast (excepting the magnet school/private school kids), seemed to have gotten somewhat squashed by the simple experience of trying to grow up in NYC going to crappy high schools and living in a place bears a metaphoric resemblance to one of those slotted metal outdoor tables. It looks like a solid surface, but the reality is that it's composed of a latticework that's nearly all edge. New York can be rough on its young.

That brings me to the other big cultural dividing line, between the freely chosen world of adults and the need by people with kids to childproof their culture. Grown-up people have the wherewithal to live in an adult world -- and New York is nothing if not an "adult" culture -- but kids simply can't handle it most of the time. They need to be protected and directed until they have the emotional and intellectual resources to make their own free choices. Frankly, I'm really glad (and not just for homeland security reasons) that they've shut down all the fake ID joints in Times Square where kids used to be able to go to start living the life of 21-year-olds at the age of 14. This is definite progress.

Indeed, it would seem like the easiest place for liberal blue-state intellectuals and red-state religious conservatives to make common cause would be doing something to make television more kid-friendly and child-proof, since both camps think there's entirely too much dreck on television, and often hate the same shows (if for different reasons). Movies and music can pretty much be left alone -- those have already been handled by the MPAA rating system and parental warning labels, and they are opt-in systems, in any event. Cable is also opt-in. Network television is universal, national, free, and not the kind of thing where you do any real advance research or planning before watching or listening (unlike movies and music).

This doesn't mean turning the clock back to the 1950s; all it would take, in some instances, is turning the clock back to the 1980s. I'm still shocked by some of what's on television these days, not because I find it inherently shocking, but just because when I was younger there were different standards. For example, now actors can say "bitch" on network television, and when I first started watching, they couldn't. But how is this progress? What great thing has been added to American culture that liberals need to defend when it comes to saying "bitch" on network television? Is the sight of Janet Jackson's breast really worth defending? Or all the incredible acts of made-up violence on TV every night? Who among us, as John Kerry would say, truly wants to see so many acts of made-up violence on network television? Especially when there will inevitably be kids watching who will get all freaked out for weeks by the same scenes that the grow-ups just giggle about and appreciate as choreography.

There are many reasons that Republicans keep winning at the local level in the most liberal precincts in the country, but one is surely the quiet, underadmitted reactionary impulses of cityfolk with secret fantasies about living someplace a little less hard and a little less grown up, and just maybe a little bit more like where some of them came from. Except, you know, freer.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THEIR NANNY-GATE IS MUCH, MUCH WORSE. Over the last few weeks we saw what happens when you cross a top law-enforcement official with an illegal nanny, abuse of office, and a love affair -- and it ain’t pretty.

As sure as the jet stream flows east, it seems the whiff of this scandal could not be contained to our shores. Hot off the wires is the news that British Home Secretary David Blunkett has resigned his post over allegations that he improperly used his office to secure a visa for his child’s nanny. The story gets a bit muddled, as there are competing claims over whether this child is, in fact, Blunkett’s son. The mother, an American publisher named Kimberly Quinn, denies Blunkett’s paternity, while Blunkett claims that his sacrificed his career for the sake of his youngest child.

Mr Blunkett has been engaged in a high court battle with Mrs Quinn for contact with her son, who Mr Blunkett claims he fathered. It was a fast-tracked visa application for the child's nanny that brought the charges of improper use of his office…Tonight a tearful Mr Blunkett said that he wanted the child to know in future years that " his father cared enough about him to sacrifice his career". Mr Blunkett said in his resignation later: "I believe these issues would never have been raised had I not decided in September that I could not walk away from my youngest son. I could not live with myself or believe I had done the best for him in the long term if I had abandoned my relationship with him. I only sought continued access to him through the courts, as I made clear two weeks ago, because all other avenues had been denied me."

As home secretary, Blunkett’s position was somewhat of the functional equivalent of attorney general and director of homeland security; he was a powerhouse in British politics. In American politics, he would probably be considered a maverick, spurring controversy for championing policies as diverse as relaxing marijuana laws and hard-nosed post-September 11 immigration controls.

Whatever one's opinions on the man, this quick and somewhat unexpected resignation is a big deal in Britain.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST LIKE THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION, BUT A LOT LESS MEAN. Planning for the Bush-Cheney Inaugural '05 is proceeding apace. This morning the broad themes of what's shaping up to be a very martial celebration were announced in a conference call. According to Jeanne Johnson Phillips, the chair of the Fifty-Fifth Presidential Inaugural Committee:

Our theme, "Celebrating Freedom, Honoring Service," is an extension of the character and courage Americans have shown since September 11th, 2001, and it is an important display of gratitude to the armed forces serving abroad.  We recognize this time that we are a nation at war.  Our theme, "Celebrating Freedom, Honoring Service," not only allows us to celebrate our freedom as Americans here at home, but also has as the - has as our goal the freedom everywhere for everyone. "Honoring Service" points particularly to those who are fighting now to protect freedom and gives us a chance to call special attention to their lives, their families, and their sacrifices.  The ((inaudible)) service is also a unique characteristic of Americans, and this theme also calls attention to those who serve here at home in our communities to make life better each day.

Added Greg Jenkins, executive director of the inaugural committee:

Inaugural Week will be kicked off on Tuesday, January 18, with a special event entitled, "Saluting Those Who Serve."  This event will pay special tribute to our troops abroad and thank them for their service....

We are planning nine inaugural balls, and unique to this year will be the Commander in Chief Ball. This ball will be free of charge to invited men and women of the armed forces and their families. We are working with the Pentagon to distribute tickets.

The Commander in Chief Ball will be a special celebration for active troops and their families, focusing on those who have recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan or will be soon deployed there.  This event has been added to the inaugural celebration in honor - to honor our troops and thank them for their service.  The Commander in Chief Ball will specifically honor and thank the men and women and their families who are on the front lines of freedom every day. This unique event will celebrate the vital work of our military to protect our nation.

  About 2,000 active-duty personnel will be invited.

--Garance Franke-Ruta  

DOUBLE BAIT, DOUBLE SWITCH. Over at The Gaflyer, Jonathan Weiler accuses Robert Samuelson of breaking out the "tried and true trick" of "lumping social security, which is a separately financed program, with Medicaid (which is a program not specifically for retirees but for poorer Americans in general) and Medicare." True enough, but the problems run deeper than that. Medicare and Medicaid costs are predicted to skyrocket not primarily because benefits are getting more generous (as Samuelson claims) but simply because health care costs are growing much faster than the economy as a whole. Nothing about shifting the costs of health care out of the public sector and into the private sector changes that.

If you do a straight-line projection of the growth of Medicare costs compared to the growth in tax revenue over the next several decades, you'll find that the current path is unsustainable. By the same token, however, if you do a straight-line projection of the growth in the average worker's health insurance premiums compared to the growth in his income, you'll find that that's unsustainable as well. Prices are going up everywhere, and everyone's feeling the pain. Now if you look at international data, you'll see that across the developed world, the countries with bigger state health care sectors tend to have lower health care costs than those with larger private sectors. Indeed, the United States not only spends (much) more per capita on health care than any other country, but the U.S. government spends more per capita than any government besides Iceland's.

So while there are real issues worth addressing here (instead of, say, addressing Social Security's fake problems), simply calling for "benefit cuts" is neither here nor there. It's also by no means obvious as a general matter why it's problematic for health care costs to take up a larger slice of a growing economic pie. As America gets richer, we've got to spend that money on something. In very poor countries, food costs take up a huge proportion of national income. As countries get richer, people do buy more (and more expensive) food, but as a proportion it drops -- there's only so much you're going to eat. Average income will rise over the next several decades, which means people will, on the whole, get more stuff. If we keep health care spending constant as a share of GDP we might all rack up enormous DVD collections or start owning three cars per capita, but it probably makes more sense to invest a disproportionate share of that extra income in more health care.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE NOT-SO-GREAT DIVIDE. There's a lot to like in Will Marshall's "Heartland Strategy" outlined in the current issue of Blueprint, but I continue to be frustrated by the ways in which different wings of the party are exaggerating ideological divisions for reasons that strike me as pretty obscure. Marshall writes: "Democrats themselves seem unsure of their true identity: Are they the anti-war party or the party of tough-minded liberals, the party of Gov. Howard Dean or the party of Sen. Joe Biden?"

Personally, I like Joe Biden and Howard Dean and I just don't see some gaping divide between the two of them. Even on Iraq the range of disagreement is actually extremely narrow (roughly, Biden thinks the president needed the authority to go to war and then misused that authority, while Dean took the view that Bush never should have been given a "blank check"). Looking forward, I'm sure they disagree about something, but it's not obvious what it is. Dean's not a pacifist -- he supported military action in the Gulf War, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Operation Desert Fox, and in Afghanistan -- and Biden doesn't want America to invade any more countries. In fact, Biden's freshly returned from a trip to the Middle East where he concluded that the United States needs to do more to get the Israel-Palestine peace process back on track, a staple of liberal criticism of the administration. If soi-disant liberal hawks have some dramatic new idea they'd like to put on the table that they think doves won't like, then by all means, put it on the table. But from where I sit, I see a pretty wide-ranging consensus, masked by a lot of bitterness about events that took place years in the past.

--Matthew Yglesias

OTHER THINGS TO DO THIS HOUR. If watching a tort-reform panel on C-SPAN isn't your thing, here's something else to check out -- Prospect senior correspondent Chris Mooney holding a live chat on The Washington Post's Web site. He'll be talking about the impact of the Bush administration's stem-cell policy and California's Prop 71, which he laid out in detail in the Prospect in September. It starts right about ... now.

--Jeffrey Dubner

BALANCING ACT. Here's syndicated Sinclair television commentator Mark Hyman on claims by liberal organizations that his daily conservative editorials -- broadcast to all Sinclair affiliates without any opposing segment -- represent a cause for concern, according to the Baltimore Sun:

"I'm a little amused that in a 160-hour programming week [of news on Sinclair stations], anybody would be concerned with my comments, which run one or two minutes long on a daily basis for a total of 10 to 15 minutes a week," Hyman, a vice president at Sinclair, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "If they want to start a letter-writing campaign, I think from a public-service perspective, they'd be better served if they sent letters to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, for goodness sakes."

So it's a "what, little old me?" defense, eh? Well, Hyman's broadcast is so insignificant and inconsequential, why do they bother running it? Does no one watch the editorial? If so, why does Sinclair waste shareholder value by forcing party-line propaganda down the throats of its affiliates?

For that matter, if the editorials are such a tiny and marginal portion of Sinclair's broadcast hours, one imagines it would be a simple matter to take up a second tiny portion of those hours with an accompanying editorial from the left. No?

--Nick Confessore

THE PERILS OF RUMSFELD-BASHING. As Bill Kristol slams Don Rumsfeld in the pages of The Washington Post, I can't help but wonder if years of liberal attacks on the Secretary of Defense have become counterproductive. After all, it's not as if Rumsfeld is some rogue bureaucrat operating without outside supervision who coincidentally wound up in George W. Bush's cabinet. Bush kept him there, and has chosen to keep him there longer at a time when most of his cabinet secretaries are departing. Bush is the issue here -- every single one of "Rumsfeld's" bad decisions were decisions Bush could have countermanded; indeed, almost all of them were instances where Rumsfeld disagreed with other important actors inside the government and the real national mistake was for Bush to take Rumsfeld's side. Letting conservatives maintain their good president / bad defense secretary dichotomy may help them sleep at night, but it doesn't do the country any good.

--Matthew Yglesias

DISTRACT AND CONQUER. All the attention on the White House Conference on the Economy is focused on Social Security, but don't be surprised if a different, equally radical piece of the conservative business agenda comes charging out of the conference along with Social Security abolition. Of the six panels scheduled for today and tomorrow, George W. Bush is scheduled to attend exactly two: "Financial Challenges for Today and Tomorrow" (that is, "the need for spending discipline, budgetary reforms and entitlement reform, including Social Security reform") -- and "The High Costs of Lawsuit Abuse." The relative media silence on "tort reform" right now suggests nothing is imminent, but I wouldn't be certain; while everybody is debating how to best keep Americans from feeling confident in their retirement, lawsuit restrictions could move on a fast, parallel track.

Of all the items on the corporate agenda, it should be noted, the president most has a "mandate" for tort reform. He certainly didn't run from it on the stump (let alone deny he had even considered it, as he did with Social Security privatization). If people recognized how beneficial plaintiffs' attorneys actually can be, how overblown most horror stories have been, and how pro-corporation the crusade actually is, Bush might have hid this agenda just like everything else; but that's not how things are, so there's little use pretending. With at least superficial support for "tort reform," then, it'll be easy to pass a benignly named Protecting American Businesses Act (or, more likely, something with a snazzier acronym) that contains all manner of radical, unpopular restrictions that are too legalistic to get much attention. It'll be particularly easy with the public wonkery world focused on Social Security and the most sympathetic, emotionally attractive case stories put front and center on talk shows and at forums like today's panel. (The lineup of which reads like a greatest hits album from Cato and the Runaway Lawsuit Orchestra; we've got a small business destroyed by class-action lawsuits, an asbestos litigation victim, and hamstrung OB/GYNs, all under one roof!)

Anyway, the panel is at 1:30 this afternoon. Might be worth keeping an eye on.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CLEAN HANDS. We've learned recently that both the CIA and FBI eventually decided that the interrogation tactics being used by the military in Iraq were going too far and that Agency and Bureau personnel ought not participate. The Defense Intelligence Agency, too, got into a dispute with the Special Operations soldiers conducting the interrogations. Phil Carter's comments on this are worth a read:

Both the FBI and the CIA -- not agencies with a good historical record when it comes to civil liberties -- objected to the Pentagon's approved interrogation tactics. The FBI objected primarily for courtroom reasons; the CIA appears to be object for operational reasons. Yet, both were unable to sway the Pentagon through the policy vetting process, so they simply decided to abstain from these practices in the field. The natural inference here is that the tactics approved, adopted and used by the military really did go too far, as evidenced by the FBI and CIA's refusal to play ball. Clearly, I think, the FBI and CIA cared as much about squeezing HUMINT out of foreign prisoners as the military, especially when it came to Al Qaeda members plotting against the U.S. (as opposed to insurgents in Iraq.) And yet, they either saw these interrogation methods as counter-productive, inhumane, illegal, or all of the above.

The other thing to note, I think, is that it's hard to see how this level of interagency disagreement could have arisen without the dissenting agencies' disquiet with what was going on coming to the attention of top policymakers. The FBI, CIA, and DIA all joined with the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations to push for changes and no one listened. The problems here, clearly, are systemic, but also somewhat narrow in their scope, with large swathes of the American security establishment wanting nothing to do with the Defense Department's policies.

--Matthew Yglesias

SOCCER, RACE, AND EUROPE. On Monday the Washington Post had a disturbing story about the rise of racist taunts in France and across Europe during soccer matches. The piece cited a number of incidents: abuse of black players both physically and emotionally, crowds making monkey noises as taunts and hissing to indicate the gas chamber to a team rumored to have Jewish origins.

Professional soccer teams, their national and international governing bodies and anti-racism groups have been grappling with a number of incidents around Europe over the last month. They have prompted reviews of the rules, legal action against some fans, and heated debates on sports pages and Internet chat sites about whether the stadiums have become the new preserve of racists, anti-Semites and xenophobes.

Unfortunately, racism in Europe has been an issue both on and off the soccer field for years now. (In October a new study pointed to a rise in anti-Semitism in France. As disturbing as the findings are, it seems nearly every year a study points to a climb in racist and anti-Semitic acts.)

The Washington Post story collapsed a few of the major components that have contributed to a fertile environment for inter-ethnic violence in Europe: a primarily lower- and working-class or unemployed Muslim population (in France, comprised largely of immigrants from former colonies), a pocket of (primarily Muslim) radicalism, the largest Muslim concentration in the West, a large Jewish community, and an increasingly secular and uncomprehending Christian (or atheist with Christian roots) white population.

The racist taunts on the soccer field are simply another facet of an increasingly untenable relationship between immigrants (often but not exclusively Muslim immigrants) and “native” French or “native” Europeans. It’s not terribly dissimilar from the veil law debacle: The French are so connected to their idea of laïcité, or militant secularity, and enforced integration, that they continually fail to recognize that integration doesn’t necessarily produce sameness. Mix the lack of understanding about the veil with generalized post–September 11 anxieties about a Muslim "underclass" that has given birth to the rise of radical Islam in the suburbs around major French cities, and add the recent murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and you come back to soccer (which is, as my former colleague Frank Foer has written, an excellent lens for understanding the ethnic conflict).

A 2001 soccer match drove this instability home for the French. At the match, in October 2001, French Algerians and French fans found a divide in the game:

France's ease with its multi-racial identity had been called into question in the very stadium in Paris where France celebrated its 1998 [World Cup] triumph. Last October, France played a friendly match there against Algeria, the first time the two sides had played each other since the end of colonial rule. But when the French national anthem was played before the match, it was drowned out by whistles and catcalls from young French North Africans in the crowd; eventually the game had to be abandoned because of crowd disorder. The whistling across the national anthem caused shock toughout France....

The incident was particularly shocking to France, as The Economist recounts, because the 1998 World Cup win was seen as a win for all of France:

France's victory in the 1998 World Cup was seized upon as the perfect illustration of what President Jacques Chirac called a "France that wins." In a country in which far-right anti-immigration parties were even then garnering up to 15% of the vote, politicians of a more liberal persuasion pointed to the multi-racial nature of the team, blacks, beurs, blancs (blacks, Arabs, whites). In particular, much was made of the fact that the team's star, Zinedine Zidane, was the son of a warehouseman from Algeria. "What better image could there be of our unity and diversity than this magnificent team?" asked Lionel Jospin, France's prime minister at the time.

Since 2001 such glowing expressions of unity have been few and far between. It was only when French journalists were taken hostage this past summer and their kidnappers demanded that France step back from its law banning the veil in schools that a similar expression of unity rose again.

---Sarah Wildman

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A FORENSIC ARCHEOLOGIST? Despite some American protestations, it now seems that Iraqi governing officials have grown impatient and want to begin to try former Ba’athist leaders for war crimes as early as next week. Ali Hasan al-Majid ("Chemical Ali") will likely be the first to stand trial in the new and untested Iraqi Special Tribunal.

One reason that the pretrial phase has moved slowly is that the Americans assisting the tribunal, under the auspices of the Department of Justice Regime Crimes Liaison Unit, want to be sure that the cases are airtight before they go to trial. This includes the methodical exhumation of mass graves around Iraq. As The New York Times pointed out in its coverage:

Mass graves are among the key pieces of evidence for the trials of Mr. Hussein and his former officials. The forensic work required to document them is time consuming, and that is one reason why trial preparations have taken so long. Many of Mr. Hussein's senior officials have been in custody for well over a year.

The forensic work is time-consuming, particularly in a somewhat hot war zone. While one still must be cautious about setting off the occasional landmine while excavating a mass grave around, say, Brcko, Bosnia, that same caution is manifold in Iraq; forensic teams are digging up mass graves while mortars fly over their heads.

A second reason why things have moved so slowly is simply that there isn't an overabundance of archeologists trained in forensic osteology. Sadly, because our European allies seemingly consider their opposition to the death penalty as more important than the potential good that can be achieved through a thorough war crimes judicial process, they have refused to second any of their known experts to assist in the field.

Curiously, this dearth of expertise has led to an alliance between the Department of Justice and the Archeological Institute of America. As this USA Today piece from last month indicates, the organizations' joint recruiting effort has wooed a mere seven archeologists to assist in Iraqi mass grave excavations.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

UNEMPLOYED KERRY STAFFER(S). It might not be as weighty a topic as Social Security reform, but we figure there's room for all kinds of things on this blog. Turns out that you can't believe everything you read in source code. (Fancy that!) I have it on extremely good authority that the Unemployed Kerry Staffer blog, which has been amusing Washingtonians from Wonkette.com to The Hotline since launching in late November, is not a solo project by former Howard Dean and DNC communications pro Clare Gannon -- despite what internet whiz and former Kerry director of online organizing Tom Matzzie may have unearthed in the site's tech trail. Alas, though, I have been sworn to secrecy about what else I know, so that's all I can say.

Just ask yourself this simple question: Who else in the Democratic Party has a sense of humor?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE MISEDUCATION OF LATIN AMERICA. The School of the Americas has been one of the United States' dirtiest foreign-policy secrets, a breeding ground for Latin American dictators and human-rights abusers. But the school has a new name and a refined mission -- is it still the same source of shame? Aaron Mandel interviewed Lesley Gill, author of School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, to find out.

--Jeffrey Dubner

ROLLING IT ALL BACK. Adam Cohen has a very useful “editorial observer” piece in today’s New York Times about the right’s broader (and in some ways more terrifying) judicial agenda, beyond abortion and the handful of other hot-button issues you usually hear about regarding judicial appointments. Much, much more attention needs to be paid by progressives to the “Constitution-in-exile” movement, which looks to return the country to the pre-New Deal jurisprudence that had completely hampered activist federal government.

Wickard v. Filburn, the 1942 case that ratified an expansive interpretation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, is a bête noire of this movement, and progressives should perhaps be sighing in relief that the case heard before the Supreme Court last month regarding California’s medicinal marijuana law will most likely not sound Wickard’s death knell. Just like certain folks on the progressive side, the states’ rights proponents on this Court evidently find the substantive effect of their legal decision here -- ending lenient state drug laws -- to be an easy trump over any high-flown legal principles they might harbor. But, as Cohen says, since “the justices are quicker to limit Congress's power when it does things they don’t like,” they are likely “waiting for a more congenial case” to make their next move to undermine Wickard. And, of course, the makeup of the Court will be changing in the meantime. One hopes someone in the opposition is going to be paying attention to the “Constitution-in-exile” views of Bush’s nominees as closely as we all will get acquainted with their views on Roe v. Wade.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHEN IS A BANKRUPTCY NOT A BANKRUPTCY? I was groping toward this analogy myself, but Daniel Mitchell, professor of management and public policy at UCLA (via Mark Kleiman) has the numbers:

Those seeking radical restructuring of Social Security use the word "bankruptcy" to mean that the day will come when the program's trust fund will be exhausted and its earmarked tax revenue will be insufficient to pay all entitlements. By that definition, the military is bankrupt today. We spend about $500 billion per year on the military, including veterans' payments. Yet the Pentagon has no earmarked tax revenue and no trust fund. If our indefinite entitlement to national defense were treated analogously to Social Security, the Pentagon's "unfunded liability" would be on the order of $15 trillion to $20 trillion — that's trillion! Yet no calls for radical restructuring of the "bankrupt" military are heard.

There are two points to be made here. One is that the non–Social Security budget deficit is a much more pressing concern than is Social Security's projected financial shortfall, which may not even arise depending on how things go in the future. The other is that government programs -- and, indeed, whole governments -- don't go "bankrupt" when expenditures exceed revenues. If promised benefits do wind up exceeding payroll tax receipts at some point in the future, the government can just run a deficit for a year or two while the politicians of that era decide what to do. If it happens, it'll be a problem -- just as today's budget deficit is a problem -- but hardly a bankruptcy or a crisis or a reason to believe, as so many young people do, that Social Security "won't be there" in the future unless we essentially eliminate it with a radical restructuring.

--Matthew Yglesias

THOSE INTOLERANT DEMOCRATS. Richard Cohen writes about the need for Democrats to recognize the complexity of abortion, something we've been kicking around ourselves here at the Prospect. I do wish, though, that when people decided to advocate some ideological or rhetorical repositioning they didn't resort to painting such skewed portraits of the bad old days they want to leave behind. Cohen says it's "almost inconceivable that a Democratic candidate could voice qualms about abortion." I seem to remember a Democratic presidential candidate named John Kerry who voiced some qualms about abortion in the little-noticed venue of a presidential debate:

I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I'm a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can't take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can't do that.

That's not an anti-choice position, but it's hardly a qualm-free one, either. He states that it is an article of faith to him that abortion is wrong. Cohen approvingly quotes Howard Dean as saying "we ought to make a home for pro-life Democrats." And, to be sure, there should be a home for pro-life Democrats. But how homeless are pro-life Democrats right now? Harry Reid is minority leader in the Senate. David Bonior was minority whip in the House throughout the late 1990s. By contrast, there are no pro-choice Republicans in the congressional leadership and there haven't been for a very long time.

