CATASTROPHIC SUCCESSES. There’s all sorts of interesting speculation about the ifs, whos, and hows of Tom DeLay’s possible downfall, and they're all worth reading. I remain skeptical of the prospect for many of the reasons Ezra Klein and Jesse Lee mention; more importantly, I desperately hope that my skepticism is warranted. I’m fervently and sincerely cheering on the movement-conservative bigwigs gathering their resources to defend the House majority leader. The much-cited Wall Street Journal editorial attacking DeLay had me panicked that Democrats and their allies might actually succeed in securing the Hammer’s imminent fall, which would prove utterly disastrous for the prospects of nationalizing the 2006 mid-term elections with a reformist message that could topple many Republicans.

What Campaign for America’s Future and the Public Campaign Action Fund could possibly be thinking in launching concerted efforts to pressure moderate Republicans into distancing themselves from DeLay and to force the leader’s resignation -- rather than using DeLay’s troubles to popularize a broader message about the GOP congressional corruption in which those moderates are fully complicit -- is completely unfathomable to me. This is the spring of 2005. Mid-term elections are an eternity away and the party’s unity and tactical successes have yet to reap dividends in public approval of the party itself. Yet it seems dangerously possible that Democrats might achieve remarkably fast, decisive successes on two fronts -- Social Security and Tom DeLay’s machinery of iniquity -- that promise to be bleeding ulcers for the Republicans for the indefinite future if left to fester. What did our president call it when Saddam fell too quickly? A catastrophic success. Think about it.

Hands off DeLay!

--Sam Rosenfeld

NEW BLOG ON THE BLOCK. A bit more on the new foreign policy blog, DemocracyArsenal.org. The Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation came together in February to form the Security and Peace Institute (pronounced "spy"), a new group dedicated to developing and promoting liberal thinking on foreign-policy and national-security issues. This is part of the broader new liberal, thinking 25-years-in-the-future project of creating fora and institutions that can foster "academic operatives" -- people with a gift for both politics and policy, and who understand how the two are inextricably related. In its first year, CAP became known for its mix of well-established experts with ties to the Clinton administration, such as Gene Sperling; prominent figures from other Washington think tanks, such as Ruy Teixeira; and younger advocates just starting to make public names for themselves, such as the crew who write The Progress Report for the allied American Progress Action Fund. The one generation they seemed to be missing, largely because many of its members were busy working on the presidential campaigns, is exactly the one they've now brought on to write for Democracy Arsenal: a generation young enough to have a fresh perspective, but old enough to already have serious expertise and experience.

The new bloggers include my friend Michael Signer, a lawyer and political scientist who did work for Gen. Wesley K. Clark (ret.) and John Kerry in Virginia; Derek Chollet, formerly John Edwards's foreign-policy director and now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Heather Hurlburt, who wrote the definitive article on the Democrats' national-security problems for The Washington Monthly in 2002; New York-based executive and attorney Suzanne Nossel, who worked for Richard Holbrooke when he was U.S. ambassador to the UN and is married to Nixon scholar and occasional TAP contributor David Greenberg; and Lorelei Kelly, of the Henry L. Stimson Center, the recent author, with Elizabeth Turpen of that center's book Security for a New Century.

This is a very smart crew. Go back and read Hurlburt's piece, or Signer's ones for The Washington Post, about how Mark Warner managed to succeed in Virginia where John Kerry couldn't, and USA Today, on the Democratic toughness gap and Kerry's "tragic resolve" from last May. There are a lot of newer voices in the Democratic Party/liberal movement circles with similarly interesting things to say, and it speaks well of both CAP and The Century Foundation that they've figured out a way to help give some more of them a microphone.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A VERY WELCOME ADDITION. As Matt mentioned on his personal blog, his recurrent complaint about the lack of liberal foreign-policy infrastructure and commitment is getting answered bit by bit, most recently in the form of the new Security and Peace Initiative and its new blog, Democracy Arsenal. It's a stellar roster of youngish foreign-policy professionals. They've already given us the spot-on term Stepford Wonks (you know exactly what they mean), and that's just the cheeky part of their work.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE RIGHT KIND OF ALTERNATIVE. There's a very oddly written story in The Hill which seems to suggest that Senate Democrats are going to offer an alternative Social Security plan after all. But when you peer into the details, that doesn't seem to be what's actually happening. Instead, it "tackles low-income incentives for saving by setting up accounts at birth in which the government would deposit $500 for each newborn and $1,000 for families with below-average incomes." That sounds like a version of the ASPIRE Act, which has always had some support from liberals (and deserves more, I think) but has very little to do with Social Security as such.

The article details some other ideas, but they're all along these lines -- they have to do with savings and investment policy but not with Social Security as such. I think that's the correct approach to take. The president is not wrong when he says it would be good to create a society in which all Americans get to be owners and investors. There's just no reason to accomplish this by phasing out Social Security. My favorite idea for strengthening savings policy is, sadly, this mind-numbingly dull one endorsed by the dull-but-worthy folks at Brookings. "In a nutshell, the automatic 401(k) consists of changing the default option at each phase of the 401(k) savings cycle to make sound saving and investment decisions the norm, even when the worker never gets around to making a choice in the first place." The research indicates that this would boost the personal savings rate quite a lot without inflicting any pain on anyone.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT WOULD JOHN BOLTON DO? I’ll believe it when I see it, but according to this AP report, the UN Security Council is poised to pass a resolution referring Sudan’s war crimes to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) this afternoon. At this point, it’s unclear whether or not the United States will vote for the resolution or simply abstain, but it’s important to note that the Bush administration has been struggling for the last three months to avoid being put in this very spot.

After the vote, expect a member of the Bush administration (probably Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues Pierre-Richard Prosper) to declare that the decision to acquiesce to an ICC referral does not in any way confer any legitimacy to the court. But no matter how hard the Bush administration tries to save face, this vote exposes the intellectual depravity of those like John Bolton who adhere to a strict zero-sum approach to the utility of the ICC; with this Security Council resolution, calmer heads in the Bush administration have tacitly acknowledged the potential for the ICC to fulfill one of the Bush administration’s stated foreign-policy goals -- the prosecution of Sudan’s war criminals.

But how the ICC would operate is in doubt. While we're on the subject of John Bolton, another pernicious legacy of Jesse Helms is likely to present a roadblock for U.S.–ICC cooperation on Darfur. Helms' parting gift to the human-rights community, the American Servicemembers' Protection Act (ASPA), expressly forbids any U.S. government agency from assisting the ICC in any way. Back in 2002, when the legislation was passed, Chris Dodd wisely inserted a provision into ASPA giving the president the authority to waive it on a case-by-case basis. If the president is serious about his desire to bring Darfur's war criminals to justice, now would be the time to exercise that authority.

No one is asking the Bush administration to set up something akin to the DOJ’s Regime Crimes Liaison Office in Iraq, but there are a handful of little things the U.S. government can do to aid the ICC’s investigation, such as sharing satellite imagery, intelligence, and general logistical support, that are now expressly forbidden under ASPA. As the ICC investigators prepare for Sudan, the seriousness of President Bush's intent to bring to justice Sudan's war criminals will be measured in part by whether or not he signs an executive order waiving ASPA for Darfur-related investigations.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

AND A GOOD IDEA. In case you were wondering whether the Prevention First Amendment gambit is a good political strategy, you really ought to take a look at the other Democracy Corps polling analysis (pdf), which sort of buries the lede on this one. It's all about white Catholic public opinion and it reveals, inter alia, that if a candidate "Believes in a woman's right to choose but believes all sides should come together around common goal of preventing and reducing # of abortions, with more sex ed, including abstinence, access to contraception and more adoption," an overwhelming 74 percent of white Catholics will be more likely to vote for him.

The net 52-point advantage thereby gained is way, way, way bigger than the edge obtained by a Democrat who "is pro-life on abortion" (+24), "is Catholic and pro-life on abortion" (a smaller +20, oddly), or "is Catholic and pro-choice on abortion" (+3). The bad news is that the increasingly all-abortion, all-the-time outlook of America's bishops does real damage. Episcopal condemnation for abortion rights votes is a net 16-point losing proposition. Still, the big message here is that the prevention first approach, though dismissed by pro-life activists as a kind of fraud, is a very potent political strategy and not something Democrats should drop after the initial flurry of activity.

Politics aside, this is sound policy for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with abortion. Not only does it appear that family-planning and reproductive-rights measures can be effectively sold as abortion-prevention, but people have every reason to be excited about the potential substantive outcomes as well.

--Matthew Yglesias

BETTER FEARED THAN LOVED. Democracy Corps' March "State of the Republicans" polling analysis (pdf) has, as usualy, much that's of interest. It also contains this bit of horrible advice:

They are not heralded for how they relate to the world. There is a reason why Bush established no real advantage over Kerry on foreign policy. A meager 49 percent believe that the Republicans make America respected in the world. Indeed, 58 percent say they are committing too many of our resources abroad and failing to address problems at home. In an earlier survey, this lack of domestic focus was one of the biggest doubts about the Republicans.

Some of us will recall the strategy being implicitly endorsed here as "How John Kerry lost the 2004 election." He argued that he would make America "Stronger At Home, Respected in the World" and as this poll shows the people believed him. The thing of it is that he lost anyway. The notion that Bush "established no real advantage over Kerry on foreign policy" is laughable. As DCorps' own polling shows, the GOP enjoys a nine-point advantage on "can be trusted to keep America safe." That's an advantage. When you portray the national-security debate as a zero-sum exchange between safety and respect, the side offering respect is almost certain to lose.

Being respected in the world is one of those things that's nice but that people will easily forgo in order to be safe. If Democrats want to win future presidential elections, they're either going to have to hope that the salience of national security fades (which it might, but it's not likely to fade a lot) or they're going to have to get more than 38 percent of the public to develop doubts about the GOP's ability to provide safety. The liberal internationalist line isn't supposed to be that internationalism makes you respected, it's that internationalism provides security. The reasons for thinking this are, I'll admit, a bit complicated and it's not obvious to me how you turn it into a sound bite, but that's the task strategists have to set for themselves -- not the task of pushing the party to lean even harder on the purported wonderfulness of respect as such.

--Matthew Yglesias

SALES TAX FOLLIES. George Will really ought to be ashamed of himself for writing today's column pimping Rep. John Linder's insane plan to replace the income tax, payroll tax, and corporate income tax all with a national sales tax. For one thing, the proposal is not, as Will states, for a "23 percent national sales tax on personal consumption" but for a 30-percent tax, at least if you use the words with their standard meaning (the tax would be 23 percent of the total after-tax price, which is 30 percent of the pre-tax price). All the available evidence suggests that it's not possible to enforce and collect sales taxes higher than 10 percent. Even at 30 percent it doesn't raise enough revenue to fund the government. A large-scale switch like this would be devastatingly unfair to senior citizens.

Beyond all that, the central contention of the column is clearly false. "If the income tax were replaced -- Linder had better repeal the 16th Amendment, to make sure the income tax stays gone -- everyone and all businesses would pay their taxes through economic choices, and K Street's intellectual capital, which consists of knowing how to game the tax code, would be radically depreciated." Why's that? Does Will really think corporate lobbyists would close up shop rather than just trying to get the products their clients sell exempted from the sales tax? The way to curb K Street's influence over policy in Washington would be to replace the current crop of shameless, endlessly corrupt individuals who are running the country at the moment.

--Mattthew Yglesias

DEMOCRACY-PROMOTION BY UNEXPECTED MEANS. Via Abu Aardvark, a great Dan Murphy piece about Arab reform movements. It makes an interesting point at the end about the connection between the Iraq War and the current wave of protests in Egypt:

The nucleus of what calls itself Kifaya today began organizing five years ago in response to the Palestinian uprising and picked up steam in March 2003 when about 10,000 Egyptians took to the streets of Cairo to protest the US invasion of Iraq. That protest quickly evolved into an anti-Mubarak demonstration, the first in his 25-year rule.

That's certainly a different spin on things. In many ways, though, I think a lot of what you hear said about this misses the force of one of the points in the president's inaugural address -- namely, that movements favoring democratic reform arise, primarily, because most people would prefer to live in a liberal democracy than a dictatorship. To me, that cuts against the notion that invading and occupying Iraq was somehow essential to sparking a renewal of the wave of reformist agitation that we saw in the 1990s and tended to fade during post–September 11 clampdowns. The article also makes the point that your Egyptian democracy activists aren't really the friendly, pro-American Israelophiles the more naive among the neoconservatives are dreaming of. But, really, so what? It would be much, much better if people who wanted to curb American influence in the Middle East did so by winning elections and denying us flyover and basing rights than by launching terrorist attacks on our soil.

--Matthew Yglesias

BUT FOR WHAT? On today's New York Times op-ed page, Bill Bradley offers up an account of history that's become increasingly popular in liberal circles:

Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

That's all true enough, but I think it's crucially important for liberals not to become overly impressed by the degree of success this effort has had. For one thing, it's really not the case that the Goldwater Republicans "didn't try to become Democrats" after losing in 1964. Goldwater ran on a platform of eliminating Social Security, opposing the Civil Rights Act, opposing the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and opposing a federal role in education finance. By the time Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement to power in 1981 he had abandoned all of those planks and also had to accept the existence of the EPA and various other innovations of the 1970s. What he did once in power was basically scale back to some extent programs that didn't even exist when Goldwater ran.

The Bush administration, obviously, has returned to Social Security phase-out, but this looks more like an instance of the right shooting itself in the foot than deploying its infrastructure to good effect. He's expanded Medicare, and needed to accept various expansions of Medicaid, the creation of SCHIP, and other Clinton-era boosts in public-sector health care. The environment is less well-regulated than it was in 2000, but much better protected than it was in 1993. The federal government spends more money than ever on public schools for poor kids. I don't mean to overstate my case here; obviously the right has made progress on other fronts. But I feel like the case is so regularly overstated in the other direction that this point is worth making over and over again. Assuming that liberals don't just want to build an infrastructure so that Democrats can govern in corrupt, power-for-power's-sake, GOP style there are real limits to how much you want to imitate their methods. The past 30 years of right-wing infrastructure have served the financial interests of their financiers very, very, very well but they've achieved remarkably little in terms of advancing core ideological principles.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: "DEATH" AND RESURRECTION. The environmental movement is one of liberalism's most successful. So why do some think it needs to be reborn? Mark Schmitt considers the controversial report "The Death of Environmentalism."

--Jeffrey Dubner

HARRY AND LOUISE'S LONG-AWAITED REAPPEARANCE. It's been months since Social Security defenders started brainstorming a "Harry and Louise" ad campaign against privatization. (Mike Tomasky suggested it back on December 21, and I remember tossing it around over coffee just after Thanksgiving.) True Majority has finally made the dream a reality, and it's not a bad job. The conceit is that privatization has passed Congress, and a couple ("Frank" and a woman only known as "Honey") is discovering "how much of Social Security [they've] lost in the market." I love the last exchange:

Honey: Frank, what are we going to do?

Frank: Maybe the kids will take us in.

If that's not a frightening prospect to every age group, I don't know what is. The Note says the ad is airing in three Iowa congressional districts, and the version on True Majority's site is directed at Pennsylvania Republican Charlie Dent.

--Jeffrey Dubner

AGE DISCRIMINATION. The Supreme Court has voted to lower the bar plaintiffs need to meet in order to establish a claim of age discrimination. See Julie Saltman's discussion for more details. If conservatives weren't obsessed with eliminating Social Security and the High Lords of Punditry weren't obsessed with urging politicians to demonstrate a "courageous" will to inflict "pain" on beneficiaries, this is the sort of thing we'd be talking about.

Insofar as the country faces a problematic situation due to population aging, there are three obvious, non-painful things we should be trying to do. One is to bring more immigrants into the country. The second is to try and stem the rising incidence of disabilities through a bigger emphasis on preventative medicine and other public health measures. The third is to try and raise the labor-force participation rate of older Americans by fighting age discrimination and helping older workers who lose their jobs due to frictional turnover in the economy find new ones.

--Matthew Yglesias

NO CRACKUP. We were just having our editorial meeting at which I wondered why it is that people (including this magazine on a few occasions) repeatedly predict an imminent "conservative crackup" that never quite seems to happen. I see Jonah Goldberg did a column today on the subject, focused more on libertarians making the prediction, but liberals do it, too. Jonah's pretty much got this right: Any political coalition achieving anything resembling majority status in America is going to involve a lot of disagreements. There's nothing unusual about it, or any particular reason to think such coalitions can't be sustained.

The interesting thing about the Bushian mix of tax cuts, foreign wars, and higher spending isn't that the political coalition supporting it is dissonant; all coalitions are like that. The important point is that it's unsustainable policy. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, liberals in Congress forced Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to make a lot of tax-side concessions to liberalism that put national policy on a viable course. Today's Democrats don't have nearly enough power to do that.

--Matthew Yglesias

SEPARATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND WORK? The proposed Workplace Religious Freedom Act (WRFA) cosponsored by the unlikely bedfellows of John Kerry and Rick Santorum is coming under fire from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign. Speaking to the Washington Blade (in a smart article that lays out the anxieties shared by reproductive-rights organizations as well as gay and lesbian groups), ACLU legislative counsel Christopher Anders argued that "The two main targets of misuse of WRFA are going to be gay men and lesbians and people seeking reproductive health services, especially emergency contraception."

What's the problem? Without the long-awaited Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the fear is that WRFA will go so far toward protecting religious beliefs that those same beliefs will be used to discriminate against gay men and lesbians or harass them in their workplace by the posting of anti-gay diatribes, for example, or attempts to "convert" them. On reproductive rights, the concern would be inhibiting access to contraception and abortion, even in emergency cases.

Most of the groups opposed believe it's a wording problem, not a fundamental flaw. If you have a moment, wade through this (long) ACLU parsing of the legislation. The document (persuasively, in my opinion) lays out the three major ways that this law would significantly change how courts process religious-based claims of discrimination. The question is, should legislation go beyond simply cementing protections for people who need time away from work for religious holidays, dispensation to dress according to their religious beliefs, or wear beards or other personal religious symbols? This legislation goes a lot further than that, and throws into deep ambiguity cases that have already been settled and cases that seem to be getting more coverage in recent months: pharmacists who refuse to provide contraception; a request by a place of business that an employee not wear a graphically anti-abortion button at work; a nurse's request to be able to proselytize to her patient with AIDS and his partner. But so far, according to the Blade at least, neither Kerry nor cosponsor Hillary Clinton appear to have been amenable to alterations.

--Sarah Wildman

BOLTON'S INSUBORDINATION. Steve Clemons' non-stop Bolton-blogging has uncovered an interesting bit of news:

One of the more interesting tidbits I picked up in these conversations -- with several people -- is that John Bolton regularly and frequently defied command and control within the State Department. The first major example of this flamboyant disregard for authority above him -- disregard for Secretary of State Powell and the White House -- was Bolton's August 2001 announcement to Russian media that Russia had a deadline of November 2001 to accomodate the U.S. position on ballistic missile defense testing or the U.S. would initiate abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Several sources report that Secretary of State Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage were livid that Bolton had threatened (intentially or unintentionally) the Russians with a deadline -- and more importantly, had taken the lead himself (without vested authority) to argue under what terms the United States would abrogate the ABM treaty. According to insiders, Bolton had gotten ahead of the process and had spoken too early -- particularly when Bush was trying to "play nice" with Russia.

Now in this instance, Bolton's views on the ABM were basically in line with administration policy, so no real harm was done. Nevertheless, it drives home the point that Bolton is not above disregarding orders and overstepping his authority in order to advance his personal agenda. One might be skeptical that it really matters who the UN ambassador is since he's just supposed to be executing policies determined at a level above his pay grade, but it's no secret that serious policy disagreements exist inside this administration's national security establishment, which leaves plenty of room for someone with outlier views and a penchant for freelancing to do real damage. A lot of sensitive issues -- most imminently, Iran and Lebanon -- will be coming before the UN in coming years and if we're not represented there by someone who will try to implement policy in good faith, then our policies are bound to fail.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE U.K.'S ABU GHRAIB. The Mau Mau rebellion was widely perceived as a primitive insurgency. But was it instead a case of brutal colonial overreach? Heather Bobrow interviews Caroline Elkins, author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THEY'RE BAD ENOUGH AS IT IS. I agree with Matt that focusing too narrowly on abortion and cultural issues obscures the equally important regulatory and business issues at stake. (See also Matt's incisive back-and-forth with National Association of Manufacturers President John Engler.) But I'd go further and say that, in denouncing the nuclear option to the American public, neither area is the most useful thing to focus on.

My reasoning: Any florid claim of a grand conspiracy or a shadowy, anti-democratic mission will be dismissed by most viewers. That includes many, many receptive moderates. And the more restricted claim -- that Democrats are upholding the long tradition of oversight on judicial nominees, and that the small handful they've blocked are genuinely out of the mainstream -- is believable and appealing to anybody but a lockstep freeper. Thomas Griffith has been practicing law illegally for the last six years. Why should he be a judge? Janice Rogers Brown thinks that FDR was a socialist and that Social Security is unconstitutional. Why should she be a judge? Judges, the right's best efforts notwithstanding, are expected to be the most upright, evenhanded people in America. That Democrats have okayed over 200 of George W. Bush's nominees and filibustered just 10 is an outcome that nobody can honestly object to. And that's before you even get to the fact that Republicans -- Kim Jong Bill included -- filibustered judicial nominees as recently as five years and 15 days ago.

The hysterical critique has its place; after all, there is a shadowy, anti-democratic mission at work here. But that place is in narrowly targeted campaigns and on political blogs, not in high-profile events or on national TV. We'll find out soon whether or not the interest groups on this campaign -- not to mention Senate Dems -- agree.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CULTURE OF LIFE, WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? EDITION. The New York Times yesterday had the best round-up I've yet seen on who the protesters outside Schiavo's hospice are. Wrote Rick Lyman:

In numbers, they were not as great on Easter as they were on the previous three days, when the legal and public relations battle came to its bitter climax. But like soup simmered for hours, what remains is a concentrated stock of the angriest and most devoted, the prayerful and the publicity hungry.

Among the protestors was one Bill Tierney:

"No, we're not going to go home," said Bill Tierney, a young daughter at his side. "Terri is not dead until she's dead."

Mr. Tierney, a former military intelligence officer in Iraq who works as a translator and investigator for private companies, cried as he talked about watching the Schiavo spectacle on television and feeling the utter need to be at the hospice.

Atrios has more about Tierney's background, including his discharge from the military and his highly unconventional approach to locating WMD.

And then there was also this lovely individual:

The father of a 10-year-old Kannapolis boy arrested for trying to take a glass of water to Terri Schiavo says the religious beliefs that prompted his vigil outside the brain-damaged woman's hospice were shaped while serving time in jail.

Howard Scott Heldreth, 32, said his views changed when he was 19 as he spent months in an Ohio jail while awaiting trial on rape and kidnapping charges.

Heldreth was in jail for parts of 1992 and 1993, court records show. He eventually pleaded guilty to sexual battery and served time on probation....

Heldreth on Saturday declined to discuss the specifics of the incident that led to his jail time. He has written on a Web site that it happened at a college party and involved a young woman there.

The former Naperville, Fla., resident remains listed on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's sex offender registry, but he's not registered on North Carolina's. The North Carolina registry applies to offenders convicted on or after Jan. 1, 1996.

Heldreth and his wife, Kathy, are members of Operation Save America, a group that opposes and protests against abortion and homosexuality. Heldreth and his son, Josh, traveled to Florida last week because they felt strongly that Schiavo should be kept alive, Kathy Heldreth said.

Operation Save America is actually Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, the anti-abortion group run by the Rev. Flip Benham.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CULTURE OF LIFE, CONSIDERATION FOR OTHERS PART TWO. Via Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte, I see that it wasn't just Florida schoolkids and other griefstriken families whose lives were made more difficult by the right-wing Schiavo protesters. The Associated Press reported on Friday that the activists were tying up phone lines that needed to be kept open for vulnerable kids and families:

TALLAHASSEE -- Hundreds of protesters trying to keep Terri Schiavo alive are calling the Florida Department of Children & Families hot line each day, and officials are concerned they could be jamming the line for people who are trying to report abuse unrelated to the case.

"The Department of Children & Families appreciates the concern expressed in a number of heartfelt calls to the abuse hot line on behalf of Terri Schiavo's well-being. Inadvertently these callers may be putting other neglected, abused and vulnerable citizens at risk," said DCF spokeswoman Zoraya Suarez on Friday....

Gov. Jeb Bush's office also asked protesters to stop calling the line.

"We understand the strong emotions on both sides, but we would implore people to please not call the abuse hot line because it could be preventing new emergencies from being reported when time is of the essence,'' said Bush spokeswoman Alia Faraj.

Ah, the culture of life. So concerned for every last child.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NUCLEAR ECONOMICS. A very strong New Dem Dispatch on efforts to leverage the Terri Schiavo case into an argument for deploying the nuclear option to get Bush's judges confirmed does manage to fall into the unfortunate trap of making it seem that the fight over judges is all about abortion. Obviously, for a certain element of the Republican base it is all about abortion. For another element of the GOP base -- the one that pays the bills -- it's not about abortion at all, it's about gutting the federal government's authority to regulate business. For liberals, it needs to be about both.

The U.S. Senate isn't the friendliest territory for cultural liberalism, weighted as it is toward rural states. Beyond that, it's very likely that the business judicial agenda is uniformly less popular than the cultural conservative judicial agenda. Much of what bothers social conservatives about the courts is their habit of ruling certain laws unconstitutional. Since those laws passed in the first place, there's reason to believe they have some real popular support. What bothers business conservatives about the courts, however, is that they haven't overturned nearly as many democratically enacted laws as they would like. In essence, the right has failed to sell small-government conservatism to the public and can't get it passed through Congress, so they'd like to enact it through the courts, all the while hoping people are so focused on the clash over sex-and-death issues that nobody notices that the entire federal regulatory apparatus is about to vanish until it's too late.

--Matthew Yglesias

CULTURE OF LIFE, CATS EDITION. Chris Mooney wrote in his column yesterday that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is "a man who has in fact repeatedly cashed in on his white-coat status to score political points" and "routinely exploits his medical credentials for political gain." The events of the past two weeks may create a lasting image of the doctor as a political opportunist, or they may help cement his credentials with the religious right. Either way, I suspect Frist will be hitting some bumps as a presidential candidate in '08, should he run, for another reason related to his medical career and a somewhat different "culture of life" issue: his history of killing cats.

When Frist was studying to be a heart-surgeon, he adopted strays from Boston animal shelters and practiced surgical techniques on them before sacrificing the animals, to use the medical term of art. As The Boston Globe reported in 2002:

Frist is an animal lover who said his decision to become a doctor was clinched when he helped heal a friend's dog. But Frist now found himself forced to kill animals during medical research. And his new dilemma was finding enough animals to kill. Soon, he began lying to obtain more animals. He went to the animal shelters around Boston and promised he would care for the cats as pets. Then he killed them during experiments. 'It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do,' Frist wrote.

Politically, cat-killing plays into negative cultural stereotypes about heartless Republicans in much the same way that John Kerry's windsurfing evoked ones about culturally aloof Democrats.

Vast numbers of Americans love cats. There are roughly 73 million pet cats in America in 32,128,000 households. Three in ten American households have a cat in them. Cat ownership is highest in the Republican South and West and lowest in the liberal Northeast. And 20 percent of these pet cats come from animal shelters.

In our present stoop-to-any-means electoral environment, it would be malpractice for an electoral competitor or 527 in a presidential contest -- including, perhaps, a primary contest -- not to make a character issue out of Frist's lying to obtain cats to kill as an example of a life-long pattern of opportunistic and unethical behaviour. And "kitty-killer" is exactly the sort of emotionally charged, highly memorable accusation that sticks and can define a candidate who is otherwise not well-known, providing a frame through which to interpret his other actions (for example, if he lied to get cats to kill, what won't he lie about)?

Lest you think I write in jest, recall that Kerry and his supporters were hounded around the country by people dressed as "Flipper the Dolphin" or waving flip-flop sandals as part of the messaging against him as a flip-flopper; the Republican "Wolves" ad; or how Osama bin Laden was used in ads run by a 527 against Howard Dean during the Democratic primaries. Heck -- Rudy Giuliani's political enemies are already out to knee-cap him. Given the enormous number of silly things that become issues in campaigns -- how one orders a cheesesteak or pronounces a town's name, for example -- and the large number of metaphoric animals that are part of them, how will campaigners be able to resist the cat issue?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: LABOR WAR IN ILLINOIS. Harold Meyerson has the latest unbelievable development in the labor movement's civil war: a bitter confrontation between AFSCME and the SEIU over representing Illinois' 48,000 child-care workers. The insurgent SEIU President Andy Stern won the day -- but may have hurt his own cause in the long run.

--Jeffrey Dubner

BOLTON AND IRAN. I can't say that I agree with his take, but Lawrence Kaplan's rundown of divisions inside the Bush administration on Iran policy is worth taking a look at. The existence of these sorts of disagreements is something that people should keep in mind with regard to John Bolton's nomination to serve as UN ambassador. It's no secret that the Iran hardliners wanted him to get the better job of Deputy Secretary of State and that UN ambassador is a mere consolation prize. If he winds up not getting that job, either, moderates like Stephen Hadley at the National Security Council will have a greater chance of carrying the day, while a high-profile job for Bolton might let Dick Cheney and the hawks win their battle.

Its pretty clear that Senators Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, and Lincoln Chafee are more sympathetic to the moderate elements at the NSC and in the State Department than to the hawks surrounding Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Bucking an administration of your own party is always a tough call, but doing so in order to shore up the elements of the administration that you identify with and support is about the best reason you could think of for doing so.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FULL-SERVICE CONGRESS. Bill Frist, M.D., did Terri Schiavo the good service of diagnosing her from Washington. (She didn't even have to ask!) So certainly Charles P. Pierce isn't demanding too much in calling for Tom DeLay to handle his pest problem, is he? Or Denny Hastert to show him a good headlock? That's what small-government conservatives are for, isn't it?

--Jeffrey Dubner

CULTURE OF LIFE, CONSIDERATION FOR OTHERS EDITION. The Terri Schiavo protestors are starting to have some very negative effects on families of other end-of-life patients at the same hospice, says today's Washington Post:

The heavy security presence has created some complications for the families of hospice patients who are not involved in the Schiavo case. One woman told CNN that she was unable to be with her grandfather when he died because she was held up at security checkpoint after being told that he was about to expire. The commotion has also prompted an elementary school about a block from the hospice to close and send its students to other schools because of concerns about school buses having difficulty getting through the clogged street.

Of all the disgusting, self-involved actors in this long, tragic story, these protestors have got to be the worst. If the Schindler family had any decency, they would call more loudly for the protestors to go home -- and make that call firmly and repeatedly, until the protestors left. Because right now the only thing these protestors are doing is hurting other families, and the local schoolchildren.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who arrived at the Florida hospice today in "a white-stretch limousine" to provide spiritual support to the Schindlers, is also guilty of exacerbating the circus atmosphere at the hospice. It's been a while since Jackson has been a respected political leader, but showing up at Schiavo's hospice 12 days after her feeding tube was removed is an act so crass and vulture-like it ought to undermine what little credibility the man has left. And that's not even taking into consideration any new alliances he's forging by being there.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHAT MATTERS MOST. Kevin Drum and PolySigh both discuss some data showing that terrorism -- not moral values -- was the key issue in 2004, and especially the key source of Bush's electoral strength. Well, that's what I've been saying since November, so naturally I agree. The historical data is also interesting, and seems to indicate that the only really reliable way to beat an incumbent is for the country to be mired in serious macroeconomic problems.

--Matthew Yglesias

TWO ON IRAQ. Two important Iraq stories in today's New York Times, one about the continuing gridlock that's preventing the political process from moving forward, and the second about a prominent Sunni cleric who says he'll withdraw his support for the insurgency if America will commit to a date for ending our military presence in Iraq. On the first point, it's not clear that there's much we can do to make things better. On the second point, however, we're the key movers.

The conflict between the United States and the Sunni Arab insurgency has gotten bogged down in an unfortunate paradox. We feel we can't leave Iraq until the insurgency is beaten. But the only way to beat the insurgency is to peel the anti-occupation Sunni mainstream away from the hardcore minority groups fighting for more grandiose goals. The only way to do that, however, is to commit to withdrawing from Iraq. Spencer Ackerman laid out the case for doing so in February, and I agree. There are risks to trying to take moderate Sunni leaders up on this offer, but the risks of going in the other direction are much higher.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: HANDS OFF MY IPOD. The fate of the free world -- well, the fate of the file-sharing world, at least -- hangs on the Supreme Court's decision in MGM v. Grokster. As the Court hears arguments in the case, Matthew Yglesias explains why the recording industry should lose its case.

--Jeffrey Dubner

"PREDICTABLE, IF GHOULISH." That's The New York Times' apt description of Response Unlimited's plan to rent the pro–feeding tube coalition for five bills a month. If you donated to Bob Schindler's campaign to prolong Terri Schiavo's death, your email address will be sold to who knows how many other groups -- mostly, but not exclusively, Christian right causes (the "Cadillac Conservative Donors" list, for example, has been sold to everybody from Thune for Congress and the Alliance Defense Fund to US News and World Report and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum).

This is a decades-old practice, and an extremely important one to the conservative movement. Richard Viguerie's recent book, America's Right Turn, isn't particularly good but includes a few fascinating chapters on the accumulation of conservative direct-mail lists. The networking and bartering of lists allowed conservative causes and campaigns to target highly likely voters, donors, and activists and very carefully calibrate their messages, so that rhetoric that was too incendiary or particular for a broad audience could be used effectively and at low cost with suitable audiences. It also lent tremendous power to conservatives within the party, as the best lists sprung from the Goldwater campaign and the control of those increasingly robust lists remained in conservative hands.

Conservatives, unsurprisingly, have retained the edge on this front in the Internet age. Beyond Bush-Cheney '04's groundbreaking targeted field campaign, there's the simple matter of email lists; as Garance reported in a great dispatch from our March issue, the Dems lag behind in terms of both conceptualization and coordination where email lists are concerned. While it can't be helped in time for the current fights -- it's not a problem you can just will out of existence overnight -- the current battles over the nuclear option and Social Security can be used to make up some of the gap. We'll probably be able to tell whether or not that was actually done by '06.

--Jeffrey Dubner

GRASSLEY TO THE WOODSHED? Apparently, back on Friday afternoon Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley told Iowa public television that the chances of passing a privatization plan are "right now, less than 50-50" and hinted that he'd be willing to talk solvency without talking carve-outs. An absence of privateer zeal among the top senator on the relevant committee would, in essence, doom the plan to failure. Nevertheless, the administration has thus far been very good at getting wandering sheep back on the reservation after calling people into the White House for a little chat. We'll see if Grassley's still telling the same story by the end of this week.

--Matthew Yglesias

REAL FILIBUSTERS. The Boston Herald edit board, in a quirkily nostalgic editorial, longs for the days when the filibuster meant holding forth until you couldn't stand any longer (or at least until pageboys dumped thousands of pre-astroturf telegrams on the Senate floor). Now, they lament, even "wimps" can force the Senate to require a supermajority.

The Herald doesn't mention that it's the erstwhile majority, and not the filibustering minority, that decides whether an individual filibuster is a procedural tool or a titanic battle of will. And that's an important point to remember when weighing the public-opinion calculus of the nuclear option and the broader judicial nominations battle. If the Republicans wanted, they could force the Democrats to mount a true filibuster on any one of the few rejected nominees; that would test the Democrats' will the old-fashioned way and really put a spotlight on their objections. But Republicans clearly don't want to do that; they're desperate to keep the actual qualifications of these judges and the historical basis for Democratic opposition out of the public eye. That's why, rather than allow the drama of a true filibuster -- which might get the Dems' arguments some media coverage -- they move on to other legislation and let the nominees stew, or hog the show-stopping numbers for themselves. (Of course, there's also the pressure to get pro-business bills done and the longstanding tradition of stringing along the religious right to encourage this strategy.)

The Senate Dems have done a good job of keeping these few, most extreme nominees off the bench, but they haven't quite found their voices and turned these horrific nominees against the White House or the Senate majority. But there's a reason that Kim Jong Bill is afraid of giving them a platform on this issue: They'd win.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: OPEN SEASON ON AID WORKERS? The Khartoum government may think it can push peacekeepers out of Darfur -- and last week's shooting of a USAID employee may be part of that effort. Mark Leon Goldberg reports on the suspicions that the campaign of intimidation may have just begun.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE TOUGH GUY CRACKS. I'd give a lot more credence to Craig Horowitz sympathetic profile of disgraced tough guy Bernie Kerik in New York magazine if it weren't for its noticeably elided timeline of Kerik's downfall. Reading only this article, you'd think the week between the announcement of Kerik's nomination and his front-lawn press conference to withdraw his nomination contained no events but for Giuliani Partners staffers discovering Kerik's nanny problem:

Kerik withdrew on a Friday night, exactly one week after he was announced as the nominee. By Monday, the charges began to fly, and they seemed to get uglier and more serious by the moment. Kerik had ties to organized crime. He accepted thousands of dollars in unreported gifts. He had not one but two mistresses, and one of them was tempestuous publishing titan Judith Regan. He used a ground-zero apartment, designated for rescue workers, as a love nest. He’d gone bankrupt. He ran the jails and then the NYPD like his own little fiefdoms, rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. A warrant had been issued for his arrest in New Jersey. And on it went.