There obviously is something wrong with Democrats' positioning on this issue -- pro-lifers feel far more marginalized by the Democratic Party than the reality merits, while a dogmatically anti-choice national Republican Party does an excellent job of soft-pedaling its agenda with vague talk of a "culture of life" and references to Dred Scott -- but people interested in seeing the party reposition don't do anyone any favors by building up and knocking down a strawman version of Democrats' stance on the issue.

--Matthew Yglesias

TRUTH IN HEADLINE-WRITING. This New York Times news analysis gets it right: "Most G.O.P. Plans to Remake Social Security Involve Deep Cuts to Tomorrow's Retirees."

There's simply no two ways around it.

I'll be curious to see how the papers deal with any potential White House maneuvers to redefine or explain away the massive amount of government borrowing that would be required to finance the abolition of Social Security and the transition to private accounts. That, too, will involve some pretty interesting verbal flips and flops.

But Democrats need to do a better job of framing this debate. As Kevin Drum aptly noted here, the Social Security trust fund is not there for people to just play around with or finance irresponsible deficit spending with. Those dollars are a promise to the people who paid their payroll taxes -- a promise that their elders will be taken care of in retirement, and that they themselves will be supported when they reach old age. In other words, those dollars are spoken for. If your party cuts taxes, ups spending, runs the government into red ink, and borrows from the Social Security trust fund to keep things afloat -- then your party is responsible for getting money back into that lockbox. It's as simple as that.

--Nick Confessore

DOING BUSINESS WITH THE MERCHANT OF DEATH. Newsweek's Mike Isikoff follows up on arms dealer Victor Bout's flights into Iraq. Other folks have been bird-dogging this one recently, including Mother Jones' Michael Scherer, who was the first to publish a magazine article on the Bout companies' refueling contracts. But Isikoff adds two juicy scoops: The exact number of flights Bout-connected firms made into Iraq (142!) and the fact that the firms were contracted by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. (If you're unfamiliar with the story, you'll probably want to read Isikoff's article before continuing with this post.)

This is a very big story. Under the Clinton administration, the United States was trying to shut Bout down. Under the Bush administration, we gave him permission to fly into Iraq and refuel at American bases. Throw in Halliburton and, as British blogger Alexander Harrowell -- who, as far as I can tell, was the first guy to uncover evidence of the fuel purchase agreements -- says, you have "something like a Bush administration perfect storm."

Doug Farah, a veteran foreign correspondent formerly with the Washington Post, has also been monitoring these developments. He points out:

By my count, if the contracts were voided after 7 months, or roughly 28 weeks, that means Air Bas was refuelling five times a week at U.S. military bases. Hardly an occassional operator in the field.

So what was Bout doing for the Pentagon? Here's one theory. When I was digging into this story last summer, some documents I found with Harrowell's help indicated that one Bout-linked firm was drawing fuel from the Army as of March 10th, 2004, and another as of April 5, 2004. This roughly coincides with the early stages of the insurgency in Iraq, at which time coalition forces in Iraq found themselves in a massive logistics crunch; it was increasingly difficult and dangerous to convoy supplies and ammunition over the roads. One source of mine, working for a contractor active in Iraq, recalled that the Pentagon began leasing airlift capacity from just about anyone who had it, while also outsourcing a lot of convoy duty to private security firms to limit the exposure of American troops. So it may be that the Bout-linked firms got contracted in a mad scramble for airlift capacity. Given all the ways Bout is known to mask his connections to these companies, KBR may well not have known who they were ultimately dealing with. But it's still another black eye for the guys running the Pentagon. Because they didn't plan for a tough occupation, they ended up so desparate for airlift capacity that they resorted to hiring companies tied to one of the most notorious arms-and-diamond smugglers in the world -- who also smuggled guns to the Taliban! Pretty bad.

But here's the real question: When did anyone in charge become aware that one branch of the U.S. government was lining the pockets of a guy whom another branch of the U.S. government was trying to nail? Last May, the Financial Times reported that British officials had joined American officials in an effort to keep Bout off a UN sanction registry applying to individuals who had helped run guns to former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor. (Supplying guns to African regimes was one of Bout's principal ventures, and the one for which he was most reviled, until recently.) Why? Because, an anonymous diplomat complained, "the American defence forces are using Victor's planes for their logistics."

Now, the Financial Times is a reputable paper, but a couple of people I spoke with last summer, and who had no reason to defend the Bush administration, wondered whether the story could possibly be true -- whether knowledge of Bout's work for the Pentagon was so widespread among top U.S. officials. Now you have to wonder.

Soon after the Times published that story, Senate Democrats asked State's Dick Armitage and Defense's Paul Wolfowitz if there was anything to the allegations. Both said they didn't know anything about it, but would look into the matter. In his own article, published in September, Scherer notes that:

An inquiry conducted by the State Department found, according to a State Department source, that "there were allegations that raised our concerns, and we shared those concerns with the Department of Defense." Months later, however, the Pentagon has yet to respond, and officials there would not say whether they are looking into the State Department's concerns.

So we can surmise that State looked into it, and got rebuffed by the Pentagon -- which, according to Scherer's sources, continued to use Bout's services through the summer.

As Isikoff notes in passing in his story, it took Bush until July to issue an executive order directing the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is based out of the Treasury Department, to finally add Bout to a list which essentially freezes his assets here in the United States and forbids Americans from doing business with him. (It's not the same as the UN list mentioned above -- it's kind of the U.S. version of that list.) And it's not as if Bout just got onto the United States' radar screen. The Clinton administration had been after Bout for several years before Bush took office.

So one is tempted to infer that the Bush administration pressured the UN to keep Bout off the international asset freeze list because the Pentagon didn't want to be deprived of his services in Iraq, and waited until his services were no longer required before they got around to adding him to the United States' own asset freeze list.

Surely there's a newspaper investigative unit out there that wants to pick this one up.

--Nick Confessore

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WAIT AND SEE. Social Security crisis? What Social Security crisis? Matthew Yglesias isn't convinced that one actually exists -- and privatization's backers seem to agree.

--Jeffrey Dubner

DEMOCRACY-PROMOTION WITHOUT DEMOCRACY. Reading Marina Ottaway and Thomas Carothers' Middle East democracy primer in the new Foreign Policy, I was struck by their characterization of the Bush administration's pro-democracy initiatives so far as "mild, gradual measures designed to promote democratic change without unduly challenging the authority of incumbent governments." That's about right, but it's also nonsensical. There's a case to be made for not challenging the authority of incumbent governments, and there's a case to be made for promoting democracy, but you can't promote democracy without challenging the authority of undemocratic governments -- challenging incumbent regimes is what democracy is all about.

Unfortunately, I worry that the Bush administration's incoherence and hypocrisy on this point may make it very hard for the United States to ever change course effectively. Back in November 2003, in the course of his excellent address to the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush made just the sort of commitment to a clean break with past U.S. policies that is a necessary part of any effort to overcome the considerable skepticism in the Arab world about American intentions: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." But of course when you say something like that and then don't do anything about it, you merely make it harder for the next guy to come up with a speech that will be taken seriously -- whether or not Bush's successors take the truth of the words more to heart.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: STATES OF FLUX. The federal minimum wage might not be increasing any time soon, but it just went up in the red states of Florida and Nevada. Similar state-level changes are happening on health care, unemployment insurance, and other progressive, quality-of-life issues. Jared Bernstein explains why the states are once again the ideal laboratories for democracy.

--Jeffrey Dubner

HOW TO KILL LEGISLATION: A PRIMER. Via Pandagon, here's Digby excerpting a timeline of how the GOP killed health care reform at the beginning of the first Clinton administration. It's telling, and Democrats eager to beat George W. Bush's plan for abolishing Social Security might well learn something from it. I still think Kevin Drum and others are correct in their supposition that "you can't beat something with nothing." And, I'm not mistaken, the GOP did have an alternative plan for health care -- which they promptly ditched once they were done beating Bill Clinton's into the ground. Cynical, but effective.

For more on the failure of health care reform, let me recommend this 1995 article from the Prospect by John Judis, and this one from Paul Starr. Readers looking for a deeper read are encouraged to purchase Judis's marvelous book, The Paradox of American Democracy, which includes the material in the aforementioned article.

--Nick Confessore

MORE RED-STATE KULTCHA. I'm starting to wonder how useful a lot of our descriptions of the cultural divide between red states and blue states really are. Not that I doubt that there are real differences, but it's also frequently the case that the red states are the source of a lot of the cultural products and individuals we associate with Hollywood and the blue states and the entertainment-industrial-complex. For example, last night I was reading the latest issue of Vanity Fair, the one with blue-state Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover, and they had a nice little item about Conor Oberst of the indie rock band Bright Eyes, whose poetic and lyrical CD Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground keeps me company in the kitchen sometimes when I'm chopping onions. Now, Bright Eyes hails from Omaha, Nebraska, which is a red state; they even have a song called "Omaha" and lyrics about wanting to be born again. But Oberst is an indie music hero across the country, whose music I was first introduced to by a former colleague from Rockville, Maryland, who's always reminded me of one of those record-store guys from the movie High Fidelity. That got me thinking about how many of our highly controversial or disparaged pop-culture figures -- and pop heroes -- are actually from red states. The lawsuit-inspiring Evanescence is just the tip of the iceberg. Britney Spears, for years the bane of tween girls' parents trying to make sure their 11-year-old doesn't look like a tramp, hails from Louisiana (and has thankfully returned there to try to figure out why she's such a mess). Jessica Simpson grew up in Richardson, Texas, where her dad was a Baptist minister. Some time ago The New York Times Magazine had a great cover story on The Neptunes and the whole music scene in Virginia Beach, Virginia, from whence Missy Elliott and Timbaland also hail. And Bright Eyes is only part of a whole Omaha-based music scene that includes The Faint.

Nor is this kind of broadly dispersed cultural creativity a new thing. The history of rock and roll wouldn't have been possible without Mississippi/Memphis original Elvis Presley, Little Richard of Macon, Georgia, and a heck of a lot of other southern musicians and generations of southern musical history (not to mention what went on in Detroit, for that matter). Nashville and Memphis to continue bestride America's culture industry like giants. Heck, it was Dixie that put the twang in the Bush-critical Dixie Chicks, the "Texas-by-way-of-Nashville trio," as they're described on their Web site. Superstar Beyonce is a native of Houston, Texas, and current mega-crooner Usher was a choir boy in Atlanta, Georgia. Creepy goth rocker Marilyn Manson -- the self-proclaimed "anti-Christ Superstar" -- was born in Canton, Ohio, land of the Reagan Democrat, where he attended a strict Catholic school. Canton, you will recall, was much reported on during the run up to election 2004 when local employer Timken announced jobs cut just as president Bush was set to visit.

There's a lot of back and forth between the states and between American cultural groups, though the evidence suggests that most of the cultural movement trends blue, while the georgraphical movement goes every which way. And so I wonder: Is some of the alleged elitism in the blue states just the defensive pride of those who've uprooted themselves from their small, staid communities and built new lives for themselves in new locales, based on choice and creativity? I have a feeling that, at least in part, our current cultural divide is not a showdown between fixed camps but more of an intra-family feud between those who stay and those who go, and over which direction those who go have gone. Even the fear of blue-state culture stealing your children that is so much discussed by red-state parents has an under-recognized geographical component. A lot of the red states, particularly in the Great Plains and midwest, bleed young people left and right. How much of the cultural resentment against the cities and the coastal blue states is not just about losing kids to a different culture, but literally losing them, because they move away and join what often seems like a different world?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GROVER NORQUIST IS NOT MAKING SENSE. I thought I'd found another unlikely voice of reason when I read what Grover Norquist told The Boston Globe about cutting Social Security benefits to pay for privatization:

"Some of these guys think they could rejigger the indexation of benefits to go from wages to [price] inflation, which would quote, save money, unquote," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. "But the headline writers will say, 'Bush cuts Social Security benefits.'"

This turns out not to mean that Norquist is a defender of traditional Social Security. Instead, his organization is backing Peter Ferrara's so-called "free lunch" plan, which is based on the fact that if you just let the government borrow trillions of dollars and neglect the borrowing's negative impact on the economy, you can give away a lot of goodies. Here's what Jeff Lemieux -- who, I hasten to add, is a supporter of privatization -- had to say about it:

The Ferrara proposal will probably be supported by the same anti-tax groups who brought us unfunded supply-side and business oriented tax cuts.  A motivating belief in these proposals is that very large federal deficits will not hurt the economy very much.  True believers in the "free lunch" philosophy actually seem to favor huge federal deficits and debts, in order to cause an economic crisis that would (presumably) lead to dramatic reductions in federal spending at some point in the future.  This is the so-called "starve the government" political philosophy and its rhetoric has occasionally been incorporated by the Bush Administration.

As a solution to the Social Security "crisis," Ferrara's plan has some problems. As Lemieux writes, "Interestingly, at its peak, the cost of the Ferrara proposal would be higher than that of the current system at any time over the next 75 years." That is interesting. For now, I'll stick with the DeLay plan.

--Matthew Yglesias

LIBERALS AND GAYS AND TERRORISTS, OH MY. This piece in today's New York Times quotes Missouri State Representative Cynthia Davis comparing liberals to terrorists:

"It's like when the hijackers took over those four planes on Sept. 11 and took people to a place where they didn't want to go," she added. "I think a lot of people feel that liberals have taken our country somewhere we don't want to go. I think a lot more people realize this is our country and we're going to take it back."

It's a little like those Hitler analogies the Republicans flogged during the campaign: above and beyond any normal standard of decency.

--Sarah Wildman

TOM DELAY IS MAKING SENSE! There's lots of frightening stuff in Fred Barnes' article on Social Security privatization, but the scariest thing of all is learning that Tom DeLay is the voice of reason inside the Republican Party:

There's a third camp, those who would do nothing on Social Security because insolvency won't be a threat for a decade or more. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has privately questioned whether it makes sense to tackle Social Security now. After all, Republicans worked for years to gain control of Congress. Why jeopardize that by provoking a fight over Social Security?

That's exactly right. As Kevin Drum point outs, predictions of Social Security's demise have proven premature in the past, victims of overly pessimistic assumptions about productivity growth. This is one of those bridges that we can cross when we come to it. Barnes says DeLay's political logic is off. "Sorry, but the fight is unavoidable. Bush made it so by emphasizing Social Security in his speech to the Republican convention last summer." That's silly; Bush promised Social Security privatization in 2000, then backed away from it, then spent the 2002 election swearing he'd never proposed any such thing, and barely campaigned on the issue at all in 2004. No one is forcing the Republicans to do this. They should listen to their majority leader.

--Matthew Yglesias

A GOOD START. Roll Call (subscription only) reports that, in light of the disintegration of Congress' oversight reponsibilities vis a vis the executive branch under consolidated GOP rule, the Democratic Policy Committee under Byron Dorgan's leadership is creating a Democratic investigative apparatus to pursue White House scandals and hold hearings on issues:

Lacking the power to formally examine alleged corruption in the Bush administration, Senate Democrats plan to create their own investigative team and hold hearings on their findings in the new Congress.

Though the hearings will not be officially sanctioned by the Senate — and will not be aided by Congressional subpoena power — Democrats say they will offer an opportunity to provide oversight of the executive branch, which they claim has been lacking under Republican rule.

...

The first hearing is likely to take place in January, Dorgan said, with the focus possibly being on the awarding of contracts to private companies for services related to the Iraq war. Incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Dorgan are expected to officially announce their plans to step up their oversight of the administration Monday at a Capitol Hill news conference.

“Clearly, there are a lot of areas in which the government is broken and we need to expose any malfeasance, corruption and misuse of official resources,” said Susan McCue, Reid’s chief of staff. “Senator Reid looks forward to reforming government with Senator Dorgan in the new year.”

This seems like a very good thing to try. The fact that the whole project would fall outside official Senate procedural sanction and that Democrats would lack subpeona powers certainly hinders what they will actually be able to uncover through investigations and hearings, but there is a P.R. component to this that's important.

A major reason the press has seemed so somnolent to liberals in covering this White House is that there have not been the congressional inquiries, investigations, and hearings that drove the aggressive media coverage during Watergate, Iran-Contra, or the Clinton years. Congress' oversight and investigative authority is one of the basic hooks on which critical media coverage of the White House has always been pegged; hearings and reports provide just what the press needs in terms of a "he said, she said" frame to actually air serious accusations against the president, his team, and his policies. The actual substantive heft of this new Democratic investigative team may be light, but if done right it could at least help to provide the "he said" cover for the press to be aggressive in its own reporting on these various scandals.

--Sam Rosenfeld

A TELLING CONTRAST. The tributes to Tom Daschle in Sunday’s New York Times and Washington Post both provide some much-needed anecdotal evidence for those TAPPED readers who might still harbor doubts that modern Republicans are rather partisan folks. The Times piece quotes Daschle discussing the on-the-D.L. consolation calls he received from Republicans:

"I can't tell you how many Republicans have called and said, 'If you ever tell anybody I called you, I'll deny it.' I just don't know what to say about that. Why is it that this town has to be so mean that a guy can't even call and say, 'I'm sorry you lost'?"

There are more serious things in the world to complain about than fellow senators being “mean,” but it is a rather revealing illustration of the psychological and organizational state of the GOP caucus that even pro forma goodbye calls to Daschle must be made in secret. Meanwhile, the Post piece mentions the eloquent farewell address Daschle delivered last month that nearly all Republicans boycotted (including Bill Frist, who showed up after Daschle had finished his speech). This prompted me to Nexis some accounts of then-majority leader Bob Dole’s famously tearful press announcement in May of 1996 that he was retiring from the Senate. I remember the coverage of that speech; commentators portrayed it as a genuinely moving address that captured the spirit of what public servants like those that make up the U.S. Senate really do their work for, in spite of the often bitter partisan divisions and competition that come with the job. And sure enough, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported on May 17 of that year:

The Senate is a club, and Democrats came to Dole's press conference in order to pay their respects, said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). Other Democratic senators showing up were Minority Leader Tom Daschle (S.D.), Paul Wellstone (Minn.) and Bob Kerrey (Neb.).

A small contrast, sure, but one worth recalling.

--Sam Rosenfeld

ANNALS OF IRONY. The culture war eats its own: A blue-state resident is suing Wal-Mart for not plastering parental advisories on an album by red-state Christian goth-rock band Evanescence:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which promotes itself as a seller of clean music, deceived customers by stocking compact discs by the rock group Evanescence that contain the f-word, a lawsuit claims.

The hit group's latest CD and DVD, Anywhere But Home, don't carry parental advisory labels alerting potential buyers to the obscenity. If they did, Wal-Mart wouldn't carry them, according to the retailer's policy.

But the lawsuit claims Wal-Mart knew about the explicit lyrics in the song, Thoughtless, because it censored the word in a free sample available on its Web site and in its stores.

The complaint, filed Thursday in Washington County Circuit Court, seeks an order requiring Wal-Mart to either censor or remove the music from its Maryland stores. It also seeks damages of up to $74,500 for each of the thousands of people who bought the music at Wal-Marts in Maryland.

"I don't want any other families to get this, expecting it to be clean. It needs to be removed from the shelves to prevent other children from hearing it," said plaintiff Trevin Skeens of Brownsville....

The lawsuit also names as defendants Wind-up Records LLC, the New York-based company that recorded the music and decided not to apply parental-advisory stickers; and distributor BMG Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, of New York....

The Skeens' lawyer, Jon Pels of Bethesda, said he aims to "take this case national, even if that means going state by state."

Sheesh. And you'd think thanking the good Lord in your liner notes, as the Little Rock, Arkansas, band did on their last album (the cross-over multi-platinum hit Fallen), would protect you from this kind of stuff. Or having lyrics like: "my God my tourniquet / return to me salvation" and "my soul cries for deliverance / will I be denied Christ." But I guess the band's trick is they've realized there's nothing darker or more "goth" than religious versification, which has long specialized in the sort of soul-in-torment questioning perennially popular with depressive high-schoolers. Reading over the lyrics of the new song in question, "Thoughtless," it sure seems like the band's done it again -- and not just by using the f-word. The song, written by Korn, appears to be a rape-victim's revenge fantasy of attacking her attacker. Very goth, indeed.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CHRISTMAS IN MOSUL. David George offers a nice report of the dilemmas facing Iraq's Christian community, which has been increasingly targeted by Islamist insurgents and is reluctant to rely on the good offices of the peshmerga to keep them safe. Options on the table include fleeing into exile, or -- more likely, for my money -- forming a militia of their own. I'm relatively optimistic about the ability of a post-election Iraqi government to effectively combat the insurgency in the long term, even with what I anticipate will be rapidly diminishing U.S. military assistance. Shiite Arabs who've been reluctant to put their lives on the line for the semi-quisling Iyad Allawi government will likely be much more inspired by a government they've elected and that enjoys the strong backing of their religious leaders.

Whether this will in any way halt the descent of Iraq into chaotic, multisided communal warfare à la Lebanon is another question entirely. As George's story indicates, the trends are toward further fragmentation, with Christians and Turkmen trying to develop armed forces that can defend their own communities' interests and make credible allies for other factions.

--Matthew Yglesias

SAFER NOW. We're at the one-year anniversary of Saddam Hussein's capture. Remember when nabbing Hussein "was supposed to break the backs of the insurgency" and anybody who thought otherwise "was in a spider hole of denial"? Tom Schaller notes that the daily U.S. fatality rate in Iraq has been 33.8 percent higher since Hussein's capture than before.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOPE IS IN THE STATES. Here's another point of agreement for reform Democrats of all stripes. Ed Kilgore noted that, Bush administration or no Bush administration, environmental policies can still be pursued at the state level. Coincidentally, we'll have similar commentary on progressive, state-level economic policies on the Web site later this week, from the fine folks at the Economic Policy Institute. And just yesterday, watching an old episode of The West Wing (seemed like as good a time as any to start watching a show about the politically optimistic '90s), I caught a reference to the fantastic Center for Policy Alternatives, which is dedicated to promoting proven, enactable progressive policies at the state level. If you're looking to make something happen between now and the recovery of Washington Democrats, the drop-down menu at the upper–left-hand corner there is a great place to start.

--Jeffrey Dubner

RENEGOTIATING THE CONTRACT. This USA Today story, via the Progress Report, on the higher death rates experienced by troops in the Army National Guard (one fatality for every 264 soldiers) than the active army (one fatality per 402 soldiers) adds to a growing set of examples that paints the war in Iraq as a radically different experience for our troops than previous American interventions.

Forty percent of the fighting force in Iraq are citizen soldiers in the National Guard and Reserve. (This compares to roughly 2 percent of soldiers in Vietnam.) Further, the way in which this war is being fought is spreading casualties more evenly across different categories of troops. As Phil Carter portrayed in his op-ed yesterday, compared to any previous American conflict, combat troops share a more equal proportion of the risk of injury with their support troops (logisticians, mechanics, etc.) who are stationed in theater.

Despite all this change, our contract with soldiers serving in Iraq (and to a lesser extent Afghanistan) does not reflect new realities faced by those soldiers whom we put in harms way.

George W. Bush and fellow travelers on Capitol Hill like to repeat the mantra that the world changed on September 11. The war in Iraq certainly demonstrates that the ways in which we rely on soldiers has, indeed, significantly changed -- but how we care for our soldiers has not done so accordingly. As the job of the soldier changes in novel and unforeseen ways, our formula for compensating them and their families for their service ought to catch up with the times. Whether this means opening the military’s cheap healthcare options to national guardsmen or their families, or simply subsidizing the phone calls of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, I don’t know. What is certain is that it is high time for policy makers to update their contract with American service members.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REFORM DEMOCRATS. Last week I wrote up some thoughts about the underlying nature of the emerging debate in Democratic circles about the future of the party. I argued (and was not the first to) that it's not really a left-right debate, but a debate between reform and status quo. And I pointed to some indicators of the points around which the reform pole of debate has been coalescing. It's striking that people of a reform bent span the ideological spectrum, and they share some ideas in common even when they disagree on other ideas. Ed Kilgore lays out some of the possibilities for a reform agenda here. And the slowly-unfolding scandal around Jack Abramoff should convince any smart Democrat that there is gold in them thar hills.

But I've noticed that the discussion is quickly getting bogged down in some cliches and myths that obscure what's going on, most of them swirling around Howard Dean and his candidacy for DNC chair. Let me draw them with a broad brush for clarity's sake, and invite reader response at nconfessore-at-gmail.com

Here's one myth: The fight is between the grassroots Democrats and the Beltway Democrats. This is a gross oversimplification. Many of the people who are part of the Democrats' problem are here in D.C., but so are many people who are part of the solution. Guess who raised money and led the 527s that so effectively mobilized the ground game for Democrats this cycle? Beltway Democrats like Ellen Malcolm and Steve Rosenthal. Heck, Joe Trippi himself is, by any reasonable definition, a Democratic insider and Beltway denizen. The point is, whether someone resides and works in the Beltway is not a particularly reliable indicator of whether they are pro– or anti–status quo. Nor, for that matter, is whether they work at the Democratic Leadership Council or came out of the Clinton administration.

Here's another myth: Anyone who opposes Dean's candidacy for DNC chair is part of the corrupt, inside-baseball, Beltway political class who have been the Democrats' downfall these past two cycles. Not true. There are lots of people who want to change how the party does business, but who also don't want Dean running, for reasons ranging from the political (a Yankee won't do as the face of the party) to the practical (he's not seasoned enough, he's too much of a loose cannon, etc.) to the self-interested (they prefer someone else in '08, and don't want to give Dean a leg up). And here's the best part: There are people who I would say are part of that corrupted insider class who do want Dean to be chairman, simply because they believe he is good at raising money.

That brings me to another myth: that Dean is synonmous with the Democratic grassroots. Dean lost the Democratic primary. In fact, he came close to not winning a single state. Yes, the Democratic nominating process is broken in any number of ways. It is convoluted, too front-loaded, and gives disproportionate say to the good people of white-as-snow Iowa and New Hampshire. But since the McGovern reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Democratic nominating process has not been a particularly occult one. The smoke-filled rooms are gone. The party "establishment" lacks for enough votes, cohesion, wit, or foresight to ordain a nominee. And Dean still lost. John Kerry was the choice of the Democratic Party grassroots, in all its wisdom and stupidity. And then he raised more money than any Democrat, ever, much of it online and from small donors.

Finally, there's this chestnut: If Dean loses the race for DNC chair, the "status quo" forces will have won, dealing a blow to the emerging "netroots." No doubt this interpretation flatters Deaniacs who want their guy in the driver's seat (and well-positioned for 2008). It certainly flatters Dean. But it's false. If nothing else, the Democrats' need and desire for a small-donor fundraising base ensures that the next chairman -- no women have put their names in the hat, alas -- will be cultivating the netroots. Indeed, Terry McAuliffe, perhaps the uber-insider and the past master of collecting big checks from rich guys, did more to advance the DNC's small-donor fundraising ability than any party chair in recent memory.

Later, some thoughts about the party establishment that was, the establishment that is, and the establishment that will be.

UPDATE: Atrios has some additional thoughts here. I don't think there's a real disagreement here, but it's worth clarifying that to the extent what I would given McAuliffe credit for is good management on the technical and organizational back-end. I'm talking about things like computer systems, voting databases, and the like. In these respects, the GOP got its own shop in order thirty years ago, the Republican National Committee remains a far superior organization on almost every level. Whatever you think of the DNC now, back before McAuliffe came in, it was a real mess, from soup to nuts. There's only so much of any kind of credit you can give to any party chair after an election drubbing. But McAuliffe hasn't exactly been strutting around Washington patting himself on the back.

--Nick Confessore

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IT'S STARTED. Just when you thought we were safe from Quadrennial Recriminations MMIV, the fireworks erupt. It's the "soft" MoveOn.org! No, it's the "corporate" DLC! Sorry, but it's not as simple as that, says Michael Tomasky -- nor are there any easy fixes. But a constructive debate can, and must be had...

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS. Via Laura Rozen I see that Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol wants to put a stop to all this loose talk of Iran and focus on Syria, which is "urgent" -- though he concedes that Iran (and Saudi Arabia) may "ultimately be more serious," which is presumably why it's a good idea to avoid confronting the Iran problem until after Tehran has nuclear weapons, when there won't be anything we can do about it.

On one level, I think that what's going on here is simply that, as Kenneth Pollack and Frank Foer both argue, Iran doesn't admit of a solution unless you're willing to step outside the neoconservative ideological box. So instead of confronting that fact, or the hard questions posed by U.S. policy to other more serious dilemmas about our policies toward Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Kristol is urging a focus on Syria, which is much more amenable to simplistic sloganeering about the need to get tough on potential adversaries. It's reminiscent, in a way, of Don Rumsfeld's post–September 11 desire to attack Iraq rather than the Taliban because target selection would be easier against the former opponent.

--Matthew Yglesias

A RETURN TO MODESTY -- BY MEN. Teenagers have been getting more behaviorally conservative since the late '80s, and that trend has continued, according to new government stats:

The National Center for Health Statistics said that for girls aged 15 to 17 the percentage who had ever had intercourse declined from 38 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002.

For boys, the agency said, the decline was 43 percent to 31 percent....

In addition, the agency said that when teens do have intercourse, 79 percent reported using contraception in 1991-2002 compared with 61 percent in the 1980's. The agency said the increase in contraception is consistent with a decline in teen pregnancy.

Intriguingly, though, older teenage girls are now more experienced than older teenage boys:

While there was a drop in sexual activity at ages 15 to 17, the share of never-married females aged 18-19 who had ever had intercourse was 69 percent in 2002, up from 68 percent in 1995.

By contrast, for 18- and 19-year-old boys the share dropped from 75 percent in 1995 to 64 percent in 2002.

Huh. Wonder what cultural phenomenon is behind that. The actual study gets at this in more detail, finding that, overall, only 46 percent of never-married teenage males in 2002 had previously had sex, compared to 60 percent in 1988 -- "a significant decline."

Over to you, Laura Sessions Stepp...

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MESSAGE IN A BATTLE. How on earth did the Democrats get out-communicated by a man whose public-speaking style is somewhere between John Wayne and Beavis? David Low offers thoughts on defining an agenda and taking it to the people.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WEEKEND UPDATE. Too busy jumping between holiday parties to follow the news? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. The coalition's not so willing.
• Thomas Friedman. That's because foreigners are bad.
• David Brooks. If you're not embracing Bush's Social Security plans, it must be because you're a communist.
• George Will. If you're reading The American Prospect, it must be because you're soft on communism.
• Jim Hoagland. Funny, I didn't mention this Yawar fellow nearly as much back when he was denouncing U.S. policy.
• David Broder. I went to a conference and all I brought back was this collection of banalities.
• Maureen Dowd. If other columnists could do this, they'd make the big bucks too.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read.

• Phil Carter on the vanishing front line

--Matthew Yglesias

BETWEEN TWO STOOLS. I'm sure I'll get a lot of flak from Atrios, Daily Kos, and the folks at MyDD, who are incensed that Democratic officials booted some bloggers out of an off-the-record Q-and-A with the candidates for Democratic National Committee chair. And from what I've been reading, the officials in question probably could have resolved the difficulties pretty easily if they'd been a little less pig-headed. (For instance, they could have just said, "This is off the record, and that applies to bloggers too, and if you violate that pledge we're not letting you into any more meetings.") But at the end of the day, I can't quite blame them. Let me explain why.

Here's what Kos posted apropos of the issue:

People may disagree on the party's ability to keep "press" out of certain events. But Democratic bloggers aren't "press". We're not disinterested observers chronicling events. We're engaged and active in the fight to rebuild our party, and as such, deserve, at very least, to stand in the back wall and observe those events that have an impact in our party.

This is where it gets tricky. Many political bloggers and blog readers relish the fact that they are part of a new medium, an amalgam of activists, grassroots fundraisers, and the partisan presses of the Revolutionary Era. They self-identify as outsiders who don't play by the silly old rules and aren't on the reservation. And that's no doubt one wellspring on which this medium draws is vitality.

But if you accept as legitimate the desire of party officials to have a private, informal discussion among DNC members and aspiring DNC chairs that will remain private, then you can hardly blame them for treating bloggers as press. After all, bloggers have the central power and privilege of the traditional press -- which is not objectivity, but the ability to write about what they see and hear for, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of readers. If you're going to claim those privileges in a setting like a DNC meeting, it's not quite fair to then switch hats and say, "Hey, now I'm part of the party grassroots -- let me in!"

It's not clear to me from reading about the meetings secondhand if the bloggers attending offered a pledge of off-the-recordness in exchange for sitting in on the discussion. If that was in the cards, and the party officials spurned it, than that was probably a dumb and shortsighted thing to do. Obviously I wasn't at this thing. (And I welcome email from those who were -- nconfessore-at-gmail.com.) From what I've read, this strikes me more as a growing pain of a new medium that doesn't easily fit into any of the old boxes, which means people in charge aren't quite sure how to treat them. If the Democratic leadership is smart, they'll find a way to integrate these folks into the discussion. They showed a basic willingness to at the convention, so there's no reason to think the door is closed.

Of course, this eventually gets to the root of the dilemma of the "netroots": How much top-down, central authority in a political organization is enough, and how much is too much? That's a question for another post, coming later.

UPDATE: Matt Stoller had already noted on MyDD that they he had offered to respect the off-the-record nature of the session, and still got booted. That's pretty silly.

--Nick Confessore

GET SMART. My friend Jonathan Chait has an absolute must-read column in today's Los Angeles Times. It's about the liberal slant of academia, and it's the best thing I've ever read on the subject. A preview:

A few weeks ago, a pair of studies found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias.

Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?

As the saying goes, read the whole thing.

--Nick Confessore

MORE ON DIVERSITY AND DISCONTENT. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is sounding the alarm about one of the Democrats' most important constituencies:

The Democratic Party has neglected Hispanic voters for a decade and risks severe election losses unless it changes course, Hispanic lawmakers wrote party leaders Thursday.

"It is time for the leadership of the Democratic Party to face the facts. ... Republicans have been committed, methodical and are clearly winning the battle for the Hispanic voters," said the letter by the leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

"If Democrats do not undertake a major paradigm shift in how they deal with (the) Latino vote, the future of the party is in serious jeopardy," the lawmakers said. "If the recent trends hold, several current Democratic strongholds will soon become swing states."...

The Republican Party stepped up its efforts to woo Hispanic voters after a poor showing in the 1996 election. The work has paid off: President Bush claimed 35 percent of Hispanic voters in 2000 and at least 40 percent Nov. 2, according to exit polls.

The lawmaker's letter says Democrats must stop this trend by treating Hispanic voters as a swing vote, not as part of their base, and improving their message to Hispanics.

I couldn't agree more. I lived in Mexico for six and a half years and for another seven in New Mexico and I will say with no hesitation that anyone who underestimates the potential of a combined message of cultural conservatism and economic opportunity to make inroads among various Hispanic and Latino (not the same thing!) communities is no expert on either. Though some observers have liked to look at the growth of the Hispanic population as a sign of likely future Democratic strength, this past election has demonstrated what should have been obvious all along: There's not necessarily a permanent relationship between shared ethnic and linguistic ancestry and voting patterns. There's a relationship between present circumstances and voting patterns, and to the extent that shared history leads to shared present circumstances, Hispanics have seen Democrats as being more on their side. But the Republicans are changing the picture on the ground through campaign tactics and high-profile appointments, slowly encouraging Hispanic voters to consider allying with them and their agenda. The Democrats simply cannot afford to presume static affiliations on the part of Hispanic voters. As Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network noted shortly after the election:

Though we can all agree that it is the Democratic agenda that will help Latinos live a better life, we need to tell them in a compelling, culturally sensitive way. When we speak to them we can move them our way. When we don’t, as we saw nationally, they can break Republican. Given the size, growth rate and distribution of Hispanics it is safe to say that if we do not reverse the gains made by Bush and his team in future elections Democrats will not be able to become the majority Party in our lifetimes, and perhaps beyond.

All the more reason to consider moving at least one of the early Democratic primaries into a state with a substantial Hispanic population.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A BAD WEEK FOR MICHAEL MOORE. How many campaigns did Michael Moore kill? It's not enough that he's this week's explanation for the Kerry-Edwards failure -- he's now taking it from Ralph Nader as well. Man makes one little documentary and everyone's got a beef...

--Jeffrey Dubner

LOOKING FOR THAT SCHISM. Dovetailing with what Nick and Matt are saying about the strange substantive unreality permeating the current intra-Democratic feuds, today I attended a “debate” between Bob Borosage of Campaign for America’s Future and Al From of the DLC about the election and prescriptions for a Democratic renewal. If ever there was a pairing that should promise a good, vitriolic intra-party food fight, it would be this one. I’ll be writing more about it later, but suffice it to say that neither Borosage nor From said much of anything of any real substance about the future of the Dems that was incompatible with anything the other one said. The closest they came to a heated exchange was over the merits of associating with Michael Moore -- itself an issue of “perception, optics, and rhetoric” if ever there was one -- and even there Frum’s heated denunciation of Moore was matched by Borosage less with a defense of Moore than with a claim that the whole issue is silly and irrelevant and not really worth thinking about.

Major ideological fault lines were shockingly hard to perceive at this talk. Really, even major strategic and tactical disagreements barely surfaced. This is at once quite heartening and a bit scary, since the party obviously needs to undergo some kind of change following several election cycles' worth of narrow defeats, yet a set of well-articulated and distinct trajectories for Dems to choose from and argue over hasn't really coalesced. Borosage and From both had some useful things to say and they voiced few major disagreements, but neither filled me with confidence that anybody really yet knows where to go from here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PROBLEM SOLVED. I'm back from enjoying a corporate-funded chicken caesar wrap from Au Bon Pain at the DLC's panel discussion about Peter Beinart's "Fighting Faith" which had a certain more-heat-than-light quality to is. One genuine source of disagreement was that John Judis took the line that the top priority for U.S. policy should be finding a way to "extricate" ourselves from Iraq, ideally through some John Kerry–style internationalization, while Will Marshall and Peter Beinart wanted to put the fight against totalitarian Islam front and center.

I don't actually think liberals need to be very concerned about the extrication issue. As Spencer Ackerman writes, the unified Shiite list is running on the platform the Democrats didn't dare adopt -- United States go home. That means we're going to be extricating ourselves pretty soon, and nothing is going to be internationalized (which at this point would come across as a pretty lame effort at occupation with a human face). The results of this could be anywhere from okay to catastrophic depending on how Iraq's new political leaders, the main Kurdish parties, and whatever sort of spokespeople emerge for the Sunni Arab community decide what to do, but the situation is about to slip out of America's control.

--Matthew Yglesias

SHAKING IT LIKE A POLAROID. The Democratic National Committee has established a commission to shake up the Democratic primary calender -- or at least create political cover for an attempt to do so -- and possibly dislodge Iowa and New Hampshire from their decades-long dominance:

The Democratic National Committee formed a 40-member panel Friday to study whether to shake up the dominance that Iowa and New Hampshire wield in presidential elections.

Former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman and Rep. David Price, D-N.C., will lead the commission that is charged with studying the election calendar and recommending any changes.

Officials in Iowa and New Hampshire vigorously oppose any changes. They argue that voters in those states are uniquely engaged in the primary process and give candidates a tough vetting, while a national nominating process would focus on large cities and neglect rural areas.

The commission is the result of pressure from two Michigan Democrats — Sen. Carl Levin and DNC committeewoman Debbie Dingell — who contend that Iowa and New Hampshire lack the diversity to represent the country's interests and that no two states should have such influence on the presidential nomination....

Candidates spent much of the early campaign appealing to the interests of voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, two rural states where the population is predominantly white.

It is one of the more ironic (though hardly inexplicable) phenomena in recent political life that the Democrats, who draw the vast majority of minority votes, nonetheless have been losing many the of states with the highest concentrations of African-American and Hispanic residents. The census has some really great demographic maps that make this point vividly for Hispanics and African-Americans. The Dems have also been losing the states with counties that have high concentrations of poverty, which is something not unrelated to the demographics of the South and Southwest.

A candidate whose on-the-ground political views are informed mainly by conversations with residents of overwhelmingly white, largely rural, very low-unemployment states such as Iowa and New Hampshire just isn't going to hear the same things and wind up talking about things the same way as one who spends a year or two getting to know the racially and ethnically diverse populations of states with high concentrations of poverty. We tend to think of the blue states as being more tolerant and therefore more diverse, but the reality of American demographics is that the majority of African-Americans continue to live in the states of the former Confederacy and the majority of Hispanics live in the states that are closer to Mexico, or that were once part of it. Even conservative Alaska, is, on a per-county basis, less white than average, thanks to all the American Indians and Eskimos who live there. And some of the most intensely segregated cites can be found in the blue Northeast/Mid-Atlantic region and liberal California.

Conservative politics and ethnic diversity go hand-in-hand in large parts of this country, for a whole host of complicated historical reasons, and any Democratic candidate who can figure out how to appeal to more conservative southern and western white voters while also appealing to Hispanic and African-American voters will likely have an easier time in the ethnically diverse but politically conservative southern and western states come general election season.

Think of it: What would the Democratic primary season be like (besides a lot warmer) if the first two states to vote were, say, New Mexico and Louisiana? Or Arizona and Georgia? Or Texas and North Carolina? What kind of candidate would those states prefer -- and thus produce for the general election? And how might such a candidate differ from the ones preferred by Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire?

This is a conversation that's long overdue.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TREE-PLANTING AS SUSTAINABLE POLITICS. Nobel Peace Prize recipient Wangari Maathai has an op-ed in today’s New York Times that’s really worth reading. The piece offers a summary of her life’s major project and her thoughts on what lessons it might hold (the op-ed omits, thankfully, her analysis of the AIDS crisis).

Maathai’s major achievement was in organizing a massive reforestation effort among poor Kenyan women that simultaneously served as a grassroots political force pushing for women’s rights and democratic, accountable governance. As she puts it:

In the 1970's and 1980's, as I was encouraging farmers to plant trees on their land, I also discovered that corrupt government agents were responsible for much of the deforestation by illegally selling off land and trees to well-connected developers. In the early 1990's, the livelihoods, the rights and even the lives of many Kenyans in the Rift Valley were lost when elements of President Daniel arap Moi's government encouraged ethnic communities to attack one another over land. Supporters of the ruling party got the land, while those in the pro-democracy movement were displaced. This was one of the government's ways of retaining power; if communities were kept busy fighting over land, they would have less opportunity to demand democracy.

Land issues in Kenya are complex and easily exploited by politicians. Communities needed to understand and be sensitized about the history of land ownership and distribution in Kenya and Africa. We held seminars on human rights, governing and reducing conflict.

In time, the Green Belt Movement became a leading advocate of reintroducing multiparty democracy and free and fair elections in Kenya. Through public education, political advocacy and protests, we also sought to protect open spaces and forests from unscrupulous developers, who were often working hand in hand with politicians, through public education, political advocacy and protests. . .

The political component of the movement is what really compelled me when I learned about Maathai -- the idea of building up a grassroots organization that carried out a worthy function directly while also lending people a sense of engagement and participation in a larger political realm, a stake in civic life. The social movement Maathai helped to foster and then sustain has had an expansive impact in Kenya. Hers is the best kind of political work, in that the politics stems directly and logically out of the immediate material and environmental needs of the people constituting the movement, and the movement is oriented in a way that leads people to draw connections between those needs and broader political issues.

Work like Maathai's is how the development of civic institutions and a proto-democratic political culture actually happens in the third world; these things have neither easily nor commonly been achieved in the past, and, as Americans are discovering for the umpteenth time, it's not exactly a piece of cake to conjure them up by force.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE DISINTERESTED CITIZENS' BRIGADE. How is the White House planning to ease the rough public landing that should await their attempts to gut Social Security? The same way they roll out everything else:

To build public support and circumvent critics in Congress and the media, the president will travel the country and warn of the disastrous consequences of inaction, as he did to sell his Iraq and terrorism policies during the first term, White House officials said. He is also enlisting well-funded conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation to help build the case for change -- or "reform," in the words of the White House -- through ads and commentary on television and in targeted publications, the aides said.

The proxy P.R. is already well underway. Kevin Drum and Atrios caught two prime examples just in the last 24 hours. Media-watching liberals tend to assume that the major news outlets just overlook advocates of liberal positions on most issues, but that's not the problem. The reality is that nobody's shipping the liberal plants out there. (Nobody's even training spokespeople on the left like conservatives do.) And if the various grumblings, brainstorming sessions, and baseless optimism I'm hearing on this side of the fight to save Americans' retirements is any indication, that's not about to change.

--Jeffrey Dubner

DEAN AND THE DLC. One of the emails I've received on the topic of Howard Dean's candidacy for the DNC chair argues that Dean's appeal is more of an insurgent than an ideological character. I agree -- I wrote a whole article about it earlier this year. (Kindly ignore the faulty assumption therein, viz., that Dean would end up being the Democratic nominee.) But the reader also writes this:

I was in fact disgusted at the supine acceptance by the D.C. Dems of Bush administration antics and slipping around in preparation for their nifty little war, and contemptuous of Joe Lieberman, self-righteous puling cipher that he is. Calling it inchoate rage won't erase the perception, on my part as on that of others, that these folks don't give a damn about the party or the people who support its values. It isn't so much whether I agree with Dean on specific issues, it's whether he can actually rebuild the party, which I think he can, and whether he's receptive to the views of others who might not agree with him, which I think he is, probably more so than Harry Reid or anyone that he'd support. It should be obvious to all at this point that the DLC has little if anything to contribute to a debate about what Democrats should be doing; their evident joy at sticking it to any Democrat who is to the left of Harry Reid reveals their utter lack of respect for either the party or for democracy itself.

The politics of the Deanophiles always had this weird overlay in which the supinity of the Washington Democrats was assumed to be rooted in their alleged centrism. (Accusing people who hold centrist political beliefs of lacking vision or vitality is, of course, an old liberal saw, and not a very sharp one.) Dean himself, despite the distinct center-left tenor of his policies, nourished this perception during the primaries with his implicit attacks on Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council; the DLC returned the favor by pretending Dean was a liberal, when in fact, as I figured it, they were opposed to him largely on strategic grounds. Now, once again, Dean sees a value in casting himself as the insurgent candidate against a Washington establishment that is at once timid and middle-of-the-road, even though he himself is not particularly liberal.

Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I think my correspondent -- along with Markos Zuniga, who posts here, and others who have waded into this debate -- are very wrong in their belief that the DLC is not only useless to the broader progressive resurgence, but actively opposed to it. A quick perusal of the material they've put out recently suggests that they share with their antagonists much of the sense that the Democrats must learn to be a real opposition party -- a party of reform.

In fact, let me recommend the following exercise: Read this post by Josh Marshall (which summarizes the thinking of quite a lot of anti-status quo Democrats in Washington), this recent DLC paper, this post on Ed Kilgore's blog, this Tapped post by Garance Franke-Ruta, this article by Clay Risen in The New Republic, these two posts on Marshall Wittman's blog, and Dean's speech two days ago. (For that last, focus for now on the substance, not the rhetoric.)

Maybe I'm just a decadent Washington denizen, but I observe that there are some commonalities here. You have common interests in campaign and electoral reform. You have the goal of figuring out how to compete nationally and turn on red-state voters. You have a shared enthusiasm for the new small-donor fundraising and turnout mechanisms, tempered, I think, by an awareness that the Democrats need to rethink their substance as well as their organization. You have the rhetorical emphasis on casting the Republicans as defenders of pork-barrel spending, fiscal profligacy, government waste, arrogance, and so forth, and on making the public aware of who's in charge -- that is, to make the GOP responsible for its own decisions and choices. This all fits comfortably under the "reform Democrat" label that's been floating around.

Now, when you get down to the particulars, that word "reform" covers a lot of terrain. For instance, the DLC document that I've linked above is rather vague about what "reform agenda" the Democrats ought to have regarding Social Security, and the DLC has always had a certain sympathy for entitlement reforms of the kind that most Democrats would be very opposed to. Likewise, there are still a lot of Democrats, both of the rump establishment and the reform-minded people, who are indifferent or hostile to building a robust set of ideas on national security and to learning how to tear down the values wall that cuts of their party from large swathes of voters who would probably otherwise listen to a lot of what Democrats want to offer. Those are fights that will have to be fought.