Things were spinning so wildly out of control by week’s end that even two seemingly outlandish rumors began to take on some ballast; so much so that Kerik asked me, at our first meeting, if I’d heard them. The first was that he’d never even employed a nanny. The nanny was a story he, and perhaps the White House, concocted to provide him with an excuse to withdraw his name from consideration before all the more embarrassing charges came out. Laughing at the absurdity of this claim, Kerik showed me a picture of the nanny at his daughter Angelina’s birthday party.

As you may recall, though (and as a quick Nexis search verifies), many of those scandals had already begun to pile up in the intervening week. That's why so many people held the "seemingly outlandish" suspicion that Kerik's nanny problem was phony; Newsday and the New York Daily News, among others, had already raised plenty of questions about his days at corrections, the indictments of multiple Kerik allies, and his short tenure in Iraq. The day after his resignation, the Daily News had two damaging stories about Kerik's ties to mobster Larry Ray, who Horowitz writes off as a shady, vengeful supplicant Kerik "cut off."

All in all, it's remarkably credulous. (One snapshot of a woman at a birthday party is all the proof Horowitz needs for a nanny who still has no name or country of origin?) Curiouser still is Kerik's decision to portray himself as a character on a Lifetime miniseries:

Kerik actually turned the job down [when first offered it]. “It was probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. I hung up the phone, got into bed, pulled the covers over me, and cried.” ...

"To live through all the stuff I’ve done in my life and to lose this opportunity . . . ” His voice trails off, and he looks out the window. Tears are streaming down his cheeks. ...

At 8:30, Kerik’s cell phone rang. “By now I’m a fucking mess,” he says. “I’m crying, I’m totally out of it, and it’s the president on the phone.” Kerik says they talked for about five minutes, and Bush told him he didn’t think he should’ve withdrawn but that he understood and respected his decision. ...

One person familiar with the inner workings of Giuliani Partners said that Giuliani sent someone to tell Kerik it was time to step down. Kerik steadfastly denies this is what happened. “... It was very emotional. We cried together.”

I'm all for men being honest about their emotions, but is Kerik really such a softie? For a man who made his name as a "cop's cop," admitting that he hid under the covers and cried when offered the job of Homeland Security Director is, well, a little out of character.

--Jeffrey Dubner

BRINGING OUT THE BIG GUNS. I’ve been fairly confident that Senate Republicans are bluffing about having enough votes to deploy the nuclear option on judicial filibusters (it would only take six moderate or institutionally traditionalist Republicans to foil the effort), and I remain so. But my confidence is a bit shaken by the news (in subscription-only Roll Call) that the AFL-CIO is joining the Democratic anti-nuke coalition, which is set to unleash multi-million-dollar ad campaigns on the subject all across the country. Surely they wouldn’t be going to all this trouble of building up a major party/advocacy group apparatus to block the nuclear option -- combining concerted efforts by the DNC and Reid’s war room with independent campaigns by MoveOn, People for the American Way, Alliance for Justice, and, now, organized labor -- if they didn’t take the GOP’s threat seriously.

Senate Democrats and their interest-group allies are sharpening their pre-emptive attacks against a GOP effort to end judicial filibusters, launching a series of ad campaigns and expanding the coalition to include big labor.

In a series of moves designed to be their final prelude to a Supreme Court nomination fight, Democrats and their allies hope to duplicate the level of coordination they have brought to bear on President Bush’s effort to revamp Social Security.

Senior Democratic aides will meet today at AFL-CIO headquarters on 16th Street Northwest with top union officials and other interest groups involved in the effort to turn back President Bush’s judicial nominations. Aides and leaders of those groups said the union presence was a big first step forward on an issue labor has been only nominally affiliated with in recent years. Also expected at the meeting are officials from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union.

There is, however, one way to account for the activity even if you believe Kim Jong Bill is bluffing about the nuclear option: The mobilization around this issue is really a way to build interest-group momentum and coordination for the looming Supreme Court nomination fight:

To that end, Senate Democrats are hopeful that the inside-outside organization being put in place over the filibuster fight is one that will stay active and ready to pounce once there is a Supreme Court vacancy. All eyes have been on Chief Justice William Rehnquist, whose battle with thyroid cancer kept him publicly off the bench for almost five months before returning last week.

“The immediate focus is on the so-called nuclear option,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “There’s a short-term and a long-term strategy here. We also need to start looking ahead at what could be a debate over a Supreme Court vacancy.”

Regardless of the tactical thinking here, it’s heartening to see organized labor get involved in the battle for the courts. Coming as it does in the wake of the announced judicial nomination campaigns by the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, the AFL-CIO’s involvement will hopefully help illuminate the crucial economic components of the fight over the judiciary that too often get obscured by the hot-button cultural issues.

--Sam Rosenfeld

EYE ON THE BALL. The class-action bill and bankruptcy-reform bill are two recent examples of legislation in which the overall complexity of the issues and the relative merits of select elements of the reforms tended to mask the interests being served. According to subscription-only Congressional Quarterly, another such bill is coming down the pipeline in the next few months, this one ostensibly aimed at cracking down on predatory mortgage lending. Instead, the bill will have the effect of overruling much tougher state-level measures:

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers are pushing a bill they say would crack down on predatory lending practices, but consumer groups and other critics say the legislation would have the reverse effect, leaving consumers more vulnerable.

The bill’s supporters expect a subcommittee hearing in the next two months, as well as a possible subcommittee markup.

Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, says the bill (HR 1295), which he introduced with Rep. Paul E. Kanjorksi, D-Pa., would set national standards, improving upon the patchwork of state and local laws governing the industry.

Supporters say the measure would protect more consumers, maintain access to mortgages for people with credit problems and set more uniform requirements on lenders.

But critics say the bill would pre-empt stronger state and local laws and lacks sufficient safeguards for consumers. Top civil rights leaders, including NAACP Chairman Julian Bond and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, issued a statement March 25 slamming the proposal, saying it would “gut protections against predatory lenders.”

There’s a rival Democratic bill, being pushed by Barney Frank, Brad Miller, and Melvin Watt, that includes stricter consumer protections and harsher penalties than the Ney-Kanjorski bill and that establishes a federal floor, rather than ceiling, for regulation of the industry. Tighter restrictions at the state and local levels would still be allowed.

Would you be surprised to know that the credit lending lobby supports the Ney-Kanjorski “crackdown”?

Mortgage lending groups support enacting a federal standard that would override state and local laws aimed at cracking down on predatory lending. They say state and local laws sometimes cut off legitimate subprime loans.

North Carolina passed a law aimed at curbing predatory mortgage lending practices in 1999. Many states and localities have followed since. Consumer groups say those local laws protect individuals from unscrupulous practices.

Kurt Pfotenhauer, senior vice president for government affairs at the Mortgage Bankers Association, praised the Ney-Kanjorksi bill as “a solid step toward achieving the twin goals of protecting consumers from fraud and enhancing homeownership opportunities.”

Charles Sipkins, a spokesman for Ameriquest, the top subprime mortgage lending company in 2004, said the company has taken no formal position, but “we have always been in favor of strong, uniform national standards which provide a high-level of consumer protection while allowing credit to be made available to consumers.”

Also see here (pdf). This is turning out to be one hell of a banner legislative year for creditors -- most recently seen nobly shaking down servicemen and women through foreclosure threats in direct contravention of federal law.

UPDATE: Read this informative Kos diary thread for more.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MEET THE EXPERTS. Richard Stevenson's written a little love poem to Karl Rove in today's New York Times which, one hopes, will give him the access he needs to score important scoops in the future. For now, though, he's trying to get us to believe that the president's decision to put Rove in charge of policy as well as politics represents not the further decline of Republican seriousness, but rather Rove's unique brilliance as a substantive thinker. The only actual evidence is this:

"He can talk the specifics even with Chuck Blahous," Mr. Card said. "I've never actually seen him correct Chuck, but I have heard him tell Chuck how to explain what he's saying so the rest of us can understand."

Blahous is the administration's main man on Social Security policy, and I'd say that if there's only one other person at the senior level who can understand what he's saying, that says more about the problematic situation inside the White House than about the unique virtues of Rove. Either they need to hire someone to do Blahous' job who's better at explaining things, or they need to hire some people to do other jobs who aren't too dumb to understand policy exposition. It's kind of an important part of running the government. I note incidentally that Blahous is a chemist by training, which some would find an odd qualification for being top policy official in a policy domain that's about economic policy. Nevertheless, it's good to hear that there are specifics being hashed out inside the West Wing. Maybe Bush will enlighten the public as to what the content of his secret plan to privatize Social Security is one of these days. Or maybe Blauhous is the only one who understands it and that's why they can't tell us.

--Matthew Yglesias

SCHIAVO AND THE COURTS. Writing in The Weekly Standard Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon argue that though cultural conservatives lost the fight over Terri Schiavo, the debate will still benefit them in the long term:

For President Bush and the social conservatives who comprise the central rampart of his base, the courts' naked assertion of judicial supremacy in deciding the fate of Terri Schiavo represents an important moment. This is because the premise of the Democratic filibuster of the president's conservative judicial nominees is that the Roe v. Wade decision must never again be called into question.

The judicial confirmation debate will now unavoidably be about whether democratic decision-making on abortion should continue to be prohibited by our courts and (effectively) by the American legal profession. From the beginning, those who believed Roe would corrupt the rule of law feared that state sanction of private killing would put all public order and all private restraint in doubt. The fate of Terri Schiavo makes clear that those fears were utterly on target.

I won't speculate about political outcomes, but the Schiavo case clearly demonstrates the opposite point about policy: that the pro-life camp in America couldn't care less about the various issues of law, federalism, and democracy swirling around the Roe case. We've seen many, many, many conservatives display an implicit contempt for the rule of law, and a large number of prominent conservatives (David Brooks just this weekend) explicitly denigrate liberal arguments about a lawsuit as too "legalistic" for their taste. Neither the letter of the law, nor the opinion of the general public, nor our best assessment of what Schiavo would have wanted could dissuade conservatives from pushing what is, to them, an apparent point of overwhelming principle: It's always wrong to let somebody die when more medical treatment could keep them alive, no matter what they would have wanted or what quality of life they can enjoy.

On the subject of Roe, conservatives would like you to believe that their complaints have something to do with judicial overreach, the reasoning of the decision, and a desire to have "democratic decision-making on abortion." In fact, the Republican Party's platform (easily the most under-read document in American politics) takes the view that a fetus is a person under the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A Supreme Court acting in accordance with the official GOP line wouldn't be leaving the decisions up to the state legislatures; it would be holding, consistent with that view, that abortion is the premeditated murder of a child and consititutionally must be punished accordingly (which means executions, I suppose, in many states). Somehow the media, assisted by a curiously ineffectual Democratic Party, has managed to consistently overlook the fact that this -- and not something about state legislatures, or some vaguely defined culture of life -- is the official Republican position, but it quite clearly is.

--Matthew Yglesias

JOB SECURITY IS TACKY. You can wade through a lot of weirdly mannered prose and rampant caricaturing in Ann Gerhart’s report on the Bush administration’s push to overturn civil-service labor laws and you’ll still find no mention of the White House’s ongoing parallel campaign to open up the entire federal workforce to competition with private contractors. This seems like a strange omission, since a more global look at this president’s approach to civil-service reform would better reveal the political agenda behind it: gutting the Democrat-supporting civil-service unions and rewarding GOP-friendly private enterprises with federal contracts, thereby resuscitating the spoils system that modern civil-service law was intended to overturn in the first place.

Instead we get a seemingly sympathetic portrayal of public-sector workers that actually typifies an exceedingly annoying and pervasive journalistic approach to a whole slew of issues like these: the implicit critique of public policies oriented toward security and stability as being stodgy and old-fashioned. It’s an analysis that sacrifices substance for optics and trendy management-speak. There is certainly something to the notion that civil-service policies and recruitment efforts ought to be loosened and modernized to better attract talented young workers, but one should be slightly wary of this assumption that the public sector self-evidently needs to mimic the high-risk postindustrial labor arrangements of the corporate world, since job security is just so mid-twentieth century and young people today, as Gerhart writes, “have no expectation of loyalty to or from an employer.” It's weird how pervasive this kind of approach to policy discussions is.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CONGRESSIONAL MALPRACTICE. The outrageous medical pronunciations by Senate Majority Quack Bill Frist continued last week with some inexplicable, long-distance diagnosing. Chris Mooney brings you Frist's long history of abusing his M.D. for inappropriate political gain.

--Jeffrey Dubner

MUD IN THE GEARS. Last week there were several stories coming out of Iraq that seemed to indicate that we'd finally begun making some real progress toward training competent security forces. One of the key props of that narrative has been subject to factual challenge (via Spencer Ackerman) that I haven't seen rebutted anywhere. But be that as it may, in the interim it seems that much of the rest of the Iraq situation seems to be mired in a mix of old and new problems.

We've got security services killing peaceful protestors, allegations of a "spiral of sectarian assassinations," and still no evidence of real progress toward forming a government. Indeed, today's New York Times reports that "A schism has begun to develop in the Shiite bloc with some politicians, including those backed by Moktada al-Sadr, the young firebrand cleric, saying they are unhappy with the bloc's choice for prime minister, the conservative head of the Dawa Islamic Party, Ibrahim al-Jaafari." Various Sunni Arab insurgent groups, needless to say, have also launched attacks killing and injuring people.

We're well past the point where any silver bullets exist that could resolve all these issues. Nevertheless, one of several reasons to think it would be a good idea to start moving toward bringing the deployment in Iraq to an end is that it might focus the minds of the various groups inside the political process on the task at hand. The sort of vague, open-ended commitment we're holding right now has the effect of hardening everybody's bargaining positions by reducing the downside associated with failing to reach compromises aimed at getting the government's house in order and seriously addressing Sunni Arab alienation from the new order. To whatever extent you want to attribute the recent upsurge in reformist activity in various parts of the world to the invasion in Iraq, it's clear from events over the weekend in Kyrgyzstan, Egypt, and Belarus that it's begun to take on its own momentum -- and that insofar as the United States can do anything useful in this regard, it's through our policies toward the countries in question rather than dogmatically staying the course in Iraq.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE PARTY OF BUSINESS. There's something almost absurd about the Washington Post reporting yesterday that "Fortune 500 companies that invested millions of dollars in electing Republicans are emerging as the earliest beneficiaries of a government controlled by President Bush and the largest GOP House and Senate majority in a half century," but the article spelling out the gory details is worth your time. The only thing I would really take issue with is the contention that "Republicans have pursued such issues for much of the past decade, asserting that free market policies are the smartest way to grow the economy." A better characterization of what's taking place comes later: "businesses feel a sense of urgency to enact as many pro-business laws as possible" (emphasis added).

Much of the Republican pro-business agenda -- the bankruptcy bill, various efforts to deny victims of defective products access to the courts, etc. -- don't have any particular relationship to the establishment of free markets, as such. Indeed, I would argue that relatively lax bankruptcy rules have long been one of the key props of America's entrepreneurial culture, and tort suits have traditionally been understood as a free-market substitute for the more highly-developed regulatory apparatus that you see in Europe. The prohibition on importing prescription drugs from Canada is clearly an anti-market rule, but it's very much one that's favorable to the business of manufacturing pharmaceuticals. The right way to understand contemporary Republican behavior is as putting policy up for sale to the highest bidder. At times that will comport with a free-market ideology, and at times it won't.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD. Yesterday’s Washington Post offered an assessment of rock-ribbed conservative Republican governors and state legislatures that have recently pushed through large tax increases to address huge budget shortfalls. The list of turncoat governors includes Nevada's Kenny Guinn, Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, Idaho's Dirk Kempthorne, Georgia's Sonny Perdue, Ohio's Bob Taft, and Colorado’s Bill Owens. Owens is the most symbolically potent born-again tax hiker, given the history of his state’s infamous TABOR spending caps. Daniel Franklin and A.G. Newmyer III covered similar ground in a recent Washington Monthly article, which portrayed these moves as examples of the waning state-level influence of anti-tax jihadists like Grover Norquist. That Norquist can still operate as a credible powerbroker in Washington even as governors and state legislators across the country spurn their former ally is, of course, a perfect illustration of how states’ balanced-budget requirements force Republicans to confront the inner contradictions of their party’s approach to fiscal policy.

The persistent condition of near-crisis that has characterized state fiscal health since the stock bubble burst is, of course, partly a consequence of the national party’s candy-for-everyone political cowardice. (Soaring health care costs are the other major factor.) The share of the total national tax burden borne by states and localities increased by 15 percent in the first three years of George W. Bush’s presidency. I used to think that shifting tax and spending burdens to the states (which must close budget shortfalls) was mainly an ideologically driven Republican ploy to cripple liberal social programs, but it’s actually all a good deal less impressive than that. Devolution is really just an unavoidable consequence of a national fiscal policy that has abstracted tax cutting from basic considerations of revenue and expenditures. (Alternatively, and even more pathetically, it's the resort of a national governing party that fully recognizes the spending trade-offs that tax-cutting creates but would rather pass the buck to their brethren at the state level than actually face up to them.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

STATES' RIGHTS There was a piece of good news out of Maryland on Friday: The Medical Decision Making Act passed the Maryland Senate by a veto-proof majority, which means, according to the state gay-rights group Equality Maryland it looks likely to pass; a similar bill passed the Maryland House in 2004. The MDMA would grant (pdf), among other things, the right to be treated as an immediate family member for purposes of hospital visitation, the right to share a room with a partner in a nursing home, and the right to arrange for the final disposition of a deceased partner's remains. The majority of rights in the bill are not currently available even through an explicit will or the like.

It's not exactly radical stuff, but it's a major achievement because it is exactly what the extremely restrictive anti-gay marriage amendments in places like Ohio undermined this past November: the basic rights that are deemed "marriage-like" by the homophobic legislators who seek to undermine them, and are thus denied to gay families.

--Sarah Wildman

WEEKND UPDATE. Watched three overtime games? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. When liberals punt on deep moral questions it's wrong, but when I punt on deep moral questions it's sophisticated.
• Nicholas Kristof. Oppression makes the faith go stronger.
• Jim Hoagland. Do I have to pay Chalabi royalties for regurgitating his line, or does he pay me?
• George Will. Having nuclear waste dumped in your backyard is just the wages of sin.
• David Broder. Only corporate-financed ballot initiative campaigns can break the hold of special interests on state governments.
• Maureen Dowd. Reading to the end is important.
• Thomas Friedman. Bush's "popularity at home -- and abroad -- would soar" if only he would embrace doubling gas prices. Sure it would ...

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Lionel Shriver on school shootings.

--Matthew Yglesias

PRODUCTIVITY FUN. Brad DeLong has peered into the archives of the Social Security Trustees Report to look at the question of the missing productivity data and comes to a very interesting conclusion. The methodological rule that "forces" the Trustees to ignore the previous four years' worth of productivity data was first implemented . . . in 2004. If they had used the methodology that was in place as recently as 2003, they would have projected long-term productivity growth of 1.9 percent per year rather than the 1.6 percent forecast they actually used. Interestingly, 1.9 percent happens to be precisely the figure used in the low-cost estimate; the low-cost estimate, also interestingly, has been more accurate historically than the intermediate projection, which forms the basis for our misleading public debate on the subject. The media masochists may not like to hear it, but if we get the policy right in terms of continued productivity growth, immigration reform, fighting age discrimination, and improving preventative medicine we may well eliminate the Social Security "crisis" without making any "painful choices" at all.

--Matthew Yglesias

BUSH FIXER TACKLES ELECTION REFORM. Ah, could there possibly be a more confidence-inspiring choice to co-chair a (non-governmental) commission on election reform than Bush consigliere and 2000 Florida recount hitman James Baker? Could there?

--Sam Rosenfeld

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS. While Josh Marshall offers only scorn, I'll give Fred Hiatt and company at the Post editorial board a response to their contention that "it's hard to take seriously the Democrats who say that Mr. Bush should switch focus from Social Security to the much bigger problem of Medicare: If they aren't willing to play a constructive role on the supposedly 'minor' challenge of Social Security, why should anyone believe that they would behave constructively if the administration wanted to fix Medicare?"

As you may recall from yesterday, the Republicans inserted a provision into the 2003 Medicare bill increasing taxpayer subsidies to private insurance companies that want to try and cover Medicare recipients. Democrats opposed this measure. According to the Bush-appointed board of trustees, Democrats were completely correct in their contention that the measure in question would increase Medicare costs rather than introduce savings and efficiencies. Since Democrats opposed it the first time, surely they would be happy to eliminate it now. Democrats also support measures to allow Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies about the price it will pay for drugs under the new pharmaceutical benefit. Neither of those measures will single-handedly resolve the health costs problem in America, but both would do something.

That would, of course, have been completely obvious if someone was genuinely curious about what Democrats would do on the Medicare front -- it's well-known to anyone who follows the debate -- but I guess bending over backwards to be "fair" to the GOP is more important nowadays. Beyond that, though, I think one really needs to take issue with the Post's claims to the universal validity of its editorial board's eccentric political opinions. "One can debate the merits of creating personal accounts in Social Security but not the case for fixing the program's solvency problems," they write. Well, no; one can debate the case for fixing the program's "solvency" problems. Here's me debating it. We can even debate the validity of the Trustees' interim projections. The Congressional Budget Office, which isn't run by left-wing partisan hacks, thinks the SSA projections are wrong. What's more, the SSA hands out three predictions in each report: a high-cost, low-cost, and interim one. Historically, the low-cost estimate has been more accurate than the interim estimate the Post refers to. Guess how big the deficit is according to the historically more accurate low-cost projection? It doesn't exist. At all. The merits of taking painful steps to solve a problem that may not exist are highly debatable.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PLAYING THE GAME. While we were listening to Tom DeLay prattle on about ethics, half of the rest of the country was listening to 50 Cent and The Game. Devin McKinney reviews the albums -- and the staged confrontation that announced them -- and finds that only one is worth the hype.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WAR ON TERROR, MEET WAR ON DRUGS. The U.S. military is going to start getting more involved in the efforts of the Afghan government to crack down on the cultivation of poppies and the production of opium and heroin. There's no question that the burgeoning drug trade is the single biggest threat to Afghanistan's stability and possible emergence as a democracy. Concentrating vast wealth (by Afghan standards) in the hands of the leaders of criminal enterprises can only prevent the emergence of a real state infrastructure and a meaningful politics.

Unfortunately, there's every reason to think that mere military crackdowns and eradication campaigns will do little to improve the situation. These sorts of efforts may well reduce poppy cultivation (and hence improve the heroin problem in drug-consuming countries) but they'll do little to make things better for Afghans (indeed, they'll make things much worse) unless the inhabitants of that country are given non-poppy economic opportunities. Afghan farmers need to be able to sell something for export in order to earn money. The problem here is, in part, one of inadequate development aid. But the terms of trade are also important -- if the rich world is serious about bringing stability to Afghanistan, we need to make sure that legitimate agricultural products can be brought to market at prices that the people who have money will pay.

Unfortunately, the farm lobby has a vice-like grip over American politics, its EU counterpart is even stronger, and Japan's is stronger still. Unless world leaders are willing to set these domestic considerations aside and do what it takes to help Afghanistan build a viable, legitimate agricultural export sector, military involvement will only bring more grief to a long-suffering country.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MORE YOU KNOW. The new Pew Poll shows mixed news for the privateers, in that the public is with them 44 to 40 percent on the question of private accounts. When you get down to the nitty-gritty, though, the news is absolutely great for Social Security's friends. This is now the fourth Pew poll on the subject, and with each survey support for private accounts drops and opposition increases. Even better, while people who haven't heard much about the issue support privatization 47-30, those who've "heard a lot" about it are against 41-52.

The real weakness of the president's position, however, is that support for private accounts is heavily concentrated among 18- to 29-year-old voters. On the one hand, not only are these the people most likely to support his view, they're also the people least likely to care about the issue enough to pay attention. That makes it hard to mobilize support. Even worse for Bush, trying to engage young people in the debate only backfires. Young people who've heard little or nothing about the plan support it 50-19, but support collapses to just 46-45 among young people who've heard a lot. This is also the least Bush-friendly demographic group overall. So the GOP is essentially relying on the support of people who don't trust them in general and aren't paying attention to the debate. It's hard to see how you can win under those circumstances.

Even better, the question is very generically worded. Since there are lots of different ways you can implement carve-out accounts, the abstract concept is bound to have more support than any specific instantiation of it. There are all sorts of tradeoffs between choice and risk, between debt and benefit cuts, between etc. and etc., that aren't being captured in this poll. All the more reason, I think, that Democrats should be the ones touring around the country complaining that the other side has no Social Security plan. No matter which specific proposal the White House winds up embracing, it's bound to look uglier than the lofty principles they're losing with right now.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE UNTOUCHABLE TRUSTEES REPORT. Max Sawicky, who certainly had his eyes peeled, concludes that there is no politically motivated book cookery to be found in the new Social Security Trustees report. But as he, Matt, Brad Plumer, and many others have pointed out many times, there are all sorts of structural assumptions and methodological issues relating to the way the Social Security Administration carries out their projections that are very easily open to challenge, and virtually all of the objections one could make trend in the direction of showing Social Security’s long-term funding balance to be less of a problem. Yet this is a notion that has barely ever penetrated the broader, non-blogospheric discussion of the issue, save for a few Paul Krugman columns. Instead, the Trustees Report remains the benchmark for discussing policy options and its data is rarely called into question by anyone of significance; none of the Democratic responses to the report yesterday attempted even to hint that the report’s findings could very well be unduly pessimistic.

This is sort of a much milder version of the Alan Greenspan dilemma -- how does one side deal with a crucial player in a political/policy fight whose perspective deserves to be called into question but who enjoys an unquestioned reputation in the elite press for objectivity and authoritative expertise? Democrats, led by lifelong Greenspan-hater Harry Reid, have taken steps recently to challenge the conventional wisdom about The Maestro, but no such thing has occurred with the SSA data. This is a bit of a problem because assuming the report’s long-term projections to be gospel tends to lead Democrats into precisely the irresponsibly “responsible” solvency discussion they ought to be avoiding, on both political and principled policy grounds. Why don’t Democrats throw the Trustees’ projections into question a bit more in their talking points? Better yet, Democrats could simply adopt the Congressional Budget Office’s projections, which push the date of insolvency back 11 years over the Trustees Report, as their go-to reference for data. Get a he-said, she-said dynamic going over the two reports. This would only be a mild, and principled, gesture in the direction of the rampant pomo-ification of expertise (your data says that? Bah! Ours says this...) that Republicans have come to master so well.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MORE WORSE. Our ongoing substantive discussion of Social Security here at the Prospect came to a momentary but screeching halt today smack in the middle of a headline in today's New York Times, which read:

Medicare Outlook Called Direr Than Social Security's

Really? Oh, we're sure the headline is correct; we're also sure that Medicare's finances are more iffy by far than Social Security's.

We just don't think that anyone has called anything "direr."

It's a word, to be sure; it's in the dictionary. But we doubt it's used much other than on a Scrabble board. And while it's imaginable that someone might use it orally, the notion of using it in writing, much less in a headline in the Paper of Record, is appalling.

"Direr" just doesn't read well. It barely reads at all. It's a five-letter word with three syllables. Its pronunciation is stunningly at odds with its spelling, even by the non-existent standards of English. The last two syllables are "er-er." You cannot say it correctly, or even read it to yourself, without seeming to stammer. It reads in French, as the infinitive for "to say." But it doesn't read in English at all.

What's wrong with "bleaker?" "Shakier?" "Flimsier?" "Wheezier?" But "direr?"

That does it. Bill Keller's got to go.

UPDATE: Readers point out that "dire" is the French infinitive for "to say," not "direr." The ugliness of the English "direr," however, remains unquestioned.

--Harold Meyerson

WHY SO “EAGER”? Somewhat apropos of Matt’s fears of creeping alternativism among Democrats on Social Security is this Congress Daily piece that The Stakeholder kindly posted yesterday. The article is a heartening account of how emboldened House Democrats are planning to spend the next week and a half visiting Republican districts to wage pro-Social Security “counter-events.” Great stuff. But what’s with the seemingly increasing enthusiasm for compromising with Republicans on the eat-your-vegetables solvency issue once privatization is taken off the table?

Democrats said the aggressive tactic is part of their effort to shift the debate away from so-called privatization and move it toward the solvency of Social Security. Levin said today in a conference call with Michigan reporters that Democrats would not offer alternative solutions until Bush withdraws his proposal for private accounts -- or public opinion kills it. "There's clearly a shortfall and we've said we need to do something," Levin said. "But the president set the agenda. We have felt it essential that we first have this debate about private accounts. Once the president says, 'Let's forget about private accounts' ... Democrats are more than willing -- indeed we're anxious -- to sit down at the table in a bipartisan way so we can address the shortfall."

Not to be too crassly political here, but why would Democrats want to shift the debate away from privatization? They’re winning on it! Moreover, there simply isn’t a serious need, on substantive policy grounds, to confront the Social Security solvency issue anytime soon. To the extent that there is a problem, it’s a tiny, tiny problem within the context of the various fiscal and budgetary crises we’re facing in the immediate term. When Democrats continually emphasize the legitimacy of discussing solvency as a way of underscoring the existential threat that privatization poses to the system, it’s perfectly understandable, but it unfortunately ends up obscuring the fundamental insignificance of Social Security’s funding problem as an actual policy priority.

Entering into a grand bargain with the Republicans to bring the system further into balance would result in some combination of unpalatable benefit cuts (which would be all the more insidious the more progressive those cuts are rendered, by heightening the chances that the well-off begin to lose a sense of stake in the system) and payroll-tax increases (which will, of course, soon simply be laundered into more income-tax cuts for the rich in a continuation of the famous 20-year Greenspanian scheme). And it would give the president and his party a political out, obscuring the extent to which this fight was started in the first place because he and they wanted to destroy the system itself. 2006 is just moments away. More demagoguery, please.

--Sam Rosenfeld

NO ONE WINS. So it was too good to be true after all. This morning The New York Times reported that France had called the Bush administration’s bluff and was poised to force the United States into the politically awkward position of either vetoing or abstaining from a Security Council resolution to refer Darfur’s war crimes to the International Criminal Court. That report turned out to be incorrect. According to my sources, France never actually put forth a formal proposal, but only circulated a draft. Now, according to this update from the Times, it looks like the French have promised to delay any vote on a possible ICC referral until next week. Of course, “we’ll vote on it next week” has been the Security Council’s refrain since mid-February.

France’s move (or shall I say, lack thereof) comes as the United States decided to split the draft Security Council resolution on Sudan into three separate resolutions. The first part is set to be passed this afternoon at 4:30 p.m. and expands the peacekeeping force in southern Sudan by 10,000 troops; these troops will also support the African Union monitoring mission in Darfur.

The second two parts deal with the scope of a sanctions regime and the venue for war crimes prosecutions. These are real sticking points and not likely to be passed anytime soon.

On Tapped a few weeks ago, I predicted that the Bush administration would do whatever it could to avoid having to vote up or down on an ICC referral. Back then I raised the possibility that they may try to gain assurances from China or Russia that one or the other would veto any resolution that would refer Darfur to the ICC. Russia and China are not as stridently opposed to the ICC as the Bush administration, but they do want to be able to sell weapons to Khartoum (Russia) and buy oil from it (China), and the ICC makes for a good bargaining chip to get the United States to agree to less stringent sanctions.

While that may have sounded somewhat hysterical back then, given the John Bolton nomination, as well as the willingness of the normally reliable U.S. Ambassador at large for War Crimes Pierre Prosper to peddle lies, it looks all the more likely that ideology will once again trump effective policy. Sadly, I think we should brace ourselves for the possibility that the Bush administration will trade the best option for effective war crimes prosecutions for a watered-down sanctions regime.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

AGAINST PROGRESSIVE PRICE-INDEXING. I heard somewhere that the White House is edging away from the idea of universal price-indexing of Social Security benefits and toward the notion of progressive price-indexing of benefits. That seems to imply something along the lines of Senator Bob Bennett's Social Security plan. I haven't actually seen a detailed plan from Bennett, but his idea is inspired by Robert Pozen's work, of which you can see a detailed explanation here courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Because progressive indexing cuts benefits less than does ordinary indexing, you either need to borrow more money to cover the transition to partial privatization, or else make the carve-out smaller, which is Pozen's idea.

Carve-outs of all sorts are, as we've been emphasizing, the devil's tool and none should play with them. But progressive indexing, on its own, has some appeal to certain misguided liberals because it protects the very poor while mostly screwing over relatively prosperous people. Don't fall for the hype! There's a somewhat cynical case against this primarily associated with Theda Skocpol which says that if you screw over the prosperous, the program will become castigated as "welfare" and eventually limited. I used to think the Mickey Kaus counterargument presented in The End of Equality was very persuasive -- this wouldn't happen, because the stigmatizing thing about welfare was that its recipients didn't work. After reading today's column from Robert Samuelson, where he makes precisely the argument Skocpol warned us about even without progressive indexing, I'm not so sure.

Fortunately, there are perfectly good on-the-merits reasons to think this is a bad idea. For one thing, any kind of indexing cuts benefits too much over the long term. Relative to GDP, Social Security's costs are going to shift in an S-shaped manner up from their current plateau and eventually settle at a new plateau about 2 percent of GDP higher. The goal of any benefit cuts should be to either extend the time it takes for that curve to reach its new plateau, or else to lower the second plateau. Price indexing, by contrast, ensures that benefits will fall relative to promises each and every year. This is appealing if, ultimately, you don't think the government should spend money on stuff. If you're actually concerned about financing Social Security, it's drastic overkill that only looks mild if you don't look far enough into the future.

Beyond that -- middle-class people count, too. Third-way types experience a bit of dissonance on this front. They're always telling liberals (correctly) that we need to have an agenda for the middle class, and not just for the poor. But when it comes to the big middle-class entitlements, they often want to "means-test" (or "progressively index") the programs, effectively turning them into things that help the poor, but not the middle class. The way Social Security works today, if you work hard all your life, go to school, and achieve a middle-class lifestyle during your working years, Social Security ensures you'll continue to have a middle-class lifestyle when you retire, even if the stock market goes down for a while. With progressive indexing, the program would guarantee that middle-class people can, after a life of vocational attainment sufficient to support middle-class status, all of a sudden live like poor people. Nobody will starve, but it'll kind of suck. If you're part of the "pain caucus" this is a good way to, basically, shoot to wound, rather than to kill, which has a certain appeal. Non-masochists will see progressive indexing as a major overreaction to a merely hypothetical problem.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NUCLEAR WHINER. How can you tell that Republican claims about Democrats' "unprecedented" opposition to a small group of George W. Bush's judicial nominees are phony? Just look at what happened to Bill Clinton's nominees, writes Herman Schwartz. Compared to Republicans' across-the-board obstructionism of Clinton's nominees and then radical curbs on minority power during Bush's term, the Democrats' actions look downright demure.

After you've read that, there are two more resources to take a look at. The first is Schwartz's 2004 book Right Wing Justice, a veritable encyclopedia of the last 20 years' controversial nominations and a convincing indictment of the Republican strategy. The second is this eye-popping floor speech (pdf) given by Republican former Senator Bob Smith on March 7, 2000, while filibustering two of Clinton's nominees. This was noted on Daily Kos a couple years ago, but really hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. Excerpts:

If you disagree with us on the basis of why we are objecting, fine. But don't pontificate on the floor of the Senate and tell me that somehow I am violating the Constitution of the United States of America by blocking a judge or filibustering a judge that I don't think deserves to be on the circuit court because I am going to continue to do it at every opportunity I believe a judge should not be on that court. That is my responsibility. That is my advise and consent role, and I intend to exercise it. I don't appreciate being told that somehow I am violating the Constitution of the United States. I swore to uphold that Constitution, and I am doing it now by standing up and saying what I am saying. ...

When you don't allow a nomination to get to the Senate floor--it may not be under the technical term ``filibuster,'' but when you block it, that is a filibuster. You are not getting it here and you can't talk about it if it isn't up here. If it is languishing in committee, then we are not going to be able to debate it, approve it, or reject it. No matter how you shake it, they were filibusters led by committee chairmen rather than the majority leader on the floor. ...

Stephen Breyer was filibustered; J. Harvie Wilkinson, Sidney Fitzwater, Daniel Manion in 1985, Edward Carnes, Rosemary Barkett, H. Lee Sarokin--there are 13 of them.

So don't tell me we haven't filibustered judges and that we don't have the right to filibuster judges on the floor of the Senate. Of course we do. That is our constitutional role. Some like it. And I have been on the other side. Listen, I wasn't in the Senate when it disapproved Robert Bork, but we lost one heck of a good judge. Clarence Thomas wasn't filibustered, but he sure was debated. I didn't like that either. But it is our right as Senators to do that. So don't criticize our right to do these things and don't say things didn't happen that did happen. ...

This came immediately after Harry Reid spoke in defense of Republican obstructionism:

I say, of course, he has a right to filibuster if that is what he chooses. Since the time I have been in the Senate, there have been a number of occasions when there has been, if not a filibuster, at least a delaying of judicial nominees. That is part of the tradition of the Senate. I have no problem with that.

And yet nobody challenges Frist's claims about "200 years of tradition." That really ought to change.

--Jeffrey Dubner

FIRST, STOP DIGGING. Based on yesterday's Trustees Report, Senator Chuck Grassley thinks that "Congress . . . needs to examine ways to make the Medicare program more effective." Sadly, nobody in Congress is more responsible for Medicare's problems than one Sen. Grassley of Iowa, who chairs the relevant committee. A lot of people have noticed that last year's bill contained a massively expensive prescription drug benefit designed by the GOP to maximize expense and, therefore, pharmaceutical company profits. Fewer remember that it also contained some provisions that were totally unrelated to prescription drugs.

One such provision was designed to push people out of traditional Medicare and into a situation where the federal government would pay insurance companies to cover them. Democrats, citing the historical record of an earlier effort to do this in the 1990s, noted that this would make Medicare more expensive. Republicans, ignoring evidence and grinning widely at the huge sums of insurance industry cash pouring into the conservative movement, chose to claim that this would control costs. Well, guess what the actuaries concluded yesterday -- costs will go up thanks to this giveaway. Now to be fair, it's not literally true that the only people who thought this was a good idea were on the insurance industry's payroll. Jeff Lemieux, a convulsively neoliberal policy analyst, published a counterintuitive argument that these subsidies only appear to make the program more expensive, but actually save money in a roundabout way. That was about a year ago. Lemieux now . . . works for the insurance industry lobby.

Back to Grassley, industries that benefitted financially from this scam are his first, second, and fourth largest sources of campaign funds, accounting for well over 15 percent of his total cash raised. Fortunately for the country, he's very well-informed about these issues and could easily improve the policy if he wanted to.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE COMING INFLATION. Mickey Kaus generously recommends my earlier posts on the subject of overly pessimistic projections in the Trustees Report and unexplained changes from the 2004 report. He's quite wrong, however, if he thinks I've "found them all" already. This is especially the case for structural over-pessimism, rather than changes between 2004 and 2005. Take inflation, for example. The Trustees sensibly state that their views on this issue "reflect a growing belief that future inflationary shocks will more likely be offsetting and that future monetary policy will be more like the recent past, with its strong emphasis on holding the growth rate in prices to relatively low levels."

So how's the CPI done in "the recent past?" Well, over the past 11 years increase has averaged 2.2 percent per year. Nevertheless, the Trustees assert in their intermediate projection that it will average a 2.8 percent annual increase between 2008 and 2080. Perhaps this is defensible, but it directly contradicts the view that future monetary policy will be like the monetary policy of the recent past. Inflation isn't under the direct control of the Federal Reserve in the sense that the governors can miscalculate in any given year and either overshoot or undershoot their goal. Over a 75-year span, however, unless we suddenly start stacking the board with incompetents, they're not going to systematically overshoot their target by 27 percent. In 2004, inflation ran at 2.6 percent, higher than the recent past average, but lower than the SSA's projection. The Fed has responded by raising interest rates to curb inflation, even though we're still seeing weakness in the labor market. If you genuinely expect that future policy will continue in this pattern, then 2.8 percent is a clear overestimate. This is also hard to square with the SSA's view that labor-force participation rates will drop for no reason.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PASSION PLAY. Every time you think you've seen the nadir of this surreal Congress, something else comes along. Terence Samuel has a look at this week's inexplicable feeding-tube frenzy, bringing you some fiery Democratic responses that you may have missed.

--Jeffrey Dubner

OASIS FILLING BACK UP. To the surprise of many observers, protests against election fraud in Kyrgyzstan appear to have succeeded in bringing down the government, with protestors seizing control of buildings and so forth. Here's a good blog covering the region, if you're interested. Inevitably, I suppose, if these goings on in Bishkek meet a happy ending, it will be woven into the "Bush doctrine" mythos, so it's worth giving early notice that this is wrong.

Kyrgyzstan, unlike the rest of Central Asia, was a hopeful "oasis of demcoracy" (or at least something approximating democracy) as recently as 2000, when things began to take a turn for the worse. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has never taken an especially pro-democracy line in Central Asia, where our main ally is Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, a leader featuring one of the worst human-rights records in the world. Even Turkmenistan's truly deranged dictator has never felt any real heat. And the administration's response to the Kyrgyz ruoff election that sparked all this was tepid at best.

Recent events in Georgia and Ukraine have clearly provided something of a demonstration effect, and America, through its participation in the OSCE, has been an important player in that entire sequence of events. But engagement with the OSCE is hardly an innovative Bush administration policy (I wonder what John Bolton thinks about it), just a worthy project that's long had bipartisan support.

--Matthew Yglesias

NO ALTERNATIVE: POLICY EDITION. Over on my other blog you can find a political argument against the notion (regaining steam in the past few days) that the Democrats need to offer an alternative to the Bush non-plan on Social Security. Some of the folks developing alternativist tendencies, however, seem more motivated by earnest, wonky policy concerns than narrow political ones so it's worth pointing out that the policy case for an alternative is even weaker than the political case. There's no "crisis" here; on that everyone agrees. But the Trustees' intermediate projection suggests that there is a long-term problem. Alternativists (and their congressional allies like Joe Lieberman) argue that it's better to cope with this problem sooner rather than later. A stitch in time saves nine, etc.

It's important to note, however, that this is not literally true of Social Security. However many stitches we need, the same number is necessary no matter when the change is made. The case for early action is merely that the stitching can be done more gradually and gradual is better than sudden. But for all the same reasons that it's better to tackle long-term problems sooner rather than later, it's better to tackle short-term problems rather than long-term problems. Of the two social insurance programs, Medicare is in far worse shape. The case against sudden changes in Medicare policy is also much stronger because these are quite literally matters of life and death. The non-social insurance portion of the budget is in crisis right now and every year we allow this situation to persist, the problem actually does grow more severe because interest payments rise, which adds to the next year's deficit.

Not only are Medicare and the general budget chronologically prior to Social Security, they're logically prior in terms of dealing with Social Security. Long before Trust Fund exhaustion comes the moment when the Trust Fund will begin drawing on the revenues it has lent to the general fund under the Reagan/Greenspan pre-funding plan. As the Republicans like to argue, this really is a bit of a problem. But it's not a Social Security problem, it's an income-taxes-are-too-low problem. Fixing Social Security requires you to fix the general budget first. Medicare, meanwhile, can be healed in two different kinds of ways. Insofar as we manage to reduce expenditures by reducing health care costs, it becomes more feasible in the future to reduce Social Security benefits, at least for non-poor people. That's because anything that would improve Medicare financing through this method would also reduce premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures, reducing the need for Social Security. But insofar as we end up reducing Medicare spending by shifting costs onto senior citizens, it becomes less feasible to reduce Social Security benefits.

Without dealing with Medicare, in other words, you're just guessing as to what the consequences of changing Social Security will be, which makes it hard to devise any sound changes. On top of that, the Social Security projections are very uncertain, so we don't have a good sense of what, if anything, the problem actually is. The Trustees' productivity number is almost certainly wrong, just an artifact of the methodology and bound to change whenever the economy stops growing. Making changes under this kind of double-uncertainty is likely to do more harm than good.

--Matthew Yglesias

MESSAGE UNITY ON THE COURTS. Suddenly it occurs to me that the Republican fight against the courts on Terri Schiavo has been, among many other things, a perfect set-up for the Republicans' next major congressional initiative: packing the courts with President Bush's conservative judicial nominees. Just take a look at how George Bush reacted this afternoon, after a federal appeals court refused to re-insert Schiavo's feeding tube:

"I believe that in a case such as this, the legislative branch, the executive branch, ought to err on the side of life, which we have," the president said. "Now we'll watch the courts make their decisions."

Combine that with the fact that Mark Levin's Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destorying America is right now on the best-seller lists, and you have a recipe for a mobilizing a hurt and highly motivated constituency in defense of the president's coming effort to transform the courts so that they more closely hew to the perspective in the White House and Congress.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHAT WOULD NINO DO? Reading conservative comments on the latest court rulings on Terri Schiavo's last days (yes, I know, there aren't that many out there, but you'll find them if you look hard enough!), I'm seeing the same amusing argument over and over again: How dare the courts flout what Congress clearly intended to order! The judicial activist nerve! The most florid examples come from Hugh Hewitt, but you can also find it from genuine legal experts like Shannen Coffin, Andy McCarthy, and Paul Mirengoff. Coffin's take is probably the most concise and fully formed one:

Here's what I find fairly extraordinary about all of this. The Congress and President of the United States thought this issue important enough to drop everything and focus entirely on this single case in enacting legislation designed to address what they viewed as a matter of critical national importance. You are free to disagree with their assessment if you choose, but it strikes me as the height of judicial arrogance that the District Court and at least six of twelve judges of the Eleventh Circuit do not view the legislation enacted as sufficiently important enough to extend Terri Schaivo's life a few days in order to allow a more careful examination of the issues in the case. The Justice Department's theory of the case today was to request a short stay in order to more fully vent the issues. But the courts, in their infinite wisdom, saw fit to decide the matter in hours, based on hurriedly thrown together briefs and no more than a short argument before a district court. Sometimes I wonder about Marbury v. Madison.

The thing is, there's this little legal theory known as "textualism," which holds that the actual engrossed letter of the law should be applied -- not, among many other things, the history of how the law has been used or the intentions of those crafting the law. Or, as Antonin Scalia wrote, "It is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver." Either Scalia is right -- he holds to as pure a version of textualism (or at least he professes to) as possible -- or he is dead wrong; you just can't have it both ways. McCarthy, for one, has said that "Ideally, Justice Antonin Scalia would be nominated to become chief justice," and it's probably safe to assume that the other three hold Scalia in the same high regard. So how do they square such a clear-cut departure from Scalia's strict theory of interpretation?

UPDATE: Orin Kerr has a similar thought, as well as the noteworthy point that several judges appointed by Ronald Reagan or the two Presidents Bush have ruled against the Schindlers this week.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CESSPOOL. It’s worth heading over to the main page of Media Matters for America for a moment and taking stock of the items they have posted. The cable news coverage of the Terri Schiavo story in the last week has got to have marked some kind of nadir for what was already a bottom-feeding and disreputable corner of the news industry. I’ve been watching this stuff for days now and the disregard for basic factuality and credible sourcing on display has simply been stunning -- and I've watched tons of crappy cable news for years. In the past few days, I saw the hackish Nobel-nominated doctor, I saw the fraudulent nurse -- twice! on two different networks! -- peddling outlandish stories of Mike Schiavo’s attempts to murder his wife. Cable networks’ obvious lack of concern for vetting the people who appear on their shows to utter knowingly fallacious statements is a longstanding problem that we all got to see in stark relief during last year's Swift Boat madness, but just because it isn't new doesn't make it any less of an outrage.

Moreover, the eggshells on which cable anchors have walked in discussing Schiavo’s (non)prospects for recovery and, especially, in interviewing Schiavo’s family -- who obviously have gone through a great deal and are emotionally invested in a belief that she is sentient and improvable -- have made a mockery of the notion that journalistic organizations have an obligation to discern facts and seek truth. I remember watching CNN’s Carol Lin interview Bob Schindler immediately following the House vote to adopt the bill on Sunday night, and shaking my head in disbelief when Lin asked him about how his “conversation” went with his daughter moments earlier:

LIN: Yes. Judy, right now I'm going to go to Pinellas Park, outside the hospice. I'm going to talk with Mr. Bob Schindler, Terri Schiavo's father. Bob, you have a very different expression on your face today than you did last Friday when it was so tense and the rulings were going against you and the feeding tube was removed. You just came from Terri's room. How did that conversation go?

SCHINDLER: With Terri, I asked her if she was ready to take a little ride. And I told her that we're going to take her for a little trip to take her outside and get her some breakfast. And I got a big smile out of her face, so help me God. So she seemed to be very pleased.

That Lin neglected to follow that claim up with any questions about Terri’s actual medical state might not be surprising -- it’s a touchy thing to bring up with the woman’s father, after all -- but it happens to be perfectly in keeping with her and her peers’ disinterest in challenging any of the similarly incredible claims made by Republicans lawmakers during this ordeal.

Someone watching CNN or FOX News for all their information on this case in the last week would, without question, be left with an impression of this story that was on balance far more wrong than right. Run-of-the-mill mediocrity is one thing; actively and consistently misinforming viewers is quite another.

--Sam Rosenfeld

NO "BROKE." The rushed and misleading AP article on the new Trustees' Report by Martin Crutsinger is getting a whole lot of play at the moment, and virtually all the outlets carrying the article run headlines or subheads that describe Social Security as "going broke" in 2041. Of course, that's nonsense. In no way can the program possible be construed as "broke" when and if the trust fund finally runs out; nobody is projecting that Social Security will ever actually go broke. All that will happen in Crutsinger's "go broke" year is a reduction in benefits to a level exceeding that which the president is proposing by suggesting a change in the indexing formula. We had a round of this kind of argument after the president's talk in his State of the Union address about the program's impending "bankruptcy," but one could make an arguable (if silly) semantic defense for using that word; there's no such defending "broke."

Meanwhile, the most important news to take away from the report has to be this graph, helpfully unearthed by Brad Plumer: The program's revenue-benefit ratio projections improved since last year. Shockingly that is not to be found in Crutsinger's report.

UPDATE: The fine folks at CJR Daily were on this an hour ago. Take a look.

--Sam Rosenfeld

VANISHING WORKERS. Here's another mysterious change. In 2004, the projected labor-force participation rate for adult men in 2080 was 74.3 percent. This year, it's down to 73.5 percent. For adult women, things have stayed the same. Both reports explain the change as due to "the net effect of increases due to assumed improvements in life expectancy, and decreases due to higher assumed disability prevalence rates and an increasing proportion of males who are never married" but don't explain in any greater detail. It's hard to see why one's thinking on any of those topics would have changed. Indeed, it's hard to see why an increase in the number of never-married men should decrease the male labor-force participation rate at all. At any rate, I can only assume that the real change here is in disability projections, since any marital status changes should be offset by increases in women's labor force participation. So why was this projection revised upwards?

--Matthew Yglesias

STRONGER COUNTERSPIN. The Senate Democrats' War Room sent out an email on the Trustees' Report noting that "the Trustees currently project that in the year following 2041, the program would still be able to pay 74% of full benefits." Good point. An even better point would note that this 74 percent of full (promised) benefits means bigger guaranteed checks than the ones you'll get if we implement price indexing, the main cost-control idea the White House has tossed around but is afraid to publicly embrace because it's consequences are too horrifying to sell directly to the public.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOW FUNDED ARE THY OBLIGATIONS. The early AP coverage of the Trustees Report looks like a hastily rewritten White House press release (literally, I think, since the reporter needed to act quickly and didn't even bother to get a token quote from anyone not appointed by the president) and, as such, is big on the privateer talking point that "The trustees said that Social Security's unfunded obligations total $4 trillion over the next 75 years, an increase from last year's projection of $3.7 trillion in unfunded liabilities." A more relevant issue, though, is the cost of the program compared to the country's overall ability to pay -- the size of the American economy.

Last year the Trustees said that "Expressed in relation to the projected gross domestic product (GDP), OASDI cost is estimated to rise from the current level of 4.3 percent of GDP, to 6.3 percent in 2030, and to 6.6 percent in 2078." This year things have gotten better, not worse. "Expressed in relation to the projected gross domestic product (GDP), OASDI cost is estimated to rise from the current level of 4.3 percent of GDP, to 6.1 percent in 2030, and to 6.4 percent in 2079."

In other words, the growing "insolvency" of Social Security does not reflect an increase in the projected cost of the program relative to the nation's ability to pay. Rather, it reflects an increase in the projected cost of the program relative to projected payroll-tax revenue. Apparently, the Trustees have changed their mind about what proportion of the overall economy in the future will come in the form of taxed payroll. For all I know, they may be right about that (though I'd like to know why). If this is true, it makes the actuarial gap larger. The more relevant point, however, is the GDP one, which means that the gap is easier to close on the revenue side, in the sense that fixing the gap purely through tax increases would impose a smaller burden on the economy as a whole.

--Matthew Yglesias

MISSING PRODUCTIVITY GAINS. This is less about the political manipulation of data than structural problems with the way these projections are made. The 2002 report projected productivity growth of 1.4 in 2002, 2.7 percent in 2003, 2.1 in 2004, 2.0 in 2005 and a long-term trend of 1.6 percent. By the 2003 report they knew that 2002 growth had actually been 3.6 percent, and short-term projections were accordingly revised upwards to 1.9 percent for 2003, 2.3 percent for 2004, and 2.1 percent for 2005. The long-term trend, however, was left at 1.6 percent. Then came the 2004 report, which revised the '02 historical number upwards to 3.8 percent, and showed that '03 productivity had actually been 3.4 percent. Thus, the projection for '04 was revised upward to 2.7 percent, and the '05 number revised downward to 1.8 percent. The long-term projection was unchanged. Now the 2005 report is out and once again past projections were too low. The actual 2004 number was 3.3 percent, and the '05 projection has been boosted to 2.0 percent.

Nevertheless, the long-term projection is unchanged. Why? Because the method used to generate the long-term projection deliberately excludes all this new data. Instead, they come up with 1.6 percent because "The annual increase in total productivity averaged 1.6 percent over the last four complete economic cycles (measured from peak to peak), covering the 34-year period from 1966 to 2000. The annual increase in total productivity averaged 2.2, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.6 percent over the business cycles 1966-73, 1973-78, 1978-89, 1989-2000, respectively." So far, productivity growth in the current cycle has been much higher than 1.6 percent. As a result, there's every reason to believe that, as long as the methodology is held constant, the long-term number will shoot up once we reach the next economic peak. The productivity figure, meanwhile, is absolutely crucial to the entire enterprise, which means that the program's fiscal health will look far better once the current expansion comes to an end.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEATH DECLINE: WHY? The new report is out and the moment of Trust Fund Doom has been moved forward from 2042 to 2041. Propaganda coup for the privateers!

Why the change? I can't say in full detail at the moment, but here's one switch in the assumptions I noted immediately as I started clicking around. Last year's death rate assumptions projected 858.4 deaths per 100,000 in 2005, 831.0 in 2010, 798.9 in 2015, 766.8 in 2020, and so on, declining forever. For Social Security, lower death rates mean tougher budgets. There was already good reason to believe that this was too sharp a decline, yet the new report just gets more pessimistic (from that actuarial viewpoint).

Now they've got 854.2 deaths per 100,000 in 2005, 828.2 in 2010, 796.7 in 2015, and 764.7 in 2020. By 2080, in the new projection, we'll be all the way down to 495.5 per 100,000 while last year's projection had us at 497.2. The text explains mysteriously that "a revision in the method of calculating death rates for ages 65-69" is responsible for the change. Given an administration known for its commitment to accuracy in factual statements and commitment to reality-based policy solutions, my assumption would be that these are good-faith (though perhaps mistaken) changes. Given the reality of the situation, I'm skeptical.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: RAISING KAINE. Is Tim Kaine the future of the Democratic Party? Terry McAuliffe said he is -- and pledged $5 million to this pro-business, anti-abortion gubernatorial candidate. Rob Garver spoke with Kaine to gauge whether he truly is the way forward for the party.

--Jeffrey Dubner

SELECTIVE ID. A big raspberry to The New York Times for seeing fit to note that James Whittemore, the district judge who ruled against the Schindlers' petition for a temporary restraining order yesterday, "was nominated by President Bill Clinton" but not that Charles Wilson, the circuit court judge who dissented (in favor of restoring treatment) from today's ruling, was also nominated by that same president. Name the president responsible for a judge's appointment or don't, but don't selectively identify them in a way that implicitly aligns their rulings with one party or philosophy or the other. The Washington Post identifies neither in a far better article that also includes more detail on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and the oddities of this case.

--Jeffrey Dubner

DOING THE MATH. Social Security should return to the public agenda in a big way today, starting with this afternoon's release of the annual Trustees' Report, a key source of data and a perennial political football that'll be more of a football than ever given the current state of the debate. Liberals will be watchfully looking for signs of data manipulation and politics-driven meddling in the production of the report, with fear driven by the Bush administration's appalling record in such matters and the reality that the Board of Trustees is dominated by Bush-appointed privateer hacks. Until the report is out, however, nobody knows for sure. There is some evidence, however, from Bruce Webb and Brad Plumer, that reports from recent years have already been manipulated. Here's one example courtesy of Brad:

To offer another example, in 2003 the Trustees "intermediate projections"—i.e. the ones in which the program goes slightly out of balance in 2042—projected 2.1 percent growth in 2005. Okay, seems a bit low, but whatever. But the next year, the Trustees' revised that prediction downward to 1.8 percent growth for 2005, even though the economy had obviously been humming along quite nicely.

Suggestive stuff. What we're primarily worried about here are small year-to-year tweaks in the assumptions that produce big differences over time. This seems like a good moment, however, to restate some general criticisms of the whole approach that you may recall from the early days of the "is there a crisis debate." First and foremost, the entire concept of offering a comprehensive set of demographic and economic assumptions on a 75-year time scale is self-evidently absurd. Think back to America in 1930 (i.e., 75 years ago) and ask yourself if anybody could have reasonably predicted the sort of sweeping social and economic changes that have happened since then. The answer, pretty clearly, is no. In order to make the purported crisis look bigger, however, privateers have been pushing to junk the already implausible 75-year projections in favor of infinite time horizon projections, which is patently absurd.

On top of that, some of the assumptions that have been pretty stable from year-to-year look unduly pessimistic to many observers. The way the productivity growth projection is done, for example, is heavily influenced by the unusually bad performance in this regard that the U.S. experienced from 1973-1995. A slump like that could recur, but it seems just as likely -- if not more so -- that the more robust performance over the past 10 years simply reflects a return to historical patterns. The report's optimism about falling death rates (which is pessimistic in actuarial terms) is not borne out by any real historical evidence; it just reflects a time-honored, and invariably disappointed, faith that future medical technologies will radically increase lifespans.

The projected decline in immigration, meanwhile, is completely lacking in evidentiary basis and would, in fact, be a totally unprecedented occurrence. On top of this, unlike other economic and demographic trends, this is entirely a matter of policy choices. Immigration rates will only decline sharply if Congress chooses to make them do so. Currently, the inclination of powerful political actors is to increase immigration levels, and we can do this, too, if we so choose. The fact that a steep decline in immigration would create problems for social insurance programs isn't a reason to change social insurance programs, it's a reason not to adopt policies that would lead to the steep decline in question. That's enough for now, but no doubt there will be much more on this all later.

--Matthew Yglesias

POP QUIZ. Who said this:

This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy.

The answer ... Chris Shays, Republican representative from Connecticut! The range of conservatives quoted criticizing Congress' League of Justice intervention into Terri Schiavo's prolonged death in this New York Times article is quite amusing, down the chain of sensibility from statesman John Warner to crank Stephen Moore.

Let's hope that some of these folks speak up as their compatriots try to use the latest decision as a bludgeon in their fight against the independent judiciary. (Full decision here (pdf); layman's analysis here.) I expect that Bill Frist will be somewhat displeased to find his own remarks used to block reinsertion of the feeding tube:

Mr. FRIST ... Nothing in the current bill or its legislative history mandates a stay. I would assume, however, the Federal court would grant a stay based on the facts of this case because Mrs. Schiavo would need to be alive in order for the court to make its determination. Nevertheless, this bill does not change current law under which a stay is discretionary.

It's hard to tell if Frist was indicating a willingness to accept a court decision not to grant a stay, or indicating that he didn't think there was any question about it. If the latter, it just goes to show how little some of these Republicans appreciate how the law works in this country. They're like little kids taking sledgehammers to a jungle gym because it wasn't actually a rocketship.

UPDATE: My mistake -- in scanning the article a second time to pick out representative critics, I grabbed Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's name. Huckabee takes the pro-intervention view, not the states' rights view.

--Jeffrey Dubner

NOW THEY ARE SHOOTING AT US. Less than a week after the government of Sudan restricted the movement of American diplomats, an American USAID worker was shot in the face when her vehicle convoy was ambushed by unknown assailants in south Darfur. According to a spokeswoman for USAID with whom I chatted this afternoon, the aid worker’s wounds are not life-threatening. For what it’s worth, a spokesman for Khartoum wished her a speedy recovery and blamed her wound on a stray bullet.

And I'm the Easter Bunny.

In all likelihood, Khartoum ordered the hit. Last wednesday, the United Nations announced that it were pulling all international staff out of west Darfur after a Janjaweed commander said that he’d target foreigners and UN humanitarian convoys there. Via Eric Reeves, I see that the attack on the USAID employee comes one day after the Sudanese governor of South Darfur tried to whip up local sentiment against aid agencies by accusing them of widespread graft. This follows a pattern; in October, Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir called aid organizations operating in Darfur “the real enemies.”

Reeves, whose credentials on the region are impeccable, warns that this shooting may be the result of a deliberate policy set by Khartoum:

The threats to humanitarian aid delivery grow more perilous by the day: this writer has received from multiple, highly authoritative sources intelligence indicating that Khartoum has ambitious plans for accelerating the obstruction of humanitarian access by means of orchestrated violence and insecurity, including the use of targeted violence against humanitarian aid workers.

I’d urge people to read his post in its entirety. The targeting of civilian non-combatants and aid workers is criminal and all too common. But now they shot a U.S. citizen working for the U.S. government. In April 1994, 10 Belgian blue-helmets were held hostage, tortured, and killed in Rwanda; shortly thereafter, the UN significantly withdrew the number of peacekeepers on ground.

Will we let Khartoum similarly push us around?

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE DEMOCRATS’ PERSISTENT VEGETATIVE STATE. The Washington Post runs a great piece today pondering the paradox of deafening Democratic silence on the Schiavo affair despite what would seem to be fairly conclusive polling evidence of public disapproval over congressional Republicans’ intervention. Noam Scheiber offers a persuasive take on why taking a louder stance in opposition to the ludicrous law that was passed yesterday -- and thus heightening the political polarization over this issue -- would play into a Republican trap:

Since the 1960s, the party has tended to take a libertarian position on social issues like abortion and the right to die. As with the U.N. and alliances, polls show that these are overwhelmingly popular positions. Large majorities agree that the government should stay out of people's personal decisions even in socially conservative regions like the South. My concern is that, despite the public support for these individual positions, embracing them tends to reinforce deeper suspicions people have about Democrats--namely, that they're a bunch of moral relativists who can't be trusted to do what's right. (Obviously Republicans got a lot of mileage out of this caricature this last election.)…

Republicans aren't stupid. They've built their majority by losing individual battles that help them win broader political wars. I hope this issue will turn out differenly, but so far I've seen nothing to convince me that's the case.

Two other factors here are worth mentioning. First, Democrats -- like certain liberal journalists who thought the big congressional news last week was the budget fight and who virtually ignored this little human interest story unfolding in Florida -- were pretty obviously blindsided by the speeding up of events, attention, and Republican initiative regarding the Schiavo affair late last week.

If you read this Hill article published last Wednesday, you see quotes and indications from Democratic senators and staffers, both anonymous and on-the-record, that a bill on Schiavo would likely face opposition from their side on the obvious procedural grounds. Four days later, you heard nary a peep of Democratic objection when that very bill was adopted in the middle of the night by a grand total of three senators present on the Senate floor. Democrats clearly had no idea this was going to crescendo the way it did, had not mapped out in advance any kind of strategy to deal with it, and, as the Post piece makes clear, have by now come to adopt the default assumption that the Christian right is an unstoppable and all-powerful force that no wise lawmaker can challenge on anything. Added to that is the fact that Tom Harkin in particular actively pushed for action on Schiavo and that Harry Reid clearly supported the bill as well.

But as for the no doubt sizable number of Democratic senators (and representatives) who silently objected to what transpired over the weekend, the other unmistakable danger in piping up is that their critique on this matter is largely procedural and a bit complicated, and can’t stand a chance in the face of full-throated screams about “saving Terri.” Some people right here in the Prospect office take a fervently held moral position on the individual case of the Schiavos, on right-to-die grounds. I don’t. (Neither, it seems, does Matt.) But I have a strong, strong objection to the process by which Republicans have gone about trying to orchestrate their desired outcome in this case. (Pace Jonah Goldberg, there very much are constitutional questions this law raises, and at any rate even liberals who don’t hold either “federalism” or “not-federalism” as sacred bedrock credos can still unhypocritically champion the separation of powers and the rule of law and oppose ad hoc, transparently politicized legislative interventions into private legal proceedings.)

My ire is intense, and probably so are a lot of Democratic lawmakers’, but it’s grounded in a rather dull argument about process. When conservatives (and Republicans) manage to whip up firestorms of outrage and cultural conflict over stories like these, liberals (and Democrats) keep finding themselves in this situation, of being utterly at a loss for a potent and effective reply. One answer would probably be to take Ezra Klein's advice and direct the outrage at the opportunistic Republicans through a "none of the government's damned business" line of argument. The process objection may be dull, but Americans evidently -- and hearteningly -- share it.

--Sam Rosenfeld

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE GOP. Unf of the excellent, but not usually political, Unfogged has some important insight into the nature of contemporary Republican governance:

Congress recently passed some new provisions that reduce the tax rate applicable to income generated from, to paint with a broad brush, making stuff in the U.S. This stuff includes motion pictures produced by a U.S. taxpayer in the U.S.

EXCEPT, that the reduced rate does not apply when the film contains "actually sexually explicit conduct." No doubt capital is fleeing the porn industry even as I write this.

Documentation is here. They passed, in other words, a corporate tax break for everyone except porn makers. Who says you can't serve God and mammon?

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ANTISOCIAL SECURITY. Ever notice that Republican "pro-growth" policies tend to grow something other than the GDP -- namely, income inequality? Jon Margolis thinks he has an explanation.

--Jeffrey Dubner

TORTURE: JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT. Yet another must-read story from Jonathan Landay reports that "Harsh techniques used by military interrogators on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, produced no better information than traditional law enforcement methods, FBI agents told their superiors in newly declassified portions of e-mails released Monday." According to one FBI agent, "DOD (Department of Defense) finally admitted the information was the same info the Bureau obtained." Nevertheless, "It still did not prevent them from continuing the 'DOD methods.'" Think that over a bit. They conceded that there was no actual purpose to using the "harsh techniques" and then kept using them anyway.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TORTURE HEAVY. The strangest thing about interrogations at Guantanamo? They're just not very good, says David Rose, author of Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights. Read Sasha Abramsky's interview with Rose for that and other thought-provoking arguments.

--Jeffrey Dubner

NO RISK, JUST GUARANTEED LOSSES. Social Security privatization is clearly an ailing cause, but it's not dead yet, or even in a permanent vegetative state. Thus it was with some pleasure that I received a copy of the House Republican Conference's latest set of talking points on the subject, useful because "you might encounter citizens with questions that are often difficult to answer in simple, understandable language." And, indeed, you might. Mostly, this is more of the same, but I was interested to note that after spending much time castigating bonds, when owned by the Social Security Administration, as "a set of IOU documents . . . an empty promise," they assure citizens that "Workers could choose to invest only in guaranteed government bond funds" if they wanted to minimize their exposure to risk.

Now it's hard to say if this is really the case, since there isn't an actual proposal on the table. Nevertheless, it's worth pointing out that unlike conventional empty-promise IOUs, guaranteed government bonds would be totally worthless in the context of private accounts as outlined at the White House's one background briefing on the subject. In addition to the massive, universal cuts that the administration seems to be envisioning, for each dollar you deposit in your private account, one dollar plus the average rate of interest paid on government bonds will be subtracted from your Social Security benefits. So if you take that dollar and invest it in federal bonds, all of your interest and all of your principle will be precisely offset by the additional reduction in your Social Security benefits. But on top of the universal benefit cut, and the offsetting benefit cut, you're going to need to pay administrative fees on your account.

The element of risk would, indeed, be eliminated this way, but only through a guarantee that you will lose money on your investments.

--Matthew Yglesias

SHE'S MY ISSUE! Ezra Klein beat me to the punch on Tom DeLay's solipsistic understanding of the entire culture war:

"This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," Mr. DeLay said.

Mr. DeLay complained that "the other side" had figured out how "to defeat the conservative movement," by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that "the whole syndicate" was "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in."

Now, The New York Times' quotations are heavily truncated, so you can't say for sure that DeLay called the ethics charges against him "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in," but it's hard not to peg that as the subtext. Unless there have been personal attacks against the Schindlers that I missed, or DeLay somehow believes that liberals brought up Terri Schiavo's tragic, drawn-out death, there's really only one message you can take away: Raising questions about DeLay's ethical problems is a direct assault on Christianity.

Over in the Senate, of course, the Schindler/Schiavo family misfortune isn't about DeLay's ethics but about activist judges. Judge James Whittemore ruled (pdf) against the Schindler's petition for a temporary restraining order, finding that "the court is limited to a consideration of the constitutional and statutory deprivations alleged by Plaintiffs in their Complaint and motion." This, according to conlaw scholar Rick Santorum, is "judicial tyranny" and "not what Congress told him to do." Nevermind that Whittemore ruled on the Schindlers' actual complaint (pdf), rather than some fantasyland complaint that based its argument on S. 653; Congress wanted the Schindlers' claim to succeed and thus it must!

Now, I'm no fancy, big-city lawyer, and I can't even guess at the implications of sections 2 and 3 of S. 653, but I do know that judges have to rule on the case that's actually brought to them, and not a case Congress might hope comes before them. That's what avoiding judicial activism means. We are, after all, a country where you can be executed because your lawyer filed your appeal a day late. Rick Santorum went to law school; he knows all this. But his idea of "judicial activism" is about politics, not the law.

--Jeffrey Dubner

COME TOGETHER. In two important posts, Steve Clemons picks up on Mike Tomasky's foray into John Bolton's questionable dealings as head of the National Policy Forum. Says Clemons:

Many conservatives have genuine concerns about the management of the United Nation's after the "Oil-for-Food" scandal, even though it's clear that the U.S. delegation to the U.N. knew what was going on.

But Bolton is a guy whose own past management experience and the blurring of legal lines in his own organization sounds a lot like what Bernie Ebbers would have looked for in his team at WorldCom or Ken Lay at Enron.

Meanwhile, conflicting rumors are circulating as to whether or not the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are truly unified in their opposition to the Bolton nomination. Yesterday I heard from a reliable source that the Democrats on the committee staff are ready to set up a unified front, but this morning I was still unable to confirm Russ Feingold's position. As the only Democrat on the committee who voted to confirm Bolton as Undersecretary of State in 2001 (and only one of five Democrats from that committee who still remain in the Senate), Feingold is the most likely holdout here.

Hopefully, Feingold won't wait until the confirmation hearing to make up his mind, for Bolton is likely to undergo another "confirmation conversion" (as John Kerry labeled Bolton's 2001 testimony), whereby Bolton repudiates incendiary comments which he previously hurled at various American presidents, U.S. policies, foreign leaders, and international institutions. In one example of this phenomenon, Kerry took Bolton to task for characterizing the Agreed Framework for North Korea as "egregiously wrong," and arguing in an op-ed that one aspect of that policy amounted to "appeasement." As Kerry pointed out, this position would have put him at odds with his bosses, President George W. Bush and Colin Powell, who at the time supported the Agreed Framework. Not about to be placed in such an awkward spot, Bolton replied:

The secretary and the president have said that the United States supports the agreed framework, and I will adhere to that policy. I understand what intellectual integrity is. I understand what the chain of command is. I understand what loyalty is. And I don't think those three things are at all necessarily inconsistent.

Of course, Bolton doesn't have anything near a blank slate when it comes to his views on the utility of the United Nations or even the existence of international law. One hopes that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will not let him escape from his past as he assures the committee of his intentions to reform the UN. He's no UN reformer. But as the U.S. ambassador there he'll surely be a fifth column.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL. As the Schindler family loses in court once again and Rick Santorum offers up his predictably psychotic response, it's worth remembering that the Schindlers themselves are among the victims in this farce. Anyone who's been in a remotely similar position will be entirely familiar with their desire to believe that their daughter may recover or that the law might suddenly cease to be the law and somehow facilitate that miraculous recovery. Normally, people in a position like that find friends and family who help them cope with the magnitude of the tragedy they're facing and accept the realities of the situation.

Instead, the Schindlers have crooks like DeLay and Randall Terry lying to them, and to the world. Pretending that Terri might recover when she plainly won't. Pretending that this congressional grandstanding will change the situation, when it won't. And all for the crassest of imaginable reasons -- to distract attention from the ethical cesspool the GOP has created right in the center of the government. It's truly the cruelest thing one can imagine being done to a long-suffering family.

--Matthew Yglesias

APRIL ISSUE NOW ONLINE. Our newest print issue is now available online. The first thing to read is Jodi Enda's rich history of the abortion debate -- its transition from a medical issue to a moral issue, and then the loss of the moral mantle by abortion's protectors. We also have, free for all readers, new developments in the story of "Iran's Ahmed Chalabi," Manucher Gorbanifar, and his neoconservative supporters, in a news-breaking investigation by Laura Rozen and Jeet Heer. And that's just to start -- check out the whole issue.

--Jeffrey Dubner

BROOKS VERSUS THE SLEAZO-CONS. Today's David Brooks column takes a good, solid whack at the "sleazo-cons" -- Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, et al. -- familiar to those of us who've been following the burgeoning scandals surrounding Tom DeLay. It's a good piece, with none of the usual "Democrats are just as bad" stuff. The complaint here would be that Brooks seems to feel, to borrow a phrase from Ed Kilgore, that the president of the United States is "just a genial well-meaning man who happens to preside over a party of loony extremists and corrupt hacks."