Last but not least, there is still an ongoing debate about whether the Democrats should be "populist" or not, a debate that to my mind has strayed so far from any rigorous understanding of what populism is and isn't that it sheds much more heat than light. You don't have to be a "populist" to want to rein in the excesses of corporate political power, support policies that benefit the middle class, or believe that George W. Bush's tax cuts must be repealed. For more on this, see Paul Starr's excellent Prospect article on the subject.

All that notwithstanding, what I find interesting -- and perplexing -- is how much of the mutual loathing and resentment that we're seeing played out on the blogs, magazines, and policy Web sites this week owes to perception, optics, and rhetoric rather than genuine substance.

--Nick Confessore

MEET THE NEW IRAQ. Iraqi scientist Hussain Shahristani, charged by Ayatollah Sistani with forming a unified Shiite list for the January elections, has finished his work. The slate he's put together is all but certain to dominate the new Iraqi government, bringing the Iyad Allawi era to an end. Leading the charge will be Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which dominates the list along with the al-Dawa party, another Islamist group that spent years in exile in Iran. In fairness, it's been obvious for a very long time that Iranian-backed fundamentalists were going to run post-occupation Iraq, but I've been waiting for the official announcement to drag this May 2003 gem from Charles Krauthammer up from the archives:

The Shiite demonstrators in Iraqi streets represent a highly organized minority, many of whom are affiliated with, infiltrated by and financed by Tehran, the headquarters for 20 years of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

These Iranian-oriented Shiite extremists are analogous to the Soviet-oriented communists in immediate post-World War II Italy and France. They too had a foreign patron. They too had foreign sources of money, agents and influence. They too had a coherent ideology. And they too were highly organized even before the end of the war. They too made a bid for power. And failed.

There is no reason to believe that Iranian-inspired Shiite fundamentalists will be any more successful in Iraq.

Nope. No reason whatsoever. Later in the column we learned that "Shiism is not a hierarchical religion," which would certainly come as news to the hawza in Najaf and sort of makes one wonder why everyone seems to listen to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. (Indeed, it's hard to know what the point of the grand/non-grand distinction would be in a non-hierarchical religon.) At any rate, the heaping of scorn upon people who warned that postwar Iraq would be dominated by Shi'a fundamentalism was a staple of pre-war hawk commentary (readers with particularly egregious examples are invited to email them) but that outcome is now the accepted plan -- even Ahmed Chalabi's gone over to the other side.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PASSIVE AGGRESSION. Saddam Hussein should pay for all of his crimes, right? Seems like a given -- but there's one crime that the United States might be better off letting slide. Mark Goldberg explains the unwanted attention that the Iraqi Special Tribunal is about to bring to the crime of aggression.

--Jeffrey Dubner

ARMOR AND IMPERIALISM. The New York Times offers further information on the lack of armor for American vehicles in Iraq, while Armor Holdings, Inc., the company that makes the armor, says Don Rumsfeld is wrong and there's nothing stopping them from making more if the Pentagon orders it. Peter Scoblic explains that Rumsfeld was warned the force he was planning to bring to Iraq was under-sized and under-equipped, but he chose to ignore those warnings.

It's worth pointing out, however, that this is less a matter of "incompetence" or "bad planning" than an integral component of the war effort. For domestic political purposes it was important that this be portrayed as a "splendid little war" lest it provoke more public scrutiny and alert a broader section of the political elite to the risks that were being undertaken. A massive pre-war buildup would have cost money up front, required the administration to justify its appropriations requests in terms of the likely difficulty of conquering and occupying Iraq, and, generally speaking, would have thrown the whole enterprise off course.

And on the strategic level, the thinking underlying the administration's decision to go to war -- that the United States can find security and maintain hegemony primarily by fighting preventative wars -- required us to at least credibly threaten, if not actually undertake, a whole series of regime-change ventures against Iran, Syria, North Korea, whomever. We've already seen that the failure of a swift victory to emerge has complicated the international situation and thrown neoconservatism into confusion to the point where some of its adherents now agree with the lefties they claim to despise. The sort of large, heavy force Scoblic says we should have used in Iraq wouldn't be something that we could throw together and deploy every couple of years and would have required a re-thinking of the entire Bush doctrine.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CARROTS, STICKS, OR STRIKES? Kenneth Pollack's previous book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, portended the war we find ourselves still in today. So what does he make of the situation in Iran, the subject of his new book, The Perisan Puzzle? Matthew Yglesias sat down with Pollack to talk about the prospects of avoiding -- or winning -- the next war.

--Jeffrey Dubner

BIZARRO WORLD. Flipping channels last night I found Ann Coulter speaking ... on VH1's Dirty Hippies. Coulter was talking about her days following the Grateful Dead across America. (She claimed to have seen 60 shows.) Beneath her name, without irony, VH1 runs the tag line Author of 'How to Talk to Liberals.

--Sarah Wildman

DEEP BREATHS EVERYONE. Having worked so hard to try and bring a little unity to the table, the Prospect seems to have rather accidentally set off a new wave of liberal-DLC feuding. We're publishing this David Sirota article in our January issue (along with a few other takes on the future of the Democrats) which takes a swipe or two at the DLC. The DLC's Ed Kilgore penned this rejoinder, which prompted Sirota to put together a rejoinder of his own.

Read the pieces and I think you'll see that a mountain is being made here out of a molehill, or rather, a 10-year-old trade agreement whose relevance has largely been superceded by subsequent events in East Asia. Sirota identifies a number of Democrats who've run successfully in culturally conservative areas that have been adversely affected by NAFTA, and attributes their success largely to their trade-bashing (i.e., progressive economic populism). Kilgore points out that some of the people in question are DLC affiliates and that most have melded their economic views with socially conservative ones.

For my money, everyone's right here and everyone ought to calm down a bit. If you're running in a socially conservative district or state, it obviously helps to adopt socially conservative views. If you're running in a district or state that's been adversely affected by free-trade agreements, it obviously helps to adopt anti-trade views. If your district is socially conservative and has been adversely affected by trade it helps to be -- wait for it -- socially conservative and anti-trade. This is neither all that hard to figure out, nor the stuff out of which a fight for the soul of the party should be made. As a true-blue son of the cultural elite born and raised in Greenwhich Village, my sympathies are with free trade and mad-dog social liberalism. Nevertheless, what works in the New York 8 isn't going to work in South Dakota so I try not to begrudge Stephanie Herseth her farm subsidizing, FMA-endorsing ways, much as I dislike them.

Since Sirota is happy to praise culturally conservative politicians (if not their cultural conservatism per se) and Kilgore is happy to praise protectionist politicians (if not protectionism per se), I think maybe everyone should take a deep breath and remember that we're all consumed by hatred of George W. Bush and endeavor to keep the looming intra-party CAFTA debate (featuring Big Sugar and Big Labor united at last in an effort to save us from cheap agricultural products) polite.

--Matthew Yglesias

HARRY'S MOVE. Apropos of Nick’s discussion of the “rump establishment v. reform wing” schism among Democrats comes the news that Harry Reid is encouraging Byron Dorgan to run for DNC chairman, possibly with the idea that he would serve as its chief spokesman while someone else acts as the day-to-day operational chief in a dual chairman structure. (And who among us can forget the storied Chris Dodd-Donald Fowler co-chairmanship of 1995? Ah, the memories ...)

Reid is widely rumored not to want Howard Dean as DNC chairman, and this would presumably be a part of his effort to stop him. But Reid’s ostensible rationale is that the North Dakota senator has a nice, red-state populist appeal that would serve the party well. You know, sort of like South Dakotan Tom Daschle’s folksy, red-state appeal that did so much to immunize Democr -- er, never mind.

I’ve got no big problem with Dorgan, and as Democratic Policy Committee Chairman he’s been a leader in at least trying to think of fresh ideas for coordinating the party’s message and program in some coherent and effective way. But I will relay what a Hill staffer told me about him: “He’s a huge mystery, because the guy grew up in a tiny town in North Dakota and went to a high school with like 26 people in it –- and yet you absolutely could never find a more inside-the-beltway guy. It’s so strange.” This would be a rump establishment pick, without doubt.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHITENESS FALLS FROM AIR. Reader L.J.B., who knows a thing or two about crunching data, writes in to note -- contra David Brooks -- that there's little evidence of any kind of a transformative baby-boom going on in the red states, regardless of race or ethnicity. According to census data crunchable at the Anne E. Casey Foundation, he says, many of the red states have actually lost ground over the past decade when it comes to the number of children in them. The leading states with increasing numbers of kids are:

Increase in Share of Under-18 Population by State, 1990 - 2000

1. California 2.1 %

2. Nevada 1.5 %

3. New Jersey 1.4 %

4. Connecticut 1.2 %

5. New York 0.9 %

6. Florida 0.7 %

7. Massachusetts 0.3 %

8. Maryland 0.1 %

All the other states, according to L.J.B., either lost children as a percent of population or had no gain. Colorado, Brooks' pre-eminent example of a new natalist haven, had 1.7 percent fewer children under 18 in it in 2000 than in 1990.

However, I will note that there was a tiny upsurge in the fertility rate -- that is, births per 1,000 women ages 15-44 -- between 2002 and 2003, according to the CDC:

The general fertility rate rose for most race and Hispanic origin groups between 2002 and 2003....The rates increased 2 percent for non-Hispanic white women and 3 percent for Hispanic and API women. The general fertility rate for non-Hispanic black women decreased less than 1 percent between 2002 and 2003; the rate for American Indian women was essentially unchanged.

Nonetheless, the current fertility rate nationwide is still lower than the recent high-point of 1990, and the groups that saw some of the highest percentage increases in fertility in 2003 were unwed mothers and older women -- hardly the kind of traditionalists I think Brooks is lauding. Women having kids between the ages of 35-39 saw a 12 percent increase in fertility and those aged 40-44 had an 11 percent increase in fertility. Meanwhile, fertility of women aged 20-24 and teenagers declined and the only ethnic group with a fertility rate higher than the level of replacement was Hispanics.

Now, the overall fertility rate in red Utah was much higher than in blue Vermont, but the indidividuals variation in fertility by state were also, overall, much lower than the variations you see between white women and Latinas. My point, in any event, wasn't to get into a statistical back-and-forth about white fertility rates with either Brooks, Sailer, or Sailer's research aides (one of whom, not L.J.B., wrote in), but rather to ask how it is that Sailer, a reporter and film critic for UPI and The American Conservative with a history of disreputable racialist statements noted by everyone from the Freepers to David Frum, is so able to position himself as a social scientist that even occasional liberals cite his statistics and a major conservative opinion writer touts his work before an audience of more than a million readers.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE FARM DOLE. Readers of The New York Times op-ed page probably don't have a big stake in agricultural policy, but they deserve something better than this from Victor Davis Hanson:

As the next secretary takes office, he should consider both the changing role of American agriculture and the consequences of its decline. Subsidies are neither necessary nor desirable. They belie conservative faith in free markets, are distributed inequitably and are fiscally indefensible.

In a time of global environmental interdependence and anxiety over security, we should insist on far more careful screening of imported food from all government agencies, and demand that our most productive farmland not be lost to suburbanization. Agricultural autonomy is not reductionist protectionism, but a way to avoid the type of petroleum dependence that has left us vulnerable to blackmail by illegitimate and dangerous regimes abroad.

Whatever could this mean? How is the government supposed to "demand" that farmland not be sold and converted into housing for fast-growing metropolitan areas? And if subsidies "belie conservative faith in free markets" (they do!) why don't import restrictions? Farming is heavily protected by the government as it is, and, as Hanson points out elsewhere in the piece, American farmers are losing ground already to super-sized domestic producers and more efficient foreign competition. This is the free market we're supposed to have faith in and, frankly, the free marketers are right -- Americans have access to a wider variety of foods at lower prices than ever before.

It makes sense to screen foreign food for potential health problems (mad cow, for example); then again, it makes just as much sense to screen domestic food for the same things. If he's referring to more of a national-security concern, that's uncommonly silly. Is Mexico going to cut off our tomato supplies? Will Nicaragua implement a banana blockade? Vietnam impose shrimp sanctions? What, exactly, are we supposed to be worried about? We don't import large quantities of food from hostile regions and, barring some major change in either the global diplomatic situation or the climatic conditions in the Middle East, we aren't ever going to.

--Matthew Yglesias

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING. The president wants to make it clear that finding the $2 trillion he'll need to finance his proposed abolition of Social Security won't be raised through higher taxes, so we'd better hope the Central Bank of China has a serious hankering for more bonds.

--Matthew Yglesias

HARMONIC CONVERGENCE. While intra-liberal disputations about national-security policy continue, there are some interesting signs of cross-party convergence. This excerpt from Natan Sharansky's new book published on The National Review Online is largely devoted to huffing and puffing at strawmen, but its actual policy prescription -- that the United States distance itself from repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Arab world -- is essentially the same as the analysis of this topic that one hears from members of the "blowback" school of foreign-policy thought on the left.

Reuel Marc Gerecht has published a short book called The Islamic Paradox (available for free on the Web site of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute) that, after delving into a lengthy analysis of Iraqi Shiite politics, essentially comes to the same conclusion regarding policy toward Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Endlessly re-hashing the Iraq War is fun (I've been known to do it myself) but the war obviously already happened, so it has a somewhat limited utility. Similarly, the Michael Moore battle is a bit trivial compared to the actual policy questions regarding Middle Eastern autocracies. Having taken some shots at the left wing of liberalism on security issues, it seems only fair to point out that the advocates of a more hawkish approach to liberalism and world affairs don't seem to have a view on this question, or if they do have one, they're not articulating it. The problem, I suppose, is that this question doesn't fit into a simplistic "hawks versus doves" narrative. To the liberal left, withdrawing support for Arab despotisms seems to be a natural extension of a dovish anti-imperialist worldview; to an increasingly large portion of the neoconservative right, it's a natural extension of hawkish neo-imperialism in Iraq. I've been complaining about the administration's inaction on this front for some time now and it seems to me that it's an issue with a real chance of transcending intra-party divides, attracting some support from the other side, and putting liberalism in touch with core American values, but it would be nice to hear what the liberal hawks have to say.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE ARMY WE HAVE. There are times when I fervently hope liberals' assessment of factual reality is wrong. This is one of those times:

U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era.

"When we already have people from Iraq on the streets, my God," said Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. "I have talked to enough (shelters) to know we are getting them. It is happening and this nation is not prepared for that."

The actual numbers are still small, but it's hard to see them staying that way. I hate to jump from human tragedy straight to politics, but Democrats need to make clear that there has been a direct tradeoff between money that could be going to support our troops -- in combat, at home, and now on the streets -- and the administration's corporate and upper-income tax slashing. Even if these tax policies were as pro-growth as they supposedly are, how many veterans' livelihoods would they be worth?

--Jeffrey Dubner

WOMEN IN COMBAT. The National Review's Mackubin Owens has an interesting piece out about the Army's below-the-radar efforts to allow female soldiers to get closer to combat situations as a means of coping with Iraq-related personnel shortages. Naturally enough, the focus of Owens' article winds up being the dastardardly feminists who, apparenly, brought this situation about by electing and re-electing George W. Bush, pushing the country into an invasion of Iraq, advocating for tax cuts that have rendered Army expansion infeasible, and then dogmatically insisted on staying the course irrespective of what happens. Nevertheless, it's a revealing look at the contemporary situation and, frankly, a reminder of the many other moments in history when military exigency has proven to by a driver of gender equality.

UPDATE: Phil Carter emails to say that the changes Owens is talking about -- part of the Force XXI redesign -- are old news, covered here in his "War Dames" for The Washington Monthly, though Iraq is the first significant test of their implementation.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD BEGINS! So far, Democrats have been patting themselves on the back for the absence of the usual post-election-loss circular firing squad. I think they're speaking too soon. The emerging contest for Democratic National Committee chair is not only bringing the gladiators out of the woodwork -- it also appears to have reduced the debate to a level of blockheadedness I've never quite seen before.

For some folks, of course, there's simply an honest difference of opinion at hand: Some liberals want to walk the party back to pre-Clinton ideas on fiscal policy, crime, welfare, and other topics. They are a minority, and I'd say they're wrong, but they know what they believe and aren't confused about it. Others are genuinely averse to the idea of Democrats getting a national-security policy that consists of something other than arms control, demining, and shrinking the Pentagon; these folks believe that having a strategy for keeping the country safe and killing the bad guys is "conservative," a misunderstanding you can bet Republicans hope modern-day liberals will continue to hold dear, and that would perplex any good Cold War liberal to no end.

What strikes me the most, however, is how confused some people seem to be. Take Howard Dean, who is in almost every substantive way a New Democrat: He's a fiscal conservative who supports gun rights; he wants the Democrats to compete nationally and increase their small-donor base; and he thinks they have to reclaim the values agenda. He delivered a pretty good speech on these subjects today. Yet he also attacks unnamed other people (i.e., the Democratic Leadership Council), who allegedly suggest the Democrats should be "Republican-lite." It's funny, because back before Bill Clinton got his party to take seriously deficit reduction, values, and so forth, liberals would attacked precisely such ideas as being "Republican-lite." If Dean had run for president in the 1990s, before the second Iraq War, those liberals would have attacked him as Republican-lite. I happen to think those liberals are and were wrong, but I have no idea where Dean thinks he's coming from. What does he think the DLC has been yapping about all these years? They agree with him on almost everything except the Iraq war.

I do think there are a couple of genuine policy issues the Democrats still have a lot of hashing out to do on. Chiefly, national-security policy and values, by which I mean religion and how to get an audience with that swath of voters who lean right on social issues like abortion but are willing, under the proper circumstances, to vote for pro-choice Democrats. (Viz., Bill Clinton.) And there will always be enduring disagreements between different wings of the party on issues of trade.

But the most consequential split in the Democratic Party going forward is not liberals versus centrists. The key split is not really ideological at all, when you get down into it. Here's how I see the fight shaping up. On the one side are the rump Democratic establishment of consultants, pollsters, and senior members of Congress, people who span the ideological continuum but who share in common an inability to adapt to the Republican ascendancy and recognize it for what it is. Many of them would like Democrats to win more often, but they are not ready to give up the Beltway fiefdoms and influence they still possess in order to achieve it. On the other side are party reformers of left and right, who tend towards ideological ecumenism but are determined to change the way the Democratic Party is organized and funded. Pretty much anyone who is deeply invested in restarting the DLC/liberal food fights is by definition part of this rump establishment, since the distinction of vision between Democratic centrists and liberals pale next to the differences between the Democratic average and the Bush-era conservatives.

The problem for Dean is that, while he is generally on the reform side, and is himself a New Democrat in all but name, his grassroots political constituency consists largely of antiwar liberals who are full of inchoate fury at Democratic leaders for being a bad opposition party and not blocking the Iraq invasion (fury that is not entirely misplaced). So to get elected DNC chair, Dean has to convince them that the bad guys, the rump establishment, are the DLC and the ex-Clintonites. The DLC makes this a little too easy for Dean because, although they acknowledge that his policies aren't liberal, the tacticians there see his anti-war vibe and Northeastern roots as sending exactly the wrong message to the rest of the country. They don't want him running the party. So the DLC used to pretend Dean was a liberal when really he's not. They've more or less given that up, to their credit, but once the DNC chair fight commenced, Dean had a renewed interest in stoking the food fight. Thus many of the outside-the-Beltway supporters of party reform have come to view it as a battle between Washington centrists and grassroots liberals -- even though it isn't.

--Nick Confessore

ADMINISTRATIVE PUNISHMENT. It turns out that after Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, noted anti-American agitator and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, complained to the Pentagon civilian leadership that members of a special forces team were torturing Iraqi prisoners and threatening DIA personnel who witnessed the incident, the government did not, in fact, respond by doing nothing. Instead, while keeping word of the events hushed up they gave the special forces involved "administrative punishments" and reassigned them to other duties.

Let's just say the fact that none of this would have come to light if not for a Freedom of Information Act request from the ACLU (and for the fact that the DIA's witnesses chose to ignore the threats and make a report, and that the head of the DIA chose to pursue the matter further) doesn't exactly inspire confidence that the Defense Department's civilian leadership is being entirely forthcoming about the extent of problems in the interrogation process.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE STRAW MEN SHALL SET YOU FREE. Not to gang up on anyone here, but I had the same criticism as Sam of a different Jonah Goldberg post from earlier this week. In partly agreeing with Nick Confessore's and Josh Marshall's praise for this Financial Times op-ed, Goldberg says:

Countless liberals have imbued the UN with a glowing moral stature that has never existed. Because they want the UN to be great, they often lapse into believing the UN is great. A classic case of confusing ought and is. Meanwhile, people like me see the UN as a flawed institution which relentlessly exploits this misperception. But, because UN-lovers have so skewed the debate, it is almost impossible to persuade the unpersuaded that the UN sucks unless you speak in "responsible" terms. Saying US out of the UN, UN out of the US in "sophisticated" company is seen as no less antediluvian than fretting about fluoridated water sapping our precious bodily fluids. And, since it's not going anywhere (sigh) one must fight for the changes one can. Holding Kofi accountable for that hothouse of sanctimony and quasi-legalized corruption seems like a nice place to start.

Sure, there are liberals who play the race card too quickly, as Goldberg argued to defend Sean Hannity. But what reputable liberal, exactly, has said the UN is some ideal entity? If all Goldberg meant to say was that many liberals think the United States' first UN-related goal should be to reform the body, not dissolve it, then he's absolutely right. But if he was alluding to the supposed great majority of liberals who think the UN is just fine as it is, he's just setting up another straw man to distract from the fact that a witch hunt against Annan is entirely separate from actual solutions to the organization's problems (which he admits). I don't believe I've ever heard the argument that the UN needs no editing whatsoever, an argument apparently so dominant on the left that "UN-lovers have so skewed the debate" that talk of problems with the UN is all but forbidden. And he can mock "responsible" discussions all he wants, but what disagreements does he have with, say, this Samantha Power article calling "the idea that the United Nations can stumble along" one of the most dangerous ideas in the world -- and suggesting ways to, you know, address the situation?

--Jeffrey Dubner

WORKERS OF THE WORLD. The headline to this short New York Times piece -- “China Blocks World Meeting on Workers’ Rights” -- illustrates nicely why Wal-Mart might declare a newfound allegiance to organized labor of the Chinese variety.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WORKING ON THE CHANGE GANG. What sort of dramatic adjustments are Congressional Democrats pursuing? It's not core values, Terence Samuel has found, and it's not big issues, and it may not even be leadership. That doesn't leave much ...

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE ARMY YOU HAVE. The full transcript of Don Rumsfeld's tête-a-tête with the troops his administration has so badly abused is worth a read. One line in particular is worth exploring at greater length:

As you know, you go to war with the Army you have.  They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.  Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe – it’s a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment.

"You go to war with the Army you have" is certainly a good description of a conventional military action. In the fall of 2001, conditions may not have been perfect for a war against the Taliban, but circumstances dictated that a war be waged, so U.S. commanders made the best of what they had on hand. But the Iraq War wasn't like this at all. Saddam Hussein hadn't attacked anyone, and showed no sign of a desire to do so in the near term. It was a preventative war, fought at a time of America's choosing, presumably because the time was well-chosen. As John Quiggin notes, this looks absurd in retrospect:

Iraq provides a good illustration. At the time Bush and Blair decided on war, the alternative was to wait for Blix’s inspections to be completed. The reasons given for going to war in March 2003 rather than waiting until later seem absurdly trivial in retrospect. It was argued that the invasion couldn’t take place in summer and that waiting until after summer would keep forces tied up too long on standby in Kuwait

Obviously, U.S. forces had to conduct operations during the Middle Eastern summer of 2003 (and then again in 2004) anyway, and our forces were (and still are) tied down in the Gulf anyway, so this rationale hardly makes sense. There was nothing stopping us from waiting months until the diplomatic groundwork was better prepared or, indeed, until armor production was at the necessary level or the regular Army had been reformed so as to be able to conduct a post-conflict stabilization without relying so heavily on the reserves, or anything else that would have made the war easier to wage.