No doubt the number of people who've engaged in actually illegal sleazy conduct is rather limited and probably doesn't affect all that many politicians per se. But if you're worried about the sleazy dealings of Abramoff et al., it seems that you should be even more worried about the fact that the entire Republican Party's legislative agenda has become little more than water-carrying for K Street. Each and every Republican legislator, along with the White House, is deeply implicated in that scandal. Roughly speaking, what you've got is a Republican Party that's abandoned small government as a principle but won't give up the tax-cut crack pipe either. The result is a "pro-business" party, rather than a properly ideological one, and it should be no surprise that sleaze follows in its wake.

--Matthew Yglesias

EAT YOUR VEGETABLES. To get a tiny flavor of the Washington pundit elite’s unflinching belief in the “inevitability” of painful Social Security benefit cuts, it’s worth taking a look at the discussion of the issue during Saturday’s edition of The Capitol Gang on CNN (said Gang consists of Margaret Carlson, Al Hunt, Kate O’Beirne, Bob Novak, and Mark Shields). Check out the full discussion in the transcript; in short, Novak ridiculed the head-in-the-sand irresponsibility of Democrats who are refusing even to consider large benefit cuts as a feature of Social Security reform, and managed to browbeat the three milquetoasts on the panel into agreeing that benefit cuts are, indeed, inevitable. Carlson piped up first: “I agree with Bob, in that Democrats have to pivot now and acknowledge, yes, there's a problem, and put forward a proposal for fixing Social Security.” Then Hunt: “You know, Bob, you're right on that. I think there are going to have to be benefit cuts, but I also think that if you move to some -- some kind of indexing, you can do it in a very progressive way.” And finally, Shields: “I think you have to have benefit cuts.”

This belief on the part of the centrist liberals on the panel is not, of course, grounded in empirical reality, but rather a particular, long-outdated conception of what responsible policymaking entails and what kind of political action should be deemed “courageous.” It’s an outlook that is, frankly, just so '90s. Those halcyon years of prosperity and reasonably responsible stewardship of the federal government’s fiscal affairs provided the only context in which the strange rise to elite esteem of the self-styled “pain caucus” in Congress could make any sense (and even then it was a pretty weird phenomenon). The pain caucus included such stalwarts of independence and bipartisan sobriety as John Breaux and Bob Kerrey, the latter of whom in particular made something of a fetish out of championing policy prescriptions that maximized the ill effects on those dependent on the support of federal entitlement programs. For his efforts he was rewarded with a reputation for fiscal responsibility and political courage by the establishment Beltway press.

Michelle Cottle touched a bit on this odd phenomenon in her 2001 profile of Breaux:

…Breaux has made a career of positioning himself as the voice of the pragmatic, rational center on a variety of high-profile policy disputes--Medicare, Social Security, tobacco, tax cuts. He is forever railing against ideological rigidity, and he talks of political compromise as if it were a holy sacrament. "I'd always rather have half of something than a hundred percent of nothing" is among his favorite sentiments. In press accounts, Breaux's name is almost invariably followed by mention of "his efforts to reach beyond party lines," "his ability to cut political deals," or how he "has made a career of splitting the difference."

…

Democrats, meanwhile, acknowledge that Breaux is something of a headache for their caucus. . . "He and Bob Kerrey call themselves the pain caucus," says a Democratic aide, clearly unimpressed. "It's a point of pride--the point being that he's willing to inflict pain on federal entitlement recipients. It's a pride in being willing to make tough choices, with the implication being that other people are not as courageous."

Fortunately for the Democrats, most of the self-styled pain caucusers in their midst have retired. But the pundit class that encouraged their “eat your vegetables” temperament is still around, and now participating in a policy discussion for which such sentiments play easily into traps laid by right-wingers like Novak and, of course, the president. Thus we have the odd sight of David Broder making a pain caucus–style argument -- “rescuing the endangered retirement, survivor and disability fund from the fiscal effects of the baby boom may require sacrifice from taxpayers and beneficiaries alike” -- on behalf of a potential “compromise” proposal completely at odds with the fiscal responsibility undergirding the original pain caucus approach.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SITTING SCHIAVO. Instead of distracting us all from last week's budget shenanigans, the sad story of Terri Schiavo should refocus our attention on what George W. Bush and House Republicans are trying to do to Medicaid spending. It's not pretty, as Matthew Yglesias reminds us, but it's not too surprising, either.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE REALLY UNSERIOUS ONES. A few Cornerites are piping up with mild dissensions from the party line on Terri Schiavo. John Derbyshire, of all people, offered a thoughtful and utterly non-dogmatic note of caution against tub-thumping and moral righteousness when it comes to complex situations like this. Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg pretty clearly has an off-the-reservation take on this whole mess, which he promises to discuss in detail later. But first he needs to engage in another dreary round of “who’s the bigger hypocrite?,” a recurring tic of his that usually features a lot of dubious straw-man claims but that in any event -- even when the hypocrisy charge is legitimate -- does nothing constructive to advance an actual positive argument for or against anything of substance.

This time Jonah calls hypocrisy on liberals for suddenly getting all passionate about federalism. The post is worth a read to get the full flavor; The Wall Street Journal's editorialists make a similar charge today, saying they'd give more credence to liberal cries of states' rights "if the same liberals who are complaining about the possibility of the federal courts reviewing Mrs. Schiavo's case felt as strongly about restraining the federal judiciary when it comes to abortion, homosexuality, and other social issues they don't want to trust to local communities." I think this line of argument rather misses the point of liberal objections in this case. (Noam Scheiber, in a post filled with some sharp thoughts, kind of misses the point in the same way.)

For one thing, liberals have never held up the opposite position of federalism (whatever that might be called) to be a core, bedrock tenet of their philosophy in the way that conservatives have championed federalism. Liberals have always taken a much more honestly instrumentalist approach to questions of federal-state balance. We’re guided by the prospect of specific policy outcomes in rendering our judgments on such matters; conservatives are quite obviously guided in the same damned manner to the same extent, only they still seek to hold fast to “federalism” and “states’ rights” as parts of some fundamental ideological credo. So on the narrow and near-irrelevant Goldbergian question of who’s a bigger hypocrite here, I think the answer is pretty obvious. (Jonah argues that the GOP’s inconsistency on the process question in this case is mitigated by the fact that it’s an inconsistency pursued in the service of “a principle they've spent some time upholding -- a culture of life.” I would say that the hypocrisy of their crusade in this case is in fact compounded by the fact that their zeal for the cause of imperiled coma victims is so patently selective.)

But more importantly, the liberal critique of how Republicans have handled this issue has less to do with “federalism” than it does with the separation of powers and the rule of law. The sustained ideological assault against an independent judiciary -- components of which include this weekend’s shenanigans and the current congressional majority’s zealous efforts to strip the courts of jurisdiction over any number of partisan agenda items -- is itself only one facet of a pervasive tendency of modern Republicans to disregard wholesale the integrity of codified processes and the autonomy of institutions, to change the rules and to politicize all conflict in the service of totally unprincipled and narrow political objectives. It’s worth reading this shrill, hysterical analysis from CBS’s legal expert and really trying to come to grips with what he’s saying:

QUESTION: What does that concept do the regular give and take between the court systems, the idea of comity and cooperation between judges?

ANSWER: It destroys it. But that's the whole point of this Congressional action. Not liking a particular result in a case that has been litigated fully and completely by a court with competent jurisdiction, Congress now has said that the game must be re-done with new rules that heavily favor one side over the other. The implications of this move are astonishing. Just think about it. Anytime Congress doesn't like the result in a particular case, it could swoop in and call a "do-over," which is essentially what this legislation represents. And this from a Congress that has for a decade or so tried to keep all sorts of citizens-- including disabled employees-- out of federal court. If this law is declared valid, no decision in any state court in the country will be immune from Congressional second-guessing. It would throw out of whack the entire concept of separation of powers. The constitutional law expert Tribe calls it "trial by legislation" and he is right.

QUESTION: You are getting agitated again. Doesn't the legislation specifically say that it does not "constitute a precedent with respect to future legislation, including the provision of private relief bills"?

ANSWER: Yes, it says that. But so what. It said that the last time Congress did this and it didn't stop Congress from doing this now. Look, there is no other way to put it: this is the most blatant and egregious power-grab by one branch over another in my lifetime. Congress is intruding so far into the power of the judiciary, on behalf of a single family, that it is breathtaking. It truly will be fascinating to see how federal court judges react to this-- whether they simply bow down to this end-run or whether they back up their state-court colleagues. And it will be interesting in particular to see what the Supreme Court does with this case. Even the conservatives on the High Court-- and the Chief Justice in particular-- must be concerned about the precedent this sort of legislation would set.

As far as I can tell, conservative advocates in this fight haven’t even bothered to engage these kinds of questions -- they just don’t care. An individual woman in Florida must be “saved” by any means necessary and that’s all there is to say about the matter. Thus legislation is passed that doesn’t even bother to offer a forward-looking rule change in the process by which these kinds of decisions can be adjudicated in the future. (Instead, the action should be considered non-binding and narrowly targeted at the specific case in question -- sound familiar?)

We’re a law-based society. Rules matter. Precedents matter. Separation of powers and institutional autonomy matter. To the Republicans in power and the conservative intelligentsia lending legitimacy to their governance, apparently, such things don’t matter at all. Congressional Republicans capped a week during which they definitively demonstrated that small-government fiscal conservatism as a guiding legislative principle is completely dead by whipping up this grotesque circus of ill-informed hysteria and rampant trampling of rules and procedural limits. There’s nothing “hypocritical” in pointing out the apparently direct relationship between the ideological bankruptcy of Republican governance and their inability to recognize any limits on their actions.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BOLTONISM GOES OFFICIAL. Via Praktike I see that the new National Defense Strategy (PDF) from the Pentagon's civilian leadership includes this odd passage:

Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the week using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.

For starters, conflating "international fora" with terrorism is pretty grotesque. A few years back our trade partners in the European Union and elsewhere filed a suit against the United States with the World Trade Organization to protest some tarrifs on steel imports that the administration had put in place. A bit before that, several members of al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes, crashed three of them into buildings, and killed thousands of innocent people. If we've really lost sight of the difference here, then something's gone wrong.

I'm more concerned, however, that this passage indicates that the John Bolton mindset about international institutions is gaining ground inside the administration, especially because the same document lists "ensur[ing] freedom of action" as a key defense policy goal later on. Freedom of action is nice, but its value needs to be properly understood and put in context. On the individual level, I think people understand this very well. One of the most important freedoms we enjoy is the freedom to sign away portions of our freedom of action by signing legally enforceable contracts. If you tried to make your way through life without ever permitting yourself to be constrained in this manner, you would find it impossible to undertake any number of worthwhile, collaborative projects. Similarly, the prohibition of murder reduces my freedom of action, but also serves my interests. Note that this would be true even if the earth's yellow sun imbued me with super powers that made it impossible for anyone to murder me: I could reign as king, but the absence of an enforceable rule against killing people would wreck society, the economy, and everything else, making such leadership basically worthless.

The situation on the international level isn't exactly the same, but it's pretty similar. Insofar as it's possible to increase the degree to which international relations consists of rule-based cooperative dynamics, Americans can gain from that even if it decreases American power as such. Even insofar as we don't require stable international frameworks for our own defense, we still benefit from inhabiting a world in which other countries that do need them have them. The failure to understand this is extremely serious and winds up affecting American policy in bad ways throughout diverse areas. Most clearly, the Bushian "forward strategy of freedom" is undermined at every turn by the (evidently accurate) perception of foreigners that democracy-promotion is intended purely as an instrumental way of securing the second goal of unrestrained American world domination.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE DOMESTIC BOLTON. John Bolton's policy views alone should be enough to disqualify him from confirmation as UN ambassador. But there are even more questions about Bolton, as Michael Tomasky recalls: Whatever happened to that Hong Kong loan he helped arrange for the RNC?

--Jeffrey Dubner

WHAT CAN ONE SAY? House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said this yesterday about Terri Schiavo:

Like other Republican lawmakers championing Schiavo's bill, DeLay often suggests she is alert and potentially treatable.

"She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts," he said Sunday evening. "It won't take a miracle to help Terri Schiavo. It will only take the medical care and therapy that patients require."

For those keeping score at home, that statement is a straight-up, non-fungible, unambiguous, and utterly unconscionable lie. And if you were watching cable news yesterday (as I was), it’s probably safe to say you never heard anyone call DeLay out on it, or any number of similarly, knowingly fallacious statements spewing forth from the mouths of our national political leaders.

(Via The Stakeholder.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

FEATURES, BUGS, AND HSAS. I mostly agree with what Garance had to say about a forward-looking, progressive savings agenda, but her near-endorsement of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) demands, I think, some more scrutiny. The fly in the ointment is that, as she says, these things would be a very good deal for "reasonably healthy" people, along with (and this accounts for the GOP's HSA-love) people facing very high marginal tax rates. While this might be a feature from one perspective, it's a bug from a broader health care perspective because it will encourage healthier people and younger people to drop out of the market for traditional comprehensive insurance and rely instead on a combination of tax-preferred savings accounts and catatrophic insurance.

That, in turn, makes the pool of people remaining in the traditional market more expensive to cover, which will lead to rising premiums. As premiums go up, the number of people for whom HSA-plus-catatrophic becomes a good deal will also go up. Then premium rise even more. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Meanwhile, as premiums keep spiraling upwards, more and more employers will find it impossible to afford offering traditional inurance to their employees. Impoverished workers will wind up on Medicaid (deficit troubles ahead); young people will be okay with their HSAs; and ordinary middle-aged, middle-class people will be left out in the cold, unable to get health care.

Now on Tuesdays and Fridays I'm inclined to think this looming collapse of the employer-based health care system may be a feature, rather than a bug, from a liberal perspective. There's every reason to think a comprehensive, universal health insurance system familiar from the rest of the world would be better than America's current inefficient hodgepodge. But it's very hard to see how we get from here to there. Perhaps things will have to get worse before they get better. The other five days a week I hew to the standard view that deliberate implementation of bad policy is a bad idea. That aside, let me also note that insofar as we want to use tax incentives for any purpose (retirement savings, health care, etc.), it's vitally important that liberals push (à la the American Progress tax-reform plan) for the use of tax credits rather than tax deductions as the incentive of choice. Deductions provide more help to the rich than to the middle class, even though they need it less, and often provide no help whatsoever to poor people.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: A MAJORITY LEADER OF ONE. What with the pernicious legislative state in Congress right now, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that last week's story was the imminent demise of Tom DeLay. In case the feeding-tube-and-circus spectacle didn't convince you that the House Republicans fully control the agenda, Sam Rosenfeld brings you a tale of the sheer muscle and determination DeLay commands and of how he can fight for survival like no one else.

--Jeffrey Dubner

MEDICARE CRISIS! RUN! I was reading over Max Sawicky's recent budget paper (PDF) released by the Economic Policy Institute when I came across this set of fun facts I'd previously been unaware of:

The current non-crisis situation of the Medicare program provides a glimpse of the future course of Social Security. Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) fund, devoted to "hospital, home health, skilled nursing facility, and hospice care for the aged and disabled," is financed with dedicated payroll taxes equal to 2.9% of total payroll, split equally between worker and employer. In 2003 the HI fund had assets equal to 152% of fund expenses (Trustees 2004b). At the same time, the HI fund ran a cash deficit identical in form to that projected for Social Security after 2018. Hence, it is currently financed in part by general revenues that redeem Trust Fund bonds disparaged as "mere IOUs" by conservative critics of Social Security.

So there you have it. Nothing's "going bust," or whatever the talking point of the day is. Now of course it's true (and this is the point of the EPI paper) that these bonds aren't magical, grows-on-trees kind of money. You need income-tax revenue to pay them off. But for both Medicare and Social Security the point is the same -- the obstacle to maintaining the programs in their current form has nothing to do with alleged payroll-tax shortfalls and everything to do with the Republican Party's maniacal desire to keep income taxes as low as possible. On the Medicare front, the implication of current tax policies is that we're looking at a future of steep cuts. Including, I dare say, cuts in the fields of nursing facilities and hospice care for the aged and disabled, something conservatives are busying themselves pretending to care about of late.

--Matthew Yglesias

DR. HACK. Amy Sullivan nails Bill Frist to the wall for his Senate-career-spanning serial medical quackery on behalf of whatever right-wing cause celebre happens to come down the pipeline. Frist’s reprehensible diagnostic intervention in the Terri Schiavo fight was not, sadly, an isolated case of Republican lawmakers abusing the presumed authority of their medical degrees during the political shame-o-rama we’ve all watched unfold in the last week; Senator Tom Coburn attested to Schiavo’s viability on Wednesday, while late last night I had the distinct pleasure of watching Representative (and licensed physician) Dave Weldon of Florida assure Geraldo Rivera on FOX News that the videotape of Schiavo the Schindler family provided has convinced him that she’s no vegetable. (He said this after first helpfully suggesting that the leaked strategy memo distributed to GOP senators last week might have actually been written by Democrats looking to spring a PR trap.)

But obviously the Senate majority leader -- “speaking more as a physician than as a United States senator” -- is the highest-profile MD-abuser in this fight. The gist of his statement on the Senate floor is that the videotape he’s seen of a smiling, open-eyed patient undercuts the notion that Schiavo is really in a persistent vegetative state; he also refers with complete credulity to quite dubious claims made by doctors in affidavits recently introduced by the Schindlers. Advocates in this fight have made much of the fact that Schiavo isn’t actually in a coma -- as if that bolstered, rather than undermined, their case that she’s in a viable state or that there is reason to hope for improvement. As The Los Angeles Times described on Saturday:

The term coma covers a broad range of states. A person who drank too much, passed out and cannot be roused is in a coma, Keane said. At the other extreme, a coma can be so deep that the patient requires blood-pressure support and help breathing. In all cases, the patient's eyes are shut and he or she is unresponsive.

A coma is usually considered to be a short-term situation. After a few weeks or months, the situation is usually resolved with the coma being reversed or the patient dying.

A persistent vegetative state is something different, "sort of like being in an awake coma," said Dr. David A. Goldstein of the Keck School of Medicine at USC. Patients' eyes are open, they have sleep-wake cycles, and it often appears that they are interacting with visitors, which makes it hard on families.

The brains of such patients are functioning only at a very rudimentary level, said Dr. Kenneth V. Iserson of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center in Tucson. They cannot feel pain, express themselves or receive communication. They may have grimaces or smiles or other facial movements that look like they are reflecting emotions, but "there really isn't a significant relationship with the outside world," Goldstein said.

And the longer the state persists, "the less likely they are to come out of it," Keane added. Schiavo has been in this condition for 15 years "and it is very, very unlikely she would wake up," he said.

And as The New York Times wrote yesterday:

Especially when a patient's eyes open on emergence from a coma, Dr. Fins said, family members are likely to assume that this is evidence of recovery. In fact, he said, it can augur poorly for the patient. When the eyes open but there is no quick return to mental responsiveness, it suggests that the primitive brain stem is reasserting itself, without engaging the higher brain: the cortex and other parts that are involved in thought and emotion.

Does the good Dr. Frist know he’s being misleading when he raises doubts about Schiavo’s state of mind or, not being a neurologist, is he being sincere, and merely mistaken (and flagrantly negligent) in his speculations? Which is worse? What a choice!

It’s these little teapot tempests, which Republicans like to stir up as a way of distracting themselves and their constituents from the core bankruptcy of their animating ideology and the massive unpopularity of their policy agenda, that can sometimes help to reveal the operating impulses of some of these guys. Tom DeLay is a special combo: the very embodiment of modern GOP corruption and hackery who also happens to have the cold-eyed conviction of a true believer. Frist’s just faking it and always has been. Which is worse? What a choice!

--Sam Rosenfeld

CONSERVATISM JUMPS THE SHARK. Tapped doesn't work weekends, so we've largely missed out on the disgusting farce the GOP has made out of the Schiavo family's tragedy. I, at least, don't have a great deal to say beyond what's been on the most prominent liberal blogs, but don't miss Mark Kleiman's post on the gross hypocrisy of it all (by all accounts completely ignored in the weekend's wall-to-wall cable coverage) or this post from Rivka on the medical and scientific issues in play.

Let me also agree with Marshall Wittman that what we're seeing here is, in many ways, the death of conservatism -- and not just in the Republican Party's wholesale abandonment of its erstwhile beliefs about federalism, the rule of law, limited government, etc. What we have here is pretty clearly a desperate (though effective, for all I know) effort to distract attention from the GOP's failure to come to grips with the serious policy dilemmas post by their past four years of malgovernment.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEYOND PRIVATIZATION. Mark Schmitt had an insightful post on Social Security last week that ought to be taken to heart. His concerns about how the growing opposition to Social Security privatization might play out:

I worry that Democrats, trapped once again in the blinders of "policy literalism," will not fully understand this broader message. The conclusion they will draw is that Social Security is popular, Democrats protect Social Security, Republicans tried to cut Social Security. They will run predictably alarmist ads next fall that are all about Social Security, not about security. And once again, as in 2002 and 2004, they will have no message at all for all the people "across all but the highest rungs of the income ladder [who] confront a wide a array of intensified financial pressures."

That's worry #1, easily solved if people like Anrig who get it and are in some position to influence public debate pound this point home aggressively.

Worry #2, though, is still the security/opportunity tradeoff. Security is not sufficient as a way "for liberals to define themselves." It's not enough, and in fact, it's not what liberalism is. There is something to the idea that there is a difference between the industrial economy and the information age economy, and the difference is that fewer workers feel they are passive pawns in a large company that will govern their life. They feel, or want to feel, that they can make their way in an economy that is changing and challenging, that demands skill and rewards initiative and risk. They want a government that does more than catch them when they fall, but that helps them move forward, and eventually capture some of the rewards that go to capital in this economy.

I think liberals, then, need to find a way to capture both sides of the security/opportunity tradeoff.

Earlier in the week Yglesias and I had some back and forth about this same question of what it means to be forward-looking, and I think Schmitt and I share the same idea of the answer.

To begin with, getting the narrative right means finding the big story that explains our world and politics today in a way that sounds real and fresh. What do the president's Social Security proposals have to do with Tom DeLay's ethical problems? How is Republican opposition to increasing the minumum wage of a piece with drilling for oil in ANWR? What do fake news releases have to do with the absence of WMD in Iraq? The DCCC has come up with the best frame I've seen so far, which also happens to be one of the oldest tried-and-true narratives for insurgent candidates taking on incumbents: calling the D.C. Republicans a group of corrupt Washington politicians. But there's a lot more work to be done in this area.

The other, and much more important, part of being forward-looking involves figuring out how people live and what it is they need to live better. For example, I know I'm supposed to think medical savings accounts and the like are the devil's handiwork (and some proposals are truly bad ideas), but we also have a flexible spending arrangement (FSA) for medical expenses here at the Prospect (only 19 percent of eligible workers have such accounts) and I really love being able to set aside pre-tax dollars for unreimbursed health expenses. It's like getting a 30-percent discount off the cost of my contact lenses and pain medications over the course of a year. Heck, it even covers sun screen -- what's not to like?

Conservative reformers, including President Bush, argue that FSAs should allow funds to be rolled over from year to year, making the accounts more like medical savings accounts. This seems like a reasonable idea to me -- after all, if you're reasonably healthy, most of your health expenses over time are unreimbursed, over-the-counter products that genuinely promote or help maintain health, and these unreimbursed expenses occur unpredictably. Health insurance covers the treatment of diseases and ailments, along with regular check-ups, but does little or nothing for the more minor and everyday problems we all deal with. Using the tax code to give a discount on over-the-counter products to consumers who pay in a lot more in health insurance each year than they get back seems like a good way to help healthy people stay that way, and I buy the argument that the "use it or lose it" provision of FSAs just encourages wasteful end-of-year consumer spending.

That may sound like a Republican argument. But is it wrong? Many of America's extra-Social Security savings instruments -- think Roth IRAs, named for former Republican Senator William Roth of Delaware -- are Republican creations. Does that make them wrong, too? What's so wrong with helping people save for their retirements on their own in addition to Social Security? Nothing -- these are great goals. The problems with the extra-Social Security savings programs such as 401(k)s and IRAs is not that they exist but that they are confusing and under-utilized even by the people who are eligible for them. More than half of families, according to Gene Sperling, have no assests in such accounts.

Why are they under-utilized? Why do only half of Americans even save for their retirement? What can be done about this? Are there ways to help Americans save for their retirements in addition to Social Security? These are the kinds of questions I wish dominated our debate about retirement security.

For example, Sperling's proposal for 401(k)-like Social Security add-on accounts for lower-income workers, to be paid for through estate taxes, sounds like a very good idea and one about which I'd like to hear more public discussion. That's what it means to be foward-looking -- it means genuinely looking forward and creating new ways of solving current problems and helping Americans live more prosperous and economically stable lives. After all, one of the biggest complaints about Social Security among members of the public before Bush launched his initiative to unravel it had nothing to do with the program's solvency or the budget deficit. It was that Social Security doesn't pay enough to live on by itself.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WEEKEND UPDATE. Just recovered from a persistent vegetative state? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. Republicans irresponsibly govern irresponsibly, Democrats irresponsibly fail to collaborate in Republican malgovernment.
• Nicholas Kristof. Class warfare!
• Maureen Dowd. I'm definitely satirizing something here.
• Thomas Friedman. Time for a new Iraq policy: Hand out Nobel Prizes and hope for the best.
• Jim Hoagland. Appointing discredited cronies to important jobs is all part of a secret master plan, I promise.
• George Will. Republicans are getting so crazy, I think they're getting crazy.
• David Broder. Fixing Social Security is easy -- just borrow a huge sum of money and add bipartisanship!

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Yo'av Karny on the death of Chechnya's Arafat. --Matthew Yglesias
  Posted at 09:45 AM

THE UNSERIOUS ONES. Apropos of what Matt and I have been discussing recently, Mark Schmitt helpfully offers up a back-of-the-envelope ranking of the relative intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of Republican senators based on their combined votes on Russ Feingold’s PAYGO amendment and Gordon Smith’s amendment rescinding the budget’s Medicaid cuts. It should be added that the incoherence Senate Republicans displayed regarding federal revenues and expenditures wasn’t limited to those two amendments yesterday. The Senate also passed both an amendment to raise the five-year cap on discretionary spending by $5.4 billion and another amendment that nearly doubles the amount of tax cuts the Senate budget had originally called for (it even exceeds the more militant House’s tax cut total by $30 billion). The new tax cuts come from Jim Bunning’s amendment to rescind 1993 legislation increasing income taxes on the Social Security benefits of well-off retirees. There seems to have been a large amount of confusion among members about whether they were voting for a non-binding “sense of the Senate” resolution or an actual tax cut; turns out it was the latter, as explained by subscription-only Congressional Quarterly:

Republican leaders are mulling the implications of Thursday night’s surprise vote. While GOP moderates had balked at anything more than the $70 billion of the initial resolution, several voted for the Bunning amendment — possibly out of confusion.

The amendment had the stated purpose of reversing a 1993 law (PL 103-66) that increased to 85 percent the proportion of Social Security benefits paid to relatively well-off seniors that is subject to income tax.

But that policy recommendation is non-binding, and the practical effect of the amendment was to expand the total tax cut figure that would be afforded procedural protection against filibusters in the Senate.

Way to go, guys! The excuse that they didn't know their vote would actually have a substantive effect doesn't deserve much respect. Of the several weaselly, intellectually bankrupt (or, to use Mark’s more sober description, “cheap, untenable, dishonest and disgraceful”) Republican senators who had both opposed reinstating PAYGO and opposed the Medicaid cuts, two of them compounded their disgrace later in the day by simultaneously voting for the new increase in discretionary spending and the new, huge increase in tax cuts: the honorable Messrs. Mike DeWine and Arlen Specter.

This combination of votes, it needs to be understood, does not constitute a “moderate” outlier in the GOP’s overall fiscal approach; it is in fact the most perfect emblem of the disastrous condition of perpetual dissociation that has come to define that approach: a complete inability to acknowledge the costs of permanent tax-cutting and a related unwillingness to make a serious case for actual smaller government.

Meanwhile, E.J. Dionne discusses something I’d first heard from the CBPP folks: that Republicans, mindful of past budget defeats that taught them that Americans actually don’t want smaller government even if they love their tax cuts, are planning to push through entirely separate reconciliation bills for tax cuts and spending cuts, so as to continue to obscure as much as possible the connection between the two. It’s the party of responsibility, didn’t you know?

--Sam Rosenfeld

HEALTHCARE FOR ONE IN SIX AMERICANS ON CHOPPING BLOCK. Medicaid Cuts: Slashing Healthcare for One in Six Americans, a Moving Ideas project on the battle to save Medicaid, is now available on MovingIdeas.org. The president's budget slashes federal Medicaid spending. The program provides health care and long-term care services for one in six Americans -- 51 million low-income children, parents, elderly, and disabled. Yet Congress would rather give tax cuts to the rich.

Read our report and get involved in the fight!

--Diane Greenhalgh

“I GOT YOUR PLAN RIGHT HERE.” Congressional Democrats are hewing to the game theory–sanctioned negotiating strategy on Social Security (though they've smartly added fiscal balance as a second precondition to good-faith Democratic negotiation, on top of the precondition that private accounts be taken off the table). And they're evincing quite the fighting spirit these days in doing so. Take a look at Nancy Pelosi’s response to a reporter’s inevitable "where's the Dems' plan?" question at her press conference yesterday:

Q. Lastly on this issue, it seems like some of your Members have been concerned and the question they hear at home most is what is their alternative.

Ms. Pelosi. Oh, really? You think Democrats are concerned? There is nobody who wants the Democrats to have a plan on Social Security more than the Republicans.

The President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, with all that goes with that in terms of power, discretion, bully pulpit, moral suasion, power of the office, said that Social Security was in a crisis. Not true. He said it would be bankrupt by 2018. Not true. He said he had a plan. Well, we have some provisions of it: Two provisions. One, private accounts, will destroy Social Security. The second one, indexing to prices rather than wages, will slash benefits by 40 percent.

He is the one who is creating the crisis with his deficit spending. If there were to be a crisis down the road, it would be because of his deficit spending. We must stop him. So if the President of the United States has not given us his full plan, but what we do know about some of its provisions is that it slashes benefits and bankrupts the Social Security trust fund, then why should we put a plan up?

Our plan is to stop him. Stop him. He must be stopped. He must not be allowed to go forward with these private accounts. He must not be allowed to put us on a trajectory of $15 trillion in deficit so we cannot pay the Social Security back what is owed it, the American people what is owed them.

So our plan is to, once they take that dangerous element of destruction to the Social Security trust fund off the table, we will go to the table with them and discuss how we deal with Social Security from 2050 to 2100. That's our plan.

And the point is that it is a tactic. It is a tactic. You asked the question, but the fact is he is the one who is creating the crisis. He defines it as a crisis, which it is not. It is a problem. It is a challenge down the road, and we have time to do it right. So the burden is on the President of the United States. He now is saying he is going to send over a statement of principles, or something like that.

So I feel very confident about how our Democrats, with over 300 town meetings, more to come, on the air, on the Internet, on the road, on college campuses, in the Congress, in committee, and on the floor have made the case for why Social Security is an important pillar of our society, why it needs to be strengthened and how Democrats will do that.

One can’t help but suspect that Terence Samuel is right: Democrats in Congress just seem to be having more fun these days, and they have the president's obsession with destroying Social Security and Tom DeLay's flamboyant corruption to thank for it.

--Sam Rosenfeld

IF YOU WISH HARD ENOUGH. The Hill reports that some conservatives have devised a plan to revive the ailing cause of privatization . . . magic!

But Republicans are not ready to throw in the towel. They say the key to victory is to emphasize repeatedly that reform legislation would provide current and future Social Security beneficiaries with a guarantee that they will not collect a penny less than the present system allows. . . .

Stephen Moore, president of the Free Enterprise Fund, said the safety net would ensure that "Grandma and Grandpa don't get thrown out of their home" if their investments go sour.

The reference here is not to the plan put forward by the president's commission on "strengthening" Social Security or the one leaked in White House aide Peter Wehner's memo. Rather, it's the one devised by the demented Peter Ferrara and introduced into Congress by Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. John Sununu. The idea here is to privatize Social Security, but also to guarantee that if your investments do poorly the government will pay the full guaranteed benefit you've been promised anyway. The number of reasons why this is a bad idea are almost too many to count, but let me first refer readers to this morning's post on the ideological bankruptcy of modern conservatism. The plan to get people to eliminate a government spending program is to promise them that their benefits won't get smaller no matter what.

Now if you're looking for a way to get the forces of "convulsive neoliberalism" back in the Democrats' corner, one could hardly come up with a better idea than endorsing the Ferrara plan. I'll refer readers to entrists.org, ground zero for convulsion, and Ed Lorenzen's critique of the plan: "Ferrara relies on a fiscal slight of hand . . . individual accounts . . . would increase Social Security’s actuarial deficit by nearly 50% . . . Social Security cash deficit equal to 7.37% of payroll, more than $850 . . . dump an additional $6.8 trillion into the system . . . general revenue transfers would require substantial reductions . . . Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, etc."

Now on top of the fiscal Armageddon implicit in this approach is the reality that eliminating the risk element from stock investing will create the mother of all moral hazards. Absent a guarantee, most people will try to invest conservatively in order to minimize their exposure to risk and relatively few people will fall below the floor that would have been provided by guaranteed benefits. That can make the costs of compensating the losers look relatively modest. But if you do provide the guaranteed floor, then people are going to invest much more aggressively, seeking higher returns, and that's going to lead many more people to fall below the floor.

I'm not sure how seriously this needs to be taken since, on its face, the Ferrara Plan is utterly insane, but apparently this is Plan B now that the initial push for privatization seems to have run out of steam. One hopes moderate Republicans will shoot the madness down and save Democrats the trouble, but counting on moderate Republicans is never much of a plan.

--Matthew Yglesias

NO COMRPOMISE -- GAME THEORY EDITION. Based on the latest propaganda from Cato's Michael Tanner, it appears that the new privateer angle is to just pound the table with the purported Social Security crisis and castigate the Democrats' failure to produce a plan to achieve long-term actuarial balance ("solvency," says I, should be stricken from the liberal lexicon). Never mind that no less a privateer than the president himself has likewise refused to offer a plan. So should Democrats offer a plan? Well, we've been down this road before and the answer is "no." But don't take my word for it; listen to the Brookings Institution's Thoman Mann, a paragon of Beltway establishment moderation if ever there was one. He lays the case against compromise -- or, rather, why obstruction is the necessary prelude to compromise -- in terms of game theory and other highfalutin' stuff.

--Matthew Yglesias

FROM THE PRINT PROSPECT: LABOR INTENSE. In an article from our upcoming April print issue, Harold Meyerson provides the latest developments in the labor movement's upheaval. He gets inside the recent Las Vegas executive-council meeting to reveal an embattled John Sweeney and two more unions considering pulling out of the federation. It's still an open question, Meyerson writes, whether the turmoil will lead to "a new sense of purpose and direction" or "defeat and marginalization ... infighting and splits."

--Jeffrey Dubner

MONEY FOR NOTHING. The sudden post–September 11 conversion of the American right to messianic global humanitarianism has been a sight to behold, but as Peter Baker reports in today's Washington Post (via David Holliday) there's often less going on than meets the eye. New spending on democracy promotion in the Middle East is being found by . . . cutting spending on the promotion of political reform and human rights outside of the Middle East. Now, an extra level of attention on that region is understandable, but the level of funds being spent on this sort of thing has always been puny -- particularly compared to what's spent on the military side of the national-security ledger -- so there was hardly any need to rob Peter in order to pay Paul on this.

Add to that the Bush administration's continued acquiescence in the ongoing crackdown in Jordan, the efforts to stifle the free press in the Arab world, and so forth, and it's not really very hard to understand why the bulk of global opinion is deeply skeptical of American intentions in this regard.

--Matthew Yglesias

BANKING ON MR. MAGOO. I've refrained from commentary on the idea of Paul Wolfowitz as World Bank President out of general ignorance of the Bank and the debates surrounding it. Clearly, Wolfowitz has made a mistake or two (or three) regarding Iraq policy, but the Bank's activities are very different. Via Suburban Guerilla, however, I see a Michael Lind Salon article which quite correctly points out that the Wolfowitz record of being wrong is enormously large in both its scope and duration.

To be fair, though, Lind's contention that Wolfowitz "has been consistently wrong about foreign policy for 30 years," though amusing, isn't really correct. During the Reagan years, Wolfowitz's work on Asia policy had a clearly beneficial effect in eventually pushing the administration toward a strategy of political reform and democratization among America's then-authoritarian allies in the region. This is perhaps less a case of perfect incompetence than of the Peter Principle "that employees within an organization will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent." Either way, Lind's general point has force. The Bush administration may think international organizations are unimportant and, therefore, a good dumping ground for undesirables, but these things actually do matter.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHITHER SMALL GOVERNMENT? If I may say so, yesterday's vote to save Medicaid from proposed cuts is a hugely important signpost in the continuing decline of American conservatism. Five things -- the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt -- constitute the overwhelming majority of federal spending and, moreover, the overwhelming majority of projected growth in federal spending. Conservatives don't want to cut the military and can't cut interest spending; that leaves just three programs from which the cuts could possibly come after endless rounds of tax cutting have successfully starved the beast.

Of the three, Medicaid is by far the one most vulnerable to cuts. Its beneficiaries are overwhelmingly poor people (though some middle-class, middle-aged people with elderly parents in nursing homes also benefit) with little political leverage over anyone, especially Republicans. A large proportion are children who don't get to vote at all. Best of all, since it's a joint state-federal program, Congress can cut off money without specifying exactly which services to cut, thus allowing the congressional GOP to mostly pass the buck on all the hard decisions to governors. In other words, if small government conservatism has any viability as a legislative agenda, it's here that it should be scoring its victories.

Apparently, it doesn't. The Republican Party is undoubtedly a formidable political force, but the ideology it's supposed to embody is dead as a duck. There's no constituency for it, and the politicians who are supposed to represent that seem to know it. Meanwhile, conservative intellectuals -- the people who are supposed to care more about seeing their ideas enacted than about Republican electoral wins -- don't seem to care or even to have noticed. National Review has web pieces up about everything under the sun, but not this. At The Weekly Standard it's all about bashing Harvard and the UN. On The Corner it's all Terry Schiavo, all the time. I guess I'm not upset, as such, that conservatives have decided to abandon the core tenets of conservatism and focus on trivia instead, but it's a bit weird. Liberals don't spend a ton of time nowadays dreaming up new policy ideas because we figure we need to win some elections before we can implement them. But conservatives have done the whole "win the election" thing. If not now, when? If not the Republican Party, who? What's the plan here, guys? When does the beast starve?

--Matthew Yglesias

BEYOND DELAY. Jumping off Sam's post from yesterday evening, I, too, am concerned that the House Democrats' nascent reform insurgency shouldn't become too focused on the person of Tom DeLay. This forthcoming New Republic editorial seems to me an excellent example of what you don't want to be doing:

Although they have been in the majority only ten years--as opposed to the 40 years the Democrats ruled the House before being swept out in 1994--House Republicans have become just as entrenched and arrogant as Democrats were before their downfall. And their steadfast defense of DeLay and his ethical transgressions is simply the most prominent manifestation of that. If they continue in this defense, it will only be a matter of time before House Democrats, taking a page from Gingrich's old playbook, will successfully use DeLay to cast the entire Republican majority as corrupt--and in need of replacing.

Such a development would hardly be unwelcome in these quarters. At the same time, however, it's a shame that the majority party refuses to govern in an ethical manner. House Republicans should cease their all-out defense of DeLay and let him face the consequences of his actions--much as Senate Republicans refused to stand by their majority leader, Trent Lott, in 2002 after his indefensible comments about Strom Thurmond and segregation. If, in doing so, Republicans make it more difficult for Democrats to retake the House, at least they will have also made Congress more honest.

That's sound political advice to the GOP, but it's not much of a stance. The reality is that removing DeLay without dismantling DeLayism -- the ironclad links between the GOP and K Street, the total absence of procedural fairness from the House of Representatives, the hypercentralization of authority in the leadership, and the severely gerrymandered districts that let them get away with it -- will no more make the Congress honest than the removal of Trent Lott as majority leader altered Republicans' deep-seated indifference to the policy concerns of African-Americans. Cutting the Hammer loose would be a clever attempt to shift blame and escape the trap, not a genuine step toward reform.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BANK OF AMERICA. The last time the World Bank switched presidents, Kenneth Rapoza recollects, it prompted a 180-degree change. What will Paul Wolfowitz bring? If nothing else, Rapoza warns, it will embolden the Bank's loudest critics.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE GINGRICH STRATEGY. Via Brad Plumer I see that the latest USA Today poll shows that public approval of the U.S. Congress is low and still slipping. Via The Stakeholder I see that Louise Slaughter is following up her staff’s recent report on institutional abuse in Congress with calls for full Rules committee hearings on the breakdown of the House ethics process. Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore offers some very incisive thoughts on the savvy and effective way Senate Democrats are attempting to frame the coming battle over judicial filibusters.

This is all heartening enough, but even more so are the new reports on the Democrats’ nascent strategy to weave all of these fights together with the various Tom DeLay, Inc. scandals and try to forge a national, reformist, “throw the bums out” message for the 2006 midterm elections. This is good stuff. The narrative Democrats seem to be trying to construct -- which has an obvious precedent in the early 1990s scandal-mongering campaigns of Newt Gingrich and his fellow GOP jihadists -- has two components: corruption and institutional abuse. One could easily dismiss Slaughter’s recent report on Rules committee abuses as a lot of ineffectual whining over obscure procedural issues that Americans couldn't care less about, unless it’s put in the context of a broader charge -- that Republicans came to power, immediately opened the doors to business lobbyists while closing them to everybody else, and transformed the powers the majority congressional party enjoys in order to ram through policies that could never survive in the face of public scrutiny or input from the minority. The Republicans are brazen in their corruption, they are arrogant in their habitual abuse of power, and as a result they are out of touch with the interests and concerns of the public. Throw the bums out.

Like I said, good stuff. This passage from Roll Call’s piece gave me slight pause, however:

In recent weeks Democrats have engaged in a coordinated campaign with key constituency and public interest groups to ensure the public is aware of the allegations and that the drum beat continues. Party fundraisers have also used the controversy surrounding DeLay to try to coax more money from top donors.

One well-placed House Democrat said the minority’s strategy is to keep pressing for an improved ethical environment in the House and questioning the GOP’s leadership until DeLay falls or takes his party down with him.

It’s the “until DeLay falls” part I’m worried about. It’s really important not to personalize the issue so completely here. For a few reasons, I happen to be of the mind that Tom DeLay won’t go down any time remotely soon as a result of scandals and bad press, but it’s certainly at least a possibility worth considering. What if they sacrifice the Hammer? That won’t mean that Republicans are no longer a corrupt and abusive majority party. It won’t mean an end to the obscene marriage of K Street and GOP interests and it won’t put a halt to the steady and unceasing centralization of all congressional power in the hands of the chambers’ party leadership. This is about the Republicans, not about DeLay.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE POWER OF CONFUSION. Gordon Smith's amendment rescinding the budget's Medicaid cuts passed the Senate today 52-48. This far from assures the budget resolution's eventual doom -- the cuts could be restored in conference and the moderate Senate Republicans could very well buckle -- but it's a promising sign. Meanwhile, for further illustration that confusion between the programs "Medicare" and "Medicaid" is widespread, deeply ingrained, and not at all unhelpful to the fortunes of the latter, check out the headline to this AP story: "Senate kills plan to cut Medicare benefits."

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DENOUNCING DELAY WITHOUT DELAY. The fireworks have been lit in the House of Representatives. According to Terence Samuel, it's only a matter of time now before they start going off. Get ready to hear a whole lot about ethics and even more about a little man by the name of Tom.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE WOMEN? Earlier this month in New York, delegates from around the world met for the 10-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action, a broad-based agenda for countries to promote and protect women's human rights.

Join Moving Ideas and leaders from the Feminist Majority Foundation, Choice USA and CodePink for an online discussion on Tuesday, March 22 to discuss what Beijing +10 means for women around the world. Ask your questions in advance or stop by next Tuesday to participate in the conversation.

--Diana Onken, Moving Ideas

TWO MAKES A TREND. It started in Kansas, but now via Professor B. I see that Indiana is getting into the act of using the prevention of child molestation as a pretext for harrassing abortion providers and their clients. In theory, what's happening here is that the attorney general is seizing Planned Parenthood records in order to ascertain whether statutory rape cases have taken place and, if so, whether the organization has reported them properly. In practice, it's a simple effort at harrassment and intimidation. That's something anti-choice groups have gotten very good at over the years, but things look a bit different when they're using the long arm of state law-enforcement authority to do the harrassing.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE TORTURE PERMISSION SLIP. I suppose it doesn't come as news to readers that the United States of America is now in the habit of regularly torturing people with a level of violence that, at times, leads to death. Nevertheless, Dana Priest does us all a service by noting in The Washington Post that "The system the CIA relies on to ensure that the suspected terrorists it transfers to other countries will not be tortured has been ineffective and virtually impossible to monitor." The system turns out to be not much of a system: "To comply with anti-torture laws that bar sending people to countries where they are likely to be tortured, the CIA's office of general counsel requires a verbal assurance from each nation that detainees will be treated humanely."

As Spencer Ackerman writes today the brutality bug is contagious and seems to have caught on big time among Iraq's new security services. Inspiring as the January elections were, the reality is that most un-democratic countries have seen approximations of fair votes at one time or another. The problem is the tendency of these situations to degenerate into authoritarian ones as issues get resolved through force, fraud, and corruption rather than a political process. So far, the Iraqi state looks less like an emerging liberal democracy than a reflection of the Republican Party's id.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE DARFUR. Apparently, the government of Sudan has imposed travel restrictions on U.S. diplomats, forbidding them to travel more than 25 kilometers from the presidential palace in Khartoum. One hopes our diplomatic corps refuses to be pushed around, if only to set a better example than the UN. Just yesterday, the UN had to withdraw its staff from a region in Darfur after the Janjaweed militia announced that it was open season on foreign humanitarian workers. Check out the Coalition for Darfur's blog for regular updates on this situation.

Meanwhile, Nigeria has tried to break the current Security Council impasse by offering to establish a war crimes tribunal on its territory. While the Bush administration may get behind this idea, the presence of a U.S.–backed international war crimes tribunal in Nigeria would be something of an awkward sight. For the last couple years, the former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor, wanted for crimes against humanity by the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone, has been hiding in plain sight in a Nigerian bungalow. To the chagrin of the Nigerian government, the United States put a $2 million bounty on Taylor in October 2003 (as part of the $87 billion Iraq supplemental) in the hopes of coaxing someone into turning him over to the court in Sierra Leone.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE PERFECT, THE GOOD, AND THE TERRIBLE. Brad Plumer, echoing complaints I've heard in realspace, wants to roll back the enthusiasm about the Center for American Progress' tax reform plan on the grounds that raising revenue from its current 16 percent of GDP up to 17.2 percent of GDP is desperately inadequate. True enough, but that misses the point.

As we saw with the rejection of PAYGO rules (itself a desperately inadequate step toward fiscal responsibility) there's absolutely no chance of getting the budget situation straightened out unless some different politicians get elected to office. The Center's plan doesn't really address the revenue gap because it's designed as an intervention into a different kind of debate, the looming one that will be engaged when the President's tax reform commission delivers it's report. This won't be a debate about how much tax revenue we should have, it'll be a debate about what kind of tax code we ought to have. To liberals, "tax reform" means broadening the tax base, to allow rates to be as low as possible and the burdens of supporting public services distributed equally. That's what it meant to Ronald Reagan, too. But to post-Reagan conservatives, "tax reform" means creating a situation where work is taxed and income derived from pre-existing wealth is not.

When the Bush proposal comes down the pike, there are two traps it's vital for the Democrats not to fall into. One is being "against tax reform" and instead defenders of the current messy, complicated, bad status quo. The other is a situation where "everyone's for tax reform, but the Democrats are also for a tax hike." It's important for the debate to be joined over the question of what tax reform is. That's what the Center's plan does. It puts forward a progressive vision of a fairer, simpler tax code that will allow us to have a debate about whether or not wealth should be permitted to escape taxation. That debate is a crucially important one, it's logically prior to the debate about what the tax rates should be, and it's going to come up chronologically first. I think it's vitally important for Democrats to get ahead of the curve on this one because, unlike with Social Security, simply upholding the status quo really won't be a viable position on this issue. An alternative really will be needed, and what's needed is an alternative that frames the debate quickly. Now progressives have one at hand, and Democrats would do well to embrace it

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ANATOMY OF A GENOCIDE. Few people have seen firsthand the unfolding genocide in Darfur. Former Marine Captain Brian Steidle has, and he tells Mark Leon Goldberg how the genocidaires operate -- and how we might be able to stop them.

--Jeffrey Dubner

FLIP-FLOPPER. Atrios is quite right about Rick Santorum’s brazen flip-flop on Amtrak funding. Santorum has been attempting a rather unlikely image recalibration of late in anticipation of the tough reelection fight he’s facing next year. He’s done a lot of odd posturing as a poverty-fighting crusader (remember that terrific minimum-wage package?), and he’s also made a big show of tending to his constituents’ interests back home. Bucking the president on Amtrak funding was supposed to be a part of this. Then he caved.

Amtrak isn’t completely doomed yet -- there will be more struggles to come in this budget process. But yesterday’s vote was rather surprising, and Senator Man-on-Dog’s the most surprising of all.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MARCHING ONWARD. Both Maria Cantwell’s amendment protecting ANWR from oil excavation and Russ Feingold’s amendment restoring PAYGO were shot down yesterday in the Senate by votes of 49-51 and 50-50, respectively.

That really leaves one last opportunity to possibly scuttle the budget’s prospects of passing: Gordon Smith’s amendment to rescind the budget’s Medicaid cuts, to be debated and put to a vote today. Smith, you’ll recall, is not only a noble champion of public spending on health insurance for the poor but also a committed Republican tax-cutter, so it’s no surprise he’s an opponent of the PAYGO rule that would force him to face choices between, say, cutting taxes for the top 0.2 percent of Americans and giving health insurance to poor people. The fate of the budget now hinges on the GOP’s own profound inner contradictions regarding fiscal policy.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TROUBLE IN PAKISTAN. When last we met the wasteland that is America's Pakistan policy, the president of the United States was praising the country's military dictatorship as a model of freedom and democracy the people of Palestine ought to look up to. This morning on NPR I heard a report about Condoleezza Rice's trip to India, where local officials are upset about our new habit of selling advanced military airplanes to the unstable dictatorship next door. The justification, of course, is Pakistan's status as a "key ally in the war on terror." Then on the Metro this morning, I read a wire story about how "Pakistani security forces may have come close to capturing Osama bin Laden eight to 10 months ago, but the terrorist leader eluded arrest and his trail has gone cold, Pakistan's president said." That's some useful allying. So far, so bad. Then, thanks to reader S.D. comes this:

Pakistan has developed new illicit channels to upgrade its nuclear weapons programme, despite efforts by the U.N. atomic watchdog to shut down all illegal procurement avenues, diplomats and nuclear experts said.

It goes on and it's not pretty. To be fair, there are no easy answers in the field of Pakistan policy, but surely what we're doing is not the best choice. If the plan is to cozy up to the dictatorship in exchange for assistance in our security goals, we need to be getting actual assistance in our security goals. If we can't get assistance, then there's no reason to be making Pakistan a Major Non-NATO Ally and pretending to think that Pervez Musharraf is a courageous political reformer.

--Matthew Yglesias

QUALIFIED BUYERS. The Judicial Confirmation Network has an amusing new poll designed to convince Republican senators that voters want them to go forward on the nuclear option. The poll finds that 82 percent of people agree that "if a nominee for any federal judgeship is well-qualified, he or she deserves an up or down vote on the floor of the Senate," a sentiment I myself certainly share. For some reason, though, they didn't ask the obvious follow-up question: what if a nominee isn't well-qualified? Instead, they spin the results to claim that people want an "up or down vote on nominees based on their qualifications." Not quite what the poll said.

The fact that people want a vote at all indicates that they believe that presidential nominations deserve scrutiny, and that some nominations might not meet that scrutiny. The opposition party in the Senate is the constitutionally mandated source of that scrutiny; in the current Senate, where Orrin Hatch and now Arlen Specter have abolished every rule that preserves moderation and minority rights on judicial nominations, the filibuster is the only way that that scrutiny can be exercised. If conservatives think that the public cares what parliamentary tactic is used to enforce that power, they're fooling themselves, and any honest publicity on the few intolerable nominees who Democrats have deemed worth fighting against will seriously damage the conservative cause.

--Jeffrey Dubner

STUDENTS FOR ACADEMIC PERSECUTION. There are two kinds of smear campaigns: Those that force their subject to respond, and those that rely on not giving their subject a chance to respond. David Horowitz's campaign to delegitimize "liberal" academia is of the second type. To make a long story short (see next month's Prospect for the longer version), Horowitz has been on a crusade that mainly consists of publicizing trumped-up claims of attempted indoctrination and liberal bias as loudly as possible, with the effect of making it dangerous to teach subject matter that could be construed, in some sense, as liberal. Over the last 18 months, Colorado has been the campaign's greatest success.

Horowitz has gotten probably the most mileage out of an anecdote about an exam question asking students to “Explain why George Bush is a war criminal.” There are, shall we say, certain problems with that 2-year-old accusation, prompting an aggressive correction yesterday from Horowitz. But this incident doesn't quite capture how egregiously willing Horowitz has been to promote unproven allegations against largely defenseless professors. For that, you've got to talk about Oneida Meranto, who has taped evidence that a claim against her is utterly false -- a fact that Horowitz has still not acknowledged.

Meranto is a political science professor at Denver's Metropolitan State College and has received perhaps more grief at Horowitz's hands than any other professor. After Horowitz spent large parts of September and October in Colorado grooming and training student complainants, a student named George Culpepper raised various charges against her at a hearing held by Colorado Senate President John Andrews. Meranto contradicted him in a Denver Post article, saying (in the Post's words) that he "dropped her class because he hadn't done enough of the work and knew he couldn't pass"; Culpepper then sought her dismissal, arguing she had violated his privacy rights.

After Culpepper wrote an article for Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com condemning "Leftist Professor" Meranto, she began receiving death threats. A university investigation found in August 2004 that there was no basis to Culpepper's claims, although it criticized her for the privacy violation. Then, two days into the '04-'05 school year, another student, William R. Pierce, filed another grievance against her. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, Meranto had begun taping her lectures by then and easily disproved Pierce's complaint. By that time, of course, Pierce had written about it for FrontPageMag.com and raised it at yet another Andrews state senate hearing. Horowitz staffer Sara Dogan wrote a lengthy rebuttal to the Chronicle's story well after the tape had come to light, and managed not to mention this rather important point (not to mention the claim in Metro State's newspaper that Culpepper bragged of planting a student in Meranto's class). In an interview just last week, Horowitz said to me that "[Meranto] was entirely the aggressor."

So when Horowitz "apologize[s] for not having fully checked and corrected" the "war criminal" story, be sure that that's the rule, not the exception. Indeed, Dogan told me that they "respond to all [complaints] and suggest advice," making no mention of verifying the charges they spread as far as they can. But since when has accuracy been a prerequisite for a witch hunt?

--Jeffrey Dubner

GOOD POST, BAD POST. Mike Allen may impress today, but The Washington Post is far from perfect -- what's with Jonathan Weisman's dubious characterization of PAYGO in the last graf of this piece? He refers to "rules requiring that future tax cuts be paid for by equal proportions of spending cuts and revenue increases." That is not what PAYGO requires. It merely requires that any budgeted tax cuts or new spending be fully paid for -- offset -- by other revenue increases or spending cuts. As the C-SPAN Congressional Glossary puts it simply, the "pay-as-you-go rule compels new spending or tax changes to not add to the federal deficit." Now, I don't like the split infinitive in that definition any more than Weisman might, but surely that's not what's causing the confusion here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

COMPARE AND CONTRAST. If you want a perfect side-by-side comparison of, on the one hand, conventionally toothless he-said/she-said reporting and, on the other, reporting that may be unhelpfully bound by he-said/she-said strictures but that still manages to give the reader some ability to discern what’s actually true, read Carl Hulse’s phoned-in New York Times write-up of Tom DeLay’s whiny press conference yesterday and compare it to the piece covering the same event by Mike Allen and James V. Grimaldi of The Washington Post. True, the Post writers likely had more motivation to actually scrutinize DeLay’s comments a bit, given that the House majority leader specifically accused that paper of sloppy, innuendo-filled reporting -- but that’s hardly an excuse for the Times.

Meanwhile, it falls to Susan Ferrechio of (subscription-only) Congressional Quarterly to pen the most acerbic and effective evocation of the inherent absurdity in DeLay’s pledge to take his case before the House ethics committee:

With the House ethics committee paralyzed and unable to function as a result of Democratic objections to rules changes imposed by Republicans reacting to the panel’s scrutiny of Tom DeLay, the majority leader himself now wants to tell the committee that he did nothing wrong in accepting some free trips and is eager to be officially exonerated.

It really is quite a fiasco House leaders have created in their efforts to tame that committee. Nancy Pelosi and co. show no signs of relenting in their efforts to stoke the fire and get Republicans on the record on this whole mess, and it's a sight to behold.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE SLOPE, SHE SLIPS. One of the things privateers like to note in favor of their proposal is that the private accounts being proposed by the president come with various restrictions designed to ensure that people make relatively prudent investments. Here's Gregory Mankiw on the subject:

To be sure, the paternalists raise a valid concern--some segments of the population are not economically sophisticated--but this is not so much an argument against personal accounts as a reason why we need to get the details right. Any reform should include some restrictions to protect people from themselves. There should be limits on how much risk people can take in their portfolios, especially as they approach retirement.

One thing liberals note is that any such restrictions are almost certain to be lifted over time. Fortunately, you don't need to take my word for it; you can listen to arch-privateer Ramesh Ponnuru:

[T]he accounts would create a constituency that would both resist restrictions that limited the account-holders returns and would demand a reduction in existing restrictions that limited returns . . . it's worth noting that most of the restrictions being talked about are similar to those in 401(k) plans. Control was limited from the start--people could pick a few funds, alter their allocations a few times a year, etc. The regulation of their investment didn't cause huge problems, and loosened over time."

But of course the problems here are huge. 401(k) plans are held by relatively affluent people who can afford to cope with having made some bad investments. 401(k) owners are also protected by generous guaranteed Social Security benefits. Under a privatization scheme, you would have people of modest means depending on 401(k)-esque investments for their entire retirement security. Even if most people do a relatively good job of managing these accounts, many, many, many people will not even during a generally good market (what happens in a crash is another matter). Realistically, for all the reasons Social Security was created in the first place, the political system will demand that something be done to bail these unfortunates out, just as has happened in most other countries that have gone down the privatization road.

Once the precedent for bailout is set, you've created an enormous moral hazard. The next cohort will invest their funds even more aggressively. This will work out well for some, but even more will go bust, setting the stage for another round of bailouts. The result will be a fiasco that benefits nobody except the fund managers who'll clean up reaping administrative fees once the account restrictions are lifted.

--Matthew Yglesias

TODAY’S FIGHTS. Yesterday was the day for symbolic Social Security votes in the Senate floor fight over the budget; today’s the day for battling over the real, potentially deal-breaking amendments. The most important of these are:

• Russ Feingold’s amendment to restore serious PAYGO rules to the budget process. This is the big one, in that if it passes it could kill the prospects of the Senate and House agreeing to a budget resolution (which, given this budget, would be a good thing!), just as it did last year when Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and John McCain refused to back down when the amendment was stripped from the conference report. Unfortunately, at the moment, it looks like Feingold doesn’t have the votes to get the amendment adopted -- but it’ll be close. The reports I’ve read this morning describe GOP leaders as “cautiously optimistic” about beating it back, and presumably that means they think they can hold all 50 Republicans not already on record supporting the amendment (the five who are on record consist of the fantastic foursome plus George Voinovich) from voting “yea.”
• Maria Cantwell and John Kerry’s amendment to strip language from the budget permitting oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Thanks to the GOP’s 2004 Senate gains, defeat for this amendment seems assured, though taken merely as a procedural issue the ANWR provision in the budget strikes me as the most obviously egregious example this year of the abusive use of the reconciliation process, which was originally intended as a deficit-reduction tool and not simply an end-run for any old random legislation that can’t pass on its own.
• Republican Gordon Smith’s amendment, which could be submitted today and likely voted on tomorrow, that would strip from the budget reconciliation instructions to the Finance Committee to cut $15 billion, at least $14 of which would come out of Medicaid. At the moment, this looks like it very well could pass. Republicans who had expressed interest in supporting PAYGO but who now appear to have backed down under pressure from the leadership -- like Ohio’s Mike DeWine -- remain firmly in support of Smith’s amendment. Whether or not this would be enough to kill the chances of a House-Senate conference report eventually passing is an open question. The fact that Smith himself told Congressional Quarterly yesterday that even “if his amendment is adopted but dropped in conference, he will support the final product” gives one reason to be skeptical.

More amendments will likely be coming up tomorrow, likely including a few more noble efforts to restore spending to various programs by some Republicans who seem to have forgotten what “starve the beast” is supposed to mean. On top of the headaches the House leadership is experiencing with its restive right flank over budget process rules, the trajectory of the Senate fight indicates there's still a possibility that no budget will end up passing -- for the second year in a row. Ah, that storied Republican discipline and parliamentary efficiency!

--Sam Rosenfeld

WE WERE ALL WRONG! Alan Greenspan, no longer getting the kid gloves treatment from Democrats, found himself on the defensive yesterday about his deficit double-talk. To recap, in 2001 Greenspan went to the Hill to endorse Bush's tax cuts, citing the odd view that without massive tax cuts the budget surplus would turn out to be too big. The tax cuts passed and there arose an enormous deficit. At this point, Greenspan started insisting that the budget should be cut. In 2003, he endorsed another round of Bush tax cuts, and didn't really even bother to make up a reason. Then, in response to even bigger deficits, he's started suggesting that everyone should have their Social Security benefits cut. So what does the chairman have to say for himself?

I look back and I would say to you, if confronted with the same evidence we had back then, I would recommend exactly what I recommended then," Mr. Greenspan said. "It turns out we were all wrong."

This is almost the precise same language the administration has used to cover up its WMD misdeeds. It's true, of course, that nobody in 2001 was able to precisely predict the exact budget conditions the country would be facing in 2005. In that sense, then, everyone was "wrong." But "we" certainly weren't all wrong about the reality that the Bush tax cuts would lead to steep budget deficits. If Greenspan had demonstrated, say, a casual concern for the truth, he might have noted that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warned at the time that Bush's budgeting would eliminate the budget surplus. Or as the Prospect's Robert McIntyre put it at the time of Greenspan's '01 testimony:

Actually, the latest budget news is even worse for Bush than the Post reported. If discretionary spending keeps up with population growth, says the Clinton analysis, projected surpluses drop to $1.2 trillion. Alternatively, if appropriations keep up with the economy, then the surpluses over the next 10 years fall to less than $0.5 trillion. Add in some of the new spending initiatives that enjoy bipartisan support--funds for prescription drugs, education, defense, and the like--and there's hardly any surplus left beyond Social Security and Medicare.

The projections of tax cut affordability were based, like just about everything the Bush administration does, on a series of transparent frauds that might fool a casual consumer of political news, but could in no way have have actually tricked a trained economist with an interest in discerning the truth. Here was the DLC's contemporary take, and here's Paul Krugman's. Everybody genuinely interested in budget discipline knew the administration was pulling the wool over people's eyes. It's true that the administration's projections were even further off than most critics alleged at the time, but that hardly means everyone was wrong and nobody's to blame.

--Matthew Yglesias

WOLFOWITZ. As I write this, George W. Bush officially is officially announcing that Paul Wolfowitz will take over the World Bank when James Wolfensohn steps down in May. This has been a rumor flying around DC's World Bank/IMF circles for sometime, but most people couldn't quite believe that Bush would so openly thumb his nose at the Europeans who will be incensed by the choice. As the Financial Times delicately put it March 2, "the White House's consideration of Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, for the presidency of the World Bank has again raised the question of what qualifications are required to head the world's leading development institution."

It's likely to throw progressives in a tizzy as well. As recently as Tuesday the Los Angeles Times was recommending Bono for the job, suggesting that at the least "the United States should rethink its traditional claim to the job and look to some formidable candidates from the developing world, including former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and former Brazilian President Henrique Cardoso." A whole blog was devoted to speculation. The pundits from my building -- primarily World Bank, IMF, and IADB economists -- have been apoplectic talking over all of these suggestions, but none has set them off more than Wolfowitz. As one wrote me this morning, "Now it is time to see if the Europeans have some cojones." But he didn't seem optimistic. As long as you're resigning yourself to the idea of President Wolfowitz, see this good Bloomberg run down of what the Bush administration would like a World Bank Wolfowitz to do for them, and what the Bushies didn't like about Wolfensohn

--Sarah Wildman

THINK LIKE AN OPPOSITION. There are a slew of very important budget amendment fights on the Senate floor to watch in the next few days, and we'll try to stay on top of them. For now, here's a small point about the non-binding "sense of the Senate" amendment that Bill Nelson proposed today, which states that "Congress should reject any Social Security plan that requires deep benefit cuts or a massive increase in debt." A helpful rapid response email I just received touts the five Republican senators -- Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Mike DeWine, Arlen Specter, and Lindsey Graham -- who joined the united Democratic caucus in voting for it. "So basically," it reads, "five Republicans are rejecting George Bush's plan that will both increase debt and cut benefits."

That's cute, but not really the point of Nelson's (valuable) excercise. The commenters at Kos have this one right: Democrats shouldn't be focusing on the Republicans who agree with them but the 50 Republican senators who are now on record supporting deep benefit cuts and massive debt. From now until 2006, Dems are going to want to seize every chance they can to put Republicans on the record, on everything from Social Security to the minimum wage to ethics rules, and rack up the roll call votes with which they can hang the Republicans come election time. As Matt just suggested, brainstorming talking points for Bob Casey, Jr. "Which is it you liked so much, Senator Santorum, the steep benefit cuts or the massive increase in debt?"

--Sam Rosenfeld

GOOD WORK! Back when I was overestimating the White House's political savvy, I assumed the big domestic initiative of the first term would be not Social Security privatization but some kind of scamilicious "tax reform." I was also worried that Democratic efforts to oppose the plan would be disastrous: In the name of opposing some kind of awful, regressive effort, the party would get stuck defending the actually existing -- and pretty awful on its own terms -- tax code. What was needed was a well-thought-out progressive tax-reform proposal that could put the GOP on the defensive.

A lot of readers may have seen John Podesta's op-ed in today's Washington Post hinting that the Center for American Progress has devised such a plan. In the narrow space of an op-ed, however, Podesta wasn't really able to convey the full awesomeness of the plan, whose gory details you can access here. Having read the longish, boring document, along with the accompanying PowerPoints, I'm very impressed. For one thing let me note that, in contrast to the tendency of "new progressive infrastructure" groups to dedicate too much energy to in-the-moment counterspin and not enough to long-range thinking, this is, in my opinion, exactly the sort of thing the Center should be doing, so major kudos to them for simply taking on the task. This plan does a lot of good stuff:

• It simplifies the tax code by eliminating deductions, reducing the number of brackets, and treating all income equally.
• It's progressive, cutting taxes for most people.
• It encourages saving, especially savings for the middle and working classes, by replacing tax deductions with tax credits as the main mechanism for making the tax code pro-savings.
• It strengthens Social Security both by injecting new revenue and offering legal protections that can make pre-funding workable.

Beyond the wonkish details, it offers Democrats the opportunity to make a compelling case that they are the party looking out for fairness, simplicity, and the encouragement of economic growth. Now I don't think the proposal is precisely perfect, but probably nothing would strike all (or even most) liberals as precisely perfect. It would be a huge improvement over the status quo and a very useful way to reframe the public debate. If the Democrats have any sense, they'll seize this historical moment in which they're feeling pressure to put some positive ideas on the table to rally behind this (or something very similar) and put the White House on the defensive. It's crucial to move on this before the president's tax-reform commission and whatever awful ideas it comes up with take center stage in the media.

--Matthew Yglesias

GREED IS GOOD! Prominent guest-bloggers Brad Plumer and Jon Chait are both trumpeting a Jonathan Weisman article claiming that old people know Bush has promised not to cut their benefits but don't like privatization anyway as evidence that the American people aren't as selfish as the White House expected. Since I'm on record with the belief that selfishness, greed, and materialism should be at the core of liberalism I need to point out the availability of an alternative view.

Yes, the one guy Weisman quotes did say he's opposed to privatization because he cares about his grandkids. But all we really know from the poll is that old people know Bush has promised not to cut their benefits and still oppose his plan. Maybe they oppose the plan because they don't believe Bush's promises. Look at it this way: If we don't privatize, old people definitely won't see benefit cuts; they have nothing to lose from inaction. If we do privatize, old people won't get accounts; they have nothing to gain from the Bush plan. If we privatize, people under 55 will no longer have any self-interested reason in supporting high benefits for the Greatest Generation, because guaranteed benefits for those under 55 will be frozen no matter what. And not least of all, if we privatize, Social Security will face a very real financial crisis caused by the transition costs.

So who's going to get the axe? Old people, that's who. Bush, with all his big promises, won't even be in office when the cash crunch arises. Sure, the next president and the future Congress might keep a promise they never even made, but they might not. At best, privatization will leave old people the same as they are. At worst, it will leave them with nothing but a set of worthless promises to secure their retirement with. The AARP is the quintessential greedy (in a good way!) Washington interest group, and they understand this dynamic just fine. David Brooks, George Will, Sebastian Mallaby, et al. simply don't have the capacity to keep the promises they're making -- they want seniors to sit quietly and watch an actual revenue stream be exchanged for a bunch of bounced checks. It's a ridiculous dodge, the equivalent of me proposing some $300 billion per year spending scheme and then "promising" that it won't be paid for in future tax hikes.

--Matthew Yglesias

CHOOSING BATTLES. I'm getting a bit worried that the "netroots" don't necessarily have the best sense of which are the really important lines to draw. To take an example, Mark Schmitt notes that Senators Russ Feingold and Lincoln Chafee, the erstwhile villains of the Steve Clemons/John Bolton saga, are leading the side of the angels on the fight to restore PAYGO rules to the budget process. I'm no fan of Bolton, and think this is a great opportunity for Democrats to outline the liberal internationalist approach to the world, but in all honesty I'm not so sure what the actual impact of putting Bolton, as opposed to some other Bush appointee, in Turtle Bay will be.

The PAYGO rules, by contrast, are extraordinarily dull, very complicated, and crucially important. As Mark outlines, with no PAYGO rules, the administration can easily slip billions more in tax cuts for the super-rich into law and largely avoid paying a political price for doing so. PAYGO will force the GOP to actually choose between its donor base and programs the public likes, setting the stage for the sort of debate between public investment and tax cuts uber alles that liberals want to have. This is the kind of obscure issue that's not likely to attract the scrutiny it deserves, but it really does deserve scrutiny. Moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans alike claim to worship at the altar of fiscal responsibility, but often stray from the path. A little pressure could be what it takes to put these rules back in and shape the debate in a positive way for months to come.

--Matthew Yglesias

MISSING THE POINT. On top of what's already been said about today's David Brooks column it's worth noting that even though he's now ready to proclaim the fight for "reform" dead, he still doesn't even understand what the fight was about. He treats the question of whether the country should continue to have Social Security or whether it should be replaced with a system of 401(k) plans as if it's some minor detail that better GOP tactics or more Democratic open-mindedness could have finessed. But it's not a compromisable issue, and it has nothing, really, to do with whether or not benefit cuts should be part of a solvency package.

"Senator Robert Bennett suggested progressively indexing benefits to protect the poor and working class from cost-saving steps," writes Brooks, as if benefit cuts for the rich were the center of Democratic opposition to the Bennett plan. The point, though, is that these benefit cuts for the rich were designed to finance the phasing-out of Social Security. Yes, Bennett's plan would shift toward phase-out more slowly than would, say, the Cato Institute's plan. But it's still a step toward phase-out. If you don't believe Social Security should be phased-out, there's nothing to compromise about. That's a fundamental issue. Relatedly, the nature of the benefit cuts is important. Bennett would cut benefits through a (partial) switch from wage indexing to price indexing, and the White House has hinted that it favors a total switch.

This is a form of benefit cut that goes far beyond what's needed to ensure long-term solvency. That's because under price indexing, Social Security's "replacement rate" (the proportion of average wages an average worker receives after retirement) would drop every single year. Right now, it's around 40 percent. Under price indexing it would, slowly but surely, asymptotically approach zero percent. Which is to say that Social Security would be phased-out. A one-off drop in the replacement rate for the non-poor is something most liberals could live with in the context of a broader compromise designed to save rather than destroy Social Security. But price indexing is phase-out, and phase-out isn't going to get any liberal support. Ever. No matter how progressive a phase-out it is.

Brooks thinks the GOP needed "to show they love [Social Security], too, before voters would trust them to reform it." This is self-justifying nonsense of the sort I'm more used to hearing from lefties. Bush tried really, really hard to lie to voters and convince them that Republicans love Social Security. Brooks played a role in this scam. So did every other prominent conservative editorialist and most prominent moderate editorialists. I can show you ream after ream of pro-privatization propaganda featuring glowing images of FDR and paeans to the grand legacy of Social Security (Brooks must have seen it, too). The conservative problem on this front isn't that they failed to show their love for Social Security; it's that, in fact, they hate Social Security and always have. That's why their main reform idea is to (slowly, dishonestly) phase the program out and replace it with something entirely different. The right can either give up on that goal, or they can give up on ever being trusted on the Social Security issue.

--Matthew Yglesias

REBRANDING DEMOCRATS. In the current New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg has an article on a subject near and dear to my heart, efforts to strengthen the Democratic brand on national security issues. I'm going to go out on a limb, however, and say that my take on this in the current Prospect is better (though one can't help but be impressed by anyone who got a U.S. senator to say "fucking" on the record). The thing of it is that Goldberg dedicates an inordinate amount of time to re-hashing the well-known fact that the Democratic Party was split -- and most of the party's security elite split from most of the party's voters -- over the Iraq War.

This is clearly true and it's not exactly unimportant. At the same time, from the perspective of early 2005 a split that occured in late 2002 over an invasion that wound up happening in early 2003 isn't the most important thing in the world. On forward-looking issues there are, to be sure, disagreements among Democrats. But in my experience those disagreements don't split the party into two camps, don't map onto a hawk-dove divide, and don't have a great deal to do with the Iraq War. The bigger divide is just between people of various persuasions who are determined to continue focusing on national security and find a way to make the Democrats competitive on the issue versus those who'd prefer to put their heads in the sand and hope for a revival of '90s-style "it's the economy, stupid" politics. That, however, is a different question from a hawk-dove divide.