Bush chose to wage the war with the Army he had, he didn't need to. As I wrote back in July, even the infamously exaggerated WMD intelligence indicated that we had a window of opportunity of six to eight years before the threat we were trying to forestall materialized, according to documents released by the administration itself. In a genuine state of national emergency, a certain number of mistakes are forgivable, but when a president wants to fight a preventative war to combat a distant threat, he denies himself any such margin of error.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON THE CONSERVO-RACE CARD. Via D-Day I see that Bob Novak has climbed aboard the Harry Reid-as-racist train that James Taranto and Sean Hannity got rolling along on Monday. It’s no big surprise to see Novak piping up on this. He loves to play the conservo-race card; recall his question to Crossfire guest Rahm Emanuel last spring during Richard Clarke’s appearance before the 9-11 Commission: “[Y] ou're a sophisticated guy, do you believe watching these hearings that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?”

Meanwhile, The Filibuster reminds me that Noam Scheiber also raised an eyebrow at Reid’s Meet the Press remarks about Clarence Thomas being an “embarrassment.” I admit that I find Scheiber speculating on Reid’s motivations considerably less icky than the spectacle of Sean Hannity getting worked up into full-on unctuous defender-of-minorities mode, but the suspicion Scheiber airs still seems like a stretch to me. The operative question here is whether there are any possible non-racist grounds for someone to reasonably call Thomas an “embarrassment” while not calling Antonin Scalia something similar. I, like virtually everyone else discussing the Reid comment, admit to having no legal expertise or particular grounding in Thomas’ written decisions as a Justice. But even I have certainly heard widespread comments about how Thomas rarely asks questions during oral arguments, and have read allegations of his penchant for dozing off in court. It certainly doesn’t seem beyond imagining that one could disagree with both Thomas' and Scalia’s jurisprudence while also drawing distinctions between the two on matters of competence, seriousness, intellect, etc. (Scheiber calls such a position “increasingly untenable,” linking to David Garrow’s recent, positive review of a book on Thomas as evidence; but really, that’s some pretty thin evidence.) Without Reid having expanded on his thoughts, it’s a leap to sound charges of racism just because of his stated dislike for Thomas.

Happily, Jonah Goldberg completely agrees with my thoughts on the matter. Unhappily, Goldberg thinks that I, as a TAPPED man, have little leg to stand on in making such an argument, citing a dispute he had last year with then–Prospect Web editor Richard Just:

In one sense I think he makes a fair point. But frankly, I just don't think liberals like the gang at Tapped have much credibility when it comes to this sort of gripe (remember their insistence that Hillsdale is racist because it showed some white kids in an ad with a tagline "remember the good old days?").

The argument that Hannity uses, I suspect, would not raise an eyebrow (at least not in public) from Rosenfeld and his colleagues were it to come from Mary Francis Berry, Julian Bond et al and if it was aimed at conservatives. Indeed, Hannity's argument is exactly the sort of thing we hear every day from liberals. …

Now, I’ve never met Just and I started working here long after the great Hillsdale debate took place, so it seems kinda beside the point to bring that up. As for Goldberg’s suggestion that I “can gripe about bad arguments getting old after spending [my] entire adult life being accused of racism because [I] oppose giving the sons of rich black doctors preferential treatment over the daughters of poor whites, Asians, Jews, et al.,” well, logistically speaking, that seems a bit impractical. His alternative challenge -- that I apply “this complaint in defense of conservatives who've whethered such accusations unjustly (sic)” -- sounds doable, so the next time Jonah observes such a thing happening (and he insists that liberals make Hannity-style racial accusations every day, so I'm sure he'll have a few late-breaking examples before the week is out) he should send it my way and I’ll dutifully voice my outrage.

So, like I said, aside from the guilt-by-association, his speculation on how I would react to things that haven’t taken place, and his rampant use of unnamed liberal straw men, Goldberg and I are in complete agreement on the matter.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST COUNT DIFFERENTLY! Republicans are big on practical solutions. So the government is going to have to borrow $2 trillion to pay for Social Security privatization? Well, don't worry, the plan will eventually produce huge surpluses that will more than offset the initial borrowing, thanks to economic growth so splendid it mitigates the very need for an adjustment in Social Security financing that provides the pretext for the privatization plan now being pushed! But such heavy borrowing upfront might still be politically dicey. Ah, quit your worrying, all you have to do is change the way the Congressional Budget Office scores Social Security legislation. If the borrowing isn't counted, you see, it didn't happen:

Republicans are pushing to rewrite budget rules in an attempt to remove financial obstacles that threaten the GOP’s effort to reform Social Security.

The potential move to craft budget language that would direct the Congressional Budget Office to score Social Security reform legislation over 30 or more years would likely increase the chances that the bill would pass in the 109th Congress.

Republicans could also write budget provisions that would remove the program entirely from the budget process.

Read the whole piece to see the justification for such a move offered up by GOP congressmen like John Sununu and Clay Shaw. Basically, the plan they're pushing is sure to produce huge surpluses 50 years down the road, so it's the height of foolishness to simply count the gigantic debt it's going to produce in the next ten years. The CBO, in other words, requires some dynamic scoring when it comes to Social Security.

Bob Matsui, the top House Dem on Social Security, is quoted in the piece as saying that he "never even contemplated that anyone would come up with an idea like this," and I suspect he's being perfectly honest about that. Republicans are damned skilled at coming up with ideas that Democrats could never have even contemplated anyone coming up with until Republicans come up with them. It's something Democrats will want to work on.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT GRATITUDE! In what transformed from a pep rally to a heated exchange between Donald Rumsfeld and National Guard and Reservists stationed at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, solders placed Rumsfeld on the spot for his poor military planning and management skills. The rally was intended to be a send-off for the soldiers as they headed north, but with Rumsfeld in attendance, more than a few took the opportunity to pose tough, yet sensible, questions to their boss.

According to this Reuters report, Army Spc. Thomas Wilson voiced the question seemingly on everyone's mind:

"Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to armor our vehicles... [scrap] that has already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take us into combat?

This comment apparently drew cheers from the audience. Lest the Sectretary of Defense be upstaged by some lowly Tennessee National Guardsman, though, Rumsfeld told the soldiers just exactly what he thinks about the utility of armor in the first place.

"I've talked a great deal about this with a team of people who have been working hard at the Pentagon... if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can blow up...”

The thing is, soldiers are rooting around landfills to find scraps of metal because they do think it will help keep them from losing a limb or worse. If Rumsfeld knew someone who was driving those trucks, do you think he would take such a cavalier attitude on the effectiveness of armor?

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE CRYSTAL BALL. Brad DeLong has a good post on the boring-but-important subject of the macroeconomic forecasts underlying the Social Security debate. The entire "crisis" exists because the Social Security trustees forecast that economic growth over the next 75 years will be slower than growth over the past 75 years. There are some reasons to think this is correct, but the important thing to note is that the would-be privatizers are working with the assumption that stock market growth over the next 75 years will be the same as stock market growth over the past 75 years.

That, in turn, is only justifiable under the theory that macroeconomic performance in the future will be about the same as past performance. But if that's true, then there's no crisis. Personally, I think 75-year forecasting is a bit silly. I told a colleague this morning that by the time we retire, the first batch of super-productive genetically engineered ubermenschen should be coming on the market and will solve all our problems. He replied that the ubermenschen might turn on their creators and oppress us. (There's no universal social insurance in Gattaca.) The point is that if economic growth is as bad as the trustees think it will be, this will generate all kinds of problems for everyone and everything, problems that will extent to the stock market and hypothetical private accounts (to say nothing of the federal General Fund). Conversely, if the economy grows fast enough to keep the stock market generally healthy, there is no Social Security problem.

--Matthew Yglesias

NO ISLAMIC REPUBLIC, NO BAN. Reader E.F. writes in apropos of some recent Iran-related commentary to ask: "Why is it automatically assumed that the Iranian nuclear program would be terminated if the rule of the ayatollahs is terminated? Democratic countries like Britain, France and Israel felt no such constraints." Quite true. It's hard to know for certain, but indications are that the nuclear program is reasonably popular on the Iranian street and a democratic government might be interested in moving forward with it.

On the other hand, even if that did happen, a nuclear Iran wouldn't be nearly as troubling to the United States if the country wasn't being run by an ideologically antagonistic regime with a self-conception as an anti-American revolutionary power. Moreover, a government responsible to the Iranian people would likely be much more concerned about the deleterious consequences to Iranian well-being of withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and a functioning democracy with a transparent government and a free press would have a harder time cheating on its NPT commitments. But the case of Israel does show that these factors aren't necessarily decisive; a country that feels sufficiently threatened by its neighbors will just stay out of the NPT and build its bomb. Israel isn't a strategic threat to the United States, and a democratic Iran probably wouldn't be either, but if it's proliferation per se that you're trying to stop, there's a need for real NPT reform, some mechanism for moving non-NPT countries into the system, and some demonstrated commitment on the part of the United States, China, Russia, France, and Britain (especially the first two) to their NPT commitment to move toward multilateral nuclear disarmament.

--Matthew Yglesias

THINKING ABOUT UN REFORM. The recent fracas about Kofi Annan, of course, has almost nothing to do with Annan or the oil-for-food program, and a great deal to do with the role of the UN Security Council as a legitimate source of authority to embark on military ventures. The conservative position on this, though not stated forthrightly during the current debate, is reasonably clear: The United States should not allowed itself to get tied down by Lilliputians who use their Security Council votes as a substitute for military might that they lack. By calling into question the integrity of the UN bureacracy, they hope to tar other UN institutions and erode their legitimacy. It's a bit of a low blow, but it does serve a coherent position.

What's the liberal alternative? One path, suggested by Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson in the current Foreign Affairs is to view Security Council resolutions and self-defense as the sole legitimate bases for military action. Tucker and Hendrickson are obviously writing with Iraq in the foreground (though it's worth noting that their 1992 book, The Imperial Temptation, came out against the first Gulf War, UN authorization notwithstanding), but it also takes a whack at the Clinton administration for its use of force during the Kosovo crisis.

In practice, the liberal dilemma is more general than that. China and Russia both have vetos on the Security Council, neither government is committed to liberal democratic norms, and both for that reason espouse a very strong doctrine of state sovereignty lest humanitarian principles be turned against them some day. This isn't really a problem that can be resolved through the popular step of expanding Security Council membership (by including rising powers like Japan, India, Brazil, Nigeria, etc.) unless you also get rid of the veto rule so that you don't have the absurd situation of the world's democracies holding back from humanitarian action until they can get the go-ahead from Vladimir Putin or the Communist Party of China. That would be hard to do, both in terms of international and domestic politics, but if it could be achieved it would spare liberals the burden of needing to hem and haw every time the subject of the Security Council comes up and offer us a position that would not only be clear (like Tucker and Hendrickson's) but also viable.

--Matthew Yglesias

EL PRESIDENTE? Lots of lefties of my aquaintance like to wonder whether we're living in some kind of a banana republic. It appears the White House P.R. team decided to oblige their fantasies. Check out what George W. Bush was wearing for a speech at Camp Pendleton yesterday.

In reality, of course, the Marines were simply welcoming the president by giving him one of their own jackets, customized with his name and rank (commander-in-chief). But the epaulets really give the picture a "Dear Leader" quality, no? A cross between Fidel Castro and Moon Over Parador.

--Nick Confessore

WATCH THE EMERGING CW. The old CW that John Kerry lost the election because of moral values seems good and dead by now (see this prescient morning-after debunking by yours truly that, sadly, has not yet brought me the fame and fortune I so richly deserve), but as we've been seeing the notion that it's all about the exurbs is still hot.

If you want to get on top of the emerging debunking of this theory, let me suggest that you put aside your post-election bitterness and click over to Ruy Teixeira's site, where he's been crunching the numbers and coming to the conclusion that exurban turnout and population growth didn't have much to do with it. Instead, George W. Bush's additional votes seem to have come from the most painfully uncool places of them all -- small cities like Youngstown, Canton, and Dayton, and Jacksonville, Pensacola, and Sarasota. I look forward to future David Brooks columns about how these dreary, stagnating locales represent the true spirit of America, as well as bitter intra-Democratic fights about how to win small-city hearts and minds in which, shockingly, it turns out that everyone's favored political prescriptions are the same as their favored substantive policy prescriptions.

--Matthew Yglesias

SENSE AND IRRITABILITY.While conventional wisdom would have it that Sen. Norm Coleman's call for Kofi Annan to resign is little more than a reflexive, anti-UN knee-jerk reaction that comes naturally to a certain element in Congress, I disagree. What I see is a hollow man in need of some grandstanding, so he conjures Joe McCarthy’s ghost by leveling unsubstantiated and incendiary charges against a single individual.

But at least one senator of good-conscience, not to mention substance, disagrees with Coleman’s “shoot first ask questions later” methods. Joe Conason of the New York Observer offers us Sen. John McCain's take on the Coleman-Annan fracas:

Asked whether he believes that Mr. Annan should step down, the Arizona Republican and outspoken hawk replied, "No. I think that we should have a full and complete investigation and then make decisions like that. Am I disturbed when I hear that his son was on payroll? Of course I’m disturbed about it, and apparently Kofi Annan was [disturbed] also." He added, "I think Coleman is kind of a symptom of some dissatisfaction within Congress about the U.N.—but no, I think we need a full and complete investigation, and there’s plenty of time to decide whether people should keep their jobs or not."

It's always heartening to read this kind of refreshing dose of common sense.

--Mark Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE DEMOCRATS' DA VINCI CODE. David Sirota thinks he's found a way forward for the Democrats -- and he's got the evidence to back it up. Sirota looks at the tactics that buoy perennially successful red-state Democrats like Byron Dorgan, Ted Strickland, and Janet Napolitano. How do they win while strong candidates like Erskine Bowles plummet? It's the little guy, the class war, the corruption, argues Sirota -- in short, it's good old-fashioned populism.

--Jeffrey Dubner

HAWKS AND DOVES, TOGETHER AT LAST. Marshall Wittman lays down a commitment to staying the course in Iraq as a test of the national-security bona fides of liberals, but look who's cutting and running according to Warren Strobel:

However, top Bush administration officials are now hinting that the White House is eager to start withdrawing troops from Iraq by the middle of next year. One rationale, a senior administration official said, is to give the president greater flexibility in dealing with Iran.

"Greater flexibility," in this context, would mean greater flexibility to launch airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities without exposing U.S. troops to counterattacks by Iranian intelligence operatives working in Iraq. Some of the other ideas being floated in this article seem much better, though it's pretty distressing to see that trying to work out a unified diplomatic front with the EU to use economic carrots and sticks to dissuade Iran from going nuclear doesn't even seem to be on the table. And of course nothing about withdrawing from Iraq will change the fact that we don't know where Iran's nuclear facilities are, which makes them pretty hard to destroy.

--Matthew Yglesias

COALITION OF THE STRONG-ARMED. In his column today, Nicolas Kristof selflessly pledges to search Eastern Europe and the Baltic for more troops to send to our coalition of the willing. Though he leaves Estonia empty handed, Kristof is undeterred:

I'll continue my mission on behalf of Mr. Bush by traveling to two more giants in our coalition: Latvia and Lithuania. Will I find more troops for Iraq? Stay tuned.

When Kristof heads to Latvia, he might be in for a surprise. In February 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, Latvia signed on to the “coalition of the willing;” after the invasion, Latvia sent a small contingent of soldiers to support the American occupying force. However, on July 1, 2003, with Latvian soldiers still in Iraq, the Bush administration suspended its military assistance programs to Latvia because the country refused to sign a bilateral immunity agreement excluding Americans from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. As a result, for a full five months, Latvian troops were at once being punished by the United States and supporting American troops in Iraq. Finally, in November 2003, President Bush waived these punitive sanctions against our erstwhile ally.

Some skilled diplomacy, eh?

--Mark Leon Goldberg

A GUTTING OF FEW WORDS. Looks like Sam Rosenfeld spoke too soon when he said the intelligence reform bill had been revived with "only take a tiny change" rather than "a further watering down of the budgetary authority given to the new post of national director of intelligence." As Fred Kaplan explains, the small change in the legislative language will have big results, to wit essentially restoring all the Secretary of Defense's authority over the majority of the intelligence budget. When all is said and done, then, there's almost no content to this reform, largely because the president doesn't favor intelligence reform. On it's own terms, that's fine (there are lots of reputable people on both sides of the 9-11 Commission proposal), but it's all-too-typical of the way this administration does business to kill reform by pretending to embrace it rather than putting its actual position on the table and trying to win an honest argument.

--Matthew Yglesias

DAVID BROOKS NEEDS TO DO HIS HOMEWORK. Why is David Brooks promoting the work of a well-known eugenicist sympathizer who regularly indulges in racial stereotyping for a Web site condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a "hate group"? In today's New York Times, Brooks cited a recent article by Steve Sailer, a well-known promoter of quasi-scientific explanations for racial stereotypes who's mixed up with a variety of right-wing eugenicists, white supremacists, and general all-around wack-jobs.

Brooks also adopted a fair number of Sailer's analytic points. Brooks wrote fondly about "natalism," "a little-known movement sweeping across the United States":

All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling - in Western Europe, in Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends...

If you wanted a one-sentence explanation for the explosive growth of far-flung suburbs, it would be that when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences....

You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

The "bad influences" mentioned in Sailer's The American Conservative story, "The Baby Gap: How birthrates color the electoral map" (get it? color) are, by and large, "illegal immigrants and other poor minorities," "ghetto hellions," and "the public schools." Sailer's article is explicitly about whites:

Nobody noticed that the famous blue-red gap was a white baby gap because the subject of white fertility is considered disreputable. But I believe the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking. At least, it’s certainly more interesting.

Brooks writes that "Young families move away from what they perceive as disorder, vulgarity and danger and move to places like Douglas County in Colorado (which is the fastest-growing county in the country and has one of the highest concentrations of kids)." Compare that to Sailer: "Couples attempting to raise children in a big blue city quickly learn the truth of what bond trader Sherman McCoy’s father told him in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities: 'If you want to live in New York, you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate.'" Unable to insulate themselves through buying into private schools that save them from the urban minorities, writes Sailer, they simply move to the 'burbs, where, "Having insulated themselves through distance rather than money, they can now send their kids to public schools."

In bringing aboard a movement conservative, the august Times could hardly have imagined that they'd eventually have a ready conduit for the racialist thinking of the fringe right on their pages. But this promotion of Sailer's analysis by Brooks is opinion journalism at its absolute shoddiest. The New York Times owes its readers an apology and Brooks ought to be reprimanded for promoting this kind of clap-trap.

Sailer articles in the past few years have included: "Save Europe! Keep Turkey Out of the EU"; "Brown vs. Black—vs. America"; and "GOP’s Southern (=Sailer) Strategy Rises Again. Actually, It’s Never Been Down." The far-right Web site FreeRepublic.com has previously refused to post Sailer's article "GOP Future Depends on White Vote," calling the piece "divisive" and "promoting racism." And check out Sailer's graphs purporting to show how racial differences in body-fat composition account for patterns of interacial marriage, if you want more of a taste of his kind of "science."

Sailer is, among other things, a columnist for VDARE.com, described thusly in the Southern Poverty Law Center's report, "Keeping America White":

Once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page, VDARE has now become a meeting place for many on the radical right. One essay complains about how the government encourages "the garbage of Africa" to come to the United States. The same writer says once the "Mexican invasion" engulfs the country, "high teenage birthrates, poverty, ignorance and disease will be what remains."

Another says that Hispanics have a "significantly higher level of social pathology than American whites. ... In other words, some immigrants are better than others." Yet another complains that a Jewish immigrant rights group is helping "African Muslim refugees" come to America.

Brimelow's site carries archives of columns from men like Sam Francis, who is the editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group whose Web page recently described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity."

It has run articles by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine, which specializes in dubious race and IQ studies and eugenics, the "science" of "race betterment" through selective breeding.

Recently, VDARE has even begun to publish the writings of Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State-Long Beach. MacDonald accuses Jews of "dominating" the "movement to change the ethnic balance of the United States by allowing mass, non-traditional [i.e., non-white] immigration."

He writes that Jews, believing "the masses ha[ve] to be deceived," frame their appeals in universalistic language. But behind that are "the Jewish agendas" of the deceivers. MacDonald also mentions "the famously heavy Jewish role" in television news.

Who are some of Sailer's allies and what role has he served in his chosen intellectual community? According to the SPLC, Sailer has organized an invitation-only online discussion group called the Human Biodiversity Institute:

This exclusive group of academics, race scientists and right-wing journalists — along with a reported handful of liberals — exchanges thoughts about "differences in race, sex and sexual orientation" for a chilling purpose: promoting and studying "artificial [genetic] selection."....

According to a list posted on HBI's Web site until last summer, this "elite" includes: · Jean-Phillippe Rushton, a prominent researcher on black genetic inferiority who is president of a pro-eugenics hate group, the Pioneer Fund; · Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, which purported to show black and Latino intellectual inferiority; · Kevin MacDonald, a professor at California State University at Long Beach who has written several books about supposed Jewish strategies to subvert "Euro-American" culture; and · Gregory Cochrane, a physicist who has suggested the existence of a genetic "gay germ."

These ideas about race and sex have not been limited to the world of academia. The HBI also includes several right-wing journalists who help popularize their theories — and promote their books.

The most prominent cheerleader for Bailey and the other HBI researchers is the man who started the HBI: Steve Sailer, a United Press International reporter and frequent contributor to the anti-immigration Web site, VDARE.com.

Just listen to Sailer in his own words. On gays: "[M]ost of them were effeminate little boys.” "[A]n infectious disease itself could cause homosexuality. It's probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an intestinal or respiratory germ. It's radically unfashionable to call homosexuality a disease. But you can't think rigorously about the gay gene theory without drawing straightforward analogies to genetic diseases."

On immigration: "The more diversity, the more identity politics. If we didn't want blacks to engage in ethnocentric politics, well, our ancestors shouldn't have dragged them here in chains. We can, however, moderate the amount of diversity we import in the future."

On the segregationist Pioneer Fund: "I can't think of any general moral principle justifying [Pioneer Fund founder Wickliffe Preston Draper's] critics' presumption that, while black or Irish or Jewish ethnocentric foundations are hunky-dory, the early Pioneer Fund's WASP ethnocentrism was the blackest sin imaginable....no organization has done more than the Pioneer Fund to develop scientific knowledge about human biodiversity."

According to The Wall Street Journal, the pro-segregation Pioneer Fund was charted in part to provide scholarships to "children who are deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states." Further, promoting high birthrates among whites -- and quantitative scientific research that proved the superiority of whites -- was part of the purpose of the group:

One of the first major projects of the Pioneer Fund under Mr. Draper was a program to encourage officers of the all-white U.S. Army Air Corps, predecessor of the Air Force, to have more children. Mr. Draper and other directors of the foundation believed that the Pioneer Fund should encourage a higher birth rate among the best of the white race....

Draper would doubtless be pleased to see Brooks' economium to the new white natalism sweeping the land, and on the op-ed page of The New York Times, at that.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CONSERVO-RACE CARD. The moment I saw that Harry Reid had called Clarence Thomas an “embarrassment” on Meet the Press on Sunday, I started waiting for conservatives to indulge in one of their more bizarre debating ploys when piling on the outrage. Thanks to Sean Hannity, whose hackery brooks no real comparisons, I didn’t have to wait for long. Yesterday on Hannity and Colmes, our man berated Democratic congressman Adam Smith (who was quite sharp throughout the entire program, I should add) about Reid’s swipe at Thomas. Hannity, ever perceptive, sensed something ominous simmering just beneath the surface:

HANNITY: I'm just beginning to see a pattern here. I see a lot of the left attacking Condoleezza Rice. I see when -- when Justice Janice Brown, an African-American woman, when the president wants to appoint her, Democrats oppose her. Democrats opposing Miguel Estrada. Democrats attacking Condi Rice, Democrats attacking Clarence Thomas.

And I'm just wondering, it seems, you know, for the party that always claims they're for minorities and for advancement of minorities, they don't put them in positions of power when they have the opportunity, and then when other people try...

SMITH: That's ridiculous.

HANNITY: Well, Bill Clinton...

SMITH: That's just absolutely ridiculous.

HANNITY: ... didn't put people into the positions of power that George Bush has.

SMITH: Bill Clinton appointed African-Americans. He appointed Hispanic-Americans.

HANNITY: Not to national security adviser, not to secretary of state, not to the Supreme Court, sir.

SMITH: Certainly. But to say, I mean, you are basically implying that Harry Reid is a racist. He's criticizing Clarence Thomas.

HANNITY: No, I'm not. No, you let me finish my point.

SMITH: You're always saying what you said -- you hard liberal Democrats (ph).

HANNITY: You might learn something. Let me finish my point. What I see is Democrats oppose African-Americans that are conservative, but yet they claim to support minority rights.

And what I'm saying here is, why, if you're for the advancement of minorities, why do you oppose every conservative African-American or Hispanic American? Why is this pattern emerging?

This pose of faux-racial sensitivity that Republicans adopt reflexively whenever a minority conservative gets criticized is really pretty disgusting -- and it's really getting old.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BAD APPLES. Lurking in the midst of this sordid tale of detainee abuse and witness intimidation in Iraq and Afghanistan comes the revelation that the FBI sent an email on the subject of interrogations noting that General Geoffrey Miller, who, at various times, has run the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities and the prison system in Iraq, "continued to support interrogation strategies [the FBI] not only advised against, but questioned in terms of effectiveness." We also learn that "The special forces also monitored e-mails sent by defense personnel and ordered them 'not to talk to anyone' in the United States about what they saw, said one memo written by the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, who complained to his Pentagon bosses about the harassment."

But, hey, a landful of low-ranking soldiers are being prosecuted, so I guess the real lesson here is that the system works.

--Matthew Yglesias

AH, "ASIDE." The New Dem Daily cleared up the ambiguity in the UN editorial that I criticized yesterday. Turns out they "simply meant to convey that [Kofi Annan] should remove himself from any involvement in the oil-for-food investigation, and let Paul Volcker, a man of unquestioned integrity and ability, conduct it independently and publicly release his findings."

Glad to see they made that clear and dedicated today's editorial to the hypocrisy of the current congressional GOP -- they of the DeLay Rule, the K Street Project, and much more -- calling for accountability in another institution. But I'm still dismayed by the political sensibilities in that first effort. What is to be gained from a mild criticism of Kofi Annan and a call for a recusal he's already made? The revised editorial is still just a milquetoasty me-too of the radical-right position; it repeats all the same criticisms levied by the unreasonables and favorably quotes Sen. Norm Coleman's Wall Street Journal tirade against Annan; the only thing that differentiates it are its even-keeled tone and, apparently, the choice of the word "aside" rather than "down."

Of course, Democrats and the broader left shouldn't be offering a blind defense of the UN. (This DLC editorial last week in favor of UN reform is quite good on that front.) But why is the DLC weighing in on this issue in a way that not only makes the case for the extremists' objective, but also gives up the standing to rightly criticize the Republicans' tactics? They can call for whatever they want in terms of Annan and the UN, but they shouldn't ignore what their bedfellows on the other side are up to. The question Democrats (who, after all, have little to no power on the matter) should be asking isn't, "What should be done with Annan"; it's, "Why is the White House letting a few radical, out-of-the-mainstream congressmen trample on our foreign policy?" Everybody knows the White House supports Coleman and friends stirring up anti-UN sentiment, but they've been able to keep their hands clean of it so far. If there's anything the DLC can productively do here, it's try to make the administration own this attitude.

--Jeffrey Dubner

ANOTHER ELECTION MYTH SHATTERED. There's been some good reportage debunking the now-widespread notion that "values voters" swung the election in 2004. (The most recent I've seen was Dick Meyer's piece in the Washington Post's Sunday section.) Here's another flawed-exit-polling-related issue: George W. Bush's share of the Hispanic vote.

You'll recall that the various exit poll results had Bush receiving around 44-45 percent of the Hispanic vote, a major increase from his 2000 showing of 35 percent and, really, a death knell for the Democrats. Separate polling by the William C. Velasquez Institute (WCVI), however, had Bush at only 33 percent this November -- about the same, statistically, as his showing in 2000. Now the institute has put out a press release claiming partial vindication: NBC News has revised its original 44 percent number down to 40 percent. We'll see if other networks follow.

As a side note, the WCVI says that Republicans have gained in Hispanic support in Texas and Arizona, while Democrats have gained in Colorado and Florida -- better news for the latter party than the former, it would seem.

--Nick Confessore

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL. Yesterday 12 former servicemen and women filed suit in Massachusetts. All were discharged for their sexual orientation. The suit is being handled by the estimable Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), a group which has year by year dutifully published the egregious attacks on gay men and lesbians in the military since the very flawed "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue" policy was enacted under the first Clinton administration. In Cook v. Rumsfeld, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the 12 seek reinstatement. In a statement released to the press, C. Dixon Oxborne, the executive director of SLDN, said:

Last year, the Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, recognized that gays and lesbians have a fundamental right to privacy. Seventy-nine percent of Americans support allowing gays to serve openly, including a majority of junior enlisted personnel. Two retired generals and an admiral recently came out of the closet. Our closest military allies allow gays to serve openly. Quite simply, there is no compelling reason for a continued ban on gay personnel in the world’s strongest military. It is unconstitutional and contrary to our national security interests.

One of the things most striking in SLDN's work over the past few years is the organization's ability to highlight truth quietly and without fanfare. They will, for example, list those among the linguists in the U.S. Armed Forces who are forced out of the military after being outed -- including experts in languages like Arabic, people we sorely need. (Read the profiles of the plantiffs if you have time; they are all accomplished people who left the service only because they were forced and/or were living under extremely hostile conditions.) This case is clearly expected to go to the Supreme Court -- it's being argued using Lawrence v. Texas, the sodomy case. It asserts that: "'Don’t Ask, Don't Tell' punishes gay, lesbian and bisexual service members . . . for their sexual orientation and for their private, constitutionally protected conduct. As a result, it has denied and continues to deny them several Constitutional rights, including the right of privacy, equal protection of the law, and freedom of speech." It's particularly striking to see this suit juxtaposed against the daily barrage of news on backdoor drafts and over-extended tours of duty.

--Sarah Wildman

SO YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION? The New York Sun's Eli Lake reports on a new move toward unity on the part of the sundry Iranian groups opposed to the Islamic Republic; the focal point is a platform calling for a referendum on the extraordinary powers granted to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. On its own terms, nothing but good news, though the subtext here is obviously ongoing debates about the direction of America's Iran policy. One school of thought holds that our policy toward ending Iran's nuclear program should consist of support for these groups -- help the opposition end the regime.

Almost everyone one could call an establishment expert, however, is highly skeptical that any such regime change is in the cards for the near term, certainly not fast enough to stop the nuclear program. In fairness, this is one instances where the modern right's general disdain for expertise may have something to be said for it. Predicting internal events in Iranian politics has not exactly been the Intelligence Community's strong suit over the past several decades, and the more general issue of when a country is and is not in a revolutionary situation is poorly understood. Back to the first hand, however, the sort of argument on offer here from Soviet dissident and current Israeli cabinet member Natan Sharansky is plainly a fallacy.

There's a big gap between saying (correctly) that when sudden change is on the horizon expert observers often fail to see it, and saying that sudden change is, in fact, on the horizon just because expert observers say it isn't. The simple fact is that these things are hard to predict, but one thing we can know for sure is that overthrows of regimes -- even unpopular and tyrannical ones -- are very rare.

All that notwithstanding, on one level it's hard to see the harm in offering encouragement to Iran's democratic opposition and hoping for the best, while pursuing other measures at the same time. The trouble is that after watching the Iraqi National Congress morph from a long-shot effort at supporting opposition to Saddam Hussein into a domestic lobby that effectively captured America's Iraq policy to serve its own ends, many of us are leery that what's being sold now as an alternative to military measures (just as the INC once was) may turn into something else later.

--Matthew Yglesias

SILENT MAJORITY. I found Michael Powell's op-ed last Friday to be pretty reasonable, when I first read it. Then this came out (link via Taegan Goddard):

In an appearance before Congress in February, when the controversy over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl moment was at its height, Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell laid some startling statistics on U.S. senators.

The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”

What Powell did not reveal—apparently because he was unaware—was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group.

This year, the trend has continued, and perhaps intensified.

Through early October, 99.9 percent of indecency complaints—aside from those concerning the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast on CBS— were brought by the PTC, according to the FCC analysis dated Oct. 1. (The agency last week estimated it had received 1,068,767 complaints about broadcast indecency so far this year; the Super Bowl broadcast accounted for over 540,000, according to commissioners’ statements.)(emphasis added)

It's quite generous to suggest that Powell "was unaware" that the Parents Television Council (PTC) was behind nearly all the complaints. But forget about that; just reread Powell's op-ed to see how little he's concerned about letting one organization determine what the FCC looks into. Presumably knowing that the FCC's analysis was about to be publicized, all he had to say on the subject was:

Advocacy groups do generate many complaints, as our critics note, but that's not unusual in today's Internet world. We are very familiar with organized protests when it comes to media issues, but that fact does not minimize the merits of the groups' concerns.

Yet elsewhere he focused on "escalating calls for the government to enforce indecency laws aggressively" and "citizens who believe in values and reasonable limits" -- as if the former would exist without the PTC "e-alert" service, and as if the latter all agreed with the PTC's crusade.

Certainly all interest groups, however small a minority, should be able to make their complaints heard; and I'm all for making it easier for citizens to register grievances against corporations and government agencies. But where do the vast majority of Americans, who object to giving Brent Bozell the biggest say in what gets shown on broadcast television, go to file their complaints?

--Jeffrey Dubner

WRONG TRACK IN PAKISTAN. Yesterday, I took note of the president's odd take on Pakistani democracy, but writing in today's LA Times, Robert Scheer unloads an appropriately indignant column taking a look at the total situation. Looking at the administration's failure to make progress on any one of the three key issues in U.S.-Pakistani relations -- democracy, nuclear proliferation, and al-Qaeda -- it's easy enough to defer blame by citing the importance of the other issues. It's when you look at things altogether and see that Bush hasn't gained much of anything on any of these fronts over the past couple of years that you begin to see how far off course we are.

Worse, Bush aggravates policy failure on all these tracks by insisting that there are no problems. I'm perfectly aware that the president can't wave some magic wand and turn Pakistan into a non-proliferating liberal democracy that rounds up all terrorists overnight. But by continually claiming that he has done this when it's obvious that he hasn't, Bush damages American credibility on all three counts when we need to deal with other countries. Would it really kill him to try approaching this problem by telling the truth, and then proceeding from there?

--Matthew Yglesias

ACCOUNTABILITY FOR THAT GUY, BUT NOT THOSE GUYS. House Republicans -- some of whom presumably don't care for the United Nations, period -- are in high dudgeon over alleged corruption in the UN-administered oil-for-food program. Some of them are calling for Kofi Annan's resignation, and more:

Rep. Scott Garrett (news, bio, voting record), R-N.J., said stepping down may not be enough for Annan.

"To me the question should not be whether Kofi Annan should remain in charge," he said. "The question is whether he should be in jail," he said.

Garrett and four other Republican lawmakers spoke at a Capitol news conference in support of a bill that would withhold some U.S. dues to the United Nations if the organization doesn't fully cooperate with investigations of the program.

Three other Republicans, Rep. Vito Fossella of New York and Reps. Dan Burton and Mike Pence of Indiana also said Annan should resign. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., declined to join them, saying he didn't want calls for Annan's removal to distract from the oil-for-food investigations.

Separately, another lawmaker, Rep. Roger Wicker (news, bio, voting record), R-Miss., said he would introduce a House resolution calling for Annan's resignation.

"These allegations of corruption and mismanagement have seriously undermined Mr. Annan's credibility and his capacity to head the U.N.," Wicker said.

I know I'm more or less wasting my time to expect any consistency from these guys, but still, for the record: None of these guys voted against the DeLay Rule allowing GOP leaders indicted for a criminal offense to retain their posts. Rep. Garrett, who thinks perhaps Annan deserves to be in jail, took $15,000 from DeLay's PAC. And more to the point, I don't see them making a fuss over the 27 separate criminal investigations into Coalition Provisional Authority contracts in Iraq, involving millions of dollars of fraud and waste of taxpayer money. No outrage at all, really, no calls for accountability or resignation, let alone jail time for those at the top.

It's easy to see what's really going on here, of course. As the left-wing pinkos at the Financial Times put it today:

The witch-hunt against Kofi Annan and the United Nations over the Iraq oil-for-food scandal is, quite simply, a scandal all on its own. The leaders of this lynch mob in the US Congress and the rightwing commentariat are not gunning for Mr Annan so much as aiming to destroy the UN as an institution. That would be a disaster - for all of us, including, especially, the US. ...

First, the oil-for-food policy was devised and run by the member states of the UN Security Council, not by the UN Secretariat. All of the roughly 36,000 contracts were approved by a Security Council committee dominated by the US and the UK. Of these, about 5,000 were held up. But objections were entirely about imports to Iraq that might have offered Baghdad dual-use technology with which to reconstitute its weapons programmes. There was not one objection about oil-pricing scams, although UN officials brought these to the attention of the committee on no fewer than 70 occasions. ...

If the independent inquiry headed by Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, finds any UN official complicit in Iraq's roughly $4.4bn oil price skimming, then that person should have his diplomatic immunity lifted and be prosecuted. But there is nothing here to be laid at the door of Mr Annan, even though the lobbying activities of his son Kojo, who was still receiving severance payments from a company seeking Iraq's trade after oil-for-food started, will have hurt him.

Well said.

--Nick Confessore

PROGNOSIS NEGATIVE. While Andrew Sullivan makes the case for guarded optimism in Iraq, the CIA's Baghdad station chief disagrees. Doug Jehl reports that his newly leaked assessment suggested that "the security situation was likely to get worse, including more violence and sectarian clashes." Meanwhile, Don Rumsfeld promises that the troops will be home within the next four years, a statement for which a certain Democratic presidential nominee was roundly pilloried in the conservative press but on which Rumsfeld, naturally enough, will get a free pass followed by fulsome praise if he manages to make it happen.

At this juncture, however, it's worth noting how far we've gone toward lowering the goalposts for "success" in Iraq. If you'd said before the war that over a year (and 1,000 U.S. fatalities) after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces would still be taking large numbers of casualties in an effort to create a government dominated by Shiite fundamentalists that has little capacity to exercise control over broad swathes of Iraqi territory you would have been labled a major-league pessimist about the venture. Now that's the hope of the optimists. It's probably right to think that that's a better outcome than any of the feasible alternatives and, indeed, that if we'd lowered our goalposts sooner we'd actually be in a better position right now. Nevertheless, it's a startling climbdown from the happy promises that were made before the war was undertaken.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TO THE VIKTOR. Don't look now, but freedom is on the march, just about 1,400 miles northwest of Baghdad. What can we learn from watching democracy take hold in Ukraine? For one thing, that it's too late to call the western bloc broken, says Matthew Yglesias -- and that all parties will have to swallow some pride if the West is to outmaneuver Iran.

--Jeffrey Dubner

ABOLISHING SOCIAL SECURITY. The New York Times's Paul Krugman has the first of what will no doubt be many columns on the Bush administration's plans for Social Security. It packs a lot of good, clear debunking into a minimum of space. I think this part -- pointing out that the system is not "in crisis" -- is most useful:

There's nothing strange or mysterious about how Social Security works: it's just a government program supported by a dedicated tax on payroll earnings, just as highway maintenance is supported by a dedicated tax on gasoline.

Right now the revenues from the payroll tax exceed the amount paid out in benefits. This is deliberate, the result of a payroll tax increase -- recommended by none other than Alan Greenspan -- two decades ago. His justification at the time for raising a tax that falls mainly on lower- and middle-income families, even though Ronald Reagan had just cut the taxes that fall mainly on the very well-off, was that the extra revenue was needed to build up a trust fund. This could be drawn on to pay benefits once the baby boomers began to retire.

The grain of truth in claims of a Social Security crisis is that this tax increase wasn't quite big enough. Projections in a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (which are probably more realistic than the very cautious projections of the Social Security Administration) say that the trust fund will run out in 2052. The system won't become "bankrupt" at that point; even after the trust fund is gone, Social Security revenues will cover 81 percent of the promised benefits. Still, there is a long-run financing problem.

But it's a problem of modest size. The report finds that extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending - less than we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of the revenue lost each year because of President Bush's tax cuts - roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes over $500,000 a year.

Given these numbers, it's not at all hard to come up with fiscal packages that would secure the retirement program, with no major changes, for generations to come.

It's true that the federal government as a whole faces a very large financial shortfall. That shortfall, however, has much more to do with tax cuts - cuts that Mr. Bush nonetheless insists on making permanent - than it does with Social Security.

Regarding the administration's plans, Josh Marshall achieves similar economy:

Simply financing the 'transition costs' of phasing out Social Security will cost a good trillion or two dollars, maybe more -- by the White House's own informal estimates. And where on earth are we going to get that money? Borrow it, says the White House. Notta problem. In other words, we have to start phasing out Social Security now because if we don't we're going to face some big borrowing in a few decades. But we can avoid that horror of horrors by doing some big time borrowing now to finance abolishing Social Security we won't have to face that terrible fate a few decades from now.

Makes perfect sense, right?

I sense Josh is being ironic.

--Nick Confessore

CHOICES, CHOICES. Via Daniel Okrent's omblog, I came across the following thoughts of Lester Markel, who ran The New York Times' Sunday sections for many years, on objectivity:

"The reporter, the most objective reporter, collects fifty facts. Out of the fifty he selects twelve to include in his story (there is such a thing as space limitation). Thus he discards thirty-eight. This is Judgment Number One.

"Then the reporter or editor decides which of the facts shall be the first paragraph of the story, thus emphasizing one fact above the other eleven. This is Judgment Number Two.

"Then the editor decides whether the story shall be placed on Page One or Page Twelve; on Page One it will command many times the attention it would on Page Twelve. This is Judgment Number Three.

"This so-called factual presentation is thus subjected to three judgments, all of them most humanly and most ungodly made."

I was trying to make a similar point in this post last month. But the truth is that this stuff isn't, or shouldn't be, rocket science. Indeed, any given story is subject to almost innumerable judgments, even more than the ones Markel laid out. My point here isn't that newspapers should all look like the New York Sun or the Washington Times, which read like editorials written in inverted-pyramid style. And -- I can't stress this enough -- the fact that reporters and editors make choices when putting together stories doesn't mean those stories are "biased" in the way that discussions of media bias are usually framed. But I do think that part of the distrust readers increasingly have for the mainstream media -- the part not rooted in long-running and well-funded mau-mauing campaigns emanating from the political right -- is rooted in the pretension many reporters have that what they publish is objective fact, and therefore beyond challenge. A little humility, a little acknowledgment that any given news article represents the point of view of one human being, however diligent and fairminded, doing their best to match up printed words with perceived reality, would go a long way.

--Nick Confessore

DUNCAN GETS IN LINE. So, the impasse has been broken and the intelligence bill is moving forward to certain passage in the next few days. As it turned out, it really did only take a tiny change in the language concerning battlefield chain of command to assuage Duncan Hunter, rather than a further watering down of the budgetary authority given to the new post of national director of intelligence, as I had feared. (Then again, the conference report was already so watered down in that regard -- with the new director only allowed to move among agencies a maximum of 5 percent of a particular agency’s budget -- that it’s hard to see what more could have been compromised away.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

ASTROTURF BLOGGING. Over the past month or so I've been contacted by a number of people doing research for term papers and the like about blogging, and one of the points I've intermittently tried to make is that the legend of the blogger has relatively little to do with the tawdry reality of blogging. Basically, a family of software tools has been developed that makes it easy for an individual to produce web content. It's a kind of tool that cold be used for all sorts of purposes. For example, you could be a fiercely independent citizen-journalist commenting on issues of public concern. Or you could do what John Thune's Senate campaign did and pay some people to pretend to be fiercely independent citizen-journalists who just so happen to be supporting your man.

While deplorable on its own terms, this is but a small slice of the burgeoning field of "astroturf organizing" where, in exchange for money, someone goes off and creates the illusion of grassroots support for your cause. This particular blog gambit bears a special resemblance to James Glassman's innovative approach to journalism that Nick Confessore has explored at length. One has to assume that the Thune campaign wasn't the only outfit trying this out during the 2004 election season, and if they were they almost certainly won't be the last, since there's an obvious value to putting your talking points out through spokespeople who can't be readily identified as your spokespeople.

--Matthew Yglesias

ASIDE OR DOWN? It's unclear from this editorial whether the Democratic Leadership Council is calling for Kofi Annan to step down from his post as secretary general, or if they're just saying he hasn't recused himself fully enough from the oil-for-food investigation. Either way, though, is Norm Coleman's grandstanding the sort of thing that the DLC should be endorsing? Politically, there's much more to be gained for the Democrats by calling for the White House to get on the record supporting or condemning Coleman's demands; if nothing else, shouldn't somebody be asking how this furthers the goal of internationalizing and strengthening the coalition against terrorism? (As a wise man once said: "He called them coerced and the bribed. That's not how you bring people together.") And looking beyond domestic politics, there's no doubt that Annan's head isn't the ultimate prize here -- the goal is the delegitimation of the United Nations. Is that something the DLC wants to further?

--Jeffrey Dubner

ACTUAL COUNTERTERRORISM. I've been writing a lot lately on the Democrats and national-security policy, mostly in terms that are not extremely flattering to the party's left wing. For the sake of some balance, though, take a look at these thoughts from Ed Kilgore:

Long-time DLC activists have probably heard Montana's State Auditor, John Morrison, speak on this subject at one event or another. At the DLC training event in Colorado I attended last week, I heard Morrison make another valuable observation about the intersection of values and policy in the West. Noting that there is relatively little fear in Montana about the possibility of a terrorist attack, he said Montanans' strong support for the war on terror is based on the feeling that "America should kick butt where there are butts that need kicking." Given the fondness of Westerners for very large motor vehicles, that's a line that would probably fit on a bumper sticker througout most of the Rocky Mountain region.

No doubt that's right, but of course many of us here in the Democrats' big-city base actually are worried that terrorists might kill thousands of people just blocks from our home (it's already happened to me once -- wasn't fun) and have a rather large vested interest in seeing the country adopt policies that would actually reduce the probability of a terrorist attack. To some extent it's a tautology to suggest that "butts that need kicking" ought to be kicked, but, as liberals never tire of pointing out, this kind of strategy doesn't do you much good if you go around kicking butt in a way that inspires ever-more people to join the al-Qaeda movement or if you insist on clinging to policies (in Israel, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) that infuriate huge numbers of people.

Democrats probably do need to get in better touch with heartland nationalism to win, but if you wind up doing that in a way that vitiates all of the distinctively liberal insights into how these things work (and, frankly, the quintessentially blue-state attitude of viewing counterterrorism as actually about preventing terrorism and not restoring the nation's manly honor) then there's really no point.

--Matthew Yglesias

IS THERE A REAL DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE? The good doctor Bill Frist was on This Week yesterday. George Stephanopoulos asked him about those federally funded abstinence-only education programs we heard about last week -- the ones that seek to return youth to the blessed days of American innocence before Alfred Kinsey ruined everything. Frist is clearly reluctant to upset evangelical supporters of such programs by questioning the scientific veracity of their curricula, and his hesitance led to this rather remarkable exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Okay, let me switch to another subject. There was a bit of an uproar in Washington this week about this issue of these abstinence programs that are funded by the Federal government, the funding has doubled over the last four years but there was a report by the minority staff at the House Government Affairs Committee that showed that 11 of 13 of these programs are giving out false information. I want to show some of the claims they identified in the curricula. One of them was, one of the programs taught that "The actual ability of condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS, even if the product is intact, is not definitively known." Another, "The popular claim that condoms help prevent the spread of STDs is not supported by the data." A third suggested that tears and sweat could transmit HIV and AIDS. Now, you're a doctor. Do you believe that tears and sweat can transmit HIV?

FRIST: I don't know. I can tell you ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: You don't know?

FRIST: I can tell you things like, like ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, wait, let me stop you, you don't know that, you believe that tears and sweat might be able to transmit AIDS?

FRIST: Yeah, no, I can tell you that HIV is not very transmissible as an element like, compared to smallpox, compared to the flu. It is not, but the first slide, because I think it's dangerous to show that and then sort of walk away.

...

[after talking about other issues pertaining to the programs]

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me just, I wanted to move to another subject, let me just clear this up, though. Do you or do you not believe that tears and sweat can transmit HIV?

FRIST: It would be very hard. It would be very hard for tears and sweat, I mean, you can get virus in tears and sweat but in terms of the degree of infecting somebody, it would be very hard.