This morning I got a press release from Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi indicating that they're on the right side of this split and are forming a National Security Advisory Group to be headed by former Secretary of Defense William Perry to help Democrats out on this issue. This is unquestionably a step in the right direction. Simple ignorance of the substantive policy questions makes it hard for Democrats to even start thinking about how to do political positioning right (you need to know what you're trying to sell before you figure out how you want to sell it) and increasing the resources available to senators and representatives who want to get involved in these debates is the key first step to building a deeper Democratic bench.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NUTS AND BOLTON. As neocons are fond of saying, "ideas have consequences." John Bolton's ideas, says Matthew Yglesias, are a little simple-minded -- and their consequences will be no better.

--Jeffrey Dubner

PAYOLA IN THE DESERT. Jim Gibbons, the Nevada Republican congressman best known for plagiarizing jingoistic speeches, has apparently taken a cue from the White House and launched his own payola program.

According to campaign finance reports obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Gibbons paid a well-known TV reporter $8,000 for consulting last year while she worked as a freelance reporter for a Reno radio station. Gibbons picked her up right after she’d been fired from the TV station, but she was still on the dole when she filed reports for the radio station:

A Federal Election Commission report filed by Gibbons, R-Nev., lists the payment to Andrea Engleman on Nov. 30, 2004, just weeks after she had been fired as co-host of the television news program Nevada Newsmakers. At the time the contract was in effect, she said, she was compiling reports for KOH-AM, 780 in Reno.

Not that KOH-AM was an oasis of liberal thought in the desert:

... KOH is one of more than 200 stations owned by Citadel Broadcasting in 24 states. The Reno station has a talk format featuring conservative voices Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Bill O'Reilly.

The White House sets a nice example for the kids, no?

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE SWEET SPOT. Ezra Klein makes a sharp catch and calls out David Brooks for his casual dismissal of the very notion that “it is possible to fix [Social Security] without benefit cuts.” It is, of course, abundantly clear that there are any number of ways to “fix” whatever might need fixing in Social Security without cutting benefits, as Ezra shows.

An obsession with the “inevitability” of painful benefit cuts is central to the outlook on Social Security espoused by the “convulsively neoliberal” DC pundit establishment. (Brooks is less a card-carrying member of this establishment than an insidious, Satanic plant in their midst, quietly but determinedly working to turn them to the nihilistic, hard-right-radical dark side. He can be a damned effective mole, because he knows how to tickle the elite Washington pundit class’s erogenous zones.) The DC chatterers rank no value higher than “political courage,” and their special brand of policy dramaturgy demands that ennobled lawmakers demonstrate said courage by screwing over some constituency or another. Somebody has to pay. Someone must be sacrificed. Hence, when discussing Social Security reform, it is sacrosanct that benefit cuts will happen, one way or another, and that the only honorable lawmakers are those who assess the situation with cold-eyed realism and exact the necessary sacrifices in the name of reform.

To normal human beings, of course, this is a very strange way to think about things. But this is a very strange town.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DOES NOT COMPUTE. One more thing about the budget. Reports have it that several totally mainstream, non-Fantastic Foursome (i.e. Snowe, Collins, McCain, and Chafee) Republican senators are gearing up to oppose the budget’s proposed $14 billion cuts in federal Medicaid spending. Led by Gordon Smith of Oregon, these senators include Minnesota’s Norm Coleman and Ohio’s Mike DeWine. All three, along with oddballs like Rick Santorum and Kay Bailey Hutchinson, have also been outspoken in opposing proposed cuts to Community Development Block Grants. This is all great -- I applaud these senators’ efforts! At the same time I’m moved to wonder: what the hell is wrong with Republicans?

To refuse to foist piddling, symbolic efforts at deficit reduction on the backs of the nation’s poor and vulnerable is to share in the broadly sensible and minimally compassionate outlook typifying the entire Democratic Party. Good for these Republicans. But these same lawmakers voted for George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts. Unlike any Democrats save Zell Miller, they also voted for his 2003 tax cuts. Where, and when, exactly, do they expect to pay for those revenue losses? At what point do they think it’s appropriate to try, in presumably orthodox Republican fashion, to cut spending a bit to help offset the tax relief?

Let’s step back for a moment. Republicans control all arms of the federal government; large deficits now exist that create a context in which fiscal stringency can be rationalized. The budget process is an entirely Republican endeavor, given that Senate filibusters are not a factor. One would think that this would be a time ripe for some serious spending rollbacks. And, indeed, there likely will be some rollbacks -- cuts on the margins that liberals like me find objectionable and, in light of the tax cuts they’re meant to finance, basically unconscionable. But let’s be candid: given the political and fiscal situation, these cuts are not nearly as large as they could be. They don’t come anywhere close to fundamentally eroding the safety net. And yet even these cuts are apparently too much for a number of dutifully tax cutting Republicans to stomach. At the same time, someone like Gordon Smith can defend his recent record of opposing strict pay-as-you-go budget rules that would require that both new spending and new tax cuts be paid for by making the fiscally hallucinatory argument that “the tax cuts are working. Our economy and our revenues are up. I’m against any device to limit them.” Our revenues are in fact at the lowest share of GDP since the Truman administration; it’s as if Republicans have cognitively severed tax cutting as a policy from the whole question of government revenue. Tax cutting has been abstracted. The whole point of starving the beast through tax cuts was eventually to create the conditions to effectively shrink government. But actual Republican lawmakers seem incapable of taking that next step in any serious, structural way. They barely seem aware that there’s a contradiction here.

The basic fiscal unseriousness of our governing party is a disaster for the country, but it’s also a rather critical intellectual problem for conservatives. If Fred Barnes or George Will or David Brooks want to erect an elaborate philosophical edifice to justify “big government conservatism,” terrific! But big government, conservative or liberal, requires revenue. Relentless, dogged tax cutting cannot stand as a core policy of such a party program. (A different but similarly inescapable contradiction plagues the outlook of hardcore starve-the-beasters like Grover Norquist and a few of the Republican Study Group members in the House who seem to quietly think these days that a necessary precondition for smashing the welfare state once and for all is a financial collapse spurred on by ballooning deficits; why such an economic catastrophe wouldn’t instead spark a public outcry for even bigger government, as it has in the past, is a question the nihilist wing doesn’t seem to have considered.)

We may be witnessing the second straight year in a row in which an all-Republican legislative branch proves itself incapable of passing a budget; it’s too early to say whether or not that will happen, but it’s certainly a possibility, and the fundamental reason lies in this basic, rather weird refusal of Republicans to face up to the realities of taxing and spending. They seem to realize that there is a pretty durable public demand for a robust level of government expenditures on programs and services, below which politicians should be fearful to tread; they seem not to realize that their own tax-cutting policies are steadily taking government revenues trillions of dollars south of that level. The result, in the long run, is fiscal calamity for the country.

UPDATE: A reader cruelly reminds me that Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, and not just Zellfire, voted for the 2003 tax cuts.

--Sam Rosenfeld

"DOUBLE STANDARDS." Gregory Mankiw, writing in The New Republic, observes that most Harvard professors are liberals, most liberals oppose privatizing Social Security, and yet Harvard professors have 401(k) plans. Ergo, liberals are being hypocritical in their opposition to the phase-out and must have some secret agenda. I'm sad to say that the quite distinguished Mankiw has been clearly outclassed in the field of Social Security mumbo-jumbo by AEI Research Associate Bryan O'Keefe writing on Tech Central Station. O'Keefe tightens the argument by noting that union pension funds hold private equities and that the AFL-CIO opposes privatization, thus eliminating one nonsensical leap of logic from the "argument."

Now needless to say, the devasting flaw in both of these arguments is that Harvard professors and folks with union pensions alike own private assets in addition to Social Security benefits. Let's say I were to propose that you stop buying food, and just invest all your money in buying a really nice house. "That's dumb -- I don't want to starve," you say. "No, no," I reply, "don't you see -- you already rent a house, which is a lot like paying a mortgage, so you've got no reason to object. Why do you hate America?" Stock ownership is a good way to make money, but it's risky. Social insurance isn't a get-rich-quick scheme, but it provides baseline guarantees and assurances against catastrophe. It's good to have both and, indeed, social insurance enables us to take risks in our lives and, if fortune smiles upon us, to reap some nice rewards. O'Keefe's parents presumably taught him at some point about how even though chocolate tastes good, you don't want to adopt an all-chocolate diet.

--Matthew Yglesias

FROM PUSHBACK TO ROLLBACK. I'm not sure how much substantive disagreement there is between my view that there's no need for Democrats to put forward an alternative Social Security reform proposal and Garance's contention that "the Democrats will have to propose something that's forward-looking and agenda-setting when it come to retirement planning -- or at least frame their Social Security defense as part of a larger story -- or they will save Social Security but not their own party's future." Certainly, there does need to be some looking forward and setting of agendas, but the question is what sort of thing do you look forward with?

Back during the 1990s, Bill Clinton found the slogan "Save Social Security First" to be a useful tool in blunting the insatiable Republican appetite for tax cuts. Beyond preventing the destruction of Social Security, the other main policy challenge facing the Democrats is making the case for the restoration of the federal revenue lost through the catastrophic Bush tax cuts. The sort of linkage Clinton drew on this front could be a useful tool for leveraging a win on the Social Security issue into a win on taxes. If you take a look at this long-term budget projection chart, for example, you'll see that the projected rise in Social Security outlays over the next thirty years is considerably smaller than the interest we're paying right now on the federal debt, and way smaller than the interest we'll be paying decades from now if we stay on the present course. Repeal Bush's tax cuts, start paying that debt down now before the baby boomers retire, and that'll free up a lot for future retirement spending.

--Matthew Yglesias

IDLE SPECULATION TIME. Normally if you see the words, "That's why those Bush foes who insist on protecting the Social Security program exactly as it is are misguided" in an opinion piece, you ought to stop reading right away. But rather than plying the usual center-right phase-out snake out, Eugene Steuerle was making some good points Sunday (via Max Sawicky) about some of the odder quirks in the current Social Security benefit calculation. He's quite right to argue that tweaks to the formula could probably reduce overall costs and make sure Social Security does a better job of protecting the truly vulnerable.

Indeed, though the Diamond-Orszag plan is best known for its politically unpalatable combination of benefit cuts and tax increases, it actually involves benefit increases for certain groups of people for just the sort of reasons Steuerle mentions. The problem here, though, is that these are the sort of proposals that would be in order if the powers that be were actually interested in reforming Social Security. "Reforms," normally, refer to efforts to change something while leaving it basically the same. Making sure that a divorcée's Social Security benefits do not depend, in part, on whether or not her ex-husband is dead would be a reform. The White House, however, is trying to kill the program, which makes discussions of this sort less than relevant. The shame of it is that we really should be having these discussions, but are basically prevented from doing so by the GOP's fanatical insistence that nothing can be changed about Social Security unless the whole program is radically altered.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: LETTER TO THE EDITOR. What does the National Association of Manufacturers care about who sits on the federal bench? NAM President John Engler takes issue with the way Matthew Yglesias interpreted their multimillion-dollar campaign. Read Engler's explanation and Matt's rebuttal and come to your own conclusion.

--Jeffrey Dubner

SQUEEZE TIME. This week the House and Senate will debate the FY 2006 budget plans passed by their respective budget committees last week. While there are several important differences, the plans’ overall thrust -- pass the buck and use spending caps and the pressure of tax cut extensions to squeeze out weak clients -- differs little from the president’s budget proposal. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a slew of short analyses on the budgets that are really worth looking at. Both the Senate and the House plans double the cuts Bush called for in Medicaid and SCHIP; they differ a bit in the size of tax cuts over the next five years. If a resolution passes, we’re basically looking at somewhere in the range of $30-50 billion in entitlement cuts and $40-70 billion in tax cuts, all to be pushed through in reconciliation bills that can’t be filibustered.

In a conference call last week, CBPP president Bob Greenstein discussed how GOP aides told him that they’d learned from the P.R. mistakes they made back during the 1995 budget fight, when they combined huge spending cuts for the poor and tax cuts for the wealthy in one single reconciliation package, and the Robin-Hood-in-reverse quality of the contrast proved too much for the public to stomach. They’ve gotten smarter: The House and Senate are going to push for separate reconciliation bills for the tax cuts and the spending cuts over the course of the summer and fall, which will make it tougher to highlight the iniquities at work. (Those iniquities are, well, predictably amazing: The CBPP cites an Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center estimate that 46 percent of the proceeds of the fast-tracked tax cuts -- which consist merely of extending the capital gains and dividend tax cuts two years past their slated 2008 expiration -- will go to the top 0.2 percent of taxpayers.)

There are a few things to note about the budget fights this week: The House, being the House, will likely block all chances to offer floor amendments when the budget is taken up later this week; the real fight is going on behind the scenes between the leadership and conservatives who want stringent structural measures inserted that put blocks on future spending increases. The safe money is on the conservatives whining loudly but eventually getting with the program. Meanwhile, the floor fight in the Senate will likely hinge, as it did last year, on moderate Republicans’ support for Russ Feingold’s amendment to restore real, 1990s-style pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budgeting rules that require full offsetting both for spending increases and tax cuts (see here for details). The Senate Budget committee’s plan includes an ominous procedural item that would ensure a kind of one-sided PAYGO spending regime for decades to come:

The proposal includes a new Senate point of order that would prohibit consideration of legislation that would increase mandatory spending by $5 billion or more in any of the four 10-year periods from 2015 through 2055. The point of order could be waived only with 60 votes. This point of order would do nothing to prevent enactment of tax cuts that would substantially increase the deficit in future years, but it would make it impossible to consider modest increases in spending to deal with major problems, such as providing health care for the uninsured, without 60 votes or without cuts in other entitlement programs to offset these increases.

It should be clear that relatively obscure procedural issues play a rather crucial role in the budget discussion this year.

On that note, now is a good time to recall predictions that the president’s call for cuts in farm subsidies was really meant as a cover for squeezing money out of the food stamp program. As Congress debates a budget resolution that will instruct the Agriculture committees of both chambers to cut upwards of $5 billion out of mandatory spending within their jurisdiction, an ag subsidy-to-food stamp switcheroo is precisely what looks to be in the cards. As Congressional Quarterly (subscription-only) reports today:

It is still unclear how the two chambers will handle proposed deep cuts to farm programs. Though the president has proposed limiting payments to farmers of federally subsidized crops, House Budget Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, has said the object of cuts to mandatory spending for agricultural programs is not “reopening” the 2002 farm law, which governs those subsidy programs.

There may be few other options within the Agriculture Committee’s jurisdiction, which likely means savings will be found in the food stamp program . . .

There’s more here. You couldn’t come up with a more classic case of weak claims trumping weak clients if you tried.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE OPPOSITION ANSWERS. Mostly Shiite, pro-government parties answered Lebanese opposition rallies last week with an even bigger rally on Tuesday. Today the opposition is back with the biggest rally yet, including, according to Neil MacFarquhar, some support from the Shiites and religious Sunni Muslims who seem to be the main source of support for the current government.

It looks at this point like the opposition and the international community will probably succeed in pushing Syria out of Lebanon. Nevertheless, there's no denying that the pro-government parties speak for a sizable number of Lebanese (maybe even most -- it's hard to say since nobody really knows what the confessional breakdown is) and the opposition will need to eventually reach some sort of negotiated agreement about the composition of a new cabinet to oversee the withdrawal.

Meanwhile, they're still protesting in Jordan against government efforts to neuter civil society groups, though for some reason nobody in the western media seems to care about unrest in America's closest undemocratic ally in the region.

--Matthew Yglesias

POOR HAMMER. Tom DeLay is all over the news these days with new revelations of dirty dealings and a spate of “can he survive?” pieces popping up in all the major dailies, seemingly without the explicit instigation of anything done or said by the House Democrats. The Stakeholder and The Daily DeLay provide one-stop spots for all the latest news, but to summarize, the majority leader’s current problems include:

• Austin district attorney Ronnie Earle’s ongoing grand jury investigation into campaign finance violations on the part of Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC) during the 2002 state legislative elections; as recently as last week Earle appeared on 60 Minutes and pointedly refused to rule out a future indictment of DeLay (who set up TRMPAC).
• The just-concluded civil trial concerning a lawsuit filed against TRMPAC by several ousted Texas Democratic legislators, during the course of which new evidence surfaced of DeLay’s direct involvement in TRMPAC’s operations. The TRMPAC scandal has not only helped to fatten the coffers of DeLay’s legal defense fund, but has also inspired the creation of a similar legal defense fund for the already-indicted DeLay operative Jim Ellis, to which House reps like Roy Blunt, Tom Feeney, and Ralph Regula have already contributed.
• The ever-expanding comic opera that is the Jack Abramoff-Mike Scanlon Indian casino lobbying scandal. Not only were Abramoff and Scanlon long-time confidants (and, in Scanlon’s case, a former employee) of DeLay’s, there is also clear evidence that one of Abramoff’s tribal clients funded a trip DeLay took to London in 2000 by funneling money through a right-wing think tank. Months later DeLay helped kill a bill the tribe wanted defeated.
• New evidence that DeLay, along with a bipartisan roster of fellow House members, took trips funded by a registered foreign agent -- the Korea- U.S. Exchange Council -- in violation of House ethics rules. As a must-read new report in Time reveals, the council shares the same address as the lobbying office of DeLay’s former chief of staff.
• The breakdown of the House ethics committee, which is now mired in a deadlock as Democratic members refuse to agree to the rules changes that DeLay helped push through in January and continue to rail against the purge of disloyal Republicans from the panel and their replacement by reps who have donated to DeLay’s legal defense fund. (It turns out that one of the new members, Lamar Smith of Texas, has not only donated to the fund but also hosted a fundraiser for TRMPAC in 2002.) The ethics committee imbroglio is now a PR battle -- Republicans would have no problem letting the committee remain paralyzed indefinitely if they believed they could get away with it, but Democrats are counting on the slew of recent ethics-related news coverage to shine the spotlight on the situation in the committee.

That’s where we are at the moment. DeLay certainly seems embattled, but he has appeared that way before and there's no evidence yet of a break in the solidity of GOP support for him. A tipping point in that respect will likely come only when GOP rank-and-filers start catching flack from their constituents back home. That's why the attempts to put lawmakers on the record on matters like the ethics rules are so important, and why local advertising and advocacy linking district reps to the swirling pool of slime and corruption in DC are so needed. The widening net of the Abramoff-Scanlon scandal is one way to do that, and the Tom Delay Legal Expense Trust donor list (pdf) is another. Here's a third: indicted DeLay aide Jim Ellis is still acting head of DeLay's mega-huge PAC, Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC). How about some local Dems challenging House and Senate recipients of 2004 ARMPAC campaign contributions to explain their connection to a political fund being administered by a man under criminal indictment?

--Sam Rosenfeld

SOCIAL SECURITY CHESS. Support for the president's as yet not fully described plan to transform the Social Security system has hit an all-time low. Even so, contra Yglesias, I'm still not conviced that this isn't going to be a case of winning the battle but not the war. Politics is like a game of chess. It's not just about the next move, but about thinking five moves in the future -- and in mutiple directions -- to set yourself up along a trajectory for victory. Right now the Democrats have been so busy defending their queen that they aren't able to move their pawns across the board or save their rooks and knights.

The Republican master narrative about the Democrats will work just as well if the Dems win on Social Security as if they lose. According to the Republicans, Democrats are "the party of 'No'," "the party of the past," and "obsctructionists" who shoot down every new plan for dealing with America's problems but refuse to propose alternatives. That is going to be drummed into the American public every day until 2008, it seems, and even liberals admit these days that they don't know what the Dems stand for (as opposed to against).

What is the Democratic narrative about Republicans that will be given credence or set in motion if the president's proposal fails to come up for a vote this year (i.e. is defeated)? If there is one coherent theme, I haven't been able to detect it yet.

This is a real communications defect in an otherwise winning campaign on the Democratic side. John Kerry lost in '04 partly because people couldn't figure out what he stood for; he had no overarching narrative to tie together his various stances. At some point the Democrats will have to propose something that's forward-looking and agenda-setting when it come to retirement planning -- or at least frame their Social Security defense as part of a larger story -- or they will save Social Security but not their own party's future. The goal of this game is checkmate, not defense.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released one of those reports designed to prove that increasing media consumption was destroying America's children. Sadly for scaremongers everywhere, it found no evidence that kids were watching more television than they used to. It also found no evidence that they were spending more time on all forms of media consumption than they used to. So Kaiser decided to engage in a little double-counting. Yesterday I spent some time sitting on my couch watching professional basketball. (Yes, I am the only person in the United States who watches professional basketball in mid-March.) Simultaneously I was using my laptop to do frivolous things like stay in touch with friends, write blog posts, and read the latest Carnegie Arab Reform Bulletin. Later, I played Mike Tyson's Punch-Out while listening to the radio. If you want to be alarmist about it (and boy do people want to be alarmist about it!), you can thus conclude that kids "pack 8 1/2 hours of media exposure into 6 1/2 hours of each day, seven days a week."

Shocking stuff, yes. My debunking, at any rate, comes secondhand from Michelle Cottle's excellent column on the subject. What she doesn't get into, but what I think must always be emphasized in these discussions, is that there isn't even a problem that the "rise" in media consumption could be causing. Youth crime is trending down, as is teen pregnancy, while student test scores are going up. Even though people don't approve of the result, research shows that watching television makes people happy -- not quite as happy as hanging out with friends or having sex, but happier than just about everything else. In economic terms, media products are one of only a very small number of goods (along with airplanes, weapons, and debt) of which the United States is a successful exporter.

Nevertheless you've now got folks like Hillary Clinton, Dick Durbin, and Mary Landrieu using the Kaiser study as a pretext for joining forces with right-wing moralists like Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback to clamp down on youth media consumption. The worst part about it may be that the political calculation is correct:

Politically, this issue is a good example of the cultural concerns that have helped drive many voters into the arms of the GOP, which is perceived as far less likely to turn a deaf ear, even if they rarely offer concrete steps to do something practical about it. Millions of parents feel they are fighting a losing battle for influence over their children's values and habits. These are legitimate concerns. And to the extent that Democrats focus on holding powerful media corporations accountable for the real-life impact of their products and marketing on kids, it's a solidly progressive, even "populist" topic.

I'm almost 100 percent certain that the DLC has that right. This is exactly the sort of pointless, mildly harmful grandstanding that will allow Democrats to regain credibility as exponents of sound moral values without compromising core equity principles. Every generation believes the generation following it is uniquely debased and that their favored media-consumption patterns are an important cause of the unique debasement. There's apparently nothing you can do to convince people otherwise even though this theory is invariably wrong and, in fact, succeeding generations are invariably significantly smarter than their elders. It's fun to pretend that good policy and good politics are always the same thing, but oftentimes it's not the case.

--Matthew Yglesias

BOLTON ACTIVISM. Citizens for Global Solutions has launched a website, StopBolton.org, to fight the nomination of John Bolton as the U.S. ambassador to the UN. The site features all the modern tools of internet activism, including an excellent video montage of choice Bolton quotes and fist-pounding.

Also, via Steve Clemons (whom we can thank for helping to delay the nomination proceedings), I see that MoveOn is mobilizing its members who live in states represented by senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In a mass email, Eli Pariser calls his members to action and references this Bill O’Reilly-John Bolton exchange first dredged up by Eugene Oregon.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

UGH. Via Taegan Goddard I see that the lawsuit for public access to Howard Dean's sealed gubernatorial files has finally reached the Vermont Supreme Court. I hear there's not much to be afraid of in those files from a DC Democrat's perspective -- just a bunch of frank comments in document margins that might not have endeared Dean to his Vermont community or to an electorate, were he running for office. Still, Dean doubtless had a reason for telling reporters in 2003, "we didn't want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time in any future endeavor," when justifying the 10-year seal of the files. The lower-court ruling being appealed before the state's Supreme Court was in favor of opening the files.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

COALITIONS OF THE WILLING. In the wake of last week's report on illegal settlement building, the Knesset decided yesterday to dismantle a dozen illegal settlements. The announcement is being met with the skepticism you'd expect after months of promises, little movement, and evidence that the government is, at best, pandering to two constituencies by quietly allowing illegal settlements while also talking peace. And to bolster that other constituency, the Jerusalem Post, reports, some 40 or so American Jews led by New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind arrived in Israel today to show support for the settlers of Gush Katif, a bloc of settlements in the Gaza Strip that has been slated for disengagement for months now. Hikind has been planning this for some weeks now. Settlers will welcome him, but the average Israeli will likely be nonplussed. Especially as, in the coming months, evangelical Christians will also head to Israel to obstruct the dismantling.

--Sarah Wildman

SINKING FAST. A new Washington Post poll will reveal that the Social Security phase-out is less popular than ever and "the more [people] hear about Bush's plan to reform the giant retirement system, the less they like it." In light of this and other data, the people out there urging the Democrats to put a specific plan on the table are either crazy or, more likely, deliberately offering advice they know to be bad. The only person Democrats should be encouraging to put a specific plan on the table is the President of the United States.

That said, Bush's overall approval rating remains in the weak-but-strong-enough range (50-48 in this instance) that it's been in for months now. There's a hope out there that the Republican Party will just kind of magically collapse if the phase-out can be beaten, but I don't see real evidence of that. Democrats are going to have to get better at outlining a positive agenda -- not for "reforming" Social Security, but for attacking the country's serious budgetary, health care, security, and other problems. They're also eventually going to need to widen the attack into, say, the ethical cesspool from whence the phase-out plan sprung.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DRECKONOMICS. By now, it's no surprise when the Bush administration scrambles the science on an issue like mercury pollution. But they're faking the economics, too, writes Chris Mooney, and it's depriving us of policies that could save billions.

--Jeffrey Dubner

ALL PROPAGANDA, ALL THE TIME. The revelation some time ago that the Bush administration was in the habit of offering payola to friendly columnists provoked a great deal of much-warranted outrage, some of it even admirably bipartisan and non-ideological. It's clear, however, that such conduct is only at one end of a wide spectrum of misconduct. Yesterday's New York Times contained an eye-opening report into the administration's habit of hiring actors to pretend to be news reporters and then sending out the resulting segments to be played on television stations as if they were news reports. As a result, we're now in the absurd position of people feeling the need to launch a website dedicated to stopping fake news.

The same Times article also made it clear that while government-sponsored (and probably illegal) fake news is a relative novelty to the media scene, corporate-backed fake news segments are to some extent old hat. That seems to be legal, but as John Quiggin argues it's certainly disturbing. What's more, in light of the current administration's habit of simply pushing the policy agenda of its corporate financers, it's not clear to me that stamping out government-sponsored fake news while letting the corporate-sponsored fake news run wild will really change anything. How any media outlet could have gotten it into its head that it's okay to broadcast something like this is beyond me.

Then there's the small matter of taxpayer money going to pay for closed-to-the-public events designed to create the appearance of public support for the Social Security phase-out. We've also got your money paying for this site designed to convince you that we ought to "strengthen" Social Security by eliminating it. The use of public monies for the creation of websites that do some advocacy work is only new in the sense that the Internet is new, but at the same time we've come to expect our .gov sites to meet some kind of standard of accuracy in describing government programs. The Treasury Department, which runs the site in question, is our source for lots of economic information that provides some kind of common ground in policy debates. But the new Social Security site says things like "The system of personal retirement accounts would be similar to the Federal employee retirement program, known as the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) . . . administrative fees, estimated at 30 basis points, would be for recordkeeping, which would be done by the government, not investment management done by Wall Street." But as The Washington Post reported several weeks ago, "Bush's proposed accounts differ substantially from the 19-year-old TSP. Moreover, they would be much more difficult to run than the TSP and have far higher administrative costs than the president and his supporters let on, some experts say."

At the most clearly permitted end of the spectrum you've got mere poor decision-making, like the idea that spinmeister Karen Hughes should be put in charge of America's public diplomacy operation so that she can use State Department resources to enhance the president's domestic political standing rather than advance actual policy goals. Or Karl Rove's new job as deputy chief of staff, where he'll be overseeing all the White House's policy operations and giving us an even more cynically politicized approach to substantive policy issues than we had in the first term. It's an ugly, ugly situation all the way down.

--Matthew Yglesias

BUM RAP. Let me second Atrios in calling out the uncharacteristic foolishness of E.J. Dionne’s column on the two parties’ handling of the abortion issue. Regarding the Bob Casey, Jr. situation in particular, I can personally attest -- as someone who was assigned to do a piece on the intra-Democratic disputes over abortion in the run-up to the ’06 Pennsylvania Senate race only to find that there simply wasn’t an actual story to be told -- that Dionne is blind if he doesn’t see that Democrats were far more ruthlessly clear-eyed and flexible in this case than Republicans were throughout last year’s Arlen Specter-Pat Toomey brawl. The Democratic establishment managed to prevent a divisive high-profile primary from even happening, which is obviously more than can be said for the Republicans, and the difference in part lies in the fact that the Democratic base and various interest groups were much more comfortable agreeing pragmatically to support the most promising candidate than Republicans had been. As a reporter who actively sought out some juicy intra-party conflict, all in vain, I can attest that even the relevant pro-choice groups (most prominently EMILY’s List, but NARAL as well) muted their concerns over how this race unfolded and what it did or did not signify about the party’s commitment to its base’s stance on abortion. The party establishment’s preemptive intervention certainly raises important questions about the justice and efficacy of preventing primaries, but those questions have nothing to do with any supposed Democratic “intolerance” on the abortion issue.

Indeed, Dionne comes up with exactly zero compelling examples of such intolerance. That the party’s own leader in the Senate happens to be pro-life has been mentioned about a zillion times around here, but that’s because it’s a rather important fact to keep in mind. (As for the Republicans' supposedly more flexible and effective approach on abortion, Dionne cites Rick Santorum's full-throated primary support for Specter last year; that support was certainly noteworthy given the pair's ideological differences, but it was also utterly in keeping with their longstanding history of mutual support and cannily entwined fortunes.) If, in total, pro-choice congressional Republicans happen to outnumber pro-life congressional Democrats, that may have something to do with the minor fact that pro-choice Americans outnumber pro-life Americans.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WEEKEND UPDATE. Blew your fortune on legal bills and a creepy ranch? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. It's a good thing nobody's told me this is the fattest country on earth.
• Nicholas Kristof. This isn't what "The Death of Environmentalism" is about at all, but let's pretend.
• George Will. Old people have nothing to worry about -- of course eliminating Social Security's revenue stream won't imperil their benefits. After all, the president's promised us!
• David Broder. Maybe I should have written this when it could have done some good.
• Jim Hoagland. Man, it's as if hawkish "tough on terror" measures are sometimes counterproductive. Maybe I should apply this view to America, too.
• Maureen Dowd. It's too bad female opinion writers get discussed in such gendered terms, they'd bring a lot of "grace" to op-ed pages.
• Thomas Friedman. Maybe rewarding Egypt's dictator would spread democracy. Yeah, that's the ticket.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Mona Eltahaway on giving the Arabs credit.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHO'S GOT THE POWER? REPLY TO THE POWERLINE. Deacon, a k a Paul Mirengoff had some thoughts on the piece, in which his site is mentioned, but this is, I think, the most interesting part:

Franke-Ruta's approach to Power Line mirrors her approach to the other bloggers who come in for attack. She simply drops whatever biographical information she has without any analysis of how it might undercut the blogger's credentials as a "citizen," his or her ability to say valid things, or the truth and quality of what the blogger actually said about Eason Jordan or Dan Rather. These two bloggers, she reveals breathlessly, have published articles in National Review; that one is a former paratrooper; the one over there is a "Republican and member of Right to Life of Michigan;" some of them are proteges of a guy who mocked John Kerry by distributing band-aids with purple hearts on them, and so on.

Would the blogosphere be a better place if it were populated by people who sprang up out of total obscurity and had no meaningful political past? Speaking as someone who just about fits that description, my answer is no (and that, in fact, has been the line of the MSM's defenders who attack us as folks in pajamas with no credentials). Just about everyone has a political past....So what?

Nothing undercuts anyone’s credentials as a citizen except taking citizenship somewhere else. But my 2-year-old niece is a citizen, too, and that doesn’t tell you very much about her. I just happen to think that calling bloggers “citizens” or “citizen-journalists” is not very descriptively useful or informative. Time magazine's description struck me as fuzzy-headed hype of the kind I heard back in the hey-day of the dotcom boom, when every new start-up’s CEO was a hero, regardless of whether he had a business plan or not, or any chance of ever turning a profit. Just as with blogging, the dotcoms were going to change everything, until (gasp) they didn’t. Blogging technology has not created any new people in the world and it certainly doesn’t denude anyone of their pasts; it’s simply given existing individuals with existing agendas new ways to communicate what it is they want to say. This is hardly a shocking statement.

Indeed, rather than reinventing the power dynamics of journalism wholesale, the blogosphere obeys many of the same power dynamics as the rest of society and is highly influenced by affiliations with partisan and mainstream media institutions alike. Many of the well-read political bloggers have significant off-line connections to either magazines, think tanks, political organizations, educational institutions, television shows, or each other (through being on the blogger-conference circuit). The costs of entry to the blogosphere may be low, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier for people without connections -- the same kind of connections you need to get ahead in any other field -- to gain prominence.

Take my colleague Matt Yglesias, for example. He attended Harvard University and The Dalton School, where, he wrote recently, people “did things like fly private helicopters to their weekend houses on the Hamptons or take a quick Concorde to Paris for Thanksgiving." He links to and is cited by his cohorts from those institutions. Now he works at The American Prospect and is embedded in a community of young journalists in D.C. Or Josh Marshall -- the former Washington editor of The American Prospect, with a Ph.D. in American history from Brown University. Just look at all the media outlets he’s written for. To the extent that making it as a blogger requires getting picked up by and listened to by print media, can there be any doubt that someone with extensive print media contacts and experience would have an edge?

From that perspective, the fact that Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox had worked at lots of places gave her an advantageously wide network of contacts. Mickey Kaus, an experienced journalist and author, is linked up with Slate, now owned by The Washington Post, and Eric Alterman, an author and Nation writer, with MSNBC. Andrew Sullivan’s blog stands alone, but he still writes a column for The Guardian and is a books author, and having been the editor of The New Republic and a regular writer for The New York Times Magazine certainly didn’t hurt him when he was starting out online. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga markedly boosted his readership at DailyKos through his alliance with the Howard Dean campaign; Kevin Drum linked up with The Washington Monthly; and Atrios has a nice symbiotic relationship with Media Matters for America. Hugh Hewitt is a columnist for The Weekly Standard and also has a radio show where Yglesias is a frequent guest. Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds is a law professor. Michelle Malkin is a columnist and FOX News television personality. Patrick Ruffini was the webmaster for Bush-Cheney '04. LaShawn Barber is an attorney and worked on Capitol Hill. I could go on.

The top bloggers in America often know one another, sit on panels and in greenrooms together, and go to lunches and dinners together over time. Many were influentials before they become bloggers. The idea that bloggers are some kind of socially isolated sui generis creation of the new medium is laughable. They have real backgrounds and social networks that matter. Some of them are political operatives and some of them come from print media or other fields. But just as no one would ever mistake the New Donkey’s Ed Kilgore for a “citizen-journalist” rather than an informed, well-educated, well-connected commentator with a specific politics, they shouldn’t mistake the Powerline trio for such, either.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

OF RED QUEENS & COMMIE BABES: REPLY TO KREMPASKY.I’m happy that Mike Krempasky wants to add to the public record about his activities, but he spends a lot of time refuting charges I did not make. If he wants to tilt at windmills or invent a “Red Queen,” as he calls me, he is welcome to do so. (Indeed, that does seem to be a favorite conservative MO, as evidenced by his co-blogger Erick Erickson, who called me a “Commie babe” on RedState.org in response to all this.)

Contra Krempasky, nowhere in my story did I say he trained Gannon or that he was paid by RedState.org. In fact, he and I had a conversation about how his 527 received a piddling $2,000 in donations, from one Daniel Cook of Dallas, according to its first filing with the Federal Election Commission. That sum is a matter of public record, and, in any event, my point was not one about money. (Though, interestingly, there’s a Daniel Cook of Dallas who is also one of George W. Bush’s Rangers.) The point is that what Krempasky is doing is not a new form of journalism, it’s a new form of politics.

As for Krempasky’s denial that he’s been "shadowy," I point readers to this story from The Chicago Tribune last fall:

Hundreds of thousands of readers know him simply as "Mike," the creator of rathergate.com, an Internet blog spearheading a petition drive demanding the resignation of CBS News anchor Dan Rather because of his alleged liberal biases.

But what the visitors to his blog did not know when he launched it early last week was that "Mike" is Mike Krempasky, a 29-year-old Republican political operative from suburban Washington, D.C., a detail some might have found relevant.

The conservative bloggers who ignited a frenzy this month over allegations that Rather relied on forged documents in a Sept. 8 "60 Minutes" broadcast questioning President Bush's Air National Guard service insist they are force-marching the nation's mainstream media into a new era of transparency and accountability.

They extol the virtues of millions of ordinary citizens using blogs, a kind of personal Internet diary, to collectively check, vet and comment on everything they read in newspapers or watch on TV.

But there's a catch: Some of the anonymous bloggers aren't so eager to endure the same scrutiny of their backgrounds and motives...