"Very hard." Glad to see Dr. Frist could clear that one up for us.

(Thanks to reader J.R.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT MAKES A PARENT? The American Civil Liberties Union issued a friend-of-the-court brief today in a case that highlights the very scary dangers of the gay-marriage amendments that passed across the country. In 1999, a lesbian couple, Tina Burch and Christine Smarr, had a child in West Virginia. Smarr, the biological mother, was killed in a car accident in 2002. Her parents have spent the last two years seeking to take custody from her partner (the surviving parent) in West Virginia's courts. The ACLU explains that:

Following Smarr’s death, her parents, Paul and Janet Smarr, sought to take custody of Zachary. The trial court sided with Burch and awarded her primary custody, with visitation rights to the grandparents. The court found Burch to be Zachary’s “psychological parent” – one who, while not related to a child biologically or through adoption, has functioned as a parent in every way. West Virginia appeals courts have recognized psychological parents in the past, but never involving gay couples.

The Circuit Court reversed the trial judge’s ruling, deciding to remove Zachary from a parent he has lived with since birth and give custody instead to his grandparents. The Circuit Court refused to apply the psychological parenthood doctrine in the context of a gay couple. The case is now before the West Virginia Supreme Court on appeal. Burch has been allowed to maintain custody of Zachary pending a decision by the high court.

Despite having raised the 4-year-old since birth, the non-biological mother is forced to fight to prove she is the parent of the child. In the wake of restrictive gay-marriage amendments, with more and more states denying rights to gay and lesbian couples that heterosexual couples take for granted, this will not be the last suit of its kind.

--Sarah Wildman

MARRIAGE MADE IN HEAVEN. Ah, nothing warms a liberal’s heart quite like a multi-million dollar distribution deal between Clear Channel and FOX News. The lengthier, subscription-only Wall Street Journal report is here. (Thanks to reader S.M.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

IRS, INC. Via Paul Glastris, I see that not only was a provision blocking the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to accelerate the contracting-out of government services across the board stripped from the omnibus budget bill, so was a similar provision specifically barring efforts to outsource the collection of delinquent taxes to private firms. (Both provisions had been co-sponsored by Rep. Chris Van Hollen.) As I said before, the White House’s efforts to outsource government services to GOP-friendly private companies -- an ongoing struggle pitting civil-service unions and their congressional backers against most Republicans and the federal contractors lobby -- should likely find much more success in George W. Bush’s second term, and are worth watching.

Here’s my favorite passage from the Washington Post piece on the push to allow private firms to collect delinquent taxes, something only the IRS is allowed to do now:

People on both sides of the issue say they believe IRS workers can collect unpaid taxes more cheaply and effectively than contract collectors. But because of chronic staff shortages and other resource constraints, IRS workers often are unable to follow up until years later.

Hmmm, might that just mean that the IRS needs to be funded and staffed more adequately? No one seems even to bother to make the efficiency argument in this case. Here’s Congressman Van Hollen’s latest statement on the irony of Congress reconvening this week to eliminate the infamous “Istook amendment” on the grounds that it jeopardizes the privacy of taxpayers, while no one mentions the fact that this measure was stripped from the same bill.

--Sam Rosenfeld

CIVIL WAR. My contention that the much-feared Iraqi Civil War is already under way has attracted some criticism, but I think things are moving in my direction. Take a look at The Washington Post's "Ethnic Violence Kills Dozens in Iraq" and The New York Times' "Mayhem in Iraq Is Starting to Look Like a Civil War."

From a certain point of view, this isn't the worst thing one could imagine. Notably, in his aforementioned critical article, James Joyner seemed to run together the contention that Iraq is facing a bloody civil war with the contention that the United States is somehow going to "lose" the war. If anything, the move toward civil war -- increasing Kurdish involvement in anti-insurgent fighting in northern Iraq and Shiite Arabs' newfound interest in forming militias to fight the Sunnis -- increases the likelihood that the Iraqi government will be able to withstand a U.S. troop withdrawl in the near future. (Iraq's president says it will take "months".)

My point (and a rare moment of agreement with Charles Krauthammer) is that as the fighting in Iraq increasingly resembles a three-cornered struggle between Shia, Sunni Arab, and Kurd, it's increasingly unclear why the U.S. Army and Marines ought to be sitting in the crossfire or working for one side or the other.

--Matthew Yglesias

COMMENCE THE WATERING DOWN. Looks like the president is now ready to join House hard-liners in putting the squeeze on Senate conferees to water down the intelligence bill. Even though the version that came out of conference already constitutes a massive compromise on the power of the proposed National Intelligence Director (NID), it doesn't cut the mustard with Duncan Hunter (nor, no doubt, with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, counseling the president behind the scenes). Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman put up a united front last week insisting that the conference bill was not up for renegotiation, but, as Roll Call quotes one Senate aide, “The bill is not going to be passed unless the conference [report] is opened.” The ostensible measure in contention pertains to fairly specific battlefield chain-of-command issues, but don't be surprised if what emerges from further "compromise" in the next two days is some kind of curtailment of the NID's budgetary authority, to the Defense Department's advantage.

Whether or not an intelligence bill gets passed this week, it's important to understand what is and is not going on here. I'm guessing that this whole protracted struggle does not, in fact, mark a particularly significant "test" of the president's power over his congressional majorities or of his ability to overcome Dennis Hastert's hardcore partisan rule about never passing legislation without a majority of his caucus backing it. Such a test can only come with legislation that the White House really, really wants to pass, not legislation that the president and his team has only ever been lukewarm about and that some significant team members have adamantly opposed from the beginning. The issues on which the White House might fervently seek legislation that congressional conservatives simply would not abide -- that is, the issues that really would put George W. Bush's power to the test -- are few and far between. The Medicare bill came close to being such a test, and there we witnessed what the White House and congressional leadership can accomplish when they really go to the mattresses on a bill.

The White House is fundamentally in sympathy with the House opponents of intelligence reform. That strikes me as a simpler and more plausible explanation for the clumsy spectacle we've been watching for weeks now than either the latest House bluster Bob Novak is channeling or the latest convoluted analysis offered up by David Broder.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE WAGES OF HYPOCRISY. Via Noam Scheiber, the president's odd ideas about Pakistani democracy:

One of the interesting lessons that the world can look at is Pakistan. You see, there are some in the world who do not believe that a Muslim society can self-govern. Some believe that the only solution for government in parts of the world is for there to be tyranny or despotism. I don't believe that. The Pakistan people have proven that those cynics are wrong. And where President Musharraf can help in world peace is to help remind people what is possible. And the solution in the Middle East is for there to be a world effort to help the Palestinians develop a state that is truly free -- one that's got an independent judiciary, one that's got a civil society, one that's got the capacity to fight off the terrorists, one that allows for dissent, one in which people can vote. And President Musharraf can play a big role in helping achieve that objective.

For some reason a lot of Muslims don't believe that Bush's policies toward Israel and Iraq are motivated by a sincere desire to spread liberty around the world. I wonder why that could be.

--Matthew Yglesias

PACIFISTS AND ALTERNATIVES. Peter Beinart and Kevin Drum are both concerned about the influence of crypto-pacifist opponents of the Afghan War on the Democratic Party. Atrios, speaking up for a popular-front, "no enemies on the left" mentality, essentially dodges the issue:

That's ridiculous. The issue with that war and any other war isn't simply whether it's "justifiable." And opposition to George Bush's War in Afghanistan does not imply that someone was "flatly opposed to any use of American military power at all." . . .

The point is that the right question is not "did 9/11 justify war" the right question is "was the way the Bush administration went to war, and all of its consequences, better than the next best option." Unless we have a conversation about the next best option before the fact, and an honest accounting of the consequences after the fact, we can never actually know that. "Taliban bad, al Qaeda bad, therefore the only possibile course of action is the Bush/Rumsfeld battle plan, is rather stupid thinking."

Fine, fine. Opposition to the Afghan War does not imply, as a matter of formal logic, that you would oppose the use of American military power under all circumstances. But if you, like I, spent the fall of 2001 in a place where anti-war sentiment ran high, listening to anti-war speeches and lectures and protests and teach-ins, reading anti-war op-eds in your school paper, speaking to anti-war people in your daily life and so forth, it was clear that most of the publicly offered rationales for opposing the war did, in fact, imply that the speaker or writer was opposed to any and all use of American military power. The most common line of criticism I heard was that any action that resulted in the deaths of Afghan civilians was an illegitimate form of collective punishment. There's a certain logic to this position, but it's the logic of pacifism and it's not the basis of a viable national-security policy. Unless the Democratic Party and its advocates can say so, it's not going to win any elections for the foreseeable future.

Atrios is trying to run opposition to the war together with the notion of criticizing some aspect of its conduct ("the only possibile course of action is the Bush/Rumsfeld battle plan"), but this is a dodge. Lots of people -- almost everyone, I would say -- think that Franklin Roosevelt's conduct during World War II is open to some criticism on both moral and pragmatic grounds. That doesn't mean the United States is full of World War II opponents. It probably paints with too broad a brush to say that every opponent of the Afghan War is a pacifist or someone who thinks that the whole thing was motivated by some nefarious natural-gas pipeline scheme, but the pacifists and the tinfoil hatters are very much real people, and liberals need to recognize that when these people become the public face of progressive politics -- as Michael Moore did around the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 -- that conservatives are the ones who reap the benefits.

--Matthew Yglesias

A WASH. The last two congressional races of the cycle came to an end this weekend, with a Democrat and a Republican winning the run-off elections in Louisiana's 3rd and 7th districts, respectively. No big surprises here, though Democrat Charles Melancon's tiny 517-vote victory over the "unqualified, overgrown frat boy" Billy Tauzin III in the 3rd district is at least a nice blow to nepotism.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WEEKEND UPDATE. Spent the weekend searching the Neverland Ranch? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. Democracy is fun!
• David Brooks. If only politicians could join hands across the aisle and implement long-held conservative policy goals, we could start putting aside all this bitterness and acrimony.
• Jim Hoagland. The UN should stop tinkering around the edges and focus on some really fundamental problems like years-old corruption allegations.
• David Broder. Republicans and Democrats ... it's like they have different beliefs about how the government should be run or something.
• Maureen Dowd. I hate Christmas.
• Thomas Freidman. And if Bush was really serious, he would wave his Magical Anti-Terrorism Wand and make the whole problem go away.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Richard Sinnreich on false hopes in Iraq.

--Matthew Yglesias

A REAL SHOCKER. So the CIA -- and, almost certainly, the White House -- apparently knew about the 2002 plot to overthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela at least a week before the coup was attempted, did nothing to warn the Chavez regime about it, prematurely announced Chavez's resignation in the immediate aftermath of the attempt, blamed Chavez for the entire disturbance, and explicitly denied that the United States had received any prior warning or indication that this was going to happen. There's no real evidence that the CIA or other American agencies were actually involved in the plot, but Josh Kurlantzick's recent piece in Mother Jones on the International Republican Institute indicates that some close American allies of the administration had trained and supported many of the participants. None of this has gotten much attention in the last two years here in the States. The focus of American foreign policy has, needless to say, moved elsewhere, and tacit American support for Latin American coups somehow seems so eighties -- like "Dynasty" or Cabbage Patch dolls.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MENTION IT, DON'T DEPEND ON IT. It may be the case that the Democratic Party spends too much on marketing, but I disagree that the biggest problem is its lack of substance (and for a slightly different reason than Matt did earlier). Like Matt said, Social Security is a good example; how should Democrats and other progressives market their opposition to the proposal the White House eventually puts out? Matt wants to see Democrats rally around a common policy; Josh Marshall recommends reviving some sort of "mend it, don't end it" rhetoric; Theda Skocpol suggests a number of criticisms centered on the effect on Social Security of Republican designs.

But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that whatever message Democrats decide on, it should have as little to do with Social Security as possible. It shouldn't even mention Social Security or its incidents. Social Security is just a policy; it may be one of the most important and beloved government programs in American history, sure, but any argument about a policy is still a step removed from an argument about people's lives.

Social Security is just a proxy for talking about the stability of people's lives. The Republicans have already cast their reforms as a way to preserve stability in this evolving 21st-century marketplace, even though their plans are only one of many policies that could respond to that situation. When they talk, they talk about why their idea matches voters' everyday concerns, not what effect it'll have on Social Security. Democrats and progressives need to do the same. The best recommendation I've heard is that they focus the debate on retirement.

The reason that dismembering Social Security is an ominous thought to people is that it threatens their retirement. Even young voters, 20 to 40 years away from depending on Social Security checks and thus not particularly worried about benefit cuts, expect to have a long and enjoyable retirement and dread the idea of paying for their parents' retirements. The Republican plan, whether intentionally or not, will gut that retirement.

It's like talking about "defending marriage;" nobody is actually attacking heterosexual marriages, but that's the fear that Democrats' policy goals most evoke. Do people fear the loss of a government program, or do they fear the loss of the things they've worked so hard for?

--Jeffrey Dubner

SORE BUMS. No one expected George Galloway to be gracious in victory. In this op-ed in the Guardian he tells those libelous Telegraph dweebs right where they can put their forged documents.

That said, he may have gone a bit over the top in comparing the pain inflicted by this judicial decision to spankings routinely received by British school children in hazing rituals:

Eighteen months and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths further on, the Daily Telegraph has been given a judicial thrashing at the high court, which will have stung more powerfully than any its public schoolboy editors endured in their younger days.

Of course, as I said yesterday, the Telegraph got what it sorely deserved.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

PULL THIS THREAD AS TOM WALKS AWAY. It hasn't attracted as much attention, but in my opinion if anything causes Tom Delay's corrupt machine to unravel, it's more likely to be the Indian gaming investigation than Ronnie Earle's inquiry into the Texas redistricting business, for two reasons. First, thanks to term limits, with the start of the new year John McCain will be stepping down as chair of the Commerce Committee and taking over at the Indian Affairs Committee. We learned at this summer's Republican convention that a lot of the McCain-worship out there was undeserved, but the fact remains that he's far more likely to zealously pursue an investigation of this sort than is any other possible GOP chairman.

Second, one of the less-obvious results of switching from a South Dakota-based Minority Leader in the Senate to a Nevada-based one is that the Democrats are switching from being led by a man who relies on strong Native American support to get re-elected to one with an extremely strong parochial interest in clamping down on the expansion of Indian gaming. That by no means ensures that DeLay will be taken down, but it does make this particular thread the one that's mostly likely to get a strong tug.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE DEATH OF VAN GOGH. The horrifying murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh has raised the profile of one of the most charged fronts in the clash between Islam and the West. How did the tension in the Netherlands reach this point, and where is it going from here? The Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg interviewed Marc Chavannes of the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad to discuss these chaotic developments.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WHERE'S THE PRODUCT? Ed Kilgore hits on an important point. The Democrats have gotten good at marketing, but not so good at developing a product:

It may be time for Democrats to make a collective decision to spend a few sheckels on the product development side of the political biz along with all the hundreds of millions they spend on marketing. That's even more important given the fact that Democrats have for too long lived off the ideas and messages developed during the Clinton administration--many of them still relevant, but now beginning to recede a bit in the rear-view mirror. Without control of the White House or either branch of Congress, where, specifically, is the Democratic institutional capacity for creating, refining, and messaging good and politically salient policy ideas? Academics? MeetUps? The new breed of talking-points distribution organizations that sprang up in 2004? Yeah, all of these can be sources of something to say, but in a party capable of raising a spending close to a billion dollars, there ought to be a little spare change under the sofa for real-live think tanks like those who have served the GOP so well over the years. We've got a few good ones, including our own Progressive Policy Institute, which gave the Clinton administration many of its best ideas, but they are pretty small operations compared not only to their conservative rivals, but to the vast array of Democratic groups focused on everything other than policy content.

I was talking to a friend who works at a progressive group in town a couple of weeks ago and she told me she'd been specifically tasked with coming up with some "new ideas" as part of an organization-wide "new ideas" drive. That doesn't strike me as the right approach, either. In my experience, progressives actually have plenty of ideas -- some genuinely new, others not-so-new but little-known. There are, for example, lots of ideas out there for resolving the financing issues with Social Security without, as the Republicans are proposing, destroying the system in order to save it. The trouble is that there's no process in place for the Democratic Party as a whole to unite around any particular idea and start pushing it. Let me quote my boss:

Also, when Nancy Pelosi compiled a list of Democratic reform ideas, harkening back to Newt Gingrich's idea of a Contract With America, it was absurd. It didn't come with a legislative agenda that Democrats would enact if they won the Congress. And the reason it didn't come with a legislative agenda is because congressional Democrats couldn't agree on one. That tells you the Democrats don't have the capability of nationalizing elections, at least as they are presently constituted.

There's the rub. I hold out some hope that Harry Reid's centralization initiative will do some good in this regard, but it'll be a hard trick to pull off. The Democrats are traditionally the less-united party, and without any real power that will let the leadership dispense -- or withhold -- favors, those centripetal forces should be stronger than ever.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS. Another intriguing hypothesis for why the Democrats' economic appeals don't always resonate with households that earn more than average comes in a new scientific study of what makes people happy:

One of the most consistent findings in the study was how little difference money made. As long as people were not battling poverty, they tended to rate their own happiness in the range of 6 or 7 or higher, on a 10-point scale. After controlling for other factors, Dr. Kahneman and his colleagues found that even differences in household income of more than $60,000 had little effect on daily moods. Job security, too, had little influence.

What made people happiest was watching television, having sex, shopping, and socializing with their friends. Which is to say, the stuff of culture and private life. No wonder cultural appeals that talk about threats to private life have an enduring appeal.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

HOMELAND SECURITY, R.I.P.? I'm not sure whether to take the nomination of Bernard Kerik to be director of homeland security as a lesson in how functionally irrelevant most cabinet secretaries are these days, or yet another indication of the degree to which the current administration values loyalty and symbolism over competence and substance. First, the news:

President Bush today announced that he has chosen Bernard B. Kerik, the New York police commissioner during the attacks on the World Trade Center, to take over the Department of Homeland Security from its first leader, Tom Ridge.

Kerik "has the background and the passion to protect our citizens," Bush said in an announcement ceremony at the White House this morning. He pointed to Kerik's work after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and said "the resolve [Kerik] felt that morning will guide him every day on this job.

White House officials described Kerik, who campaigned aggressively for Bush's reelection, as a proven crisis manager who can straighten out the lines of authority in the infant department and work to prevent a catastrophic attack or cope with its aftermath. Other Republicans said Kerik would provide a telegenic presence, and one presidential adviser pointed out that Kerik "brings 9/11 symbolism into the Cabinet."

Kerik appeared with Bush at the White House this morning and said he understands the "challenge that faces America . . . from the threat of terrorism."

Let's clear up a few things. First, Kerik has never had a high-level post in Washington before, and so will be at the mercy of all the more Washington-savvy subordinates who are, at this moment, fighting to retain their institutional prerogatives and stymie major reform within the recently-created Department of Homeland Security. That's a problem considering that DHS remains a cobbled-together assemblage of legacy agencies with little coordination or clear direction. Second, nobody can seriously credit Kerik for a significant portion of New York's decline in crime. He was police commissioner for just over a year, August 2000 until a few months after 9-11, and from what I know not an especially good one. The Washington Post even quotes a former colleague saying that Kerik is in fact a bad manager. Further evidence of this comes from point number three: His last big job was to spend six months training the Iraqi police force. He came back here after three months for reasons left obscure to the public, but easy to discern nonetheless: The training of Iraq's police has been a disaster. As Reuters reported at the time of the presidential debates (when George W. Bush was bragging about how many new police were on the job in Iraq):

The documents show that of the nearly 90,000 currently in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its new goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.

Six Army battalions have had "initial training," while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or "awaiting equipment." Just eight Guard battalions have reached "initial (operating) capability," and the Pentagon acknowledged the Guard's performance has been "uneven."

Training has yet to begin for the 4,800-man civil intervention force, which will help counter a deadly insurgency. And none of the 18,000 border enforcement guards have received any centralised training to date, despite earlier claims they had, according to Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.

They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them "minimally effective at their tasks," in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush.

But hey -- Kerik campaigned for Bush, so how bad can he be?

--Nick Confessore

REFORM NO MORE. Those of us hoping to see the Democrats become a real party of reform would seem to have just been dealt a blow (via Ezra Klein) by Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell:

For the millions of people who cannot afford high-speed Internet access, some local officials think they've hit on the answer: Build government-owned networks to provide service at rates below what big telecommunications companies charge.

From San Francisco to St. Cloud, Fla., an estimated 200 communities are toying with community-owned networks, sparking a battle with cable and telephone companies over how public, or private, access to the Internet should be.

The companies are lobbying furiously to block such plans, fearful that their businesses would be hurt. Their efforts most recently paid off Tuesday night in Pennsylvania, where a new law bans local governments from creating their own networks without first giving the primary local phone company the chance to provide service.

Consumer advocates denounce the new Pennsylvania law. They say it amounts to governments now needing a permission slip from entrenched monopolies to put a vital economic and educational tool within everyone's reach.

I couldn't begin to know whether or not such publicly-owned networks are a good idea. My concern would be that rather than providing broadband access to the poor, in practice this would mostly subsidize broadband for relatively prosperous individuals who use it anyway while diverting money from infrastructure needs that might be more useful to the working class. On the other hand, in addition to being a program to help the poor as such, a community network could also be a useful economic development initiative. But here's the thing -- one really, really good way to figure out if this makes sense would be to let some local governments try it out and then the rest of us could look at the results. What possible rationale could there be for Pennsylvania to prevent its local communities from experimenting? One can't help but think that the motives here have more to do with campaign contributions from Verizon "which helped shape the Pennsylvania law" than anything else.

--Matthew Yglesias

LET THEM IN. Regular Tapped readers will not be surprised that I couldn't agree more with the sentiments expressed in E.J. Dionne's new Washington Post column. Dionne argues that institutions of higher learning should allow military recruiters on campus even though efforts to overturn the Solomon Amendment in federal court have so far been successful. The key part:

Let's accept for the sake of argument that, in a close call, the court made the right ruling in protecting academic freedom. I'd assert further that the universities are absolutely right in opposing "don't ask, don't tell." The policy is both wrong and stupid.

It's wrong because it puts the government in a position of encouraging gays and lesbians in the military to lie about who they are. It is stupid because at a moment when we want our military to have access to all the talent it can get, we should welcome the service of all patriotic Americans, including those who are openly gay. We shouldn't make these patriots vulnerable to intimidation, pressure and even blackmail.

But having won their principle in court, these universities, including the law schools, should now voluntarily open their doors to recruiters. Liberals especially should be worried about the growing divide between the armed forces and many parts of our society. They should acknowledge that if liberals stay out of the military, their chances of influencing the military culture are reduced to close to zero. Above all, liberals should worry about the unfairness in the way the burdens of service are borne.

As I pointed out in this space a few months ago, the less the military can draw future officers from campuses that are hospitable to gays, the more it draws from campuses that are not -- and the more traditionalist and conservative the military becomes, thus making it harder to change the policy liberals want changed.

--Nick Confessore

PARTY DOWN? Today's Washington Post reports on fundraising totals for the two parties during the 2004 cycle. Here's the big news: The Democratic National Committee raised more money than the Republican National Committee, and factoring in all the money spent in support of either candidate by all different groups -- presumably including the parties, 527s, and 501(c)s -- $925 million was spent to support John Kerry compared to $822 million to support George W. Bush. For those who remember the McCain-Feingold debates, it's interesting to note, as the Post does, that both party committees exceeded their haul from 2000, when they could still legally raise soft money. That vindicates supporters of the law on their argument that banning soft money would not destroy the parties themselves. But it would be interesting if the Post had also calculated how much of the 2000 soft-money fundraising made it back into the political process via 527s -- it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

There are any number of broader lessons that can be drawn from these numbers, or at least postulated. First, the existence of left-leaning 527s does appear to have led to a massive advantage for Kerry, although it's hard to know for sure without seeing better numbers. As good students of campaign finance politics know, right-leaning 501(c)(4)s (think the National Rifle Association) spend way more than the left-leaning ones (think the Sierra Club). I would bet that, in the end, all those millions of dollars flowing into 527s first closed the gap between independent groups on the right and left, and then pushed the latter side over the top to the tune of about $100 million -- not peanuts, but not that big in the scheme of things.