Nowhere on Krempasky's site, however, did he disclose that he is the political director for American Target Advertising, a Virginia firm run by Richard Viguerie, the conservative strategist widely credited with inventing political direct mail and helping Ronald Reagan and numerous other Republicans get elected.

In addition to Rathergate.com and Easongate.com, where Krempasky is listed as a "contributor" and its founder Bill Roggio as "staff," Krempasky also runs ConfirmThem.com, a site devoted to promoting conservative judicial nominations. And then there was his PaveFrance.com, committed to posting "mischaracterized news, photoshop humor - the works," because it's "fun."

Post-Easongate, Roggio, Krempasky and La Shawn Barber attended a Conservative Political Action Conference bloggers breakfast sponsored by Creative Responsive Concepts, the Republican public relations firm that hyped the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, receiving $165,000 from them to promote the attack on John Kerry's military record, and that now is working for the astro-turf anti-Social Security outfit USA Next. The featured speakers at this breakfast? Swifties John O’Neill and Bill Franke (no relation).

While Roggio is new to these circles, that he attended at all underscores my point about the dynamics of the internet. Roggio had been an independent, right-leaning blogger in New Jersey writing about military matters, though apparently with the typical anti-MSM feelings so common in conservative circles. Yet within four days of founding Easongate.com, Barber and Krempasky were on his team, and within a week of Eason Jordan’s resignation, he was breakfasting with the Swifties at CPAC. Roggio and his military blogger friends say they started Easongate.com “to do something they felt is right, without a concern for politics,” as Roggio wrote me this week, but that doesn’t erase the fact that his concerns were considered politically important enough by some very savvy people that they wanted to aid and abet him and bring him into the heart of their movement.

Right-wing bloggers like to accuse anyone who reports on them of conspiracy mongering. In truth, conservatives are simply well-organized and good at training and supporting their compatriots. You'd think they'd be proud of that fact, instead of trying to deny it.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE BLOGGING OF THE LETTERS PAGE. We’re in uncharted territory here at TAP in terms of handling the large volume of responses my April magazine article, Blogged Down, has generated in the blogosphere, and which have not also been sent to us as letters-to-the-editor. So we’re going to try an experiment and reply to folks on Tapped, in the spirit of bloggy dialogue, rather than waiting for the letters page in our May issue. Just as with a letters column, though, priority goes to those mentioned in the article. And I’ll mainly be replying to folks individually, in order to cut down on the size of items and to allow different bloggers to link to the items that concern them alone, as well as trying to include new information so that this doesn't become tiresome. My apologies in advance to readers who do find this boring. (And, indeed, do let us know if you think this works or not, through letters-at-prospect-dot-org.)

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TOGETHER AT LAST! Don’t miss this account of a debate between Peter Beinart and Ann Coulter on the state of moral values in America, brought to you by the Tufts Daily. Hilarity ensues.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

SETTLEMENTS AN OBSTACLE TO PEACE. The news from Israel that successive governments had been complicit in the building and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza was something peaceniks (like those at Peace Now, Brit Tzedek, and B'Tselem, among others) have long known. Even The New York Times wrote of it two years ago. So why is this important?

Well, for one thing, it raises the question of why these groups that have begged and screamed and pleaded for years have no clout. But the really interesting point about this report by Talia Sasson, a former state prosecutor, is that, despite the minor uproar it has caused in Israel, this is not news. Who were the housing ministers who allowed these settlements to grow? There was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself, and also George W. Bush's new best friend in democracy-building, Natan Sharansky. As this Newsweek International story (by Ha'aretz writer Aluf Benn) explains:

Natan Sharansky is George W. Bush's favorite author. Since his re-election, the U.S. president has used every opportunity to praise "The Case for Democracy," the new book by the former Soviet dissident, now an Israeli cabinet minister. "That thinking, that's part of my presidential DNA," Bush told The New York Times. Last Wednesday, appearing with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder in Mainz, Bush said: "Sharansky's book confirmed how I was raised and what I believe." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice quoted Sharansky's ideas in her Senate confirmation hearing in January. ...

For all the accolades he's receiving in Washington, however, Sharansky carries little political clout back in Jerusalem. The Israeli media have largely ignored his recent American success, treating his rapport with Bush as a curiosity. When Sharansky made aliyah (emigrated to Israel) he was the hero of repressed Soviet Jewry. Now he's a minister without portfolio, dealing with Jewish diaspora relations and Jerusalem affairs. He's perceived mostly as a somewhat eccentric intellectual—an idealist with close ties to Washington. Most Israelis agree with his argument that the Oslo peace process failed because it fostered another Arab despot, Yasir Arafat, who spread violence and hatred against Israel. (Last week, less than a month after the Palestinians and the Israelis agreed to a ceasefire, a suicide bomber killed four people outside a Tel Aviv nightclub.) But many have doubts about the corollaries he draws. Sharansky rejects the notion that Arabs are "not built" for democracy. Nonsense, he says—the same argument was said about the Italians, the Germans and the Japanese before 1945. In his view, Israel must avoid territorial and other concessions until the Arabs are reformed and fully democratized.

As Benn explains, Sharansky voted against the cabinet's decision to evacuate settlements -- something the majority of Israelis are supportive of -- and even others on the right side of the Israeli political spectrum, in the Likud Party, have come to accept. As Housing Minister, Sharansky:

... assisted the expansion of settlements and illegal outposts in the West Bank. More recently, he chaired an obscure cabinet committee that authorized the confiscation of Palestinian-owned lands in East Jerusalem (considered by Israel, but not by the rest of the world, as a sovereign part of its territory). When the story broke out, Sharansky justified his decision as an act of proper law enforcement. Washington, on the other hand, viewed the decision as an attempt to establish facts on the most sensitive ground of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel backed off.

Pressed on the point, Sharansky resorts to the kind of realpolitik response he disputes in others. Israel's occupation, he says, "is among the most humane possible for a democracy...."

Sasson's report explicitly pointed to the building of illegal settlements -- some 105, including 54 on land not owned by Israel -- as directly undermining Israeli democracy. "The violation of the law in such a gross manner and from so many different directions could threaten the democratic regime and must be remedied," Sasson wrote. Peace Now has a round-up of international press coverage on the issue.

--Sarah Wildman

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SURVIVE THIS. Most of us don't see much war footage on the news anymore, the filmmaker of Gunner Palace notes drily in one scene. The story of a division in Baghdad doesn't always makes sense, writes Noy Thrupkaew -- but that may be the truest way to tell it.

--Jeffrey Dubner

GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT MILITARY VOTERS. On Wednesday, the DLC put out a commentary on Democratic outreach to military voters, noting that "we must go farther inviting military-minded Americans to join the party coalition: we must make it clear we do not share the views of those who would treat the military as a suspect institution." Echoing Peter Beinart's op-ed last weekend they suggest "that Democrats call on colleges (virtually all of whom receive significant public subsidies) to abandon the practice (common at many elite schools) of banning military recruiters from campuses."

This has been a historic Tapped hobbyhorse dating to before any of the current writers were with the magazine and I, at least, agree both as a substantive matter and as a question of political positioning. There's really quite a lot more the Democrats can and should be doing in terms of minor re-adjustments that could pay off big dividends in this regard. I talked yesterday to someone in Democratic circles who's been thinking on this issue recently, and he made the excellent observation that Republican congressmen and senators typically assigned the veterans' affairs brief to the same staffer who handles military affairs. Many Democrats don't even have a staffer assigned to the military brief, and veterans' issues are usually covered by someone in charge of social welfare policy.

This helps explain, I think, one reason why the party hasn't gotten as far as it should considering that, objectively speaking, Democrats are the ones willing to pony up the cash to give soldiers and veterans the treatment they deserve. It's the difference between giving public assistance to veterans as veterans and giving it to veterans as welfare recipients. The atmospherics of the current approach are wrong, and it would be pretty easy to fix them. Harder to fix -- but not so hard that it's not worth doing -- is simply changing the dynamic where few Democratic staffers and legislators actually understand military issues. Getting more Democrats to hire specialists in this field would be a step forward. Even on a simple political level, Democrats should put more thought into obvious methods of getting military votes like visiting bases and talking to troops.

--Matthew Yglesias

WORTH A TRY. The Bush administration gets smart and flip-flops on Iran, maintaining a fig leaf of non-participation in the European troika's negotiations with Tehran but agreeing to put some carrots on the table if Europe agrees to wield more sticks. I happen to think the administration's hawks are entirely correct to be somewhat skeptical that this sort of offer will entice Iran away from uranium enrichment (though I suspect we'll disagree about what to do if negotiations fail), but the point is that it's certainly worth a try and would have been worth a try quite some time ago. This policy, incidentally, is what used to be known as "John Kerry's Iran policy" back when Kerry's national security policies were said to spell certain doom for the United States.

--Matthew Yglesias

COMPROMISE, SWEET COMPROMISE. Details are hard to come by regarding the new Social Security "plans" from Senators Robert Bennett and Chuck Hagel (someone needs to coin a new term for this kind of legislative vaporware that the privateers seem to favor) but via Josh Marshall, it seems that Rovert Novak has the rough outlines of the Bennett plan:

The Bennett plan tries to sidestep the furor over personal accounts by establishing an individual savings account outside of the Social Security system. Many Democrats are proposing similar plans, and nobody really thinks they would impel workers to save appreciably more than they do today. However, Bennett would write into law, effective five years from now, the option for wage earners to commit a portion of their payroll taxes to future accounts.

In other words, nothing is sidestepped because the private accounts are not, in fact, outside the Social Security system. Instead, they're outside the Social Security system for five years at which point the phase-out of the program begins. This is, I must say, a remarkably silly purported compromise. If Bennett had put on the table a genuine plan to establish some kind of accounts outside of Social Security many of us would worry that the real plan here was to revisit the accounts in, say, five years and start using them as a phase-out mechanism. But instead of being sneaky and clever, Bennett has written the medium-term phase-out right into the bill! Anybody who falls for that needs to put his dunce cap on. The gestures toward enhanced progressivity in the benefit formula (through cuts aimed primarily at the upper ends of the income spectrum) are, however, a clever touch. Maybe Bennett should call up a conservative economist (Alan Greenspan?) and ask for an explanation of moral hazard. Democrats would do well to let the GOP stew over that one a while, just like Lindsey Graham's tax hike plan. Perhaps these latter-day apostles of class warfare will be interested in explaining their stance on the bankruptcy bill to the rest of us.

--Matthew Yglesias

"IT WON'T LAST. IT CAN'T LAST." Reader J.C. passes along this incredible interview with former Minnesota Senator Dave Durenberger. He left the Senate in 1994, when the strangling of bipartisanship by his own GOP had just begun. It's one of the most articulate, insightful things I've read in some time; excerpts can't really do it justice, but here's one anyway:

It's the tolerance for, the thriving in, and the respect for diversity. Because this nation, of all the nations in the world, is the most diverse. It's hard to believe you would visit a representative democracy on this diverse of a society. But we've done it. We have taken this incredibly diverse society of immigrants from all over the world, rich and poor, and religions from all over the world. And we visit upon that a bill of rights and separation of power and stuff like that. It's true when people say, "It's the greatest nation on earth, blah, blah, blah," but what they don't understand now is that it's this incredible diversity and the celebration of it that made that so.

David Brooks writes about exurbanites, the people beyond the suburbs, using the analogy of golf. Their life needs to be like a golf course, where all the grass is clean, and cut to the same size, and the sand traps are all edged appropriately. That's the way they live, that's the way of a growing number of Americans. They want to go to churches where people are just like them, and go to malls that serve people and lifestyles just like them. This is Brooks's characterization, not mine. Increasingly, people want to vote for people who look like them, talk like them, and think like them. They go to church on Sunday, and they want to vote for somebody who talks to them the way the preacher does.

And what [Garrison] Keillor is saying is, "You know, you guys wouldn't have those opportunities. Your girls wouldn't be playing for national basketball championships and things like that. You wouldn't have 911 to call to save your kids' life or your own life, if there hadn't been Democrats or liberals fighting for those things." Those are some of the examples he uses. And he's right.

He's really saying, Give credit where credit is due. And there's a value in universities, there is a value to big old cities. There's a value to the Hmong or whomever. Here they are. And there's a value in that that doesn't exist in the golf course community, where everybody is the same. You can't possibly say you can represent everybody in your district, everybody in your state, everybody in your nation if have this golf course community mentality.

What I kept thinking as I read this was how unfortunate my generation, those who became politically aware during the Clinton years -- and then had our memory of that molded by the Bush years, so that the Arkansas Project aspects seem most prominent -- is for missing the days when the Durenbergers were important voices in the Republican Party. Anyway, as they say, read the whole thing.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE HEAD SPINS. Yesterday afternoon National Review's Rich Lowry noted without real comment that Kofi Annan thinks "we need to recognise that [Hezbollah is] a force in society that one will have to factor in as we implement the resolution" in Lebanon. I think Annan's just right. This morning, however, National Review's Andy McCarthy offered the predictable condemnation from the right, explaining that "This is why the U.N. is dead: even with regard to the most abject evil -- groups and individuals who target civilians for gruesome murder as a political strategy -- Annan and his ilk are incapable of rendering an informed moral judgment."

Meanwhile, today's New York Times reports that "After years of campaigning against Hezbollah, the radical Shiite Muslim party in Lebanon, as a terrorist pariah, the Bush administration is grudgingly going along with efforts by France and the United Nations to steer the party into the Lebanese political mainstream, administration officials say." Good for the Bush administration, says I. But what says The National Review? Nothing so far, but one hopes they'll choose partisanship over principle and the Bush administration can continue with its sensible handling of the situation in Lebanon.

UPDATE: Lowry acknowledges the new administration view but doesn't say anything about it.

--Matthew Yglesias

RISE OF THE NEO-PRIMS? Sidney Blumenthal unpacks the Bolton nomination in the Guardian today. As always, he gets in a few good jabs:

Bolton is a specimen of the "primitives", as Truman's secretary of state Dean Acheson called the unilateralists and McCarthyites of the early cold war. Through his political integration into the neocon apparatus, Bolton might be properly classified a neoprimitive…

Bolton might be granted the integrity of his primitivism, a true believer who imagines Fortress America besieged by the UN and Europeans - "Americanists find themselves surrounded by small armies of globalists, each tightly clutching a favourite new treaty or multilateralist proposal". But Bolton's coarse ideology is advanced by sophisticated campaigns of disinformation - and not only on Iraq and North Korea. His leaks of falsehoods that Syria and Cuba had developed weapons of mass destruction sparked internal revolts by intelligence professionals and the foreign service.

This last point harkens to the central role that Bolton played in the Iraq WMD intelligence stovepipe. This from Seymour Hersh way back in October 2003:

A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. “Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business,” Thielmann said. “We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That’s what being a professional intelligence officer is all about.”

But, Thielmann told me, “Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear.” Thielmann soon found himself shut out of Bolton’s early-morning staff meetings. “I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, ‘The Under-Secretary doesn’t need you to attend this meeting anymore.’” When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, “The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family.”

As Hersh goes on to explain, Bolton then demanded that he and his staff have access to raw intelligence data before intelligence professionals could analyze its content. By doing so, he could pick and choose the data he wished to act on, thereby facilitating the ‘leaks of falsehoods’ to which Blumenthal alluded.

This ought to be worth a few questions at the confirmation hearing, no?

--Mark Leon Goldberg

HERE'S THE OUTRAGE! Even before Jeff’s intemperate browbeating of liberals for ignoring the new House Democratic report on institutional abuse in the 108th Congress, I was looking forward to reading it. I lap this stuff up.

The report is terrific for all sorts of reasons. Substantively, it takes up a number of the issues covered in the important fall Boston Globe series on Republican congressional governance and extends the analysis through to the end of the 108th Congress. It turns out that, on matters like the percentage of bills allowed on the floor under open rules, factoring in data from the months of October through December only makes the GOP leadership look more autocratic. Stylistically, the staffers who wrote this thing had the bright idea of using statements made by then-Rules Committee ranking member David Dreier touting a 1993 GOP report on the Democrats’ institutional tyranny as a kind of running leitmotif throughout the account. (Dreier, of course, now chairs the Rules Committee and has made it exponentially more ruthless than it ever was under the Dems' control.) Every new topic in the report is helpfully punctuated by impassioned Dreier quotes, circa-'93, making precisely the same arguments that Dems are making now. It’s fun stuff.

As for discovering new things in the report, my favorite is the section on suspension bills. I had been vaguely aware that Republicans had cut back the amount of scheduled floor time to debate legislation over the years, but I didn’t realize they’ve done that in part by expanding the time dedicated to passing trivial bills for naming post offices and the like, so as to crowd out floor time for debating substantive, controversial legislation.

The ostensible purpose of the suspension day procedure is, as the Republican majority describes it in one of its Parliamentary Outreach newsletters, “to dispose of non-controversial measures expeditiously.” In theory, suspensions allow the House to quickly dispose of bills that the House leadership knows enjoy broad, bipartisan support and therefore do not require lengthy debate. The procedure allows the House to clear noncontroversial bills from its schedule early in the week, so it can deal with more controversial bills that require more substantive floor debate (including the opportunity to amend the bills) during the remainder of the week. Typical suspension day items are measures naming federal buildings, resolutions congratulating individuals or groups, or bills authorizing small pilot programs or land sales that enjoy near-unanimous support in their originating committees.

Now, it used to be that such bills could be considered on Mondays or Tuesdays, and then during the last six days of the session. But in the 108th Congress, Dreier’s Rules committee expanded the time for considering suspension bills to include Wednesday -- a change that has been institutionalized for the 109th Congress. As the report puts it, “Republicans rewrote the rules in a way that allowed them to transform Wednesday from a day when the House debates and amends major legislation into a day when it names post offices and congratulates sports champions and foreign governments.” Basically, that means that there is now usually one day a week -- Thursday -- during which floor debate over substantive legislation is even possible:

In other words, the statistics bear out the often-repeated claim of Rep. McGovern, a Democratic Member of the Rules Committee, that: “the House has become a place where trivial issues are debated passionately and important issues not at all.” By reducing the number of days in session while at the same time increasing the consideration of suspension bills, the majority has been making a concerted effort to crowd out and reduce the time available to the House to consider major, controversial legislation. While the House took the time to consider almost 1,000 non-controversial bills, for example, the Republican leadership only allowed it four hours to debate the Medicare prescription drug bill, a bill involving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and affecting the quality of health care for millions of American seniors. In spite of the fact that the War against Terrorism and the War in Iraq were posing unprecedented new challenges to our armed forces and our national security during the 108th Congress, House Republicans continued to whittle away at the time the House spent debating the Department of Defense Authorization bills. Not many Congresses ago, the House would spend two weeks deliberating on the DOD bill. In 2004, the House spent only two days on defense policy. We find it ironic that a legislative body that so often passes bills congratulating other countries for conducting fair and democratic elections appears to have so little interest in allowing the democratic process to unfold in its own chamber.

The data and analysis on emergency procedures and abusive conference report rules are equally revelatory. Read the report; it’s really only about 50 pages long, plus appendices.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CHECKPOINTS AND BALANCES. Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari's death last week was probably a terrible accident -- as were the deaths of an unknown number of Iraqis at American checkpoints over the last two years. Jason Vest talks to a long-time CIA officer to understand the necessity of such checkpoints and the risks they pose.

UPDATE: This post originally named Giuliana Sgrena as the deceased intelligence officer. Sgrena was the journalist held hostage.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WEAK-SIDE SCREEN. Give Ben Nelson credit for candor. When a reform measure as urgently necessary as the bankruptcy bill is imperiled by amendments seeking to ease the pain for seniors, soldiers, and the sick and to close loopholes for millionaires and violent anti-abortionists -- well, you’ve gotta hang tough and resist the urge even to consider such amendments on their actual merits:

“So far, I’ve voted against seniors, veterans,” Nelson told The Hill, referring to his rejection of any amendment that might threaten a bipartisan compromise on the bankruptcy bill. “Why would you limit it to this particular irritation that the Schumer amendment deals with?”

You’re a trooper, Ben.

Another comment the Nebraska senator makes in this piece is worth noting:

Nelson indicated that the Democratic whip operation had contacted him about his vote, but he said there was no heavy lobbying. “Someone asked me how I was going to vote, and I told them that was it.”

If Nelson is being honest here, it underscores the kernel of truth in the “weak-side screen pass” theory of Republican strategy. Senate Democrats have been tremendously impressive in enforcing solidarity on Social Security in the last few months. Most of that stems from the fact that it is a core party issue and members believe they’re on the side of the angels in that fight, but still -- enforcing this kind of unity takes work. The leadership has to keep the pressure on, keep a whip count, find the right combination of enticements and threats to keep wayward members in line, etc. You can’t do that on every issue. And Harry Reid clearly didn’t think it was worth the effort to try to do it on this bankruptcy bill. (Of course, Reid has supported the bill on the merits in past votes and a member of his own leadership team, Debbie Stabenow, voted for cloture yesterday, so it’s not as if one should assume that deep down Reid desires to see this bill killed anyway.)

At any rate, I don’t think anyone has topped Atrios in conveying the dubiousness of the political calculus underlying Dem support for the bankruptcy bill. I’ve said before that campaign funding matters and that the problem of Democratic corporate whoring can’t just be wished away, but still -- politics boils down to elections and votes. How many votes do Democrats expect to win by supporting debt peonage?

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT INFRASTRUCTURE? WHERE? Slate Tim Noah did a short column yesterday about Phillip Longman's longer Washington Monthly article on the Veterans' Health Administration and how government-run health care produces better results than the private-sector alternative. They're both great pieces and you should read them. That's all I'll say about that.

It reminds me, however, of a bone I've been meaning to pick with the wave of self-congratulation rolling around about the construction of a new progressive infrastructure in America. We all understand, I think, that John Kerry had perfectly good reasons for not running on a platform of taking an axe to America's absurd psuedo-private, employer-based health care system and replacing it with one of the sort that produces better health outcomes at lower cost in every other comparable country. At the same time, it's well known that Democrats suffer from a perception that they lack "big ideas" -- any kind of compelling positive agenda that goes beyond opposition to bad conservative ideas. Dramatic health care reform is the obvious candidate. It's something that, privately, just about every leading liberal supports. I've even once or twice noted some support among free marketeers for the notion that a genuinely universal system would be an improvement over the status quo, albeit only a second-best alternative to a genuine free market.

This is the kind of problem that only institution-building can produce. The really pernicious (or, if you prefer, valuable) consquence of conservative and libertarian think tanks has been the legitimation of big, horrible ideas that were once verboten and the deligitimation of big, sound liberal ideas. It would take years of hard work to create a public climate where Democratic candidates could afford to admit that America does not, in fact, have the "best health care system in the world" (it's closer to the industrialized worst) and that it needs to be drastically changed. But a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and somebody needs to be taking that step. Instead, it seems to me that almost all of the new progressive energy and momentum is going into spin and counter-spin -- the sort of thing that's aimed at winning elections or at winning small-bore policy debates inside the current paradigm. What's needed on health care, however, is paradigm shift. Not how do we prop up the ailing patchwork of Medicare, Medicaid, private plans, misused emergency rooms, tax credits, and personal bankruptcies that deliver health care today, but how do we transcend this system and replace it with a better one?

--Matthew Yglesias

HE IS THAT BAD. Kudos to Demagogue for tracking down this precious March 24, 1999, exchange between John Bolton and Bill O’Reilly.

O'REILLY: And I find it difficult to stand by and watch another Cambodia, another Rwanda, unfold. And I believe the United States has a responsibility here.

BOLTON: Let me ask you this, Mr. O'Reilly. How many dead Americans is it worth to you to stop the brutality?

O'REILLY: I don't think I would quantify that because...

BOLTON: I think you have to quantify it. I think if you don't answer that question...

O'REILLY: ... I think if you're going to be a superpower...

BOLTON: ... you're ducking the key point that the commander in chief has to decide upon before putting American troops into a combat situation. We are now at war with Serbia. And the president has to be able to justify to himself and to the American people that Americans are about to die, or may well die, for a certain specific American interest. ...

BOLTON: You cannot say that there is a sufficient American interest involved to warrant the casualties that I think we're about to face. And that's where the president is likely to come unstuck, because he does not have the political support in this country at the moment for the long-term sustained campaign you're talking about.

O'REILLY: You may be - I'm sure of that. If it's a long-term situation, he does not have it. And as far as American interest, I would cross out "American" and put "humanitarian" interests...

BOLTON: I believe...

O'REILLY: ... I do not believe in standing by while people are slaughtered.

BOLTON: ... Our foreign policy should support American interests. Let the rest of the world support the rest of the world's interests.

Notwithstanding the fact that it takes John Bolton to make Bill O’Reilly sound reasonable, I seriously hope Anne Applebaum reads this exchange. In the Post today she argues that John Bolton’s blunt style makes him an ideal candidate to lead UN reforms. I doubt, however, that his goal is merely to ruffle a few feathers. Rather, as ambassador to an institution inherently at odds with his worldview, he’ll be more of a fifth column. And as he tries to diminish the UN’s mandate from within, we can be sure that most of the humanitarian causes favored by Applebaum and myself (should they not have the fortune of intersecting with Bolton’s narrow construction of American national interest) will be additional victims of his ideological crusade.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

MORE ON HAGEL AND THE RETIREMENT AGE. Sen. Chuck Hagel's proposal to raise the retirement age, discussed on this blog yesterday, is actually surprisingly good news for those who want to save Social Security. Raising the retirement age is, according to polls, incredibly unpopular with the American public.

I happened to be down in northern Florida and southern Georgia over the weekend (making it a red-state weekend trifecta around this office, what with Matt in Virginia and Mike Tomasky back home in West Virgina) and so can report that the Jacksonville-based Florida Times-Union front-pager on Sunday was "Social Insecurity: State's voters not sold on Bush's plan for Social Security Investing." That's not good press for the Republicans to start with, and it's especially bad given that the Jacksonville area is so conservative it was represented in the House by the late Tille Fowler. The Times-Union/Sun-Sentinel poll that accompanied the story went on to note that raising the retirement age from 67 to 68 was the least popular polled fix for the system. Only 9 percent of those polled backed raising the retirement age, while 37 percent backed raising the level of income subject to payroll taxes.

A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll from Feb. 9 found similar results, summarized by the headline, "Poll: Tap wealthy on Social Security":

Two-thirds of the 1,010 people surveyed last weekend said it would be a "good idea" to limit retirement benefits for the wealthy and to subject all wages to payroll taxes.

Now, annual earnings above $90,000 are not taxed.

The poll also found 60 percent oppose raising Social Security taxes for everybody, a step President George Bush has ruled out.

Some of the ideas Bush proposed in his State of the Union address last week also fell flat. By more than 2-to-1, those polled oppose reducing retirement benefits for those now under age 55. Nearly as many say it's wrong to raise the retirement age, and 57 percent are against reducing benefits for early retirees. (italics added)

A Quinnipaic poll from late January found that "A majority of young and old voters also were opposed to raising Social Security taxes, increasing the qualifying age or reducing benefits," according to a Connecticut Post story Feb. 4. And I hear that private polling data from the pro-Social Security groups shows that raising the retirement age is, again, the least popular solution to what ails Social Security. The idea, in focus groups, makes people physically and visibly angry.

People may be living longer, thanks to modern medicine's ability to cure more diseases of youth and age alike, along with good sanitation and nutrition, but no one has been able to find a cure for the aging process itself. Fowler, the former Jacksonville congressperson, passed away at age 62. People still get old and fragile. Just because many of them are able to stay alive despite that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. People have relatives; they understand this. Even if they are young, they can see what age looks like. Raising the retirement age as part of the Social Security phase out isn't just an attack on the idea of a secure retirement, it's an attack on the idea of retirement itself. If they are wise, the pro-Social Security forces will take advantage of that.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

KILLING CONTINUITY. I'll take up the Dubner burden and get outraged about the many iniquities documented in the Slaughter report. I'm even learning genuinely new stuff reading it:

The Republican leadership also demonstrated its willingness to muzzle the badly needed institutional debate over what would happen to the House in the case of a mass disaster that killed or incapacitated a large number of Members of Congress. Although the Republican leadership allowed the House to consider a constitutional amendment offered by Rep. Baird (H.J.Res. 83) that would allow Members to appoint their temporary replacements in the case of a disaster, it did so with a closed rule (H. Res. 657) that blocked consideration of other constitutional amendment proposals offered by Reps. Lofgren, Larson, and Rohrabacher. Dr. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a close observer of Congress and an expert on Congressional “continuity” issues, called the process that produced this closed rule “stupid and ultimately counterproductive.” Ornstein argued that, given the subject matter, the debate on this amendment should have been “open, nonpartisan, and deliberative.” Rep. Baird and the other Members offering constitutional amendment proposals (one of whom was a Republican) were not doing so for partisan advantage, but because they had spent a significant amount of time studying this difficult issue and had developed interesting ideas for the House to consider. Their continuity ideas were not intended to embarrass Members or to “structure 30-second campaign commercials.” They were the kind of ideas the House should debate and consider, even if they would not ultimately prevail in a final vote.

This continuity of government business is a crucially important, though quite dull, topic that's about as far from partisan or ideological interest as one could imagine. Among other things, the status quo carries the risk that if a large number of House members were incapacitated, but not actually killed, it would be impossible to conduct any government business until the next election rolled around. Since a mass casualty terrorist attack would almost certainly require new appropriations of money and authorization for the use of military force, the result would be a constitutional breakdown of one sort or another. This is clearly a solvable problem -- any number of rule changes could avoid the possibility -- and a small, bipartisan group of House members and senators have done yeoman's work thinking about a topic nobody wants to deal with and trying to do something to remove what is, realistically, the country's single greatest vulnerability to terrorist attack. It's hard to even find a plausible, low partisan rationale for the House leadership's behavior in this instance beyond a stand on principle against the concept of open debate.

--Matthew Yglesias

ON KOSOVO. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj's decision to hand himself over to The Hague is good news for the Albanian Kosovars who have been clamoring for independence. Haradinaj represented a hard-line (yet popular) faction, but turning himself in was the responsible political move; though he may not make it to the promised land himself, he may have paved the way for Kosovar independence as the Security Council meets to discuss Kosovo’s final status this summer.

His extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, however, comes at a time when the court is already seeing its resources stretched thin. As Marlise Simons reported today, since October six high-ranking former Serbian and Bosnian Serb officers have arrived at the tribunal to face war crimes charges. Just two days ago a major player in the Serbian military, General Momcilo Peresic -- a key node of the informal chain of command that helped to direct various militias to do some of the war’s dirtiest work -- surrendered to the Tribunal.

Some of the prosecutors’ resources were freed up when the prosecution rested its case in the Milosevic trial, but the new uptick in activity is somewhat unfortunately timed since the United States essentially imposed a timetable for the tribunal to wrap up its proceedings, insisting that all prosecutions must be complete by 2008. Qualified prosecutors are generally not being replaced when they leave. For one, this forces the tribunal to refer more cases to local courts of the former Yugoslavia, which is a fine thing for lower-level criminal prosecutions but inadequate for cases lik Peresic's. The lack of manpower is also pressuring prosecutors to offer plea bargains (anathema to many continental European jurists), which at once speeds up the process but also lightens the penalties.

Despite the tribunal's necessary devolution, its success is still somewhat contingent on the capture of Radko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic -- the two biggest fish evading the law. Though the drawdown of manpower may be a necessary consequence of an ad hoc tribunal it would be a shame if no was around to try them if and when they are ever captured.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

CAN THE OUTRAGE CARRY? A third discouraging moment from yesterday: The Democratic House leadership does exactly what online liberals have been demanding and nobody cares. I'll be the first to admit I haven't read the 147-page treatise (pdf) on the corruption and arrogance of House Republicans that Nancy Pelosi and bulldog Louise Slaughter released yesterday, but I sure was glad to see it. Just as I was glad to see House Democrats talking about the Medicare travesty and other outrages for hours on C-SPAN, as well as Slaughter saying the same thing on MSNBC and Joe Scarborough agreeing with Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner's party-line message on the subject.

This is something that the online liberal community has been pushing for months (e.g. here and here, to pull up two of many examples that stick out in my mind). They even dropped a copy in my inbox and splashed it right up on a couple easy-to-find websites, exactly the things we've been critical of. And yet it hasn't been plugged on any of the major liberal sites, not even fast-and-furious Daily Kos. If we can't recognize and support the things we're actively calling for when they get put into practice, we really don't understand how the game works.

If you've read the report and have thoughts on it, drop me an email. I'll read it myself just as soon as I'm able.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CAN THE CENTER HOLD? The newly energized activist base of the Democratic Party is not exactly bolstering its claim that it understands how to win elections by sacking the highly successful leadership of the Colorado Democratic Party, source of several bright spots in the bleak 2004 election season. Meanwhile, the New Democrat movement is not exactly bolstering its claim that it represents something other than the business lobby with a human face by loudly supporting the egregious bankruptcy bill. Two discouraging moments for those of us who'd like to see some constructive debate about the substantive questions that divide Democrats and who believe that both sides have something to offer on questions of electoral strategy. Leading lights on either side would be well-advised to contemplate a Sister Souljah moment vis-à-vis their wayward followers if they'd like their own credibility to not get dragged down in the muck as well.

--Matthew Yglesias

PRO-SYRIAN OR ANTI-AMERICAN? The ever-moronic Tim Graham seems to think the childlike American people need their media minders to hide the truth from them:

For a real slice of pro-Baathist coverage, listen to NPR on yesterday’s "Morning Edition" here. Ivan Watson touted a "massive" demonstration, "really massive numbers that we have not seen in the opposition Lebanese protests...I must say, though, that despite this huge number of people [at] this Hezbollah-led protest, it is peaceful, it is very well-organized, and people are very friendly."

The thing of it is that Hezbollah led a massive protest yesterday that involved more people than any of the opposition protests. By all accounts, it was peaceful and well-organized. This is sort of important and it's hard to see what good would be promoted by pretending the protest was tiny, disorganized, and violent when it, you know, wasn't. The Corner featured a much smarter take yesterday from Jonah Goldberg, who questioned whether "pro-Syrian" was really the right way to characterize the event. Jonah can find some somewhat unlikely support for his position from Abu Aardvark who likewise reports that "The emphasis has really been on resisting foreign intervention in the speeches I've heard, more than 'pro-Syrian.'"

Hassan Fattah's coverage in The New York Times does characterize the demonstrators as "pro-Syrian," but the quotations on offer display more anti-American, anti-French, and anti-Israeli sentiment than pro-Syrian sentiment as such. In some ways, this is really what democratic politics is all about: A clash of visions for the future of Lebanon in which how the country will orient itself vis-à-vis its two neighbors -- Syria and Israel -- is an important issue. Right now, we can see that both sides have the support of some pretty large segments of the population.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE SPECTER SPECULATION. This makes some sense:

Shannen’s right about the floor scheduling piece. Specter has told people privately (that he will determine whether or not to have hearings on re-nominated Appellate nominees “on a case by case basis.” He says he will have a hearing in those cases where he thinks it will be helpful to secure confirmation and not hold another hearing where it would be unproductive. Pryor falls in the latter category. When the Committee reports out the nominees, it’s the Senate Leader’s job to schedule.

Bob Novak and Shannen Coffin have also suggested similar things. If you look at the nominees, you have Thomas Griffith, who received one short hearing at the end of the 108th Congress, after the election and while Orrin Hatch was still Judiciary's chairman; Terrence Boyle, who didn't get a hearing in the 108th; and William Myers, who seemed to have the support of Ken Salazar. It could be that Specter thought that Democrats would react to them in a way that would make clear they could be confirmed this time around.

If so, it was terrible judgment. Just look at Myers -- the second hearing gave Salazar the opportunity to (and ample justification for) publicly retract his pre-campaign support for Myers' nomination. What this motivation would mean for the nuclear option is also unclear. If Specter believed that Kim Jong Bill had the votes for the nuclear option, and was desperately trying to avoid it, it'd be all over Washington. I don't think that's quite what's happening here.

--Jeffrey Dubner

BIG NEWS. Yesterday, I took news of the John Bolton announcement as evidence that there was no longer any chance that the United States would support (or at least not veto) a referral of Darfur’s war crimes to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. If this early report is correct, then I was wrong. And thankfully so.

According to unnamed sources in the Guardian, the United States is prepared to abstain from a Security Council resolution that would refer the Darfur war crimes cases to the ICC. Further, a British government source tells the Guardian that Britain, China, and Russia have also agreed to establish a sanctions regime, although at this point it looks a bit more watered down than the United States would probably like.

If the report is fully accurate (and Human Rights Watch released a contradictory report today that the United States was seeking a 45-day delay on deciding a tribunal venue), the resolution will be voted on later in the week.

If the Guardian's report is correct it still must be understood that judicial intervention in Sudan cannot be the end-point of the international pressure to pause the killings in Darfur. As I’ve said before, the ICC is only a second-best option compared to a robust peace-keeping force properly mandated to protect civilians. When the sanctions committee meets, the United States should continue to press for as aggressive a sanctions regime as possible and not let the ICC referral excuse Western leaders from further action in Darfur.

Whatever their next step is in Darfur, the Security Council must not deceive itself into thinking that indictments and prosecutions are sufficient to curb the killings in Darfur. The ICC can certainly help, but only a more empowered peace-keeping ground force can stop the daily onslaught of attacks on civillians.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

LIFE EXPECTANCY. Chuck Hagel's new privatization bill will "reduce benefits by tying them to life expectancy, meaning all monthly checks would drop as average life span grows." This is one of those ideas that's a lot less reasonable than it sounds. Right now, America has a scandalously high infant mortality rate, with 6.63 infants out of 1,000 dying soon after birth. If we managed to cut that down to a Swedenesque 2.77 per 1,000, life expectancy would go up considerably. And so, under Hagel's plan, would the retirement age.