Second, money doesn't buy you love. The Democratic fundraisers and vote-turner-outers did their job in 2004, aided by a president who aroused extraordinary antipathy among his opponents. The party isn't going to win a majority by bringing even more new people into the process; if they win in the future, it will be by changing minds. That is a fundamental fact. (They should probably start with some of the voters E.J. Dionne identified in this column.)

Third, contrary to what a lot of people in Democratic circles say, Terry McAuliffe did a pretty good job. He raised more money without access to soft dollars than his predecessors did with access to soft dollars, and the DNC is first and foremost a fundraising machine. (Whether it should be is a question I leave to others.)

Fourth, McCain-Feingold helped revive small-donor fundraising on the left -- it was already robust on the right -- by forcing the Democrats to develop an infrastructure to raise more money from the base. If the Democrats are smart, they will nurse that effort and build on it. With the GOP likely to control Congress for the next decade, and the K Street Project in force, there will be less corporate money flowing into party coffers as the years go by. This is both a threat and an opportunity. A threat because parties need money to win. And an opportunity because, for reasons Josh Marshall explained here, the Democrats now have a chance to become a truly reformist party -- indeed, they have little other choice. The more money Democrats raise from small donors, the more freedom they'll have to be a reform party.

--Nick Confessore

ROCKS AND HARD PLACES. Peter Galbraith and Leslie Gelb make the case that the January 30 Iraqi elections are going to be a disaster. I agree, but while their article's subhead (admittedly, probably not something they wrote themselves) claims that "postponing Iraq's elections would be bad; holding them would be worse," the truth is more likely the reverse. A postponement certainly might help reduce tensions with Sunni Arabs and facilitate the resolution of Kurdish issues, but it also might not. Meanwhile, it would definitely enrage influential Shiite Arabs. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani wants elections in January, and at this point we're in no position not to give them to him. The course he's picked probably won't work, but it's the course he's chosen, and opposing it will only make things worse.

The tragedy here is that if occupation authorities had shown Sistani's views more deference back in the heady days of 2003, rather than waiting to listen to him until we had no choice but to do what he says, we probably could have avoided a good deal of this trouble. What's more, the problems with this election plan have been visible for months and the administration's only plan to deal with them was to demolish Fallujah, leaving 200,000 homeless refugees in the surrounding areas.

--Matthew Yglesias

CANADIAN BACON. The Los Angeles Times praises the president for his recent efforts at improving relations with Canada and then suggests that "if he really wants to mend fences, he should make" resolving outstanding trade disputes about Canadian beef and softwood lumber "a high priority." I'm less impressed. Contrary to a lot of the reporting in the American press, the deterioration in U.S.-Canadian relations had very little to do with Iraq (Canada has a small military and a big deployment in Afghanistan, so it couldn't have done much to help with Iraq largely because it was already being so helpful elsewhere, so on the inter-governmental level there wasn't much substance to the dispute) and a great deal to do with these trade disputes and personal tensions between the president and Jean Chrétien.

The personal tensions were nicely resolved with Chrétien's replacement by Paul Martin, who's more pro-American anyway. That left trade on the table, and Bush hasn't done much of anything to accommodate the Canadian view on these issues. Worse, there's no clear sense in which the protectionist views Bush has staked out are even in America's interests, as opposed to the interests of a handful of not-especially-large American companies. But instead of addressing this, Bush went and spoke about Iraq, an emotionally divisive issue about which it will hardly be possible to reach a compromise since the relevant decisions happened in the past. Most oddly of all, Bush made a public show of his desire for U.S.-Canadian cooperation on missile defense, when I'm told that Martin was already perfectly willing to cooperate despite its unpopularity among his voters and wanted to not make a big deal out of it so as to avoid exposing himself to domestic political problems.

All-in-all, it's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's in many ways typical of the administration's failing foreign-policy efforts. Some combination of ignorance, laziness, and a preference for using foreign policy as a tool of domestic politics prevented the president from making progress on a minor, but real, problem for U.S. policy even though the problem wasn't very hard to solve. Unfortunately, some of our problems are much more severe, much harder to solve, and basically being handled in the same way.

--Matthew Yglesias

MR. IMMUNITY. My friend Amy Sullivan has written a first-rate cover story for The Washington Monthly on Bob Novak. The piece captures one of the more disgusting features of D.C. and elite media culture -- that weird combination of clubby insularity and liberal self-loathing among Novak's peers that allows resident 'wingers like him free reign to act without the slightest fear of professional accountibility. A similar point was made by Eric Boehlert in his recent Salon profile of William Safire: For decades, these two have occupied a niche in the media that renders them utterly immune from real recrimination or professional disgrace. A nice gig if you can get it.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TWO PARTIES. Where would you rather be right now: on the fairway with John Thune, or in the basement office with Harry Reid? (Don't feel like you have to answer that right away. It's a tough one.) Each party is retiring to plan strategy for next year, and the two parties couldn't be coming at it from less similar perspectives.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE PROBLEM WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT. Way back in the early '90s, I worked for an issue-based non-profit that did some fairly thorough and critical assessments of a government agency. What I learned then is that while government critics can often most frutifully make waves by accusing their targets of having some kind of pernicious intentions, in reality most problems arise because of some kind of combination of stupidity, incompetence, and bureacracy. Most people in government generally want to do the right thing, but it's very easy in bureacratic circles for people to get caught in the thick soup of their colleagues and, hampered by a lack of imagination, fail to see all the public implications of what they are proposing.

That's why this explanation by Richard Efford about how the ombinus spending bill came to include highly controversial language allowing House committee staffers to view individual's tax returns sounds so plausible to me:

In his first interview about the incident, Efford said yesterday that the genesis of the provision was problems he encountered this summer when he sought agency permission to visit an IRS facility where tax returns were being processed.

Over the past several years, Congress has appropriated more than $1 billion for the IRS to upgrade computer systems, and the agency has also received hefty increases to expand its tax-collection operations.

As the top staffer on the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the IRS budget, Efford said, he had a responsibility to inspect IRS facilities, observe computer programs and assess whether requests for additional tax enforcement personnel were justified.

But the IRS objected to on-site visits, he said. "They said if someone's return was up on a computer screen and you glanced at it there would be a release of taxpayer information," a breach of privacy laws the IRS could not accept, Efford said.

IRS officials suggested that he seek authorization from the House Ways and Means Committee, whose chairman has a right under the tax code to designate staffers to examine returns and files for the purpose of assessing the effectiveness of tax law.

"I thought, why should Appropriations Committee staff have to go beg another committee for the right to review how appropriated funds were being used," Efford said.

The matter, he said, was discussed with other committee staffers this fall. Efford said a Democratic staffer told him he had had a similar problem getting access to the IRS facilities. As a result, Efford said, he wrote language that would amend the tax code to give him and other Appropriations staffers the same inspection rights as Ways and Means personnel.

Sources said that idea was discarded because of concerns about turf conflicts with Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), the powerful and sometimes irascible Ways and Means chairman. Efford said he then asked the IRS to produce a provision that would satisfy the service's concerns.

With only one or two words changed, said Efford, that was that language that went into the spending bill.

And if I recall my IRS history correctly, that agency has previously had major problems with upgrading its Johnson-era computer systems, leading to the squandering of $4 billion in failed projects. If any agency needs close review and oversight of its computer projects, it's the IRS. This whole episode, while demonstrating a novel Democratic effectiveness in creating a (necessary) controversy, reminds me of one of those hospital reviews of a medical error. Sometimes, rather than being the fault of a single individual, such errors are the cumulative consequence of bad and disorderly processes -- and rather than focusing on punishing the doctor, the way to prevent future problems is to deal with the underlying structural weaknesses. Which, in this case, is the complete breakdown of the standard legislating process.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE INVENTIONS OF THE TELEGRAPH. There's a story behind today's news about George Galloway, the Scottish MP and left-wing Labour backbencher who received close to 130,000 pounds as the result of a libel suit he brought against Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

In a nutshell, the background to the story is this: Galloway has long challenged the West’s hard-line approach to Iraq; before the war he was one of the left’s foremost critics of the sanctions regime against Iraq, which he opposed on humanitarian grounds. He’s also visited Iraq on a few occasions. In April 2003, Telegraph reporter David Blair claimed to have found documents in the rubble of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry which proved what the right-wing British commentariat had long suspected: that Galloway was on Saddam Hussein’s payroll. On April 22, the Telegraph ran with the story, as did the Christian Science Monitor three days later, citing a separate set of documents that made the same Galloway-Hussein connection. After the stories ran, Galloway threatened a libel suit. The Monitor put the documents through a rigorous series of forensic tests and decided that they were fake.

On June 22, 2003, the Monitor retracted their story and explained how they obtained the documents in a lengthy front-page spread. The Monitor's retraction is worth a read as it offers a fascinating insight into the cryptic, if lucrative, underground market of forgeries that were distrubuted to reporters as pro-war propaganda. (I'm inclined to see the hand of the once-powerful Iraqi National Congress in this particular peddling. As Knight-Ridder’s list of INC-planted stories indicated, lying and forgery was a key part of that group's media strategy before the war.)

For its part, the Telegraph never backed off its story and did not put the documents through the same rigorous testing as the Monitor. The Telegraph continues to stand by its reporting and its decision to run with the story.

At this point, I think it's useful to take a step back and review the Telegraph’s journalistic methods immediately following the fall of Baghdad, which seemed to depend a great deal on good luck and happenstance. At the time, they had at least two investigative reporters on the ground, Inigo Gilmore and David Blair, who seemed to be dispatched to different bombed-out government buildings. At the Foreign Ministry, Blair found the Galloway scoop amidst the rubble. A few days later across town, his collegue Gilmore happened across some incredible (literally) documents in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service. As Gilmore reported on April 27, 2003, these documents apparently provided definitive proof of a Hussein–al-Qaeda link formalized in a May 1998 meeting.

Months later, the Telegraph’s Con Coughlin reported on documents he obtained which seemed to prove that Mohammed Atta and Hussein were in league prior to September 11. The scoop ran in the paper last December under the headline, "TERRORIST BEHIND SEPTEMBER 11 STRIKE WAS TRAINED BY SADDAM," and William Safire cited it in his column the following day. Of course, this document was also deemed a fake, as Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported in Newsweek.

One might wonder why this right-wing rag of a paper is so incapable of admitting its own faults. Its own reporting on the Galloway libel decision is revealing:

Telegraph Group Ltd had denied libel, claiming the articles were responsible journalism and that it was in the public interest for it to publish the contents of the documents.

In the public interest or to serve ideological ends? You decide.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES. According to the Washington Post, the abstinence education programs promoted by conservatives have a high likelihood of promoting flagrantly wrong information about any number of topics. Not surprisingly, the mistakes tend to err on the side of overstating the risks of sex with or without a condom. Some of the details:

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.

Those and other assertions are examples of the "false, misleading, or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

In providing nearly $170 million next year to fund groups that teach abstinence only, the Bush administration, with backing from the Republican Congress, is investing heavily in a just-say-no strategy for teenagers and sex. But youngsters taking the courses frequently receive medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists, said the report, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a critic of the administration who has long argued for comprehensive sex education.

Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. Waxman's staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula -- those used by at least five programs apiece.

The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. In some cases, Waxman said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.

Eleven out of two? That's a pretty high error rate, and a massive misuse of taxpayer money. If you're wondering why these educational materials have the flavor of direct mail from Concerned Women for America, this article has some of the answers. In essence, federally-funded abstinence education is pork for the religious right, groups of which are the ones who run the abstinence programs. And so, given the systematic nature of the errors in question, one is tempted to wonder how accidental they really were. We already know, after all, that advocates of abstinence are congenitally unwilling to be honest about the relatively efficacy of condoms and other forms of birth control; they also refuse to recognize voluminous data that so-called "comprehensive" sex ed is more effective than abstinence-only. Their goal isn't harm reduction, but to stop kids from having sex, period. (See this piece by Chris Mooney for further information.)

Here's how the Post delicately states matters:

Supporters of the abstinence approach, also called abstinence until marriage, counter that teaching young people about "safer sex" is an invitation to have sex.

Alma Golden, deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement that Waxman's report is a political document that does a "disservice to our children." Speaking as a pediatrician, Golden said, she knows "abstaining from sex is the most effective means of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, STDs and preventing pregnancy."

Nonpartisan researchers have been unable to document measurable benefits of the abstinence-only model.

Yes, in the same way that I have been unable to document the measurable benefits of shooting myself in the foot with a spear gun. We know that abstinence education does not work as advertised. And we know that comprehensive sex education works pretty well at slowing the onset of sexual activity and at reducing the risks of that activity once it is being done.

--Nick Confessore

PLANE FACTS. There's a very nice bit of explanatory reporting buried inside today's Washington Post, a piece by R. Jeffrey Smith that goes through some internal e-mails related to the boondoggle Boeing tanker-leasing deal that Sen. John McCain has been bird-dogging for many months (to his great credit). The piece is pitched as a glimpse into the "iron triangle," the closed ecosystem between congressional appropriators, Pentagon officials, and defense contractors that leads to the waste of so much taxpayer money. And it's well worth reading.

--Nick Confessore

P.R. BRILLIANCE. CBS and NBC’s refusal to air that rabidly pro-tolerance United Church of Christ ad has indeed begun to receive some prominent media attention (in addition to the press reports, the church’s president appeared on Paula Zahn’s CNN show last night). The Boston Globe’s piece on the controversy had one interesting nugget: apparently, ABC and NBC had notified the Church about their opposition to the ad last spring. After months of attempted negotiations and pleading had failed, the UCC folks clearly made the decision to go public with the networks’ stances on the same day they unveiled their splashy new national ad campaign. Very, very savvy. An employee of the Church told me that the UCC website crashed yesterday due to a nine-fold increase in traffic -- they had to expand their bandwidth midday to stay online. It’s almost enough to make one suspect CBS and NBC of perpetrating a brilliant liberal elite conspiracy to lavish attention on this super-progressive church and its promo by instigating this whole controversy in the first place. But no, of course, the networks really are this sincerely craven and pathetic; decades of right-wing mau-mauing have left them mighty gun-shy.

What really stands out in this whole story to me, and what I imagine is alarming even some people who wouldn’t otherwise be paying any attention to the story, is that weird, poorly written passage in CBS’s explanatory memo about how “the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman” makes the ad “unacceptable.” The reasoning here is so sweeping and so crazy (does the president’s spoken opinion on any topic in the world render that topic off-limits in CBS advertising?) and the language so oddly Orwellian (“Executive Branch”? Wasn’t it the legislative branch that officially proposed and voted on a gay marriage amendment, anyway?) that it’s no wonder the story is getting attention. (Josh Marshall touched on some of this here.)

My guess is that a rushed CBS staffer tossed off that memo without much deliberation on what exactly he or she was putting on the page, never dreaming that it would be publicized this way.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WISE MEN EVERYWHERE. When I saw that New Republic editor Peter Beinart had written a long essay suggesting that today's Democrats ought to emulate the Cold War liberals of the Truman era I was a bit surprised because I'd read James Chace's argument that today's Democrats ought to emulate the Cold War liberals of the Truman era and Chace's vision didn't seem like something Beinart would be particularly amenable to. Read both pieces (they're both good) and you'll see that Beinart and Chace don't really agree about what the Democrats should do; Beinart sees the "wise men" as crusading idealists, Chace sees them as canny realpolitikers.

This is why I tend not to like historical analogies. History gives us a few widely admired figures and then people fight about what they did (Timothy Garton Ash's Free World has a brilliant discussion of how Winston Churchill is invoked to defend diametrically opposed visions of British foreign policy), frequently obscuring the actual issues. In prescriptive terms, I'm closer to Beinart than to Chace and think Bush has done too little rather than too much to advance his vision of spreading democracy. On the historical point, I won't pretend to know enough about early Cold War history to adjudicate. Most important of all, though, I think liberals simply need to think more about these questions and not view them as distractions from the "real" (i.e., domestic) agenda.

--Matthew Yglesias

FILIBUSTER FOLLIES. On Monday, Sam Rosenfeld flagged an unconvincing liberal defense of the filibuster rule, pretty clearly motivated by a dislike of George W. Bush's judicial nominees rather than a genuine love of the rules. Today, I see George Will is also offering a defense on the merits of filibusters. Will can't be accused of hypocrisy here, though I still find his position unconvincing. His description of what the Republicans are planning to do does, however, raise a point where I think liberal desire to stop Bush's nominees is in line with broader principle:

Come January, there will be 55 Republican senators but probably not five Democrats prepared to join them. Therefore the shock-and-awe temptation: Republicans could get a ruling from the chair—from Vice President Cheney presiding—that filibustering judicial nominees is an abuse of the Senate's power to advise and consent to nominations. The ruling, which 51 senators could enforce, would be that such filibusters are unconstitutional because they prevent the president from fulfilling his constitutional duty to staff the federal judiciary.

This -- the so-called "nuclear option" -- isn't a proposal to change the filibuster rule; it's a proposal to break it, to have the presiding officer of the Senate simply rule incorrectly on a point of parliamentary procedure and then to use the GOP majority to uphold that ruling. This is what's known as "cheating," and it's wrong. The notion that the Senate is a rule-governed body is more important than the content of any particular rule. After all, what's to stop Dick Cheney and 51 senators (50, really, since Cheney gets to break ties) from just abrogating any legislative rule for any reason?

--Matthew Yglesias

ENDS, NOT MEANS. Kofi Annan reports on a major UN breakthrough in the field of semantics:

No less useful is the panel's achievement in reaching a consensus on a definition of terrorism — something that U.N. members have been unable to do over the years. It may not seem like a difficult term to define but, in fact, we were stymied. Some argued that any definition must include the use of armed force against civilians by states, as well as by private groups, and some — especially Arab and Muslim states — insisted that the definition must not override the right of peoples to resist foreign occupation.

But the panel members (including several eminent Muslim representatives) point out that international law as it stands is already clear in condemning large-scale use of force against civilians by states, and they agree "there is nothing in the fact of occupation that justifies the targeting and killing of civilians."

If you've never witnessed a tiresome debate on this subject, invariably an implicit controversy about Israel, you may not recognize how extraordinary it is that the UN was able to achieve this consensus. Having witnessed such a debate just this morning, I'm keenly aware of the difficulty. Given that the entire enterprise Annan is writing about is a pretty thinly veiled effort to get Americans to take the UN more seriously as a security institution (and this is the issue, contrary to an item I read in the other Prospect magazine implying that U.S. conservatives hate UNICEF and that Laura Bush's admiration for it is therefore noteworthy) it's important to recognize that it's also basically irrelevant to the strategic concerns of the United States.

It's been widely noted that the "war on terrorism" isn't really directed against terrorism as such. The standard example is that we're not worried about the Basque separatists of ETA. Less commonly seen is that not only are we not fighting all terrorists, but the fact that the people we're fighting against commit acts of terrorism doesn't have much to do with what we're fighting about. If on the morning of September 11, 2001, four hijacked airplanes had been crashed into U.S. military installations (as indeed one was), killing not 3,000 civilians but rather 3,000 soldiers, the fact that no terrorism had taken place would have come as cold comfort to the American people. If a jihadist group were to somehow acquire an aircraft carrier and start launching precision airstrikes against the U.S. government's command, control, communications, and intelligence infrastructure, that would be worse, not better, than what's actually going on.

That's not to say that terrorism is okay, and naturally enough any government will be especially concerned about the security of its civilian population, but it's long past time for people on all sides of these issues to start speaking more frankly about what the issues are.

--Matthew Yglesias

LIKE MIKE. Policy-wise, I don’t know what the significance might be of George W. Bush’s nomination of Nebraska governor Mike Johanns as agriculture secretary (though one could draw some obvious conclusions from Johanns' efforts to end Nebraska's constitutional ban on corporate agriculture). Politically, however, it’s a bit of a surprising choice. Johanns was widely expected to challenge Senator Ben Nelson in two years, when the conservative Democrat is up for re-election. And as far as I know he was considered to be, by far, the GOP’s best shot at taking the seat. With Johanns seemingly out of contention in Nebraska and Dino Rossi (pending continued legal action) taking the governorship in Washington and thus ruling himself out of an ’06 run against Maria Cantwell, it looks as if at least two potentially vulnerable Dem incumbents can breathe a bit easier these days.

More "peanuts," I know, but you take the good news for Democrats wherever you find it.

--Sam Rosenfeld

IRAQ ELECTION MATH. As the president confirms that Iraq's Sunni parties won't get the election delay they'd like (why the president of the United States is setting the electoral calendar for an ostensibly sovereign country is an interesting question), Knight-Ridder lays out the problem:

Block by block, and neighborhood by neighborhood, Iraq's election process is unfolding in starkly different ways. In areas populated by Shiites, who are the majority in Iraq, the process is going relatively smoothly. In contrast, intimidation and fear are rampant in some areas where Sunnis reside.

The success of the registration drive - and the success of the parliamentary election itself - matters greatly. If enough Sunnis don't register, the Shiite population is certain to dominate the election, leaving the minority Sunnis without a voice or incentive to support the government. After such an election, Iraq might be rocked by charges of minority disenfranchisement, weakening hopes for quelling violence and reducing sectarian strife. . . .

It's not only threats that keep some Sunnis from registering. Many are bitterly angry over U.S. and British military occupation and a fierce offensive that began Nov. 8 to clear out insurgents from Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad in a region known as the "Sunni triangle." In many parts of the triangle, Sunni leaders said fighting was too intense for them to organize effectively, let alone campaign, for the election.

Not only do low levels of Sunni Arab participation threaten the prospect that the post-election political process will undercut support for violent insurrection, they greatly complicate the position of the Kurds. Shiite Arabs are a majority of the Iraqi population, but not an overwhelming majority. If all groups turn out in proportion to their numbers, Shiite Islamist parties will be in the driver's seat -- but narrowly enough that Kurds could pursue a political agenda in Baghdad centered on forming a coalition with other ethnic and religious minorities (Turkmen, Christians, Sunnis, secular Iraqis of various stripes) as a means of pursuing their interests.

The lower Sunni Arab participation drops, the bigger the Shiite majority grows, to the point where minority representation in the National Assembly is meaningless. That creates an unstable imbalance, where the Kurds have the preponderance of military power across northern Iraq while the Shiite parties monopolize political power at the national level. If cool heads prevail on all sides, it would still be possible to reach a compromise that averts conflict, but the structure of the situation will militate against the benign outcome.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORALITY DISGUISED AS FACT. Read Ceci Connoly’s article summarizing the new report from Henry Waxman’s office on federally funded abstinence-only education programs, then read the report itself (pdf) to get a fuller flavor for just what $170 million of taxpayers’ money is paying for. Abortion statistics culled from 30-year-old studies, discussion of the risk of HIV transmission through sweat, bogus correlations between chlamydia and heart desease -- these programs are a real treasure trove of keen medical insight. Here are a few of my favorite lines from some of the curricula:

“[T]he popular claim that ‘condoms help prevent the spread of STDs,’ is not supported by the evidence.”

[describing a blastocyst -- made up of between 106 and 256 cells at the beginning of uterine implantation] “After conception, the tiny baby moves down the fallopian tube to the mother’s uterus. About the sixth to tenth day after conception, when the baby is no bigger than this dot (.), baby snuggles into the soft nest in the lining of the mother’s uterus.”

“Women gauge their happiness and measure their success by their relationships. Men’s happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments.”

There’s plenty more good stuff in the report. Most pervasively, one sees a penchant for misleading and fallacious use of statistics that would make your average Heritage Foundation researcher blush. Waxman's office only analyzed the programs supported by the largest federal abstinence-only fund (the curricula used in federally mandated abstinence education programs under the 1996 welfare law, for instance, aren't looked at); of the 13 curricula using funding from this federal initiative (it's called SPRANS), only two were found to contain no significant scientific errors -- and those two were used by fewer grantees than nearly all the rest.

The report’s release couldn’t be better timed, with Bill Condon’s terrific new biopic Kinsey in limited theatrical release right now and soon to be expanding to more theaters. The key line of the film -- when Liam Neeson, playing famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, lambastes the sex-ed literature that prevailed in the 1940s as “morality disguised as fact” -- couldn’t serve as a more apt description of what’s happening to government and government-funded research under Republican control. Change “morality” to “ideology”