But a decrease in life expectancy thanks to falling infant mortality rates, or a falling murder rate, or a reduced automobile fatality rate, or fewer deaths in war -- or any other cause of death whose victims tend to be young -- has nothing to do with retirement policy. Fewer dead babies should mean seniors get their retirement benefits cut? Now, indexing the retirement age to the growth in life expectancy at retirement age is a proposal of the sort that would be worth considering if and when Republicans are willing to stop talking phase-out and start talking deal. Hagel's plan, which also involves a phase-out element, however, is not. This is just an operationalization of a misleading anti-Social Security talking point that tries to use the subtle difference between life expectance and life expectancy at 65 to confuse people.

--Matthew Yglesias

POLICY CONVERGENCE. We're not even make-believe bankruptcy experts here at Tapped but professor Elizabeth Warren is the real deal, so I hope everyone will be checking out the TPM blog-within-a-blog she's running with some of her students for all the gory details. Meanwhile Max Sawicky has a question that brings it all together:

In a different vein, a good question is whether the private accounts and annuities under Bush's excellent Social Security privatization plan would be vulnerable to attachment by creditors, thereby opening up a new source of equity to the credit card industry, after they have sucked out all your blood.

Presumably, the answer is "yes." These would be real assets, after all, your very own private personal account. So if you should happen to fall ill and lack adequate health insurance you could easily wind up needing to sign your entire account over to your credit card company. Meanwhile, your Social Security benefits will be cut and you'll have to accept the special private accounts offset cut. This is by no means a wildly unlikely scenario; over two million people go bankrupt in each year right now, almost one percent of the population.

--Matthew Yglesias

FROM THE ANNALS OF BAD PREDICTIONS. In his book, Public Intellectuals: A Study In Decline, Richard Posner astutely observes that there's no real accountability in the opinion trade. This is well known (and speaking as someone who's known to consistently misforecast election results, a tendency to be encouraged). Nevertheless, it's rare that you get the kind of hyper-speed prediction-falsification that one sees in this Reuel Marc Gerecht article you can find on newsstands today in The Weekly Standard:

The assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, coming so soon after Arabic satellite television beamed astonishing pictures of Iraqis risking their lives to vote, ignited long-simmering, anti-Syrian animosity among the Lebanese Christian and Sunni communities. (There may well be a Lebanese who doesn't believe Hariri was murdered by Syria's ruler Bashar al-Assad, but what is striking about the Lebanese rumor mill--one of the most energetic in the Middle East--is how unified the view is on Syrian culpability.) The most urgent question now is whether the Lebanese Shiite community, specifically the Amal and Hezbollah political movements, will back the Sunnis and the Christians in their call for Syria's ejection. Both organizations have substantial ties to Iran--Hezbollah is revolutionary Iran's only true child and remains the clerical regime's only foreign-policy success--and would be petrified of completely losing Tehran's support. It remains unclear what the Lebanese Shia are going to do, but if one had to bet, the odds are decent that Amal and Hezbollah will not break from the Lebanese Christian and Sunni communities.

Well, no. A new Zogby poll shows that rather a lot of Lebanese doubt Syria is to blame for the assassination. 22 percent of Maronite Christians, 36 percent of Orthodox Christians, 29 percent of Sunni Muslims, 12 percent of Druze, and a striking 72 percent of Shiite Muslims say it was either Israel or the United States that did the deed. Majorities of Maronites and Druze blame either the Syrian government, the Lebanese government, or some combination of the two. Orthodox Christians are split evenly between the Syria/Lebanon faction and the U.S./Israel faction. A largish 21 percent of Sunni Muslims hold the eccentric view that "international organizations" were behind the killing. And of course Hezbollah seems to be firmly setting its standard against "outside interference" (i.e., by America and France) in Lebanon, and staying in the Syrian camp.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE BOLTON PARADOX. I think the idea expressed by some that the nomination of John Bolton to serve as UN Ambassador is some kind of "Nixon goes to China" move is foolish in the extreme, for reasons that I'll get into later. The main reason why one maybe shouldn't be overly freaked out about this is that the post of UN Ambassador has often been used as a way to appease somebody an administration wants to keep on their side without giving them any real authority. Some people -- see, for example, Jeanne Kirkpatrick -- have even been quite effective in that kicked-upstairs role.

But here's the thing about Bolton. Various people have varying degrees of skepticism about the utility of various sorts of international institutions for accomplishing worthwhile goals. I'm a little skeptical. Some people are very skeptical. It might make sense to appoint an ambassador who's very skeptical of the UN's efficacy in order to let that person kick a little ass and push for some worthy reforms that could make the UN more useful. Bolton, however, isn't like that at all. He's opposed to permanent multilateral institutions and international law in principle. He's on the record as saying that even when some piece of international law appears to serve short-term U.S. interests we ought to still oppose it and try to undermine it because the very concept of international law is a long-term plot against America. Any action that would appear to give legitimacy to the concept is, therefore, to be avoided. Even if we could do something really great through Security Council resolutions, treaties, and international tribunals Bolton would say we shouldn't do it. Indeed, his view is that it's especially important not to resort to international law when international law might work, because the threat isn't that international law is ineffective but that it might become effective.

The thinking here is that insofar as the world approximates a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes that's good for America, because as the supreme military power we come out on top in a world where might makes right. This vision is both rather repugnant and extraordinarily short-sighted. Mere world domination, as such, accomplishes nothing of value for Americans. Worse, the more America's attitude toward international institutions comes to be dominated by Bolton's prescriptions, the more Bolton's description of such institutions as anti-American per se comes to be true. Insofar as the world believes that our intention is to use our power to merely perpetuate American power and dominance, other nations have no choice but to try and combat our power. As I say, I have my doubts that the Bolton nomination reall does signal that the administration is going to start implementing full-blown Boltonism, but if it does mean that, it'll be a huge mistake. As Ed Kilgore says, Bolton has a huge paper trail that Democrats ought to ruthlessly exploit at the confirmation hearings.

--Matthew Yglesias

REPLYING TO KREMPASKY. Since bloggers apparently don't like to write letters-to-the-editor (a bad move, in my estimation, as editors are often heavily involved in the stories they publish) and prefer dueling blog posts, I'll respond to Mike Krempasky's first RedState.org post replying to my story "Blogged Down" this morning, and to his second one sometime later today or tomorrow.

Krempasky writes:

In the piece, attributed to me is this quote,

"As far as the Internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left."

Now, anyone who knows me or has spoken to me for more than 8 seconds about the internet knows that I don't believe this - nor have I said it. What I actually said was,

"As far as the Internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left when it comes to news and opinion. When it comes to politics and activism, getting people to do something - we're getting our brains beat in by the left."

Krempasky's claim to precisely recall what he said cannot be taken as gospel, however -- unless he was wearing a wire, has a photographic memory, or, more likely, was using a line he's practiced many times before. Still, none of us remember our own words as well as we think we do. Fortunately, one of us wrote down what he said. And I will put my notes up against his memory any day of the week.

What Krempasky actually said was far less interesting or quotable than what he thinks he said. He said:

As far as the internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left when it comes to news, analysis, and opinion. At the same time, our counterparts on the left have been far, far ahead of us in terms of using the internet as an activist tool.

Same basic difference, right? Except in the real version the second sentence is kind of vague and generic sounding. So I asked Krempasky what he meant by "activist tools." His major example of the superior activist use of the internet on the left was the ability of bloggers and political campaigns, such as Howard Dean's, "to use this medium to raise money." Krempasky mocked Dean's online grassroots turnout operation, and I know from my many interviews with technical staffers and internet consultants left and right that the Bush team claimed to have had more effective online organizing tools during campaign '04. (The Kerry camp vigorously disputes this.)

So this "activist tool" bit is not news. The Democrats' ability to raise money online at a much brisker clip than Republicans do has been widely reported over the past two years. Kremapsky's second sentence wound up just not being a very interesting or novel observation once he specified what he was actually talking about.

As for the truncated first sentence, I thought from the context of the paragraph to which it was attached that it was pretty clear that the subject we were on was conservative media. In retrospect, including the words "when it comes to news, analysis, and opinion" would only have made my point stronger, and could have made it clearer, as well.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

COUNTING TIME. The other shoe drops in Lebanon as "Hundreds of thousands of pro-Syrian protesters poured into a central Beirut square this afternoon in a demonstration called for by the militant group Hezbollah that vastly outnumbered recent rallies demanding that Syrian forces leave Lebanon." And there's the rub. The issue of the Syrian military presence in Lebanon tends to be conflated with the issue of Lebanese democracy. But the Lebanese political system pretty seriously -- though no one knows exactly how seriously -- underrepresents the country's Shiite Muslims, who are the main base of support for a Syrian presence. It's by no means clear how much support the opposition really has and how much support Syria has. The president's response to this, meanwhile, is sure to provoke a snicker or two:

Bush demanded anew that Syria pull its troops out of Lebanon and allow free elections. "All Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for these elections to be free and fair."

That, of course, was the view of most Sunni Arab groups in Iraq and a main cause of the widespread election boycotts in the Iraqi provinces where they predominate. Of course it's not exactly the same, but it's not all that different, either. My guess is that the reality that Syria has a large base of popular support in Lebanon -- even if we can't tell exactly how large -- will make this "withdrawal first, elections second" position ultimately untenable in light of the world's general bias toward continuation of the status quo. If the opposition wants to get rid of the Syrians, they're probably going to need to either win an election or else (and this will be more difficult) produce some kind of specific evidence that they lost the election due to cheating as opposed to the general theory that a vote can't be free and fair until the Syrians leave.

--Matthew Yglesias

GETTING TOUGH. Mark Kleiman is thinking outside the box about a way for Democrats to stop whining about unprincipled Republican power grabs and start doing something about it. Amend California's constitution to abolish congressional districts and elect all members in statewide races that, presumably, would give enormous advantages to the Democrats:

Article I never mentions such a creature as a Congressional District. All it says about Congressional elections is: The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature. So there's nothing to prevent California from making its Congressional elections winner-takes-all on a statewide basis. . . .

Run the primary system as it runs now, with the voters of each party in each district choosing a candidate. But then have the resulting nominees run as a slate statewide, with the entire winning slate going to Washington. That way each district is represented by a Member nominated by the voters of that district -- obviating any Voting Rights Act problems -- but the state is represented by the party commanding majority support statewide.

Apparently, one could amend the California constitution in time for the November 2006 elections by holding a referendum in June 2006 at the time of the primary for the governor's race. Since it's only a Democratic primary, that ought to further stack the deck in favor of passage.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FOUR FREEDOMS. There's something happening way over there in Lebanon, and Egypt, and Ukraine. What it is ain't exactly clear, but it sure looks like signs of democracy. Matthew Yglesias logs the reasons for hope -- not only for the citizens of those three countries, but for Democrats here in the U.S.A.

--Jeffrey Dubner

MOVING ON. With John Bolton poised to take on the UN (I mean, represent American interests there) we can be absolutely sure that the administration won't soften its dead-end approach to Darfur and the International Criminal Court. Until now, I still held out some small hope that the United States could be cajoled into supporting a Security Council resolution that would grant the ICC jurisdiction in Sudan. That certainly won't happen with the Bush administration’s loudest critic of the ICC as America’s UN ambassador.

I’m a staunch supporter of the ICC and believe that it has great potential, but there's no longer much point in discussing its benefits over the Bush administration’s counter-proposals for adjudicating Darfur’s war crimes. Groups like Human Rights Watch are absolutely correct in arguing that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (seated in Tanzania) is a more time-consuming and costlier option than the ICC, and a weaker deterrent that leaves Sudan’s criminals the hope that they can make like Radovan Karadzic and outlast the temporary court by simply hiding for a few years.

That said, the truth of their argument holds little potential to sway the opinions of policy-makers. Even U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues Pierre-Richard Prosper, no shrill ideologue, seems resigned to let the Bolton-style dead-enders drive the Darfur war crimes policy. At a Brookings function a week and a half ago, Prosper tried to defend the Bush administration’s position to a roomful of people as knowledgeable as he on the intricacies of war crimes adjudication. As Eugene Oregon pointed out, it seemed as if Prosper himself didn’t quite believe the B.S. he was spouting -- but did so anyway.

Now, in light of Bolton’s forthcoming appointment, David Bosco's argument is even more important: Any debate over tribunal venues ought to be delayed until after the first-order business of humanitarian intervention is complete. Those of us who have devoted energy to pushing the ICC on Darfur out of a belief that it could act as a useful deterrent should now clamor for alternative ways to impress upon Sudan’s war criminals that the United States and the world means business.

So here’s my contribution: How about positioning the USS Abraham Lincoln off the Red Sea to enforce a no-fly zone? Seems like a good idea.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JUNKIE SCIENCE. You can fault Bill Clinton for not following the science on needle exchanges and HIV prevention. But at least he was honest about it. As Chris Mooney observes, the same can't be said of the Bush administration.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE FAVORITIST, THE FUMBLER, AND THE FAKER. Over the weekend, I looked a bit more into Terrence Boyle and realized that I may have been too kind. Boyle really does seem to be a cut below the average district court judge; either the Fourth Circuit has an awfully broad interpretation of the "plain error" doctrine, or Boyle has some serious problems (pdf) understanding criminal law.

And next up is Thomas Griffith, who has been practicing illegally since at least 2000. Add in everybody's favorite favoritist, William Myers, and you have to wonder: What is Arlen Specter thinking? He pledged to start with the nominees who'd be easiest to confirm, and instead we get three guys who plainly cannot be the best of the thousands of potential candidates. What does that say about the rest of the rejected nominees?

My hunch is that Specter is trying to keep interest groups a bit quiet, and that he thinks that keeping abortion off the table -- note that that red flag is missing from each of these nominations -- will accomplish that goal. It certainly seems to have worked; Myers has been the only of the three nominees to really receive any press, even as the nuclear option continues to be an almost daily story. I'd guess Specter genuinely wants to reach common ground and believes that that's more likely if the Judiciary Committee is given a little time out of the limelight.

Or you could accept Bob Novak's interpretation: Specter is trying to undercut Kim Jong Bill by actually confirming some of Bush's worst nominees! Novak is silent on the question of why this troika even deserves consideration in the first place, for which I still haven't seen a satisfactory answer. His main point, that those crafty Democrats would best advance their cause by rolling over and letting the Republicans assemble 60 votes, is just silly. Although not nearly as silly as Dick Morris' take, which I find endearingly ridiculous.

UPDATE: Agreement from The Corner on the oddness of the strategy. (Now that they've found a reason to talk about Pryor again, they're back on the beat.) In Jonathan Adler's list of nominees he'd prefer, though, Brett Kavanaugh? The man's nomination is a calculated insult to the Democratic Party. Add to that the fact that he would be one of the two youngest judges in the D.C. Circuit's history -- in a category with none other than mentor Ken Starr -- and his nomination is clearly one of the most outlandish.

--Jeffrey Dubner

STAYING ON (THE OTHER GUY'S) MESSAGE. Reading over the transcript of Joe Lieberman's appearance on Late Edition yesterday, I'm genuinely puzzled as to what the man thinks he's doing. Late last week, he seemed to get religion on Social Security and signed an anti-phase-out letter. On the show, he portrayed himself as a staunch opponent of privatization: "I don't see how you make the problem better by diverting payroll tax revenue that otherwise goes into the Social Security trust fund." Beyond that, however, he was all over the map:

BLITZER: Is this a crisis that should be addressed right now?

LIEBERMAN: Yes, it is. It's a -- the public gets it. And in all the political and partisan discussion here in Washington, it's not clear that everybody in Washington gets it. . . .

If it goes on the course it's on now, it will simply not be able to keep the benefit, keep the promises. . . .

I think the president is right in focusing on the problem that Social Security has, insolvency coming. . . .

It's not enough to just say President Bush's solution is the wrong one, taking money out of the trust fund, payroll tax diversion.

These are what we call "Republican talking points." Indeed, as you can see discussed in any number of conservative publications, this is exactly the Republican plan for getting to phase-out. The over-hyped "crisis," the demand that Democrats put a benefit-cuts package on the table even though the GOP hasn't, etc., etc., etc. In a separate, but related, outburst of nonsense, Lieberman then went on to tout the importance of his work with moderate Republican senators. In my experience, moderate Republicans are very nice people with a lot of good ideas about policy. But to put it the most delicate way possible, they're also impotent, gutless suckers who invariably fold at key moments leaving their negotiating partners looking like idiots.

The dynamics here are painfully familiar. First Lieberman will come up with a plan in collaboration with moderate Republicans. Then the GOP Senate leadership will "reluctantly" agree to line up Republican support for the moderate plan. Then the moderates and Democrats alike will be totally cut out from the conference committee, which will return a bill bearing no resemblance to what passed the Senate. At this point, the moderate Republicans will support the conference report, leaving the Democratic compromisers in an untenable situation. Negotiating with moderate Republicans is great if you're just trying to make a point on an issue where you know no action will be taken -- Lieberman's work with John McCain on climate change is a worthy example -- but as an actual legislative strategy it's less than useless. You negotiate with the White House. If the White House wants phase-out, either phase-out will pass, or nothing will pass. Either they take it off the table, or Democrats need to take negotiations off the table.

Lieberman is very familiar with this dynamic; he was one of the key people who got screwed over during the intelligence reform farce and the homeland security debacle. Scrolling around his website, though, Lieberman doesn't actually seem to feel that he and the Democratic caucus got played on these bills -- he's proud of his work. The only conclusion I can draw is that he doesn't really care. He likes his reputation as a "serious" bipartisan kind of guy; the content of the resulting legislation isn't an issue. He'd rather be thought well of in moronic Beltway bien pensant discussions than try to advance any substantive goals. I would far prefer to believe something else, but unless he can provide some indication that he's learned anything about how legislating works in the Bush Washington, then I don't see what else you can conclude.

--Matthew Yglesias

ON DARFUR AND DETERRENCE. Foreign Policy’s David Bosco has posted an important essay on Darfur and the International Criminal Court. Too often, Bosco argues, Western powers defer to judicial procedures as a cautious alternative to armed humanitarian intervention. Thus, the current debate over the proper venue in which to try Darfur’s war criminals is not a debate worth having while Darfur still burns. A paper indictment -- whether issued by an American-supported international court seated in Arusha, Tanzania, or by the ICC in The Hague -- cannot prevent an oncoming militia from razing a village.

That said, the Security Council is not presently debating the size, mission, and rules of engagement of a peace-keeping force in Darfur, so all we have are second-best options. And here, Bosco points to certain failures of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as evidence that the threat of prosecution does little to deter war criminals:

The existence of an international criminal tribunal for the Balkans—and even explicit threats of prosecution—did not stop Slobodan Milosevic from cleansing the Albanian population of Kosovo. The Rwandan government engaged in several bloody reprisals against Hutu civilians even after the United Nations set up a tribunal to investigate the earlier genocide. And the existence of a tribunal in Rwanda appears to have done nothing to staunch the bloodletting in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.

To be sure, it is easy to find instances in which crimes against humanity were committed despite the threat of international prosecution. However, I’m not convinced that this necessarily negates the potential for the threat of prosecution to act as a deterrent. Northern Uganda, for example, has seen a dramatic decrease in violence since the ICC assumed jurisdiction there last year.

Further, it should be noted that such criminal courts are young. The conviction of the lowly Dusko Tadic obviously did not prevent Slobodan Milosevic from tearing up Kosovo. But Milosevic’s arrest has had a profound effect on other world leaders, who can no longer be sure that impunity is a foreordained consequence of state-sovereignty.

Now, statements of some high-level officials in Khartoum and their Janjaweed allies reveal that they are genuinely scared of being hauled off to court, often mentioning The Hague. If the U.S. would only back down from its zero-sum approach to the ICC and acquiesce to a Security Council vote to refer the crimes to the ICC (perhaps in exchange for European commitments on our sanction regime) then the Council could convey to Khartoum a seriousness of its intent to prosecute criminals.

Criminals fearing indictment are wont to deny and hide their crimes -- not commit more. Given the scope of the killings that occur on a daily basis, the speed in which the Security Council acts is of utmost importance. As a robust peace-keeping force is not en route to Darfur, the credible threat of prosecution would be the most immediate, albeit not the best, way to deter future atrocities.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

CHECKPOINT TROUBLE. The killing of Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari at an American-manned checkpoint in Iraq is focusing attention on a situation that's long been of concern to Iraqis. This is probably the first many Americans have heard about mistaken killings at checkpoints, but, as John F. Burns reports, "conditions for the journey . . . were broadly the same as those facing all civilian drivers approaching American checkpoints or convoys. American soldiers operate under rules of engagement that give them authority to open fire whenever they have reason to believe that they or others in their unit may be at risk of suicide bombings or other insurgent attacks."

The policy in place here, like most American policies about such matters, is designed first and foremost to keep our troops as safe as possible. It's a very understandable policy -- a military needs to take care of its own. And, again, it's entirely understandable that the men and women manning these checkpoints prefer to err on the side of caution. They'd like to survive their tours in Iraq, and I would too if I were in their place. It's entirely normal and appropriate for the American government to put somewhat more value on American lives -- particularly the lives of people who've volunteered to serve their country in combat -- than on those of foreigners.

The trouble seeps in, however, when the U.S. military starts acting as the de facto government of Iraq. For all the same reasons that Americans tend to care more about our fellow citizens than about the residents of other countries, Iraqis are going to have little sympathy for a policy that reduces the risk to American lives by increasing the risk to Iraqis. It's not a policy that any truly independent government would agree to see implemented on its soil, and Iraqi acquiescence to the policy is a token of the extent to which the new regime remains dependent on U.S. support. It's also an important source of the fundamental fact that most Iraqis -- despite the elections, despite the insurgency's unpopularity among the country's Shiite majority -- want to see American troops gone. Legally, Iraq is sovereign now, but on the ground there's still a dynamic of occupation, and it's a dynamic we're going to need to change if the new government (whenever its composition gets sorted out) is to maintain the support of Iraq's people.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BLOGGED DOWN. Everybody's talking about blogs, but few are talking about bloggers. That needs to change, argues Garance Franke-Ruta, because political operatives are embedding themselves in the supposedly independent blogosphere -- and no one seems to notice.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WEEKEND UPDATE. Spent the weekend hiring a Welsh CEO? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. The right used to do serious empirical work; now we have my columns.
• Nicholas Kristof. Aha! An un-mockable column topic.
• George Will. Anthony Kennedy lacks principles, therefore we need Justices with extreme right-wing views.
• David Broder. If we don't produce bogus national-security rationales for our favored humanitarian causes the terrorists have won.
• Jim Hoagland. Dissembling about the pre-war arguments for invading Iraq never goes out of style!
• Maureen Dowd. Two makes a trend! It's a journalistic revolution.
• Thomas Friedman. Let me retract all those columns I've written about the Middle East. Instead, the "largest strategic issue of our time is peacefully managing the rise of China."

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Peter Beinart on the military vote.

--Matthew Yglesias

REACHING TO THE NEXT GENERATION. The people at Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), the anti-Parents and Friends of Gays and Lesbians (PFLAG), are reaching out to high school students and urging them to counter gay/straight alliances in high school by starting Ex-Gay clubs. In text that sounds straight from the Onion: "Clubs can be started by students who have never been gay (everstraights), ex-gay students, and those struggling with unwanted same sex attraction."

How do Ex-Gay/Everstraight Clubs stop homophobia?

People fear what they do not understand. Students who do not understand why some of their peers struggle with same sex attractions will now have answers as to why and how homosexuality originates. They will learn that there is no scientific evidence of a gay gene, and that participating in name calling of other students only affirms that student's mistaken gay identity. Students will also have a positive outlet for participating in pro-ex-gay activities instead of anti-gay behavior. For example, why tear down a gay club flyer? The problem of homosexual struggles still remains. Instead, post an Ex-Gay & Everstraight Club flyer.

If Virginia hadn't recently defeated bills that would have bannned gay-straight alliances, as well as adoptions for gay parents, it would simply be baffling. Instead, it's just as scary as it sounds. (Thanks to Maya for pointing this out.)

--Sarah Wildman

DEMS VS. DEMS. This past week saw the Democratic Leadership Council erupting in one of its periodic outbursts against the more energetic, small-n new Democratic groups, this time in the form of an attack by DLC founder Al From on MoveOn.org for allegedly being "elites, people who sit in their basements all the time and play on their computers." MoveOn, for its part, had cast the DLC as fundamentally irrelevant in a story published in mid-February in the St. Petersburg Times. And the Republican National Committee, licking its chops at the dissension, sent out a press release with an image of two black-eyed donkeys in boxing gloves as part of their new "Dems vs. Dems" series designed to show that the Democratic Party, because it has internal disagreements, doesn't stand for anything fixed. (Hmmm...where have we heard that before?)

It's becoming conventional wisdom in some quarters that the most signifcant discussions and disagreements in the Democratic Party right now are all about tactics and strategy rather than ideas and beliefs. That's not entirely true. Once you get beyond the mediated snarkery, there are some substantive differences that keep rattling around uncomfortably like old stones in new shoes. And though it may not seem like it at first, this round of the DLC vs. MoveOn fight is very much about substantive issues.

In particular, the September/October 1995 issue of the DLC's The New Democrat magazine, now enjoying a second life as a PDF circulating in cyberspace, would seems to require some 'splaining from the DLC crew in light of current events. The cover line: "Time to Move On." The image: a picture of FDR waving from a car. The message, as laid out in the issue's prefatory editorial: "Al From ... explains why Democrats cannot win back middle-class voters by clinging ever closer to New Deal ideals." The clear-as-day implication: time to move on from the New Deal and FDR.

Given the title, it was only a matter of time before that specific issue of the DLC magazine -- which preceded Blueprint, the current DLC magazine -- fell into the hands of the MoveOn crew, who are currently running a campaign to save Social Security from a fate eerily similar to the one proposed last decade by one of the DLC's more senior staffers. In 1995, then-Progressive Policy Institute vice president Robert Shapiro wrote "Rethinking Social Security" in the aforementioned issue of The New Democrat:

We must stop channeling public monies into huge windfall cash retirement benefits for virtually everyone, and create a new model of mandatory private savings supplemented by public provision for lower income people ... Social Security shares all the serious defects of the modern welfare state. As an unfunded system of windfall cash transfers from current workers to retirees, often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars per retiree, it is fiscally unsustainable over time. It also appears to endanger the economy's health, eroding savings and investment by creating a universal entitlement for everyone to consume over their lifetimes more than what they produce. Finally, many of the system's actual operations are unsound social policy ...

The solution to this?

[T]he major share of payroll tax payments would be shifted gradually to mandatory private savings accounts, perhaps over two decades. And the remainder of the second tier would restore a measure of genuine progessivity to the system by using the remainder of the payroll tax to supplement the resources of retired people with low lifetime incomes.

If the DLC no longer supports the diversion of payroll taxes into private accounts -- and as far as I can tell it does not -- perhaps it could provide an account of how it came to change its thinking on this matter so that its more antiquated writings no longer serve to inspire (or confuse) its detractors. Even in 2003, PPI president Will Marshall was writing, "It's time to move beyond the phony war on [Social Security] privatization."

That's not how the DLC writes today, however. So is the DLC, like the rest of the Democratic party, moving left? The path from Shapiro's writings to Ed Kilgore's NewDonkey.com (link goes to a week he wrote a lot on Social Security) suggests to me that today's DLC may have more in common with MoveOn than either group has been willing to recognize.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH DELAWARE? Jon Chait takes a look at the strange case of Joe Biden's support for the bankruptcy bill thanks to some Delaware-friendly provisions, and draws some conclusions:

The trouble here is that the relationship each Democrat has with his home-state business interests is the relationship every Republican has with every business interest. The bankruptcy bill enjoys unanimous GOP support in the Senate. It's a familiar pattern: Noxious laws enjoy support from a coalition of all the Republicans plus a rotating handful of Democrats who have ties to interested parties. Almost all the Democrats are on the side of the angels on almost every issue. But it doesn't take many Democratic defectors to give the Republicans a majority.

That's just right. The truly odious Bush energy bill would stand no chance of passing without this sort of Democratic home-staterism. It's a problem, moreover, that affects even the most liberal members of the caucus. The sooner liberals figure out that this dynamic does far more than the dread specter of the DLC to make it hard for the party to unite around a solid economic agenda, the sooner we can start thinking about how to do something about it.

--Matthew Yglesias

BOYLE AND BAKE. Sam Rosenfeld popped over my cubicle wall to note my suspicious silence regarding Terrence Boyle's nomination, which the Senate Judiciary Committee discussed yesterday. Like Kathryn Jean Lopez said, some nominees seem more worth making a fuss over than others. I haven't paid much attention to Boyle because the main question raised against him -- is his record of decisions later reversed, particularly in discrimination cases, egregious enough to disqualify him? -- is one that humble, J.D.–less bloggers are ill-equipped to explore. There's also far less information floating around about Boyle, as, unlike most of Bush's most controversial nominees, he has not previously had a hearing under this administration. What there is is troubling, although I'm in no position to judge its legitimacy.

The underlying politics here, though, are pretty interesting. Boyle's history is rather different from, say, William Myers' or Bill Pryor's; he was primarily blocked by John Edwards, rather than the full Democratic caucus, and at least as much due to a Jesse Helms–instigated feud as to his record. After Boyle's nomination stalled out at the end of George Bush Sr.'s first term, Helms held up three African-American nominees to the Fourth Circuit, which Bill Clinton was determined to finally integrate. Edwards at one point reportedly sought a deal with Helms whereby one of the nominees, James Wynn, would be confirmed in exchange for Boyle's confirmation. Helms refused, and Edwards held the line on Boyle. Now that Edwards is gone, I suspect that Boyle would be confirmed fairly easily if not for the totalitarianism of the Republican leadership on the nominations process. A little comity would go a long way.

--Jeffrey Dubner

FLOUTING PRIVACY. The news last week that the attorney general of Kansas, Phill Kline, was requesting the private medical records of some 90 women who had late-term abortions in his state was couched in the terms of protecting children from rape. Despite his claim to be fighting "for more open and transparent government," Kline had been conducting this investigation under a cloak provided by a courtroom gag order. As the Times explained earlier this week:

In a shocking abuse of office, the attorney general of Kansas is conducting a stealth campaign to violate the privacy of about 90 women who obtained late-term abortions, offering the flimsy claim that he's looking for evidence of crime.

Protected by a sweeping gag order from a local judge, Attorney General Phill Kline has been demanding the women's records from two clinics that have been unable to even warn clients that their intimate histories are being sought. When the inquiry finally came to light through a court brief, Mr. Kline maintained that he needed all the women's records - including their identities, sexual histories, clinical profiles and birth control methods - to prosecute statutory rape and other suspected sexual crimes.

What's amazing here is that this seems to be not only a Big Brother attempt to boldly undermine abortion rights in Kansas (that's obvious, and Kline has long been unabashed in those efforts) but that it completely flaunts any semblance of adherence to HiPAA privacy standards (pdf). The standards maintain that "Providers and health insurers who are required to follow this law must comply with[the patient's] right to . . . Receive a notice that tells you how your health information may be used and shared [and] Decide if you want to give your permission before your health information can be used or shared for certain purposes . . . Get a report on when and why your health information was shared for certain purposes." Kline's efforts, bald as they are, reports the LA Times, will mean every intimate detail about a patient's life is exposed. Surely there is some bipartisan ground on such a violation.

But this isn't a first-time above-the-law moment for Kline. As the Times' editorial continued:

Two years ago, Mr. Kline called on health-care providers to report underage sexual activity, but a federal judge ruled him out of line. Mr. Kline deserves another rebuff, beginning with the suspension of the gag order.

The targeted clinics say they have observed state requirements to report possible crimes. They have filed an appeal to the State Supreme Court, complaining that Mr. Kline is conducting a fishing expedition, not a case-specific inquiry. The clinics have suggested a compromise - that the identities of the women be blacked out with the option for more information from any whose records might yield evidence of crimes like statutory rape.

It's not at all clear how that crime is linked in particular to late-term abortions, which just happen to be the current target of Republican anti-abortion activists across the country. Late-term abortions - beyond 22 weeks of gestation - are illegal in Kansas, except when they are done to protect a woman's health. But Mr. Kline offers no evidence to suggest he has any legal ground to justify pawing through the confidential records of the 90 women he has targeted for his mission of harassment. As for predatory abuse of girls under the age of sexual consent, they could have obtained abortions earlier than 22 weeks.

Now the Kansas City Star reports that Kline didn't even bother with his weak excuses once he assumed no public would be reading his actual legal materials:

legal documents that Kline filed Thursday with the Kansas Supreme Court make little mention of child predators, and instead indicate that the legal battle centers on the clinics themselves and whether doctors are following the law in performing late-term abortions. ...

The secret judicial inquiry began last fall, coming to light last week when the clinics filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to intercede. The clinics have asked the court to overrule a Shawnee County district judge, who ordered the clinics to comply with Kline's subpoenas.

Of course, part of the reason Kline's actions induce terror in women across the country is because they are so Ashcroftian. The former AG also appeared to have no qualms about issuing subpoenas for women's medical histories connected to abortion -- or about intimidating doctors to the extent that anti-abortion efforts become redundant.

--Sarah Wildman

NICE TRY, BUT TRY AGAIN. I learned last night that one of the first actions of the new regime at the DNC has been to create a Vice-Chair for Veteran and Military Family Outreach. I appreciate the intention here, but this really isn't the way to go. The decision to formally organize the Democratic Party as a coalition of constituency groups -- GLBT outreach, African-American outreach, Hispanic outreach, Asian Pacific Islander American outreach, Indo-American Leadership Council (note that, "Politically, the Indian American community is a part of the APIA Outreach constituency"), South Asian American Leadership Council ("a sub-committee of the Asian and Pacific Islander American Leadership Council") -- is a big part of the problem here. Not because there's anything wrong with reaching out to South Asian Americans or religious people or whomever, but because it tends to cripple the party's ability to think in terms of broad, overarching messages and topics of broad national concern.

Creating a specialized outreach group for veterans and military families will, at least, help ensure that the issue isn't totally neglected. But the politics of national security -- to say nothing of the substance -- aren't primarily about what veterans, or soldiers, or soldiers' spouses think. They're about the fact that Americans aren't going to vote for a candidate with a really neat education plan if they think his security policies may get them killed. Addressing the party's problem on this front requires Democrats to transcend the constituency-group model of politics, not try to identify a class of "military issues voters" and assimilate them to the existing model. As the analysis (PDF) accompanying the latest Democracy Corps poll shows, "We looked first at the level of esteem for Democrats, using a regression exercise. What mattered most were attributes related to security and safety."

The whole analysis is worth a read for insights beyond the security issue. It shows that over and over again, the Democrats are failing to be identified with concern for the broad public interest. On one level, this is just a kind of messaging problem. On another level, though, it's not a messaging problem that can be addressed without doing something about the party's organization and self-conception.

--Matthew Yglesias

FRIDAY MORNING MYSTERY. The Senate Democrats -- clearly harboring Scheiberesque fears that recent loose talk from Republicans about the possibility of agreeing to private accounts as an add-on to Social Security amounts to nothing more than a desire for a back-door phase-out plan -- sent a letter to the president yesterday. They basically called on him to state categorically and unequivocally that he rejects the notion of private accounts anywhere in the vicinity of the existing Social Security program as a precondition for negotiation with Democrats:

We were encouraged that Treasury Secretary John Snow suggested that you might be willing to abandon your privatization proposal and move instead to an alternative approach in which investment accounts would be established entirely separate and apart from Social Security. As you know, many Democrats, including President Bill Clinton, have advocated just such an approach, with benefits targeted to working and middle class families who need help the most. So long as such accounts remain entirely independent from Social Security and do not put the program's guaranteed benefits at risk in any way, we believe they deserve serious consideration as part of a broader effort to promote retirement security.

While Secretary Snow's suggestion was initially encouraging, subsequent reports indicate that you remain committed to your privatization plan and his public comments were little more than a tactical maneuver. According to a story in today's Washington Post, "White House officials are privately telling Republicans that Bush is opposed to the idea [of accounts outside of Social Security], but does not want to say so because it would appear he is not willing to compromise."

Given the conflicting and ambiguous reports on such a critical issue, we urge you to publicly and unambiguously announce that you reject privatized accounts funded with Social Security dollars or otherwise linked to the provision of guaranteed Social Security benefits. Such a statement would eliminate a serious obstacle to the kind of bipartisan process that Democrats are seeking to deal with Social Security's long-term challenges and to improve the retirement security of all Americans.

A piece in today’s Washington Post reports that this letter was “signed by 42 out of 44 Democrats, plus Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.).” But that’s incorrect. As of last night, when I received the letter in my in-box, it was signed by 41 out 44 Democrats, plus Jeffords. Who were the missing three? Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, and Russ Feingold. Feingold’s the strangest omission -- perhaps he just wasn’t around to sign the letter. But Nelson and Conrad are documented straddlers in this fight. The absence of their signatures on this letter may not be an accident. Could it be that the hints of some kind of not-quite-carve-out private account scheme that Republicans have been floating this week are hitting these two Senators’ sweet spots?

UPDATE: Several readers have informed me that Feingold's mother passed away on Wednesday, which would probably explain his missing signature.

--Sam Rosenfeld